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      Only the Strong review: Tom Cotton as hawk … too chicken to take on Trump?

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      Only the Strong review: Tom Cotton as hawk … too chicken to take on Trump?The Arkansas senator’s book may be a calling card for 2024 but he must know he is highly unlikely to be the next GOP nominee Together, Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell worked to undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. On 6 January 2021, both Republican senators refused to take the path paved by their colleagues Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and object to results in key states. Cotton, from Arkansas, branded those who stormed the Capitol “insurrectionists” – a label he had used before, for those who rioted in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.Senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidenceRead moreUnlike Cruz, Cotton didn’t back down or simper before Tucker Carlson. In contrast to Hawley, he is southern but not neo-Confederate, more Andrew Jackson than John C Calhoun. Cotton’s new book, Only the Strong, name-checks Abraham Lincoln. He has previously opined on slavery, saying the founders viewed it as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”, a remark that angered the left (most likely pleasing its author). More recently, Cotton condemned David DePape, the man who attacked Paul Pelosi. The US needs to “get tough on crime”, the senator said.Cotton’s consistency, however, is limited. He knows his party belongs to Trump. In his new book, he avoids mention of January 6.Cotton is happy of course to castigate Joe Biden on Ukraine, writing: “His weakness enticed Vladimir Putin to invade.” The senator is a decorated combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq (though not as an army ranger, as he has previously said). Against the backdrop of the botched US pullout from Afghanistan, his critique is comprehensible. Not surprisingly, though, Cotton is loth to criticize Trump, a Vietnam-era draft-dodger who in early 2022 lavished praise on his idol, Putin, and derided Nato as “not so smart”.“I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians,” the normally loquacious Cotton told ABC in response.There is also the fact Cotton received more than $40,000 in campaign donations from a commodities speculator who profiteered from Ukraine’s misfortune.The subtitle of Cotton’s book is “Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power”. He seeks to pin all that is wrong on the Democrats, their allies and their voters. He slams Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for their lack of military service – but again his gaze is selective. He omits George W Bush’s spotty time in the Texas air national guard, rather than go to Vietnam, and Trump’s “bone spurs” which kept him out of the same ghastly war.Practically speaking, Only the Strong is best viewed as an obligatory pre-presidential campaign book, penned to distinguish its author from the rest of the Republican field. Cotton pays lip service to Trump but his heart clearly belongs to Ronald Reagan, the last president to win in a landslide.Cotton approves of Reagan’s stance toward a Sandinista-run Nicaragua but is silent on Iran-Contra. He rightly praises Reagan’s arms treaty with the Soviets, but doubles down on his contention that Vietnam was a “noble cause”. Cotton has only scorn for Daniel Ellsberg, the source for the Pentagon Papers, which cast light on US handling of Vietnam. Cotton is unmoved by evidence the government was less than forthright.He avoids substantive criticism of the Iraq war. Bush should be faulted for failing to “dedicate enough troops during the early days”, Cotton writes, without elaboration. It’s a far cry from calling Bush a “stupid moron”, which Trump did in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.Cotton would look foolish or worse if he tried. He is an unbowed war hawk. In 2013, he attended a campaign fundraiser hosted by Dan Senor, the Bush administration spokesman who once told reporters: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.” Senor’s event netted more than $100,000. Donors included the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who memorably urged the US to bomb Iran.“You pick up your cellphone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say, ‘OK let it go,’” Adelson said in 2013. “And so, there’s an atomic weapon, goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes and scorpions, or whatever.”Predictably, Cotton goes full bore at Biden for, he claims, doing “next to nothing to protect America from our greatest threat, Communist China”. Biden’s efforts to restrict US companies and citizens from helping China make semiconductor chips seem to have escaped the senator’s notice.Likewise, Cotton supports arming Taiwan against China but fails to comment on Trump’s willingness to cut Taiwan loose. Trump once remarked that the island was “like two feet from China” and the US was “8,000 miles away”, chillingly adding that if the Chinese invade, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do”.At a September rally, Trump contrasted Biden with Xi Jinping and Putin: “I’ve got to know a lot of the foreign leaders, and let me tell you, unlike our leader, they’re at the top of their game.”Pence blames Trump for events leading to January 6 in new memoirRead moreFrom Cotton? Nada. From the looks of things, he wishes to maintains his viability as a possible Republican nominee. At 45 he is decades younger than Trump and in far better condition than Cruz. He has plenty of time.But don’t expect Cotton to take on Trump in 2024, unless Trump is indicted. Cotton lacks Ron DeSantis’s war chest, and would probably get crushed. For what it’s worth, even DeSantis is suddenly reported to be suffering from cold feet. Beyond that, Sarah Sanders, once Trump’s press secretary, is a shoo-in to be the next governor of Arkansas. With her assistance, Trump would crush Cotton in his home state.On Friday, reports said Trump was set to announce his bid for re-election in a matter of days. Within the GOP, there shall be no god before Him, and Him does not include Cotton. His book’s shelf-life may be limited.
      Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power is published in the US by Hachette
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      Don’t Buy the Republican Appeal to Workers

