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      In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies

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      House Republicans were lobbying to replace Representative Liz Cheney, who has vocally called out Donald J. Trump’s lies, with Representative Elise Stefanik, who has embraced them.WASHINGTON — Top Republicans moved swiftly on Wednesday to purge Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks for vocally rejecting Donald J. Trump’s election lies, laying the groundwork to install a replacement who has embraced his false claims of voting fraud.The move to push out Ms. Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a Trump loyalist who voted to overturn President Biden’s victory in key states, reflected how thoroughly the party’s orthodoxy has come to be defined by fealty to the former president and a tolerance for misinformation, rather than policy principles.“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” Ms. Cheney wrote in a searing opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Wednesday evening. She framed her fate as a referendum on the party’s future and warned that Republicans must “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”Ms. Cheney, 54, is a conservative who rarely defected from Mr. Trump’s policy positions in Congress, but she has refused to absolve him or the party of their roles in fomenting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol with groundless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Ms. Stefanik, 36, is more moderate and has more often parted ways with Republicans over her years in Congress, but she has emerged recently as one of Mr. Trump’s most vociferous defenders, willing to indulge and even amplify those claims.After days of quiet discussions about ousting Ms. Cheney, the effort erupted into open Republican warfare on Wednesday morning. Party leaders and Mr. Trump himself publicly boosted Ms. Stefanik, both women issued defiant statements about their intentions and dueling factions in the party competed to frame an episode with broad implications for the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.By day’s end, even President Biden had weighed in on what he called a “mini-rebellion” in the Republican ranks, arguing that the party was plagued by an inability to define itself.The turmoil illustrated how heavily Mr. Trump still looms over the Republican Party, where a pilgrimage to pay homage to the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., has become a required stop for elected leaders and efforts to restrict voting — in the name of his claims of a stolen election — are proliferating around the country.What was clear on Wednesday was that House Republicans were headed for a confrontation, as soon as next week, that now appears likely to result in Ms. Cheney’s firing from her leadership post. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, became the highest-ranking figure to call for her removal, endorsing Ms. Stefanik as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, lobbied behind the scenes on the New Yorker’s behalf.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, a spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Support from Mr. McCarthy, in particular, had helped save Ms. Cheney from a similar challenge in February after her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. But the top leader, like rank-and-file Republicans, had grown increasingly frustrated in recent weeks as Ms. Cheney continued to call out Mr. Trump in media interviews and took shots at her own party for tolerating his falsehoods, including during a party retreat in Orlando last week.By Wednesday, as it became clear that Mr. McCarthy had turned on her, Ms. Cheney was hitting back at him personally, noting that while the leader had initially condemned Mr. Trump for failing to call off his supporters during the Jan. 6 riot, “he has since changed his story.”Mr. Trump, who had been furious at Mr. McCarthy and others for backing Ms. Cheney earlier this year, sought to drive a nail in her political coffin on Wednesday. In a statement, he derided her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsed Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, a fourth-term congresswoman representing New York’s Adirondack region, had initially been wary of appearing as if she was pushing Ms. Cheney out for personal gain. But mere minutes after receiving Mr. Trump’s support, she abandoned any hint of reticence and took her campaign to replace Ms. Cheney public. “We are unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!” she wrote on Twitter.Seeing votes stacking up against Ms. Cheney, her supporters said she would not fight the drive to dethrone her; unlike in February, she has not tried to rally her allies on or off Capitol Hill. But they said she also did not intend to go quietly.Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, perhaps Ms. Cheney’s most outspoken supporter, demanded on Twitter that every lawmaker “go on the record as to how they will vote on @RepLizCheney in operation #coverupJan6 and concerned donors should take notes.”Ms. Cheney herself sought to appeal to like-minded Republicans in her opinion piece, warning that they risked driving the party toward irrelevance for short-term gain.“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney wrote. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Yet she found few other Republicans willing to defend her publicly, even among those who forcefully condemned Mr. Trump after Jan. 6 and sought to wrestle control of the party away from him.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader who vocally stood behind Ms. Cheney in the past and had previously made clear he wanted to purge Mr. Trump from the party, declined to address her predicament on Wednesday.“One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this administration,” he said, repeating the sentence almost word for word in response to follow-up questions about the move to oust Ms. Cheney.Weighing in on Wednesday from the White House, Mr. Biden, who has sought out Republican support to pass a series of sprawling infrastructure plans, expressed regret about what he characterized as a party at risk of imploding.“We badly need a Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said. “We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system.”In rallying around Ms. Stefanik, Republicans were turning to a figure who has embodied elements of the party’s transformation since she arrived in the House in 2015, as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time. A Harvard graduate and former aide to President George W. Bush and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Stefanik has shifted easily from the old Republican establishment to a new one forming around Mr. Trump.Representative Liz Cheney has refused to absolve Mr. Trump or the Republican Party of their roles in fomenting the assault on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWhile she began as one of the more moderate members of the Republican Conference — her voting record is far less conservative than Ms. Cheney’s, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation — Ms. Stefanik became one of Mr. Trump’s most strident loyalists. That role has buoyed her rapid ascension and brought in millions of dollars in campaign donations.In a lengthy, error-riddled statement published on Jan. 6 explaining why she would vote to invalidate the election, Ms. Stefanik repeated a number of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread improprieties, including incorrectly claiming that “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased and otherwise unauthorized voters” in one county in Georgia alone.Her metamorphosis mirrored that of her upstate New York district, where voters had supported a string of Democratic presidential candidates — including Barack Obama twice — before throwing their backing to Mr. Trump in 2016.Yet Ms. Stefanik has also been at the forefront of her party’s efforts to improve its standing and representation among women at a time when Mr. Trump’s caustic style threatened to alienate them and further narrow Republicans’ appeal. Her political action committee supported several of the current freshman class’s rising stars, all of them women who almost single-handedly secured the party’s impressive gains against Democrats in last year’s elections.“I know I am here in Congress because Republican women like Elise Stefanik paved the way,” said Representative Young Kim, Republican of California. “She saw the importance of helping women candidates to make it out of the primary if Republicans were serious about electing more women and growing the G.O.P. base.”Her allies argue that Ms. Stefanik’s ascendancy will bolster the party as Republicans seek to win back the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, describing her as a disciplined messenger with easy mastery over policy.“They are going to find a very smart, charming and confident younger member of Congress,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked with Ms. Stefanik as an aide to Mr. Ryan in 2012. “And I think that is a good thing for the Republican Party right now.”In a glowing blurb for Time magazine’s “100 Next” list in 2019, Mr. Ryan, who has also backed Ms. Cheney, hailed Ms. Stefanik as the future of the Republican Party.“Like any good architect, Elise sees around the corner,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “She is thinking about the big picture when the crowd is scrambling to capitalize on the controversy of the day.” More

