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      Trump Rally Underscores GOP Tension Over How to Win in 2022

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      Donald Trump’s rally in Arizona on Saturday has featured a host of election deniers. His involvement in state races and his inability to let go of his 2020 loss worries many Republicans. FLORENCE, Ariz. — Former President Donald J. Trump returned on Saturday to Arizona, a cradle of his political movement, to headline a rally in the desert that has been a striking testament to how he has elevated fringe beliefs and the politicians who spread them — even as other Republicans openly worry that voters will ultimately punish their party for it.Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.And one of his most unflinching defenders in Congress is Representative Paul Gosar, who was censured by his colleagues for posting an animated video online that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.All three spoke at Mr. Trump’s rally in front of thousands of supporters on Saturday in the town of Florence, outside Phoenix. It was the first stadium-style political event he has held so far in this midterm election year in which he will try to deepen his imprint on Republicans running for office at all levels.But as popular as the former president remains with the core of the G.O.P.’s base, his involvement in races from Arizona to Pennsylvania — and his inability to let go of his loss to Mr. Biden — has veteran Republicans in Washington and beyond concerned. They worry that Mr. Trump is imperiling their chances in what should be a highly advantageous political climate, with Democrats deeply divided over their policy agenda and Americans taking a generally pessimistic view of Mr. Biden’s leadership a year into his presidency.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and other senior party officials have expressed their misgivings in recent days about Mr. Trump’s fixation on the last election, saying that it threatens to alienate the voters they need to win over in the next election in November.Those worries are particularly acute in Arizona, where the far-right, Trump-endorsed slate of candidates could prove too extreme in a state that moved Democratic in the last election as voters came out in large numbers to oppose Mr. Trump. The myth of widespread voter fraud is animating Arizona campaigns in several races, alarming Republicans who argue that indulging the former president’s misrepresentations and falsehoods about 2020 is jeopardizing the party’s long-term competitiveness.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans are already poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s race will be at the center of the political universe this year, but there are several important contests across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.“I’ve never seen so many Republicans running in a primary for governor, attorney general, Senate,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant who has worked on statewide races in Arizona for two decades. “Usually you get two, maybe three. But not five.”At the rally on Saturday, every speaker who took the stage before Mr. Trump repeated a version of the false assertion that the vote in Arizona in 2020 was fraudulent. Mr. Gosar, the congressman, did so in perhaps the darkest language, invoking the image of a building storm, a metaphor commonly used by followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. And he called for people involved in counting ballots in Arizona in 2020 to be imprisoned. “Lock them up,” Mr. Gosar told the crowd. “That election was rotten to the core.”For Republicans who are concerned about Mr. Trump’s influence on candidates they believe are unelectable, the basic math of such crowded primaries is difficult to stomach. A winner could prevail with just a third of the total vote — which makes it more than likely a far-right candidate who is unpalatable to the broader electorate can win the nomination largely on Mr. Trump’s endorsement.One of the rally’s featured speakers was Representative Paul Gosar, who was censured by his colleagues for posting a violent animated video online.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesConservative activists in Arizona have long supplied Mr. Trump with the energy and ideas that formed the foundation of his political movement.In 2011, when the real estate developer and reality television star was testing the waters for a possible presidential campaign, his interest in the conspiracy theories that claimed former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery led him to Arizona Tea Party activists and a state legislator. They were pushing for a state law to require that political candidates produce their birth certificates before qualifying for the ballot. Mr. Trump invited them to Trump Tower.One of those activists, Kelly Townsend, now a state senator, spoke to the crowd on Saturday and praised those who sought to delegitimize Mr. Biden’s win.Arizona has been a hotbed of distortions about the 2020 election. Allies of the former president demanded an audit in the state’s largest county, insisting that the official outcome had been compromised by fraud. But when the results of the review were released — in a report both commissioned and produced by Trump supporters — it ended up showing that he actually received 