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      J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story.This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.In other instances, what superficially seemed to be examples of Republican support for worker rights were really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.For example, legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021.Only a sliver of the national work force dug in and refused to be vaccinated, including a small number of New York City employees recently granted reinstatement to their jobs by a Staten Island trial court judge. But anti-vax‌ workers were stark outliers in relation to the vast majority of their peers, from United Airlines employees to Massachusetts state employees, who overwhelmingly complied with mandates.Why did ‌these conservative Republicans suddenly want a safety net for unvaccinated workers? Because it served a culture war narrative, one that frames everything in divisive us-versus-them terms and in the case of vaccines, sees them as a nefarious liberal plot and vaccine-or-test mandates as one more example of government overreach.To that point, consider two legal cases, one brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when its enforcement arm was led by a Trump appointee, and another heard by the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees. Both cases involved workers — but neither touched on pocketbook or dignity issues central to most workers’ concerns.The E.E.O.C. case involved two Kroger workers who claimed religious discrimination after being fired for refusing to wear company-issued aprons bearing a heart-shaped logo they saw as promoting gay rights. (In pretrial depositions, both workers were shown a range of corporate logos, and the workers said several of them also represented gay rights and were incompatible with their religion; they included the logos of NBC, Google, Southwest and Apple, as well as the Olympic rings.) A Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas rejected Krogers’ motion to end the case, ordering the case to trial, and earlier this month, the company and commission said they had reached a deal to resolve the dispute.In a Supreme Court case that became a national right-wing cause célèbre, the six conservative justices ruled that a Washington State school district violated the free speech and religious rights of a public school football coach who insisted on praying very publicly after games with students at midfield, rejecting more private locations that were offered.In light of genuine worker struggles in our country, these are the workers conservatives go to bat for? It seems the trickle-down crowd finds their inner Norma Rae only if it helps them “own the libs.” These aren’t workers’ rights issues. They’re divisive culture war battles that happen to occur in the employment arena. For ordinary workers, living paycheck to paycheck, who just want a safe place to work, decent pay, and some dignity, conservatives are AWOL.The praying coach and Kroger worker cases involved First Amendment and religious rights. But the most common example of silenced expression occurs when workers get fired for reporting labor law violations or supporting a union. How many Republicans have spoken up to support the expressive rights of unionizing Starbucks or Amazon workers?Similarly, Republicans may prioritize benefits for their favored workers (such as people who are unvaccinated), but all workers need a functioning safety net, including an adequately funded and functional unemployment insurance system. What’s also essential are robust and broadly available programs for paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave and universal health care, measures most Republicans have repeatedly opposed. In this context, the rush to ensure unemployment benefits to people refusing a lifesaving vaccine is cynical, indeed.Workers need safe conditions, good wages, fair treatment and a collective voice on the job. The culture war labor incursions are divorced from what matters most to our country’s working people.As the midterms approach, Republican candidates may play dress-up in plaids and work boots, as they vie for the votes of our nation’s workers. But even a pickup truck laden with bluejeans and hard hats can’t camouflage the callous facts. The absurdity of the worker causes Republicans champion should drive home the truth to wavering voters: these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.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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      Republican senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence in new book