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      Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

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      Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump’s Republican Party.Liberal onlookers exploring the rise of right-wing populism accuse their adversaries of racism and sexism. There is plenty of truth to this view, but it’s not the whole story.In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump’s most loyal backers:Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Unleashing it is like splitting the atom; it creates enormous energy, which can lead to more honest discussions and long-delayed redress of grievances. It can also undermine personal relationships — and political regimes. Because its destructive potential is so great, it must be faced.Recent decades, Galston continues, “have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography” — difficult for “those outside its orbit to understand.”They — “social conservatives and white Christians” — have what Galston calls a “bill of particulars” against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston’s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”“They believe we have a powerful desire for moral coercion. We tell them how to behave — and, worse, how to think. When they complain, we accuse them of racism and xenophobia. How, they ask, did standing up for the traditional family become racism? When did transgender bathrooms become a civil right?”“They believe we hold them in contempt.”“Finally, they think we are hypocrites. We claim to support free speech — until someone says something we don’t like. We claim to oppose violence — unless it serves a cause we approve of. We claim to defend the Constitution — except for the Second Amendment. We support tolerance, inclusion, and social justice — except for people like them.”Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but increasingly at the white collar, managerial and professional occupational structure.Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”In an essay published in Boston Review last month, Acemoglu looked at the issue over a longer period. Initially, in the first four decades after World War II, advances in automation complemented labor, expanding the job market and improving productivity.But, he continued, “a very different technological tableau began in the 1980s — a lot more automation and a lot less of everything else.” In the process, “automation acted as the handmaiden of inequality.”Automation has pushed the job market in two opposing directions. Trends can be adverse for those (of all races and ethnicities) without higher education, but trends can also be positive for those with more education:New technologies primarily automated the more routine tasks in clerical occupations and on factory floors. This meant the demand and wages of workers specializing in blue-collar jobs and some clerical functions declined. Meanwhile professionals in managerial, engineering, finance, consulting, and design occupations flourished — both because they were essential to the success of new technologies and because they benefited from the automation of tasks that complemented their own work. As automation gathered pace, wage gaps between the top and the bottom of the income distribution magnified.Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:Falling BehindThe change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind. More

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      Giuliani’s Allies Want Trump to Pay His Legal Bills

