Elections

More than 120 Republican members of the US House of Representatives formally asked the US supreme court this week to prevent four swing states from casting electoral votes for Joe Biden to seal his victory in the November election, a brazen move that signals how the Republican party has embraced Donald Trump’s baseless attacks on the American electoral system.The request from 126 GOP members – nearly two-thirds of the Republican caucus – came in support of a lawsuit Texas filed earlier this week that sought to block the electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, all states Biden won in November. The lawsuit also won support from top House Republicans.The suit was ultimately rejected by the supreme court on Friday. The US constitution gives states clear authority to set their own election and does not give other states the right to interfere. Texas’s argument in the suit was also based on unsupported claims of fraud that have been dismissed in lower courts.“The lawsuit has so many fundamental flaws that it’s hard to know where to start. It misstates basic principles of election law and demands a remedy that is both unconstitutional and unavailable,” Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington, wrote in an email. “At core, it’s an incoherent amalgamation of claims that already failed in the lower courts.”Despite its ultimate failure the lawsuit represented a troubling case that was unprecedented in American history: a quest to overturn a presidential election on the basis of unsubstantiated claims by an incumbent who soundly lost his re-election bid.It also became a test of fealty for the president’s party that pitted Republican governors, lawmakers and elected officials against one another.One supreme court brief, filed by prominent Republicans in opposition to the Texas lawsuit, said the arguments “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.Among the 126 lawmakers who signed on to the brief is a particularly puzzling group: 19 Republican members of Congress who represent districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.Those members all appeared on the same ballot as the presidential candidates and all but one were elected under the same rules to which they are now objecting.(Meanwhile, Doug Collins, a Georgia congressman, ran for a US Senate seat and lost. Collins conceded his race, thereby accepting his defeat in a statewide election, and was later chosen by the Trump campaign to lead its recount effort in the state.)By signing on to the brief, those lawmakers are essentially arguing that their own results could have been tainted by the same irregularities they say cost Trump the election in their state.The Guardian contacted the offices of all 18 of those Republicans who won re-election to ask if they believed there should be further investigation into their electoral victories in November. None of them responded to a request for comment.Most of the lawmakers who supported the effort are far-right conservatives from deep red districts that voted for Trump. But collectively, their support for the lawsuit meant that more than a quarter of the House, including the California congressman Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, believe the supreme court should invalidate the votes of tens of millions of Americans.Seventeen Republican attorneys general have also signed on in support of the last-ditch legal bid to overturn the 2020 presidential contest before states’ electors meet on Monday to officially declare Biden the victor.Biden won the election with 306 electoral votes, the same number that Trump won in 2016, and he leads the popular vote by more than 7 million. The four states targeted by the Texas lawsuit represent 62 electoral votes.Biden soundly defeated Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania, part of the “blue wall” that Trump shattered in 2016. Biden also clawed back a third “blue wall” state – Wisconsin – while eking out a surprise victory in Georgia, where multiple recounts have affirmed his win despite an audacious attempt by the president to pressure the Republican governor and secretary of state to reverse the result.Dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump’s campaign and allies in state and federal court were unsuccessful, with the cases so lacking in evidence of the widespread voter fraud they alleged that judges summarily dismissed, derided and even denounced them as meritless. Election law experts have also roundly criticized the Texas lawsuit, pointing to what they say are substantial legal flaws in the argument brought forth by the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton.Paxton, a staunch ally of the president, is under indictment in a long-running securities fraud case and faces a separate federal investigation related to allegations that he abused the power of his office in connection with a political donor. He has denied the allegations. Yet Paxton’s attempts to override the election results have raised speculation that he may be angling for a presidential pardon, though he insists that is not his motivation. More