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      Republican senator Tom Cotton brags about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence in new bookThe Arkansas senator, a Republican presidential hopeful, also suggests president did not know military procedures In January 2020, the rightwing Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton said he would vote to acquit Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial because despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.Trump bragged about new US nuclear weapons, Woodward tape showsRead moreAccording to Cotton, the senators who sat through so much evidence would “perform the role intended for us by the founders, of providing the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’, as it says in Federalist 63.”In a new book, however, Cotton boasts that he spent his time refusing to pay attention – pretending to read materials relevant to the president’s trial – but hiding his real reading matter under a fake cover.He writes: “My aides delivered a steady flow of papers and photocopied books, hidden underneath a fancy cover sheet labeled ‘Supplementary Impeachment Materials’, so nosy reporters sitting above us in the Senate gallery couldn’t see what I was reading.”“They probably would’ve reported that I wasn’t paying attention to the trial.”Reporters did report that Republicans were not paying attention. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee named the book she chose to read instead of participating in only the third presidential trial in history: “It was Resistance (At All Costs) by Kim Strassel.”Other Republicans fidgeted or doodled. But reporters noted that Blackburn violated decorum guidelines on relevant reading: “Reading materials should be confined to only those readings which pertain to the matter before the Senate.”Admitting the same infraction, Cotton – a leading China hawk – says he was reading “about the science of coronaviruses, the methods of vaccine development and the history of pandemics”.He adds: “I was paying attention – to the story that mattered most. The outcome of the impeachment trial was a foregone conclusion, and it wouldn’t impact the daily lives of normal Americans.”Cotton’s book, Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power, will be published next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Cotton is now among senators, governors and former members of the Trump administration jostling for position in the developing contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Publishing a book is a traditional preparatory step.The senator, 45, is a former soldier who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Arlington Cemetery before entering politics as a foreign policy hawk. His book takes aim at Joe Biden and Barack Obama – and equally persistently, from the prologue to the note on sources, Woodrow Wilson, the president who took office in 1913, took the US into the first world war in 1917, left office in 1921 and died in 1924.Trump is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination 100 years later, despite facing legal jeopardy for inciting the Capitol attack, trying to overturn the 2020 election, retaining classified records and being the subject of criminal and civil suits over his business affairs and an allegation of rape.Cotton voted to acquit Trump at both his impeachment trials, the second for inciting the Capitol riot, but he was not among the eight Republican senators who supported Trump’s attempts to overturn election results in key states.In his book, however, the Arkansan skips over domestic concerns, including his own advocacy of using the military against “Antifa terrorists” during protests for racial justice in summer 2020, a position which stoked huge controversy and brought down an editor at the New York Times.Cotton is largely careful to target only Democratic presidents. Hitting Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for not serving in the military before running for the White House, he omits mention of George W Bush’s avoidance of service in Vietnam by securing a post in the Texas air national guard, to which he did not always show up.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreBut Cotton does risk angering Trump, by criticising him for “waiting too long to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal” and by dishing on a private call in which the then president professed ignorance of military protocol.Early in Trump’s term in power, Cotton writes, the president called him about a potential nominee – common Senate business.But Trump then said: “The other night, they called me and asked for approval to kill some terrorist. I never heard of the guy.”Cotton asked if Trump approved the strike.“Trump replied, ‘Oh yeah, but I asked why they called me in the first place. Didn’t they have some captain or major or someone who knew more about this guy? I mean, I’d never heard of him.’”With nudging, Cotton says, Trump worked out that the military was working according to protocols laid down by Obama, who he accuses of “impos[ing] needless layers of bureaucratic and legal review” on strikes on terrorist targets.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationTrump impeachment (2019)RepublicansUS elections 2024ArkansasReuse this content More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery‘By the grace of God, I am now cancer-free’, Sanders, 42, formerly Trump’s press secretary, says after successful operation Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”02:43Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.TopicsUS politicsArkansasnewsReuse this content More

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      Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act by limiting help to voters, a judge rules.