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      As Rudolph Giuliani faces an escalating federal investigation and defamation suits, his advisers believe he should benefit from a $250 million Trump campaign war chest.As a federal investigation into Rudolph W. Giuliani escalates, his advisers have been pressing aides to former President Donald J. Trump to reach into a $250 million war chest to pay Mr. Giuliani for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.The pressure from Mr. Giuliani’s camp has intensified since F.B.I. agents executed search warrants at Mr. Giuliani’s home and office last week, according to people familiar with the discussions, and comes as Mr. Giuliani has hired new lawyers and is facing his own protracted — and costly — legal battles.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been examining communications between Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Ukrainian officials as he tried to unearth damaging information about President Biden before the election. The prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Giuliani lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were helping him, a potential violation of federal law.Mr. Giuliani, who has not been charged, has denied any wrongdoing and denounced the searches as “corrupt.” The actions in Ukraine were part of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.Separately, Mr. Giuliani is being sued for defamation by two voting machine companies, Dominion and Smartmatic, for his false claims that the companies were involved in a conspiracy to flip votes to Mr. Biden.Mr. Giuliani led the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 race in a series of battleground states, but he was not paid for the work, according to people close to both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. His supporters now want the Trump campaign to tap into the $250 million it raised in the weeks after the election to pay Mr. Giuliani and absorb costs he has incurred in the defamation suits.“I want to know what the GOP did with the quarter of $1 billion that they collected for the election legal fight,” Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Mr. Giuliani appointed Mr. Kerik when he was mayor of New York.Using expletives, Mr. Kerik added that “lawyers and law firms that didn’t do” much work were paid handsomely, while those who worked hard “got nothing.”Mr. Kerik has made similar complaints to some of Mr. Trump’s advisers privately, according to people familiar with the conversations, arguing that Mr. Giuliani has incurred legal expenses in his efforts to help Mr. Trump and that Mr. Giuliani’s name was used to raise money during the election fight.In a separate tweet, Mr. Kerik blamed the Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel. R.N.C. officials said that the group did not make the same overt fund-raising appeals as the Trump campaign to challenge the election results.A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, Robert J. Costello, has had conversations with a lawyer for Mr. Trump about whether any of the material that was seized by the F.B.I. should be protected from scrutiny because of attorney-client privilege. Mr. Costello has also raised the question of paying Mr. Giuliani, according to two people briefed on those discussions.Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, declined to comment. Mr. Giuliani could not be reached for comment.Mr. Giuliani had encouraged Mr. Trump to file challenges to the election, and the former president tasked Mr. Giuliani with leading the effort in November. But when Mr. Giuliani’s associate, Maria Ryan, sent an email to Trump campaign officials seeking $20,000 a day for his work, Mr. Trump balked, The New York Times has reported.Mr. Trump later told his advisers he did not want Mr. Giuliani to receive any payment, according to people close to the former president with direct knowledge of the discussions. Before Mr. Trump left the White House in January, he agreed to reimburse Mr. Giuliani for more than $200,000 in expenses but not to pay a fee.Some of Mr. Giuliani’s supporters have blamed Mr. Trump’s aides — and not the former president — for the standoff. However, people close to Mr. Trump said he has stridently refused to pay Mr. Giuliani.Federal investigators seized cellphones and computers from Mr. Giuliani’s Manhattan home and office on April 28. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMr. Giuliani’s advisers were also disappointed that he did not receive a federal pardon from Mr. Trump, despite facing the long-running federal investigation into his Ukrainian dealings, a person close to Mr. Giuliani said. After months of speculation that Mr. Trump might issue Mr. Giuliani a pre-emptive pardon, Mr. Giuliani said on his radio show in January that he did not need a pardon, because “I don’t commit crimes.”The efforts to overturn the election culminated in a rally of Mr. Trump’s supporters near the White House on Jan. 6. After marching to the Capitol, where the Electoral College results were being certified, hundreds of those supporters stormed the building, resulting in deaths and scores of injuries to Capitol Police officers and others. The events led to Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, and Mr. Trump told Mr. Giuliani in a private meeting that he could not represent him in the proceedings, people briefed on the meeting said.Asked about Mr. Kerik’s tweet during an interview with ABC News, Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, said that his father’s fees should be covered by Trump’s campaign coffers.“I do think he should be indemnified,” the younger Mr. Giuliani said. “I think all those Americans that donated after Nov. 3, they were donating for the legal defense fund. My father ran the legal team at that point. So I think it’s very easy to make a very strong case for the fact that he and all the lawyers that worked on there should be indemnified.”He added, “I would find it highly irregular if the president’s lead counsel did not get indemnified.”A person close to Mr. Giuliani, who was granted anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, made a related argument, saying the Trump campaign should be careful to ensure money in the war chest was spent in connection with the election effort because it was solicited from the public for that purpose.Although there are many differences between the two situations, for some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, the standoff with Mr. Giuliani has raised uncomfortable echoes of a similar dispute with another of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyers, Michael D. Cohen.In 2019, Mr. Cohen said the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump’s family business, breached an agreement with him to cover his legal costs. In a lawsuit, Mr. Cohen said the company initially paid some of the bills after the F.B.I. searched his apartment and office in April 2018. But, he said in the lawsuit, company officials stopped the payments when they discovered around June 2018 that he was preparing to cooperate with federal investigators.Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty later that year to charges related to tax evasion, as well as a campaign finance charge related to his 2016 hush-money payment to a pornographic film star who had claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen ended up testifying about Mr. Trump in Congress, and provided assistance to the investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.After the F.B.I. searched Mr. Cohen’s home and office, he filed a civil action against the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, which Mr. Trump joined to prevent federal officials from gaining access to material that could be protected by attorney-client privilege between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers are considering filing a similar action in his case, according to one of the people close to the former mayor. One lawyer advising Mr. Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, told CNN that it would be appropriate for Mr. Trump to join such an effort. Mr. Dershowitz confirmed the comment to The Times.A new court filing made public on Tuesday showed the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan asked a federal judge last week to appoint a special master to conduct a review of potentially privileged materials seized from Mr. Giuliani. The prosecutors, writing to Judge J. Paul Oetken, said the F.B.I. had begun to extract materials from cellphones and computers seized from Mr. Giuliani, but that a review of those materials had not yet begun, the redacted court filing showed.Mr. Giuliani recently added four new lawyers to his team: Arthur L. Aidala, a former Brooklyn prosecutor and former Fox News commentator; Barry Kamins, a retired New York Supreme Court justice and law professor; the retired New York Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal; and Michael T. Jaccarino, a former Brooklyn prosecutor.William K. Rashbaum, Jonah E. Bromwich and Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting. More