On Friday, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced additional nominees of his leadership team, echoing Mr. Biden’s commitment to building a cabinet representative of the country’s diversity. More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny AnymoreRepublicans are now seriously arguing that elections are legitimate only when their side wins.Opinion ColumnistDec. 11, 2020Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh.For our purposes, the “joke” is President Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.“#OVERTURN,” he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that “If somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?”Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.But there are others who — out of partisanship, opportunism or a simple taste for mayhem — have chosen to support the president’s attack on American democracy. They refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat, back lawsuits to throw out the results, and spread lies about voter fraud and election malfeasance to Republican voters. They are laughing at Trump’s joke, not realizing (or not caring) that their laughter is infectious.What was a legal effort by the Trump campaign, for instance, is now one by the state of Texas, which has petitioned the Supreme Court to scrap election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, depriving Biden of his victory. Filed by Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, the suit says it would be a violation of due process to accept the outcome in those states, on account of “election irregularities” and “interstate differences in the treatment of voters” that disadvantage Republican voters in areas with stricter voting rules.This lawsuit rests on the novel argument that the Constitution gives exclusive and unquestioned authority to state legislatures to appoint presidential electors as they see fit and renders any action to expand voting without direct legislative consent unconstitutional. The Supreme Court already rejected that argument once this week when it turned away a similar lawsuit by the Trump campaign to overturn the results in Pennsylvania.Regardless, on Wednesday, 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of Texas, urging the court, in essence, to cancel the election and hand power back to Trump. “Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” reads the brief, which also claims that “States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States.” The next day, more than 100 Republican members of Congress filed a brief in support of this lawsuit, in effect declaring allegiance to Trump over the Constitution and urging the court to end self-government in the name of “the Framers.”Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesThere’s a paradox here. This sloppy, harebrained lawsuit has no serious chance of success. Granting Texas (and, by extension Trump, who joined the lawsuit) its relief would plunge the country into abject chaos, with violence sure to follow. That this quest is quixotic is, in all likelihood, one reason it has so much support. It is only with the knowledge of certain defeat that Republican officeholders feel comfortable plowing forward with an effort that would tear the United States apart if it succeeded. They can play politics with constitutional government (Paxton, for instance, hopes to succeed Greg Abbott as governor of Texas) knowing that the Supreme Court isn’t going to risk it all for Donald Trump.Then again, it was only two weeks before Election Day that four of the court’s conservatives announced their potential willingness to throw out votes on the basis of this theory of state legislative supremacy over electoral votes. It is very easy to imagine a world in which the election was a little closer, where the outcome came down to one state instead of three or four, and the court’s conservatives could use the conflict over a narrow margin to hand the president a second term.With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs.We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to hold power. That it is fully the party of minority rule, committed to the idea that a vote doesn’t count if it isn’t for its candidates, and that if democracy won’t serve its partisan and ideological interests, then so much for democracy.None of this is new — there is a whole tradition of reactionary, counter-majoritarian thought in American politics to which the conservative movement is heir — but it is the first time since the 1850s that these ideas have nearly captured an entire political party. And while the future is unwritten, the events of the past month make me worry that we’re following a script the climax of which requires a disaster.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The President’s TaxesOur InvestigationA 2016 WindfallProfiting From FameTimeline18 Key FindingsEditor’s NoteAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyManhattan D.A. Intensifies Investigation of TrumpProsecutors have recently interviewed employees of President Trump’s lender and insurance brokerage, in the latest indication that he still faces the potential threat of criminal charges once he leaves office.When President Trump returns to private life in January, he will lose the protection from criminal prosecution that his office has afforded him. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesWilliam K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Dec. 11, 2020Updated 7:42 a.m. ETState prosecutors in Manhattan have interviewed several employees of President Trump’s bank and insurance broker in recent weeks, according to people with knowledge of the matter, significantly escalating an investigation into the president that he is powerless to stop.The interviews with people who work for the lender, Deutsche Bank, and the insurance brokerage, Aon, are the latest indication that once Mr. Trump leaves office, he still faces the potential threat of criminal charges that would be beyond the reach of federal pardons.It remains unclear whether the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., will ultimately bring charges. The prosecutors have been fighting in court for more than a year to obtain Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns, which they have called central to their investigation. The issue now rests with the Supreme Court.But lately, Mr. Vance’s office has stepped up its efforts, issuing new subpoenas and questioning witnesses, including some before a grand jury, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation.The grand jury appears to be serving an investigative function, allowing prosecutors to authenticate documents and pursue other leads, rather than considering any charges.When Mr. Trump returns to private life in January, he will lose the protection from criminal prosecution that his office has afforded him. While The New York Times has reported that he discussed granting pre-emptive pardons to his eldest children before leaving office — and has claimed that he has the power to pardon himself — that authority applies only to federal crimes, and not to state or local investigations like the one being conducted by Mr. Vance’s office.The investigation led by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has spanned more than two years, and its focus has shifted over time. Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Trump, who has maintained he did nothing improper, has railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”The investigation by Mr. Vance, a Democrat, has focused on Mr. Trump’s conduct as a private business owner and whether he or employees at his family business, the Trump Organization, committed financial crimes. It is the only known criminal inquiry into the president.Employees of Deutsche Bank and Aon, two corporate giants, could be important witnesses. As two of Mr. Trump’s oldest allies — and some of the only mainstream companies willing to do regular business with him — they might offer investigators a rich vein of information about the Trump Organization.There is no indication that either company is suspected of wrongdoing.Because grand jury rules require secrecy, prosecutors have disclosed little about the focus of the inquiry and nothing about what investigative steps they have taken. But earlier this year, they suggested in court papers that they were examining possible insurance, tax and bank-related fraud in the president’s corporate dealings.In recent weeks, Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned two Deutsche Bank employees about the bank’s procedures for making lending decisions, according to a person familiar with the interviews. The employees were experts in the bank’s underwriting process, not bankers who worked with the Trump Organization, the person said.While the focus of those interviews was not on the relationship with Mr. Trump, bank officials expect Mr. Vance’s office to summon them for additional rounds of more specific questions in the near future, the person said.Glimpses into the investigation have come in court records during the bitter and protracted legal battle over a subpoena for eight years of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other financial records.A month after Mr. Vance’s office demanded the documents from the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in August 2019, Mr. Trump sued to block compliance with the subpoena. The case has twisted its way through the federal courts, with the president losing at every turn, and is now in front of the Supreme Court for the second time.Danny Frost, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, declined to comment on recent moves in the investigation. Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, declined to comment, but recently said that the company’s practices complied with the law and called the investigation a “fishing expedition.”Aon confirmed that the company had received a subpoena for documents from the district attorney’s office but declined to comment on the interviews with prosecutors. “As is our policy, we intend to cooperate with all regulatory bodies, including providing copies of all documents requested by those bodies,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement.Deutsche Bank, Mr. Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, received a subpoena last year from the district attorney and has said it is cooperating with the inquiry.In court papers, the prosecutors have cited public reports of Mr. Trump’s business dealings as legal justification for their inquiry, including a Washington Post article that concluded the president may have inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to lenders and insurers.Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer who turned on him after pleading guilty to federal charges, also told Congress in February 2019 that Mr. Trump and his employees manipulated his net worth to suit his interests.Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Feb. 27, 2019.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” he said in testimony before the House Oversight Committee.Mr. Trump’s supporters have noted that Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress and accused him of lying again to earn a reduced prison sentence.The Trump Organization’s lawyers are also likely to argue to prosecutors that Mr. Trump could not have duped Deutsche Bank because the bank did its own analysis of Mr. Trump’s net worth.Over the years, employees and executives inside the bank thought that Mr. Trump was overvaluing some of his assets by as much as 70 percent, according to current and former bank officials. Deutsche Bank still decided to lend Mr. Trump’s company hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, concluding that he was a safe lending risk in part because he had more than enough money and other assets to personally guarantee the debt.The prosecutors’ interviews with the employees was not the only recent activity in the investigation. Last month, The Times reported that Mr. Vance’s office had subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump.According to people with knowledge of the matter, the subpoena sought information about fees paid to TTT Consulting L.L.C., an apparent reference to Ms. Trump and other members of her family. Ms. Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she appears to have been paid as a consultant while also working for the Trump Organization.Mr. Garten, the Trump Organization’s general counsel, argued in a statement at the time that the subpoena was part of an “ongoing attempt to harass the company.” He added that “everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts.”Mr. Vance’s investigation has spanned more than two years and shifted focus over time. When the investigation began, it examined the Trump Organization’s role in hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Mr. Trump. Prosecutors were examining how the company recorded a reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for one of the payments. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations for his role in the scheme.A state grand jury convened by Mr. Vance’s office heard testimony from at least one witness about that issue last year, according to a person with knowledge of that testimony, but the payments have receded as a central focus of the inquiry.Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesFormal Transition BeginsBiden’s CabinetDefense SecretaryElection ResultsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsBiden Clashes With the LeftDec. 11, 2020, 7:01 a.m. ETDemocrats are trying to work out their differences as Biden prepares to take office. But across party lines, a lot feels unbridgeable. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Where things standThe seams in the Democratic Party have been showing this week, with progressives and moderates fixing their attention on President-elect Joe Biden’s major staff choices. All the while, eyes are locked on Georgia, where the Senate majority — and with it the Democrats’ legislative agenda, no matter how centrist or progressive — hangs in the balance.Biden this week argued that the rallying cry to “defund the police” was a political third rail, saying in a private call with leaders of civil rights groups that it could hurt the Democratic candidates in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs next month.“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,” Biden said on Tuesday, referring to down-ballot races last month, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”Over the summer, Biden resisted the calls of demonstrators and progressive organizers to defund police departments and shift funding to social services, though his website promises to “reform our criminal justice system.”A separate, intraparty battle is brewing on another issue: student loan debt. Biden has endorsed canceling up to $10,000 per person in federal student debt, but Democrats in Congress are pushing him to multiply that number by five. Both sides of the debate acknowledge that tackling the $1.7 trillion in student debt nationwide, which is spread among more than 43 million borrowers, would go far toward jump-starting the economy.“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”But economists also argue that above a certain point, most student loan debt is held by relatively affluent borrowers, given who tends to attend costly colleges and universities without being covered by financial aid. The fundamental problem, they say, is the high cost of tuition — something that debt forgiveness may not do much to combat.Progressives are expressing concern over Biden’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, Tom Vilsack, since news emerged this week that Biden plans to bring him back to run the agency he’d led throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.His appointment was met with some disappointment from progressives, Black farmers and some farm groups that had pushed for an appointee who would bring a fresher perspective and shift the department’s focus more firmly toward confronting poverty and food scarcity.Vilsack drew some criticism during the Obama years for hiring people with ties to Monsanto, and for his relative leniency on labeling genetically engineered food. Since 2017, Vilsack has led the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which pushes the dairy industry’s interests abroad.Many progressives had aligned themselves with Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, who represents an urban district and has made food access and equity a major theme of her work. Biden instead named Fudge as his pick for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.Biden also announced yesterday that Denis McDonough, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, will be his nominee for the secretary of Veterans Affairs. Susan Rice, who was national security adviser when Mr. Biden was vice president, will become the director of his Domestic Policy Council, overseeing a large part of the new president’s agenda.The latest picks underscore a theme running through Biden’s appointments thus far: He tends to be choosing people he has worked with, most often in the Obama administration.The implications are varied. He has managed to assemble a diverse team, full of “firsts” and at least somewhat representative of the country’s demographic makeup. He has also signaled that in his quest to “Build Back Better,” he intends to hand the keys back to many of the officials whose work helped to define what came before.And he is also drawing upon a number of figures who, after leaving the White House, made their way in private industry, often serving in lucrative positions for companies with direct contracts with the federal government.An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine yesterday, by a vote of 17 to 4.Some committee members expressed some reservations about possible allergic reactions reported in Britain, which authorized the vaccine last week but recommended this week that people