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      A federal judge ruled that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act with its six-voter limit for those who help people cast ballots in person, which critics had argued disenfranchised immigrants and people with disabilities.In a 39-page ruling issued on Friday, Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., wrote that Congress had explicitly given voters the choice of whom they wanted to assist them at the polls, as long as it was not their employer or union representative.Arkansas United, a nonprofit group that helps immigrants, including many Latinos who are not proficient in English, filed a lawsuit in 2020 after having to deploy additional employees and volunteers to provide translation services to voters at the polls in order to avoid violating the state law, the group said. It described its work as nonpartisan.State and county election officials have said the law was intended to prevent anyone from gaining undue influence.Thomas A. Saenz is the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented Arkansas United in the case. He said in an interview on Monday that the restrictions, enacted in 2009, constituted voter suppression and that the state had failed to present evidence that anyone had gained undue influence over voters when helping them at the polls.Read More About U.S. ImmigrationA Billion-Dollar Business: Migrant smuggling on the U.S. southern border has evolved over the past 10 years into a remunerative operation controlled by organized crime.Migrant Apprehensions: Border officials already had apprehended more migrants by June than they had in the entire previous fiscal year, and are on track to exceed two million by the end of September.An Immigration Showdown: In a political move, the governors of Texas and Arizona are offering migrants free bus rides to Washington, D.C. People on the East Coast are starting to feel the effects.“You’re at the polls,” he said. “Obviously, there are poll workers are there. It would seem the most unlikely venue for undue voter influence to occur, frankly.”Mr. Saenz’s organization, known as MALDEF, filed a lawsuit this year challenging similar restrictions in Missouri. There, a person is allowed to help only one voter.In Arkansas, the secretary of state, the State Board of Election Commissioners and election officials in three counties (Washington, Benton and Sebastian) were named as defendants in the lawsuit challenging the voter-assistance restrictions. It was not immediately clear whether they planned to appeal the ruling.Daniel J. Shults, the director of the State Board of Election Commissioners, said in an email on Monday that the agency was reviewing the decision and that its normal practice was to defend Arkansas laws designed to protect election integrity. He said that voter privacy laws in Arkansas barred election officials from monitoring conversations between voters and their helpers and that this made the six-person limit an “important safeguard” against improper influence.“The purpose of the law in question is to prevent the systematic abuse of the voting assistance process,” Mr. Shults said. “Having a uniform limitation on the number of voters a third party may assist prevents a bad actor from having unlimited access to voters in the voting booth while ensuring voter’s privacy is protected.”Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said in an email on Monday that the office was also reviewing the decision and having discussions with the state attorney general’s office about possible next steps.Russell Anzalone, a Republican who is the election commission chairman in Benton County in northwestern Arkansas, said in an email on Monday that he was not familiar with the ruling or any changes regarding voter-assistance rules. He added, “I follow the approved State of Arkansas election laws.”The other defendants in the lawsuit did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment.In the ruling, Judge Brooks wrote that state and county election officials could legally keep track of the names and addresses of anyone helping voters at the polls. But they can no longer limit the number to six voters per helper, according to the ruling.Mr. Saenz described the six-voter limit as arbitrary.“I do think that there is a stigma and unfair one on those who are simply doing their part to assist those who have every right to be able to cast a ballot,” he said. More

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      Who won, who lost and what was too close to call on Tuesday.