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      Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy

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      President Biden’s early success in getting Americans vaccinated, pushing out stimulus checks and generally calming the surface of American life has been a blessing for the country. But it’s also lulled many into thinking that Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, which propelled the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, would surely fade […] More

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      Crist Enters Race to Face DeSantis, With More Democrats Likely to Follow

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      Charlie Crist has an extensive political history in Florida and is widely known throughout the state. But his candidacy is not likely to deter other Democrats like Val Demings and Nikki Fried.MIAMI — Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, entered the race for governor on Tuesday, becoming the first challenger to Ron DeSantis, a Republican who raised his profile by shunning lockdowns during the pandemic and is now a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2024.“Every step of the way, this governor has been more focused on his personal political fortune than the struggle of everyday Floridians,” Mr. Crist said under the blazing sun in St. Petersburg as he made his announcement. “That’s just not right. Just like our former president, he always takes credit but never takes responsibility.”His candidacy signaled the start of a long, expensive and most likely bruising campaign in a battleground state that has been swinging away from Democrats since 2016. Florida’s exceptionally tight governor’s races have been decided by around one percentage point since 2010, always in Republicans’ favor. The last Democrat to win election to the governor’s mansion was Lawton Chiles, who won a second term in 1994.Mr. Crist’s advisers see him as the Democrat with the most experience running statewide and appealing to a coalition of liberal and moderate voters in the way that President Biden did nationally — though not in Florida, which former President Donald J. Trump won by three percentage points.Mr. Crist has an extensive political history in Florida and is widely known throughout the state. He served as governor as a Republican from 2007 to 2011 before running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as an independent, losing to Marco Rubio. After switching parties, he later lost a Democratic bid for governor in 2014 against the Republican incumbent, Rick Scott.The arc of his political evolution was evident in the video he used on Tuesday to announce his candidacy. It featured footage of the hug with former President Barack Obama that led to Mr. Crist’s departure from the Republican Party 11 years ago.But Mr. Crist’s experience is unlikely to deter other Democratic candidates from joining the race. His clout has been diminished by years of electoral failures and by a party that is increasingly open to a wider range of more diverse public figures to be its standard bearers. Two women, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Representative Val Demings of Orlando, are considering their own runs for the governor’s mansion as Democrats.Ms. Fried scheduled a news conference in the State Capitol for the same time as Mr. Crist’s announcement. “As the only statewide elected Democrat, it makes absolute sense for me to be running for governor,” she said, but she added that she was not making an announcement at that time.Ms. Demings released a video on Tuesday that, while not declaring a candidacy, highlighted her career as Orlando police chief, impeachment manager in Congress and a shortlisted vice-presidential pick for Mr. Biden.Similar jockeying — though not quite as intense — is underway among Democrats looking to go up against Mr. Rubio, who also faces re-election next year.Asked about Mr. Crist’s announcement on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis mocked Mr. Crist’s party-switching. “Which party is he going to run under, do we know for sure?” he said.Referring to Democrats in general, he said: “I implore them, from my political interest: Run on closing schools. Run on locking people down. Run on closing businesses.” He added, “I would love to have that debate.”In advance of Mr. Crist’s announcement, Mr. DeSantis held an official event on Monday at Mr. Crist’s favorite seafood restaurant in St. Petersburg, touting the wins he had racked up during the session the Republican-controlled Legislature concluded last week — which he and Republican lawmakers used to champion policies that will appeal to Florida’s increasingly conservative electorate.And on Monday, Mr. DeSantis signed a bill and an executive order doing away with most of Florida’s remaining pandemic restrictions, contrasting his administration’s aversion for mandates to the restrictions in states led by Democrats.Still, Mr. Crist was withering in his criticism of the governor on Tuesday.“Gov. DeSantis’s vision of Florida is clear: If you want to vote, he won’t help you,” Mr. Crist said. “If you’re working, he won’t support you. If you’re a woman, he will not empower you. If you’re an immigrant, he won’t accept you. If you’re facing discrimination, he won’t respect you. If you’re sick, he won’t care for you.” More