261 fewer votes than first thought.Still, the myth lives on. And those who question it quickly become targets of the former president and his allies. They have attacked two prominent Arizona Republicans — Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich for their roles in Arizona’s formal certification of its election results.Mr. Trump issued a statement on Friday, insisting that if Mr. Ducey decided to run for the United States Senate seat occupied by Mark Kelly, a Democrat, the governor would “never have my endorsement or the support of MAGA Nation!” Mr. Brnovich is running in that Senate primary, and a Republican political group supporting one of his opponents recently ran an ad accusing the attorney general of “making excuses instead of standing with our president” over the 2020 election.Few Republicans have been willing to call Mr. Trump out publicly for misleading his supporters in a state where all four Republicans in its House delegation voted to overturn the results of the election when Congress convened to certify on Jan. 6. Mr. Gosar was the first House member to object that day. Those who have broken ranks with their party include Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, who has started a political action committee to support Republicans running for state and local office who accept the validity of the last election. But even those who have resisted going along with Mr. Trump’s false claims have been unable to completely duck the issue when faced with pressure from the president and his supporters. When a group of 18 Republican attorneys general signed onto a far-fetched lawsuit from their counterpart in Texas that sought to delay the certification of the vote in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Brnovich did not join his colleagues. He declared at the time that the “rule of law” should prevail over politics. But as a candidate for Senate who still occupies the office of the attorney general, he has investigated claims of fraud at the behest of Trump supporters. More

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      How the 'Let's Go, Brandon' Meme Became a Campaign Ad

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      How an inside joke among Republicans became one candidate’s tactic for reaching the G.O.P. masses.It began last fall as an ironic, profane joke after a NASCAR race. Now, it’s showing up in campaign ads.Jim Lamon, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, has a new television advertisement that employs the slogan “Let’s go, Brandon.” His campaign says it is spending $1 million to air the ad, including during local broadcasts of Monday night’s college football championship.As far as we can tell, it’s the first instance of this three-word catchphrase being used in a campaign spot, and that makes it worth unpacking. It says something important about what Republican politicians think animates their primary voters.For those unfamiliar, “Let’s go, Brandon” is code for an insult to President Biden, in place of a four-letter expletive. Colleen Long of the A.P. wrote a good explainer on the phrase’s origins back in October, when it was becoming a widespread in-joke among Republicans.The phrase was even used for a bit of Christmas Eve trolling of Mr. Biden and the first lady, while they fielded a few calls to the NORAD Santa Tracker in what has become an annual White House tradition.At the end of an otherwise cordial call with a father of four from Oregon, President Biden said, “I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.”“I hope you guys have a wonderful Christmas as well,” replied the caller, later identified as Jared Schmeck, a Trump supporter. He added: “Merry Christmas and ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’”The ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ adIn Arizona, Lamon, a businessman who is running in a crowded primary field, has pledged to spend $50 million of his money.Even though money can purchase many things in politics — chartered jets, campaign staff, polling and data wizardry, yard signs — there’s one precious commodity it can’t buy: attention.Thus the new ad. “If you are pissed off about the direction of our country, let’s go,” Lamon begins, as action-movie-style music plays in the background. “If you’re ready to secure the border and stop the invasion, let’s go. If you want to keep corrupt politicians from rigging elections, let’s go.”“Let’s take the fight to Joe Biden, and show him we the people put America first,” Lamon continues, deadly serious in tone. “The time is now. Let’s go, Brandon. Are you with me?”It’s a marked contrast from Lamon’s gauzy biography ad, which introduces him as a genial military veteran who was able to go to college thanks to an R.O.T.C. scholarship.The new ad comes days ahead of a much-anticipated rally by Donald Trump in Florence, Ariz., a town of 25,000 people between Phoenix and Tucson.Trump has yet to back a candidate, but his imprimatur could be decisive. He has all but made embracing his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen an explicit condition for his endorsement, and Saturday’s rally will feature a number of prominent election deniers.