with a history of severe allergic reactions should not take it.In the Senate, hopes of a bipartisan stimulus compromise faded a bit on Thursday, as reports emerged that aides to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told colleagues that they didn’t expect Republicans to get behind a bill.Republicans have been particularly resistant to Democrats’ demands for aid to struggling state, local and tribal governments. In exchange, Republicans have sought liability protections for businesses that have reopened during the pandemic — anathema to Democrats.Only a few days remain before the 116th Congress ends and both chambers are scheduled to adjourn for the holidays. The prospects for a one-week stopgap government funding bill intended to avert a shutdown were unclear in the Senate late yesterday.Photo of the dayCredit…Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMembers of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance drove past the Capitol yesterday during a protest for more pandemic relief aid.Seven in 10 Republican voters think Biden’s win is illegitimate, poll findsBiden has made a message of national unity central to his presidential transition, but he faces a challenge in bringing together a country that simply can’t agree on basic facts anymore.The depth of the divide can be seen in a smattering of recent polls, which have found a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the very legitimacy of Biden’s win.In a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Republican registered voters said Biden’s win was not legitimate, while just 23 percent said it was. Among white male registered voters, only 47 percent said Biden had won fair and square.Comparatively, 98 percent of Democrats said Biden had won legitimately.Asked about whether there had been significant voter fraud — as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, but failed to find — 77 percent of Republicans said yes. Ninety-seven percent of Democrats said no.The results of this poll dovetail with those of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-November, after most major news outlets had called the election but before President Trump’s legal team had suffered some of its most humiliating losses in court.While 94 percent of Biden voters said they were at least somewhat confident the election had been “run and administered well,” just 21 percent of Trump voters said the same. And whereas 82 percent of Biden voters were very confident that their own vote had been accurately counted, that number plummeted to 35 percent among Trump voters.The Pew poll, published on Nov. 20, found that most Trump voters were uninterested in letting bygones be bygones: Eighty-five percent said the president should continue his “legal challenges to the voting process in several states.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe DailySubscribe:Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsA Guide to Georgia’s Senate RunoffsGeorgia flipped blue for Joe Biden. Now two costly battles there will decide control of the Senate.Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Jessica Cheung and Austin Mitchell; and edited by Paige Cowett and Lisa Tobin.More episodes ofThe DailyDecember 11, 2020  •  More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIs Andrew Yang Running for Mayor? All Signs Point to YesThe former Democratic presidential candidate is meeting with New York City power brokers and telling them he intends to enter the race to succeed Bill de Blasio.Andrew Yang, at a town-hall event in New Hampshire in February, has brought on well-known political advisers who have worked for the former mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesDec. 11, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETAndrew Yang, the former tech executive who gained a national following as a Democratic presidential candidate, has been privately telling New York City leaders that he intends to run for mayor next year.Mr. Yang is not expected to announce his bid until next month, but with the Democratic primary less than seven months away, he has begun to make overtures to several of the city’s political power brokers.He met with Corey Johnson, the speaker of the City Council, in a video call on Tuesday to seek his advice about running for mayor.He plans to visit the Rev. Al Sharpton, the Harlem kingmaker — a rite of passage for any serious candidate — in person next week when he returns to the city from Georgia, where he has been trying to help Democrats win the U.S. Senate.He has enlisted Bradley Tusk and Chris Coffey, prominent political strategists who worked for former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as advisers.Mr. Yang, whose presidential campaign was centered around offering every American a universal basic income, could shake up a race that has a large field of candidates and no clear front-runner. He would be only the second Asian-American candidate to run for mayor, following a bid in 2013 by John Liu, a state senator from Queens who was then the city’s comptroller.Mr. Yang, who has temporarily relocated to Georgia to campaign for the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — both facing runoffs next month for U.S. Senate seats — declined to say on Thursday if he was running for mayor.