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      Bee Nguyen, Georgia Democrat, Enters Race for Secretary of State

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      Ms. Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is the first major Democrat to announce a bid for the seat held by Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who defied former President Donald Trump.ATLANTA — Next year’s secretary of state election in Georgia was already shaping up to be a tense and dramatic fight: the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger — who enraged former President Donald J. Trump for refusing to overturn the state’s election results — is facing a primary challenge from a Trump-endorsed fellow Republican, Representative Jody Hice.On Tuesday morning, the race got even more interesting with the entry of the first major Democratic candidate, State Representative Bee Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who has helped lead the fight against Republican-backed bills that restrict voting rights in the state.“Republicans have done everything in their power to silence the voices of voters who chose an America that works for all of us, and not just some of us,” she said in her announcement video. “But we will not allow anyone to stand in the way of our right to a free and fair democracy.” In an interview this week, Ms. Nguyen, 39, said that Mr. Raffensperger deserved credit for standing up to Mr. Trump and rejecting his false claims of voter fraud after the November election. But she also noted that since then, Mr. Raffensperger had largely supported the voting rights law passed by the Legislature in March and continued to consider himself a Trump supporter after the former president promulgated his falsehoods about the Georgia election.“I’ve been at the forefront of battling against voter suppression laws in Georgia,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Watching everything unfold in 2020 with the erosion of our Democracy, I recognized how critically important it was to defend our right to vote.”She added, “I believe Georgians deserve better, and can do better.”Mr. Trump lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes. After the election, he made personal entreaties to both Mr. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, asking the two Republicans to intervene and help overturn the results. When they declined, Mr. Trump vowed revenge.In late March, the former president endorsed Mr. Hice, a pastor and former radio talk-show host from Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.It’s not the only race in Georgia that Mr. Trump is hoping to influence in an attempt to exact retribution against those he deems disloyal. In January, Mr. Trump vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp as he sought re-election. Since then, former State Representative Vernon Jones, a former Democrat and a vocal Trump supporter, has entered the race, but Mr. Trump has not endorsed him.On Monday, however, the Georgia political world took notice when State Senator Burt Jones, a Republican, tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Trump meeting at Mr. Trump’s Florida home. Mr. Jones, who did not return calls for comment Monday, hails from a wealthy family and could put his own funds into a statewide race. But if he is interested in higher office, he has a number of choices beyond governor, including possibly jumping into next year’s contest for the U.S. Senate seat held by the Democrat Raphael Warnock.Ms. Nguyen, a supporter of abortion rights and critic of what she has called Georgia’s “lax” gun laws, could struggle to connect with more conservative voters beyond her liberal district in metropolitan Atlanta. She first won the seat in December 2017 in a special election to replace another Democrat, Stacey Abrams, the former state House minority leader who left her position to make her ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Mr. Kemp in 2018.Ms. Abrams, who is African-American, may be gearing up to run against Mr. Kemp again next year, and if Ms. Nguyen can land a spot on the general election ballot, it will reflect the changing demographics that helped Democrats like President Biden score upset wins in Georgia in recent months.In March, Ms. Nguyen was among a group of Asian-American Georgia lawmakers who forcefully denounced the mass shootings at Atlanta-area massage parlors in which eight people were killed, including six women of Asian descent.Georgia’s secretary of state race, normally a low-profile affair, will be watched particularly closely next year given the razor-thin margins of the state’s recent elections, and its growing reputation as a key battleground in the presidential election.Mr. Raffensperger finds himself in a frustrating position. A statewide poll in January found that he had the highest approval rating of any Republican officeholder in the state, the likely result of the bipartisan respect he earned for standing up to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Hice has a good chance of overpowering Mr. Raffensperger in a G.O.P. primary, given rank-and-file Republicans’ loyalty to the former president.Two other Republicans, David Belle Isle, a former mayor of the city of Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, and T.J. Hudson, a former probate judge, are also running.Daniel Victor More