“Everybody is running to the right and trying to express their fealty to Donald Trump,” Mike O’Neil, an Arizona political analyst, said of the new Lamon ad. “This is his attempt to break through.”More chucksLamon’s ad isn’t even the most striking video of the Senate primary in Arizona.In mid-October, the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, the closest thing to an establishment candidate in the Senate race, posted a video of himself twirling nunchucks. “People, you want more chucks, you got more chucks,” Brnovich says.The display was widely ridiculed as a desperate plea for attention. Brnovich has struggled to capture the imagination of primary voters — many of whom fault him for not doing enough to prevent Biden’s win in Arizona in 2020 — leaving the race wide open.In November, Blake Masters, a 35-year-old, Stanford-educated lawyer and venture capitalist backed by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire close to Trump, introduced a video of his own that drew national attention for its unusually stark advocacy of Second Amendment rights.In that ad, Masters squints into the camera while cradling a futuristic-looking gun called the “Honey Badger.” “This is a short-barreled rifle,” he intones. “It wasn’t designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people.”Clad in a long-sleeve black T-shirt emblazoned with the word “DROPOUT,” Masters goes on to explain his reasoning, as ominous-sounding music plays in the background.“If you’re not a bad guy, I support your right to own one,” he says. “The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting. It’s about protecting your family and your country.“What’s the first thing the Taliban did when Joe Biden handed them Afghanistan?” Masters continues, before lowering his voice to barely more than a whisper. “They took away people’s guns. That’s how it works.”Harnessing the backlashThe50-second Masters spot did not run on TV, but was viewed at least 1.5 million times on Twitter, generating media coverage and buzz on the right for its unapologetic defense of a weapon that is seen as especially dangerous by gun control advocates.“What was more interesting, in a way, was how much it freaks the left out,” Masters said in an interview, reflecting on the reaction to the ad among liberals. He said he welcomed the opprobrium: “Bring it on.”He noted that when he was working on his biographical ad, introducing himself as an Arizona native, he decided not to lean too heavily on his record as an entrepreneur, and to talk about his values instead.“Dude, nobody cares,” he said. “Nobody cares about your solar company.”The Trump factorSenator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, will be a formidable and well-funded opponent for whoever wins the G.O.P. primary, which is not until August. And Trump’s support could become a liability in a general election.O’Neil noted that many conservative women in the suburbs voted for Biden in 2020 but opted for Republican candidates elsewhere on the ballot.But Masters argued that there’s no downside to running to the right.“The way you win a swing state in Arizona is not by focus-grouping,” he said. “It’s by truly being conservative, and being bold by articulating conservative ideas.”Mike Murphy, a prominent Trump critic and longtime adviser to John McCain, the deceased Arizona senator, said the Lamon ad was a “sign of the sad times in U.S. politics.”But, he quipped, “in the G.O.P. primary electorate this year, who the Brandon knows.”What to readDavid McCormick, the former chief executive of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and a former Treasury Department official, has filed paperwork to enter the Pennsylvania Senate race.The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol has asked Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House’s top Republican, for a voluntary interview, Luke Broadwater reports.Consumer prices rose in December at the fastest rate since 1982, growing at a 7 percent clip in the last year, Ana Swanson reports. An AP-NORC poll published this week found that 68 percent of Americans ranked the economy as their top concern.In a news analysis, Nate Cohn writes that Democrats “still seem nowhere close to enacting robust safeguards against another attempt to overturn a presidential election.”Trump abruptly ended an interview with Steve Inskeep when the NPR host pressed him on his false claims of a stolen election in 2022. The radio network published a full transcript of the encounter, which ended with Inskeep saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I have one more question. … He’s gone. OK.”PULSEThe approval rating for President Biden is at 33 percent. That’s down from 36 percent in November.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNo New Year bump for BidenQuinnipiac University released a poll today that showed President Biden’s approval rating at just 33 percent, while 53 percent of respondents gave him a negative rating. That’s down from 36 percent in November. It’s just one poll, but it’s a sign that Biden’s image isn’t on the rebound. The president’s average approval rating is higher, but still just 42.2 percent, according to 538.Another finding that stood out from the Quinnipiac poll: 76 percent of respondents said that political instability within the United States posed a greater threat than the country’s adversaries. A majority, 58 percent, agreed that American democracy is “in danger of collapse.”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 onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Fury Alone Won’t Destroy Trumpism. We Need a Plan B.