“I’m thrilled that people seem excited about my doing what I can to help, but no, right now I’m focused on these Senate races in Georgia,” he said in an interview.While his name recognition and fund-raising potential could easily put him in the top tier of mayoral candidates, Mr. Yang has never run for office in New York City. He will have to learn quickly about the thorny issues that can animate voters, from rezoning proposals for the SoHo and Flushing, Queens, neighborhoods to the debate over the admissions exam for the city’s elite high schools that has pitted some Asian-American families against Black and Hispanic students.At the same time, celebrity status and Twitter buzz do not always translate into votes in New York — Cynthia Nixon gained a lot of attention but not enough voters in her failed run for governor in 2018.Mr. Yang will also be jockeying for endorsements along with more than a dozen candidates, some of whom have been courting elected officials and unions for years in anticipation of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s exit next year because of term limits.Two candidates have been mainstays in New York politics: Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Scott Stringer, the city comptroller. Others are positioning themselves as outsiders, including Raymond J. McGuire, a business executive, and Maya Wiley, a lawyer and former MSNBC analyst.And on Thursday, Representative Max Rose, who lost his re-election bid last month and was said to be interested in joining the mayor’s race, registered a mayoral campaign committee with the city’s Campaign Finance Board.The pandemic has reshaped the mayor’s race, and the candidates are all trying to argue that they are the best qualified to help the city recover. The field is also perhaps the most diverse ever, including several Black and Latino candidates.Mr. Yang, who was born in upstate New York, has spent most of his adult life living in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. He gained attention on the campaign trail with his MATH slogan — “Make America Think Harder” — and amassed 1.8 million followers on Twitter and nearly $40 million in campaign contributions.His campaign to give every American adult $1,000 a month as part of a universal basic income mandate could be even more popular after many people relied on the federal stimulus to help survive the economic losses of the pandemic, said Susan Kang, a political-science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.“His brand is very zeitgeisty in many ways,” she said. “He’s made a name for himself by promoting universal programs at a time when everyone needs universal programs.”Earlier this year, Mr. Yang did not rule out a run in an interview with The New York Times.“Certainly the mayor of New York City can do a lot of good,” he said. “So that is something that I have to take a long look at.”Not long after, Mr. Yang publicly flirted with the idea of running for mayor, but his deliberations have recently grown more serious. He spoke with Mr. Johnson, who dropped out of the mayor’s race in September after struggling with depression.He also called Representative Grace Meng from Queens, the first Asian-American member of the state’s congressional delegation and a top official for the Democratic National Committee. The conversations were confirmed by two people who were familiar with them, but who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.A spokeswoman for Mr. Sharpton, Rachel Noerdlinger, confirmed his plans to meet with Mr. Yang next week.Mr. Tusk was a campaign manager for Mr. Bloomberg in 2009 and has been a prominent critic of Mr. de Blasio. In 2016, a year before Mr. de Blasio won re-election, Mr. Tusk led a public search for a Democratic candidate to unseat him.After leaving the presidential race, Mr. Yang, who led a test-prep company and a nonprofit organization, created Humanity Forward, a New York-based nonprofit that is distributing money to needy families in the Bronx.Mr. Yang performed well in a recent poll, receiving 20 percent of support as the top choice among 1,000 likely Democratic primary voters, compared with 14 percent for Mr. Adams and 11 percent for Mr. Stringer. The poll was conducted by Slingshot Strategies, a political firm that has worked for candidates like Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate. Mr. Yang did not hire the firm; a private client did, according to the firm.“It’s always encouraging when people are excited about you,” Mr. Yang said of the poll results.The race for an executive job like mayor often comes down to personality, rather than policies, and Mr. Yang, like all the candidates, will have to establish an emotional relationship with voters, Professor Kang said.“To what extent can he project warmth, humor and competence?” she asked.Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationTwo reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy.Dec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETDec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ETJeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Texas filed its election challenge directly to the Supreme Court, an unusual move.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesKen Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election.The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said.And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.”Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor.Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it.The suit’s legal argument is deeply flawed, legal experts said.Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans.The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.