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      Why Rising Diversity Might Not Help Democrats as Much as They Hope

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      Voters of color make up an increasing percentage of the United States electorate, but that trend isn’t hurting Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The Census Bureau released two important sets of data last week that have big implications for American politics — and that challenge some prevailing assumptions for both Democrats and Republicans.The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isn’t doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.The expanding Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College underscores how the growing diversity of the nation may not aid Democrats enough to win in places they most need help. Just as often, population growth is concentrated in red states — like Texas and Florida — where the Democrats don’t win nonwhite voters by the overwhelming margins necessary to overcome the state’s Republican advantage.As for the Republicans, the widely held assumption that the party will struggle as white voters decline as a percentage of the electorate may be more myth than reality. Contrary to what Tucker Carlson says repeatedly on Fox News about the rise of “white replacement theory” as a Democratic electoral strategy, the country’s growing racial diversity has not drastically upended the party’s chances. Instead, Republicans face a challenge they often take for granted: white voters.One way to think about this is to compare today’s electorate with that of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were winning in landslides. Democrats, no doubt, have benefited from the increased racial diversity of the country since then: Mr. Biden would not have even come close to winning Georgia in November if its voters were as white they were back in the 1980s. Former President Donald J. Trump would have probably won re-election if he could have turned the demographic clock back to the ’80s and reduced the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. Today’s wave of Republican-backed laws restricting voting rights may be intended to do exactly that.In states like Georgia, where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even a return to the racial demographics of the 1980s wouldn’t do nearly as much to hurt Democrats as one might expect. Yes, the November result would have gone from an extremely close win for Mr. Biden to an extremely close win for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden would have won more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though nonwhite voters had doubled their share of the electorate from 1984 to when Mrs. Clinton sought the presidency. Remarkably, Mr. Biden’s fairly modest gains among white voters helped him as much as the last 30 to 40 years of demographic shifts did.Similarly, Mr. Bush or Mr. Reagan would have still prevailed if they had had to win an electorate that was 29 percent nonwhite, as opposed to the merely 13 to 15 percent nonwhite electorates they sought to persuade at the time.This is not the conventional story of recent electoral history. In the usual tale, the growing racial diversity of the electorate broke the Reagan and Bush majorities and allowed the Democrats to win the national popular vote in seven of the next eight presidential elections.And yet it is hard to find a single state where the increasing racial diversity of the electorate, even over an exceptionally long 30- or 40-year period, has been both necessary and sufficient for Democrats to flip a state from red to blue. Even in states where Democrats have needed demographic changes to win, like Georgia and Arizona, the party has also needed significant improvement among white voters to get over the top.One reason demographic change has failed to transform electoral politics is that the increased diversity of the electorate has come not mainly from Black voters but from Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters. Those groups back Democrats, but not always by overwhelmingly large margins.In 2020, Democrats probably won around 60 to 65 percent of voters across these demographic groups. These are substantial margins, but they are small enough that even decades of demographic shifts wind up costing the Republicans only a couple of percentage points.The new census data’s finding that the percentage of non-Hispanic white voters in the country’s electorate dropped by about two percentage points from 2016 to 2020 might seem like a lot. But with Hispanic, Asian-American and multiracial voters representing the entirety of the increase, while the Black share of the electorate was flat, the growing nonwhite share of the electorate cost Mr. Trump only about half a percentage point over a four-year period.Another factor is the electoral map. The American electoral system rewards flipping states from red to blue, but many Democratic gains among nonwhite voters have been concentrated in the major cities of big and often noncompetitive states. By contrast, many traditional swing states across the northern tier, like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, have had relatively little demographic change.The ability of Democrats to flip red states has been hampered by another pattern: the tendency for Republicans to fare relatively well among nonwhite voters in red states.It’s often said that Latino voters aren’t a monolith, and that’s certainly true. While Hispanic voters back Democrats by overwhelming margins in blue states like New York and Illinois, Republicans are often far more competitive among Latinos and members of other non-Black minority groups in red states — including those Democrats now hope to flip like Texas or Florida.Texas and Florida really would be blue if Latinos voted like their counterparts in New York or Illinois. But instead, Latino population growth has not quite had a strong pro-Democratic punch in the states where the party hoped to land a knockout blow.At the same time, white voters are easy to overlook as a source of Democratic gains, give that these voters still support Republicans by a comfortable margin. But Democrats probably improved from 39 to 43 percent among white voters from 1988 to 2020. It’s a significant shift, and perhaps even enough to cover the entirety of Mr. Bush’s margin of victory in the 1988 election, without any demographic change whatsoever.President Biden won seven states, including Wisconsin, while losing among their white voters.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIt’s a little easier to see the significance of Democratic gains among white voters at the state level. According to AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won white voters in states worth 211 electoral votes. Democrats like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 or John Kerry in 2004 probably didn’t win white voters in states worth much more than 60 electoral votes, based on exit poll and other survey data.Mr. Biden even won white voters in many of the states where the growing diversity of the electorate is thought to be the main source of new Democratic strength, including California and Colorado. And he also won white voters in many big, diverse states across the North where Republicans used to win and where nonwhite demographic change might otherwise be considered the decisive source of Democratic strength, like Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, which voted almost entirely Republican at the presidential level throughout the 1980s.According to the AP/Votecast data, Mr. Biden won seven states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia — while losing among white voters. In these crucial states, Democratic strength among nonwhite voters was essential to Mr. Biden’s victory.But of these states, there are really only three where Mr. Biden clearly prevailed by the margin of the increased racial diversity of the electorate over the last few decades: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. He did not need to win any of these states to capture the presidency, but he would not have done so without long-term increases in both nonwhite voting power and Democratic strength among white voters.The story is quite different in the Northern battleground states. White voters still represent more than 80 percent of the electorate in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the new census data. The nonwhite population in these states is predominantly Black; their share of the population has been fairly steady over the last few decades. But Mr. Biden won these states so narrowly that the relatively modest demographic shifts of the last few decades were necessary for him to prevail in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.It’s just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016. More