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      In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime. “A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage. This distinction is on my mind because, like so many others, I’ve spent the week revisiting the attempted coup of Jan. 6, marinating in my fury toward the Republicans who put fealty toward Donald Trump above loyalty toward country and the few but pivotal Senate Democrats who are proving, day after day, that they think the filibuster more important than the franchise. Let me tell you, the tweets and columns I drafted in my head were searing.But fury is useful only as fuel. We need a Plan B for democracy. Plan A was to pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Neither bill, as of now, has a path to President Biden’s desk. I’ve found that you provoke a peculiar anger if you state this, as if admitting the problem were the cause of the problem. I fear denial has left many Democrats stuck on a national strategy with little hope of near-term success. In order to protect democracy, Democrats have to win more elections. And to do that, they need to make sure the country’s local electoral machinery isn’t corrupted by the Trumpist right.“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.” “I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. “Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reports. “They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.The second mismatch is emotional. If you’re frightened that America is sliding into authoritarianism, you want to support candidates, run campaigns and donate to causes that directly focus on the crisis of democracy. But few local elections are run as referendums on Trump’s big lie. They’re about trash pickup and bond ordinances and traffic management and budgeting and disaster response.Lina Hidalgo ran for county judge in Harris County, Texas, after the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had appalled her, and she wanted to do something. “I learned about this position that had flown under the radar for a very long time,” she told me. “It was the type of seat that only ever changed who held it when the incumbent died or was convicted of a crime. But it controls the budget for the county. Harris County is nearly the size of Colorado in population, larger than 28 states. It’s the budget for the hospital system, roads, bridges, libraries, the jail. And part of that includes funding the electoral system.”Hidalgo didn’t campaign as a firebrand progressive looking to defend Texas from Trump. She won it, she told me, by focusing on what mattered most to her neighbors: the constant flooding of the county, as violent storms kept overwhelming dilapidated infrastructure. “I said, ‘Do you want a community that floods year after year?’” She won, and after she won, she joined with her colleagues to spend $13 million more on election administration and to allow residents to vote at whichever polling place was convenient for them on Election Day, even if it wasn’t the location they’d been assigned.Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”Or you can simply win one yourself. That’s what Gabriella Cázares-Kelly did. Cázares-Kelly, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, agreed to staff a voter registration booth at the community college where she worked, in Pima County, Ariz. She was stunned to hear the stories of her students. “We keep blaming students for not participating, but it’s really complicated to get registered to vote if you don’t have a license, the nearest D.M.V. is an hour and a half away and you don’t own a car,” she told me.Cázares-Kelly learned that much of the authority over voter registration fell to an office neither she nor anyone around her knew much about: the County Recorder’s Office, which has authority over records ranging from deeds to voter registrations. It had powers she’d never considered. It could work with the postmaster’s office to put registration forms in tribal postal offices — or not. When it called a voter to verify a ballot and heard an answering machine message in Spanish, it could follow up in Spanish — or not.“I started contacting the records office and making suggestions and asking questions,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I did that for a long time, and the previous recorder was not very happy about it. I called so often, the staff began to know me. I didn’t have an interest in running till I heard the previous recorder was going to retire, and then my immediate thought was, ‘What if a white supremacist runs?’”So in 2020, Cázares-Kelly ran, and she won. Now she’s the county recorder for a jurisdiction with nearly a million people, and more than 600,000 registered voters, in a swing state. “One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Cyber Ninjas, Derided for Arizona Vote Review, Says It Is Shutting Down

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      The organization that conducted the widely derided review of the presidential vote in Arizona’s largest county said it was insolvent and had laid off its employees.For a company that has had its share of bad weeks, Cyber Ninjas, the Florida firm behind the widely derided review of Arizona’s 2020 presidential vote, may finally have hit bottom.On Thursday, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in Phoenix delivered a detailed four-hour livestreamed rebuttal of all the firm’s claims, showing that all, except one involving 50 votes, were either mistaken, misleading or outright false.That same day, a superior court judge cited the company for contempt after it refused to surrender records of its vote review to The Arizona Republic, which is seeking them under a freedom of information request. He levied a $50,000-a-day fine on the firm until it produces the records.By week’s end, lawyers said the firm was insolvent and had laid off its employees, including Doug Logan, its chief executive and onetime proponent of a baseless theory that the state’s voting machines had been rigged.The shutdown was confirmed on