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      Ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost in the state of Georgia during the 2020 presidential election, he has sought revenge against the Republican incumbents there whom he blamed for not helping him overturn the results. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump lost in Georgia again, with his endorsed candidates losing in their Republican primaries for governor, secretary of state and attorney general.But those weren’t the only races that voters decided on Tuesday. Here is a rundown of the winners and losers in some of the most important contests in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas:Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, won his primary despite Mr. Trump’s best efforts against him.The Georgia governor who stood up to Mr. Trump, Brian Kemp, easily defeated a Trump-backed challenger. Mr. Kemp will face Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, whom he narrowly defeated four years ago.Chris Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, also defeated his Trump-backed challenger, John Gordon, to win the Republican nomination for that office. Mr. Gordon had embraced Mr. Trump’s election lie and made that a key part of his appeal to voters. Herschel Walker, the former football star and a Trump-backed candidate to represent Georgia in the Senate, defeated a crowded field of Republican rivals. In Georgia, one House Democrat beat another House Democrat in a primary orchestrated by Republicans. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican primary for her House district in Georgia.In Texas, a scandal-scarred attorney general defeated a challenger named Bush. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Mr. Trump and the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, won the Republican nomination for governor of Arkansas.Representative Mo Brooks made it into an Alabama Senate runoff after Mr. Trump pulled back his endorsement.In Texas, a Democratic House runoff between Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who opposes abortion rights, and his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney, was too close to call. (Results are being updated in real time here). More

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      Five key takeaways: the US midterm elections

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      Five key takeaways: the US midterm electionsRaces from Georgia to Texas were a litmus test of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican party with some significant losses Blow to Donald Trump as a political kingmakerBrian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, defeated former Senator David Perdue, who had been endorsed by Donald Trump. Perdue’s loss marked a significant defeat for Trump’s reputation as a kingmaker in the Republican party, as the former president has used the power of his endorsement to wield influence over candidates and lawmakers.Perdue’s defeat raises questions about the impact of Trump’s endorsement, particularly for candidates challenging incumbents. In November, Kemp will face off against voting rights leader Stacey Abrams, who won the uncontested race for the Democratic nomination.Key race for Georgia secretary of state signals defeat for ‘big lie’ candidateBrad Raffensperger defeats Trump’s effort to oust him as Georgia’s top election officialRead moreBrad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who attracted Trump’s ire for refusing to “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, is projected to win the Republican primary for his position. Raffensperger is above 50% in his race against Trump-backed candidate Jody Hice, who has embraced the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and is expected to avoid a runoff and advance to the November general election.But Trump acolytes performed better in Arkansas and TexasBut Trump acolytes performed better in Arkansas and Texas. Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, secured the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Arkansas, meaning she will likely follow in her father’s footsteps to become governor. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who filed a lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 election, also easily defeated land commissioner George P Bush in his runoff race. Bush’s loss will have long-lasting repercussions for a political dynasty that has produced two presidents and helped shape Texas for several decades.Elementary school shooting casts pall over the nightA shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, cast a devastating shadow over Tuesday’s primaries. At least 19 children and two adults were killed when a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary school. Joe Biden expressed outrage over the tragedy, calling on Congress to pass stricter gun laws. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?” Biden said.Lucy McBath, who is the Democratic winner in Georgia’s seventh congressional district, said she has been forced to deliver a very different victory speech than she had planned.“Because just hours ago, we paid for the weapons of war on our streets again with the blood of little children sitting in our schools,” said the representative, who entered politics after her son was shot and killed in 2012. “We cannot be the only nation where one party sits on their hands as children are forced to cover their faces in fear. We are exhausted.”Democratic races also hold interestCongresswoman Lucy McBath defeated fellow House Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux to win the nomination in Georgia’s seventh congressional district. McBath currently represents the sixth congressional district, but she chose to run in the neighboring seventh district after Republican redistricting altered the state’s congressional map. McBath’s victory had particular resonance in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. Since her son’s death, McBath has staunchly advocated for stricter gun laws in honor of his legacy.A winner has still not yet been called in the closely watched runoff race between Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar and Jessica Cisneros in Texas’ 28th congressional district, which pitted a longtime centrist incumbent against a progressive challenger. Progressive groups had rallied around Cisneros, attacking Cuellar over his opposition to abortion rights as the country prepares for the likely reversal of Roe v Wade. But organizations backing Cuellar had spent heavily to help the vulnerable incumbent, and he currently leads Cisneros.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansGeorgiaArkansasTexasDemocratsnewsReuse this content More