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      Swiss Billionaire Quietly Becomes Influential Force Among Democrats

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      Hansjörg Wyss, who recently dropped his bid to buy Tribune Publishing, has been a leading source of difficult-to-trace money to groups associated with Democrats.WASHINGTON — He is not as well known as wealthy liberal patrons like George Soros or Tom Steyer. His political activism is channeled through a daisy chain of opaque organizations that mask the ultimate recipients of his money. But the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has quietly become one of the most important donors to left-leaning advocacy groups and an increasingly influential force among Democrats.Newly obtained tax filings show that two of Mr. Wyss’s organizations, a foundation and a nonprofit fund, donated $208 million from 2016 through early last year to three other nonprofit funds that doled out money to a wide array of groups that backed progressive causes and helped Democrats in their efforts to win the White House and control of Congress last year.Mr. Wyss’s representatives say his organizations’ money is not being spent on political campaigning. But documents and interviews show that the entities have come to play a prominent role in financing the political infrastructure that supports Democrats and their issues.While most of his operation’s recent politically oriented giving was channeled through the three nonprofit funds, Mr. Wyss’s organizations also directly donated tens of millions of dollars since 2016 to groups that opposed former President Donald J. Trump and promoted Democrats and their causes.Beneficiaries of his organizations’ direct giving included prominent groups such as the Center for American Progress and Priorities USA, as well as organizations that ran voter registration and mobilization campaigns to increase Democratic turnout, built media outlets accused of slanting the news to favor Democrats and sought to block Mr. Trump’s nominees, prove he colluded with Russia and push for his impeachment.Several officials from organizations started by Mr. Wyss and his team worked on the Biden transition or joined the administration, and on environmental policy in particular Mr. Wyss’s agenda appears to align with President Biden’s.Mr. Wyss’s growing political influence attracted attention after he emerged last month as a leading bidder for the Tribune Publishing newspaper chain. Mr. Wyss later dropped out of the bidding for the papers.Born in Switzerland and living in Wyoming, he has not disclosed publicly whether he holds citizenship or permanent residency in the United States. Foreign nationals without permanent residency are barred from donating directly to federal political candidates or political action committees, but not from giving to groups that seek to influence public policy — a legal distinction often lost on voters targeted by such groups.Mr. Wyss’s role as a donor is coming to light even as congressional Democrats, with support from Mr. Biden, are pushing legislation intended to rein in so-called dark money spending that could restrict some of the groups financed by Mr. Wyss’s organizations.This type of spending — which is usually channeled through nonprofit groups that do not have to disclose much information about their finances, including their donors — was embraced by conservatives after campaign spending restrictions were loosened by regulatory changes and court rulings, most notably the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case.While progressives and election watchdogs denounced the developments as bestowing too much power to wealthy interests, Democratic donors and operatives increasingly made use of dark money. During the 2020 election cycle, groups aligned with Democrats spent more than $514 million in such funds, compared to about $200 million spent by groups aligned with Republicans, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.Some of the groups financed by Mr. Wyss’s organizations played a key role in that shift, though the relatively limited disclosure requirements for these types of groups make it impossible to definitively conclude how they spent funds from the Wyss entities.Mr. Wyss and his advisers have honed a “strategic, evidence-based, metrics-driven and results-oriented approach to building political infrastructure,” said Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist.Mr. Stein, who founded the influential Democracy Alliance club of major liberal donors in 2005 and recruited Mr. Wyss to join, added that “unlike most wealthy political donors on the right and left,” Mr. Wyss and his team “know how to create measurable, sustainable impact.”Mr. Wyss, 85, was born in Bern, first visited the United States as an exchange student in 1958, and became enchanted with America’s national parks and public lands. After becoming wealthy while helping lead the Switzerland-based medical device manufacturer Synthes, he began donating his fortune through a network of nonprofit organizations to promote conservation, environmental causes and other issues.The organizations gradually increased their donations to other causes backed by Democrats, including abortion rights and minimum wage increases, and eventually to groups more directly involved in partisan political debates, particularly after Mr. Trump’s election.Asked about the shift, Howard H. Stevenson, who has been close to Mr. Wyss since the two were classmates at Harvard Business School in the 1960s, pointed to Mr. Trump’s sharp reduction to the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. One of Mr. Wyss’s foundations had teamed with five other foundations to commit $1.5 million to preserving the monument. (The Biden administration is now reviewing Mr. Trump’s policy on Bear Ears, which was broadly opposed by Democrats and conservation groups.)