Friday by a spokesman, Rod Thomson, who said it was unclear whether the company would declare bankruptcy.That did not impress the judge, John Hannah, who suggested that the shutdown might be designed “to leave the Cyber Ninjas entity as an empty piñata for all of us to swing at.” The official Maricopa County Twitter account seized on the description, declaring that “an empty piñata is a pretty accurate description of the ‘audit’ as a whole.”But whether the exercise was a complete failure is another matter. Experts say it played a role in accomplishing a more fundamental political goal: fueling anger over the accuracy and integrity of the 2020 election among former President Donald J. Trump’s most ardent backers.The six-month, $5.6 million review of the 2.1 million votes cast in Arizona’s largest county was ordered up last year by the Republican-controlled State Senate after supporters of Mr. Trump insisted that his narrow loss in the state was the result of fraud.It became something of a national punchline in September after the review concluded that President Biden actually won by a greater margin than official tallies showed.Still, the review and its supporters insisted that the election was suspect, citing 75 potential irregularities they said the Cyber Ninjas were unable to resolve.The rebuttal by the five-member Board of Supervisors, four of them Republicans, was striking both for its detail and its bluntness.The Cyber Ninjas have laid off their employees, including Doug Logan, the organization’s chief executive.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesA 93-page printed version said that a review of the Cyber Ninjas’ claims of irregularities found only 37 potentially questionable ballots among the 53,304 that had been labeled suspect. Those were referred to the state attorney general, a Republican who has been asked to review the organization’s claims.Out of the 75 claims of irregularities, the county said, the only one that could be valid involved 50 ballots that may have been double-counted. That error would not have affected the outcome of any race in the November 2020 election, the county said.The county supervisors had denounced the Senate’s review for months as partisan theatrics aimed at mollifying the substantial far-right share of the state’s Republican voters. But the board’s chairman, Bill Gates, a Republican, went further on Thursday, drawing a straight line between tolerance for “extreme misinformation” and political violence like the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.Referring to protesters who stormed the building, Mr. Gates said that “many of these people did it because they believed they were saving their country from an election that they had been told had been stolen.”“Many people in positions of power, they fed into this, for they simply turned a blind eye,” he added. “They’ve listened to the loud few and told them what they want to hear, and that’s the easy thing to do. But here, we don’t do what’s easy. We do what’s right.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      America’s Anti-Democratic Movement

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      It’s making progress.American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy.But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Trump tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name “Stop the Steal” — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage Trump supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained.“This is a five-alarm fire,” Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over the 2020 vote count there, told The Times. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article about the movement, told Terry Gross of NPR last week, “This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, notes that the movement is bigger than Trump. “I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters,” she told Thomas Edsall of Times Opinion.Ballot counting in Wisconsin in November 2020.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn plain sightThe main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas. (One way Democrats can push back against the anti-democratic movement: Make a bigger effort to win working-class votes.) The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.“None of this is happening behind closed doors,” Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. “We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.”Here is an overview of recent developments:Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.”Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop Trump’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a Trump-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a Trump-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where Trump allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.What’s next?The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result.Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, has helped to start the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates — of either party — running against Trump-backed Republicans. It is active in congressional races but does not have enough resources to compete in the state contests that often determine election procedures, Taylor told The Times.Gellman, the Atlantic writer, argues that Democrats and independents — as well as journalists — can make a difference by paying more attention. “Grass-roots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions,” he said on NPR, “could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.”For more: Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, was involved in fighting the election outcome, according to the House Committee investigating the Capitol attack.THE LATEST NEWSThe VirusCovid has killed one in 100 Americans 65 or older.Weak health care infrastructure poses challenges for many of Africa’s vaccination programs.A sense of endlessness: Anxiety and depression are taking hold.Other Big StoriesSalvaging belongings from wreckage in Kentucky.William Widmer for The New York TimesTornadoes killed at least 90 people in the U.S. this weekend. Here’s where they struck.Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News after 18 years — and after raising questions about Tucker Carlson’s work — to join CNN.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called for legislation modeled on Texas’s abortion law to go after the gun industry.A litany of crises is confronting Los Angeles before next year’s mayoral election.OpinionsThe New York TimesThe climate crisis is reshaping the planet. Here’s what it looks like in 193 countries.Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss inflation and crime.MORNING READSAnd just like that: It’s Peloton vs. “Sex and the City.”The Media Equation: A climate-change comedy nails the media’s failures.Quiz time: The average score on our latest news quiz was 8.6. See how well you do.Advice from Wirecutter: Beware overpriced, mediocre wines.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries More

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      Arizona students stage hunger strike to urge Sinema to support voting reform

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      Arizona students stage hunger strike to urge Sinema to support voting reformCollege students say they will be striking indefinitely until Arizona senator agrees to support Freedom to Vote Act Since Monday, a group of 20 college students from the University of Arizona and Arizona State have been on hunger strike in an effort to pressure one of the most heavily criticized Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema, to take action on the passage of crucial voting reform legislation.The students say they will be striking indefinitely until Arizona’s Sinema agrees to support the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that would ensure fair election measures like automatic voter registration and the protection and expansion of vote by mail.‘Time is running out’: can Congress pass a voting rights bill after months of failure?Read moreTheir target is not easy. Sinema, who was once active in the Green party, has drifted far away from the progressive wing of her party and is now widely seen – along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – as a centrist roadblock on much of Joe Biden’s agenda. As such, she has earned the anger of many Democrats, from her fellow elected officials to grassroots organizers.The Freedom to Vote Act would directly benefit those most affected by voter suppression laws and gerrymandering, especially Black and brown communities, immigrants and young voters, and voters with disabilities. The students are working with Un-Pac, a non-partisan group organizing in the hope of restoring the Voting Rights Act through the Freedom to Vote Act and eliminating gerrymandering, dark money and other threats to fair representation.Since its introduction, the bill has been consistently opposed by Republican lawmakers and is held up in the Senate where it has been blocked by Republican senators. Despite his promise to restore the Voting Rights Act during his campaign, Biden and the Democratic majority have failed to advance any voting rights legislation this year, despite a broad push by Republicans across the US to pass laws restricting access to the ballot.In 2021 alone, US Republicans have taken full advantage of the filibuster – the Senate rule requiring 60 votes to advance most legislation – and deterred voting rights bills on four different occasions. According to a recent report from the Brennan Institute for Justice, 19 states enacted 33 different laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote after the 2020 election, in which record numbers of citizens went to the polls. At the same time there has been widespread gerrymandering in mostly Republican states, chipping away at Democratic seats and splitting up voters from communities of color.Last week Sinema agreed to a private meeting with the students via Zoom, where she listened to their concerns and said she supported the passage of the legislation. However, she has a history of supporting the filibuster.“We are very clear from that meeting that Senator Sinema understands our message – that we are hunger striking until the bill passes and we would rather make this sacrifice than suffer the consequences of inaction on federal voting rights and campaign finance reform now,” said Shana Gallagher, executive director of Un-Pac. “We now believe it is incumbent upon President Biden to call another vote before the end of the year.”The students are now traveling to Washington DC, where Biden held the Summit for Democracy. Student organizers Brandon Ortega and Georgia Linden said the protestors will shift the pressure from Sinema and plan to continue striking indefinitely outside the White House in an effort to persuade Biden to talk to them and ultimately, pass the Freedom to Vote Act into law before the end of the year.“We are honestly confused and disappointed that President Biden hasn’t prioritized this more,” said Gallagher. “We don’t understand why he’s not treating this existential issue with the urgency that we are, but we are still hopeful that he has time to change course and our sacrifice will help the administration to act.”As of now, the group is hopeful of drawing the attention of the White House.“We did not originally request a meeting with Sinema but when she found out about our action, she wanted to meet with us to express her commitment to this legislation,” said Gallagher. “Our remaining demand is a meeting with the Biden administration but as of now, we have not heard a response.”The group is well aware that their hunger strike could last longer than they hope, but they are prepared for the hardships.“It’s definitely been difficult, but we do have a medical team and a support team that is taking care of all of us,” said Ortega. “We’re grateful that we have dozens of people across the country doing solidarity fasts and vigils and there has been a lot of support, most notably from a group of veterans who came to the Arizona state house to thank us and to tell us they were humbled by our actions. 