“They all do what they do,” Mr. Foley said. “For Texas to try to complain about what Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done would be a lot like Massachusetts complaining about how Texas elects its senators.”Typically state attorneys general are protective of their rights and wary of Supreme Court intervention, which Mr. Foley said makes this case unusual. “This is just the opposite,” he said. “It would be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”The four states named in the suit denounced it on Thursday and urged the court to reject it. The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, accused Mr. Paxton and other Trump allies of running “a disinformation campaign baselessly attacking the integrity of our election system.”The remedy the lawsuit seeks — the disenfranchisement of millions of voters — would be without precedent in the nation’s history.Even if the suit were proper, it was almost surely filed too late, as the procedures Texas objects to were in place before the election.A Supreme Court brief opposing Texas’ requests by prominent Republicans, including former Senator John Danforth of Missouri and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, said Texas’ filings “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers.”“It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this court,” the brief said, “to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes.”Mr. Trump and his supporters have often pointed to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election, as a hopeful historical precedent for their side. But unlike Bush v. Gore, there is not an obvious constitutional question at issue.“It looks like an inherently political suit,” Mr. Foley said.The suit uses statistical arguments that statisticians called ‘comical.’Mr. Paxton’s filing repeatedly cites an analysis by an economist in California that statisticians have said is nonsensical. Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states in question, the analysis says, were “less than one in a quadrillion.”The economist, Charles J. Cicchetti, who donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, arrived at the minuscule probability by purporting to use the results of the 2016 election as a backstop. His flawed reasoning was this: If Mr. Biden had received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he wrote, a victory would have been all but impossible.But Mr. Biden, of course, did not receive the same number of votes as Mrs. Clinton; he received over 15 million more. Nor would any candidate be expected to receive the same number of votes as a previous candidate.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 10, 2020, 4:09 p.m. ETWalmart is preparing to administer a coronavirus vaccine once it is available.Mastercard and Visa stop allowing their cards to be used on Pornhub.The U.S. budget deficit hit $207 billion in November.That one-in-a-quadrillion figure has echoed across social media and was promoted by the White House press secretary. But an array of experts have said that the figure and Mr. Cicchetti’s analysis are easily refutable.Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who runs its election data archive, called this analysis “comical.”The analysis omitted a number of obvious, relevant facts, he said: “the context of the elections are different, that a Covid pandemic is going on, that people reach different conclusions about the administration, that Biden and Clinton are different candidates.”By the same logic and formula, if Mr. Trump had received an equal number of votes in 2020 as he did in 2016, there is also a one in a quadrillion chance that Mr. Trump in 2020 would outperform his totals in 2016, said Stephen C. Preston, a professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College. “But that doesn’t prove Trump cheated, it just shows that the numbers are different,” he said. “It’s like finding a low probability that 2 equals 3.”Mr. Cicchetti also wrote that votes counted earlier in the process and votes counted later favored different candidates, and that there was “a one in many more quadrillions chance” that votes counted in the two time periods were coming from the same groups of voters.But that is exactly what was expected to happen: Democrats tended to prefer voting by mail, and those ballots were counted later in the four battleground states, while Republicans tended to prefer voting in person on Election Day, and those ballots were counted earlier.“The order and tempo of vote counting was unlike previous elections,” said Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.What Mr. Cicchetti wrote was not especially revelatory, experts agreed.“The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not science or statistics. It’s not even a good cartoon of elections.”Texas’ attorney general is caught up in scandal.Though the legal reasoning of Mr. Paxton’s case may be novel, the impulse behind it is not. It was just the latest example of a Trump loyalist using the power of public office to come to the aid of a president whose base of support remains deeply attached to him and overwhelmingly says the election was unfair, according to polls.Mr. Paxton, 57, has been under a cloud of scandal since October, when seven of his senior staff attorneys accused their boss of bribery, misuse of his office and other wrongdoing. Their allegations, which Mr. Paxton has denied, involve a wealthy developer and political donor, Nate Paul, whose home and offices were raided by federal agents in August.The aides accused Mr. Paxton of “potential criminal offenses,” including assisting in Mr. Paul’s defense and intervening in the developer’s efforts to get a favorable judgment in a legal battle between his properties and a nonprofit.First elected in 2014, Mr. Paxton has served much of his term under a still-unresolved securities fraud indictment stemming from events that took place before he took office. The indictment accuses Mr. Paxton of selling technology shares to investors in 2011 without disclosing that he received 100,000 shares of stock as compensation, and of failing to register with securities regulators.Mr. Paxton has nevertheless maintained a high national profile — and the affection of conservatives — with his relentless efforts to dismantle policies of the Obama era and shoulder the Trump administration’s causes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More