84% of Arizonians support this bill, so we’re united as a generation and as a state.”“I would just say, what’s far more dangerous than putting our bodies on the line is losing our democracy forever,” said Linden.TopicsArizonaUS voting rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t want people discussing her clothes – she could distract them by communicating | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t want people discussing her clothes – she could distract them by communicatingArwa MahdawiThe Arizona senator’s flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has inspired headlines and intrigue The Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who memorably posted a photo of herself wearing a ring that said “Fuck Off”, thinks it is offensive that the media keeps discussing her sartorial choices. Sinema has become a household name in recent months because of her resistance to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, but her flamboyant attire and ever-changing style has also helped keep the senator in the news. She’s inspired headlines such as Kyrsten Sinema’s Style Keeps Us Guessing (The New York Times) and Take note, AOC – Kyrsten Sinema’s bad style actually makes a statement (The New York Post).“It’s very inappropriate,” Sinema told Politico on Wednesday. “I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business. It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”‘Medium is the message’: AOC defends ‘tax the rich’ dress worn to Met GalaRead moreIt doesn’t matter whether you’re a senator or a schoolkid, female clothing is unfairly policed. Professional women often find themselves getting scrutinized for their fashion choices in ways that their male counterparts are not. But does that mean, as Sinema seems to be suggesting, that it is automatically sexist or inappropriate to comment on what a female politician is wearing? Of course not. Fashion has always been used to make political statements and there are plenty of examples where a woman’s clothing or appearance is a legitimate news story. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sworn in as congresswoman, for example, she wore all-white to honour the suffragettes and Shirley Chisholm. In this instance, she was very much dressing for someone else.Style can have substance. One of the most famous examples of this is Madeleine Albright who used jewelry to communicate her views when she was secretary of state. “I found that jewelry had become part of my personal diplomatic arsenal,” Albright has said. “While President George HW Bush had been known for saying ‘Read my lips’, I began urging colleagues and reporters to ‘Read my pins.’”Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters, hasn’t explicitly urged anyone to “read her pins”, but it often seems like she wants people to pay attention to her wardrobe. Last year she wore a bright purple wig on the Senate floor; after voting she pointed at her wig, just to make sure everyone knew it was her. “Kyrsten is continuing to call attention to the need for all of us to stay home as much as possible and practice social distancing – which she is diligently practicing, including from her hair salon,” her spokeswoman later said. So are her fashion choices no one’s business, as she told Politico, or is she using them to make a political statement? I’m confused.But that’s the Sinema effect: she’s the former Green party-aligned activist who ran on a progressive policy platform then, as soon as she got into power, became one of the biggest roadblocks to getting any progressive policies passed. She’s nominally a Democrat, but is so chummy with the GOP that the Republican senator John Cornyn has said he “would be surprised if Republicans tried to unseat” Sinema in 2024. (He’s since walked that back a little.) She’s nothing if not inconsistent.One reason that so much attention is paid to the senator’s clothes is that people are desperate to understand what (if anything) she stands for, and clothes seem to be one of the main ways she expresses herself. Sinema seems to have forgotten that she is a public servant and that part of her job is communicating with the people she represents. She doesn’t hold public events for her Arizona constituents; she doesn’t communicate with the local progressive groups who got her elected or even her previous allies; she rarely gives interviews and, when she does speak to the press, says little of substance. The New York Times has described her as “one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill”; the Politico piece noted that “even after an extended interview, the first-term Democrat holds onto the air of mystery that’s become a signature part of her political brand”.Sinema owes no one an explanation for how she dresses, but there are plenty of other things she owes us all an explanation for. Like whether all the money big pharma has been sending her way has anything to do with her U-turn on drug prices. Sinema campaigned on lowering drug prices and making healthcare more affordable in her 2018 Senate race; as a senator she had the opportunity to help Biden do just that but instead was instrumental in massively watering down drug pricing reforms. She hasn’t given the public any details regarding this shift – just as she hasn’t given the public any meaningful details on why she is raking in so much money from multilevel marketing businesses (often criticized as pyramid schemes). If Sinema wants people to focus on her work instead of her wigs, then maybe she should remember who she is supposed to be working for. If Sinema starts providing much-needed explanations about what she stands for, there might be rather less talk about the thigh-high boots she’s standing in.TopicsFashionArizonaUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Arizona voters baffled by Kyrsten Sinema: ‘she betrayed us’

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      ArizonaArizona voters baffled by Kyrsten Sinema: ‘she betrayed us’The senator’s support for the filibuster has soured feelings among former supporters in the state David Smith in Washington@smithinamericaSat 6 Nov 2021 04.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 6 Nov 2021 04.02 EDTAllie Young believed in Kyrsten Sinema. Her vote helped elect the seemingly progressive Democrat from Arizona to the Senate in 2018. But she wonders what happened to Sinema when she got to Washington.Young, a voting rights activist and citizen of the Diné, or Navajo Nation, is appalled by Sinema’s refusal to reform or abolish the filibuster.The McConnell filibuster is not the same as the Jim Crow filibuster – it’s much worse | David LittRead more“She has betrayed her constituents,” Young, 31, said by phone this week. “The sort of inaction that she’s taking right now is an action and it’s making the BIPOC community, especially in Arizona, distrust her more and more as the days go by.”Republicans have deployed the filibuster to block legislation brought by Democrats to safeguard voting rights four times this year. On Wednesday they thwarted debate on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after the civil rights hero and congressman.It is an issue that hits home for Young, who last year organized a second “Ride to the Polls” campaign in Arizona that led Indigenous people more than 20 miles on horseback to polling places so they could cast their votes. “Her campaign was something that attracted us because back then she seemed to be a little more progressive than she is now. That’s the part that we’re all having trouble understanding. What happened?”The bewilderment deepened late last year when Sinema nominated Young for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s Citizen Honors Award for her contribution to increasing voter registration and turnout. Young reflected: “The fact that nomination came from her and her office tells me that she knows the importance of the Native vote.”“[But] she’s not protecting our right to vote and, if she doesn’t end the filibuster and these voting rights acts don’t get passed, that will affect us. We’re already seeing some of these voter suppression laws that have been passed earlier this year and how they will affect the Native vote.”This has led to the oft-asked question: what does Sinema really want? “A lot of folks are talking about how she’s trying to stay bipartisan. She thinks that’s the key to everything that’s happening in the divisiveness that we’ve seen,” Young says.“It’s very devastating to all of us Arizonans and those who trusted in her. That’s the point of this election process. We vote in and we elect leaders that should be held accountable and that’s what we’re doing now. We put faith in a leader that’s going to show up for us and protect us and fight for us and we’re not seeing that right now.”Earlier this year the US supreme court upheld Arizona laws that ban the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, and reject any ballots cast in the wrong precinct.Republicans, who control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Arizona, are also pushing to end same-day voter registration, a move that would hurt the Navajo Nation, with 170,000 people and 110 communities spread over 27,000 square miles, mostly in Arizona.Young explained: “Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to get to the poll. It’s difficult to get anywhere, to even get to a hospital or a clinic or a grocery store, so making multiple trips to ensure that our vote is counted is nearly impossible for a lot of people.”Young argued the case for protecting voting rights with Kamala Harris at a White House meeting and is collecting signatures of Navajo leaders to register their discontent with Sinema. She welcomes the prospect of another Democrat challenging her in a primary election one day.The filibuster, which is not in the US constitution, enables the Senate minority to block debate on legislation. Barack Obama has called it “a Jim Crow relic”, a reference to its long history of thwarting civil rights legislation.Apart from blocking voting rights legislations, Republicans have used it to block the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the 6 January insurrection at the US this year. Activists regard eliminating the procedure as crucial to other issues including immigration reform and reproductive rights.In a CNN town hall last month, Biden indicated willingness to “fundamentally alter the filibuster”, adding that it “remains to be seen exactly what that means in terms of fundamentally – on whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up”.But just as on his economic agenda, senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema stand in his way. Both have repeatedly defended the filibuster, with Sinema arguing that it “protects the democracy of our nation rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years”.Just Democracy, a coalition led by Black and brown organizers, is coordinating with Arizona groups to step up the pressure on her to reconsider.This includes a psychological thriller-style parody movie trailer, The Betrayal, about Sinema turning her back on people of color in Arizona, ending with: “Now playing in Sinemas near you.” It will be backed by anadvertising campaign in Arizona and run alongside horror content on the streaming service Hulu.Channel Powe, 40, a local organizer, former Arizona school board member and spokesperson for Just Democracy, said: “We’re going to make it politically impossible for Senator Sinema to continue to stand by the filibuster. In this week of action we are creating a surround sound effect that pushes Senator Sinema on the filibuster. We wanted to share the terrifying consequences of the world that Sinema is enabling.”Powe added: “Once upon a time, she was a mentor of mine in a 2011 political fellowship that I participated in. I looked up to her. Kyrsten used to be a fierce fighter for the people. But once she got to Congress, she turned her back on the very same people who helped her get her in office.”TopicsArizonaUS politicsUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More