“You don’t have to look at people destroying your work to say maybe you want to try and figure out how you respond in the most effective way,” said Mr. Stevenson, who is an adviser to one of Mr. Wyss’s foundations and whose son sits on the board of another Wyss organization.One of Mr. Wyss’s foundations teamed with five other foundations to commit $1.5 million to preserving Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.KC McGinnis for The New York TimesMr. Wyss did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article, and most of the people interviewed either declined to discuss him or requested anonymity to do so.Price Floyd, a spokesman for two of Mr. Wyss’s operations — the Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund, both of which are based in Washington — pushed back on suggestions that his giving was intended to help the Democratic Party, suggesting that his focus was on issues important to him.He described Mr. Wyss in a statement as “a successful businessman turned philanthropist who has pledged over a billion dollars to conserve nature and also sought to bolster social welfare programs in the United States.”The Wyss Foundation, which is housed in a stately 19th-century Georgian Revival mansion in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, had assets of more than $2 billion at the end of 2019, according to its most recent tax filing.It is registered under a section of the tax code that prohibits it from spending money to expressly support partisan political campaigns.But it can, and does, donate to groups that seek to influence the political debate in a manner that aligns with Democrats and their agenda, including the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank where Mr. Wyss sits on the board. The organization was started by John D. Podesta, a top White House aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. A foundation that Mr. Wyss led as chairman and that has since merged with the Wyss Foundation paid Mr. Podesta as an adviser, and the two men remained close, according to associates.The Berger Action Fund, which shares facilities and staff with the Wyss Foundation, had assets of nearly $65 million at the end of March 2020, according to its most recent tax filing. The fund is registered under a section of the tax code that allows it to spend money supporting and opposing candidates, or to donate to groups that do.Mr. Floyd said Berger Action had its own policy barring “any of its funding from being used to support or oppose political candidates or electoral activities.”Because the recipients of funds from Mr. Wyss’s organizations do not have to disclose many details about their finances, including which donations are used for which projects, it is not clear how they have used the money originating from Mr. Wyss’s operation. But some of the groups funded by Berger Action helped pay for campaign ads helping Democrats and attacking Republicans including Mr. Trump, or gave to other groups that did.The voluntary restriction is potentially notable, given questions about Mr. Wyss’s citizenship.While Mr. Wyss donated nearly $70,000 to Democratic congressional candidates and left-leaning political action committees from 1990 to 2003, he does not appear to have made any such donations to federal candidates or PACs since.Mr. Wyss’s representatives provided the tax filings documenting the expansion of recent giving to politically oriented groups only after requests from a lawyer for The New York Times, and after Mr. Wyss dropped his bid for Tribune Publishing. Such filings are legally required to be made public upon request. The tax filings show that his organizations’ biggest grants in recent years went to entities that mostly dispense funds to other groups, and sometimes act as incubators for new outfits intended partly to serve functions seen as lacking on the left. Voters casting their ballots in Topeka, Kan., in the 2018 midterm elections. While little known by the public, Mr. Wyss and his foundations have come to play an increasing role in financing the political infrastructure that supports Democrats and their issues.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesBetween the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2020, the Berger Action Fund donated more than $135 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which has become among the leading dark money spenders on the left, filings from the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission show.One of the nonprofit groups managed by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors, Sixteen Thirty donated more than $63 million to super PACs backing Democrats or opposing Republicans in 2020, including the pro-Biden groups Priorities USA Action and Unite the Country and the scandal-plagued anti-Trump group Lincoln Project, according to Federal Election Commission filings.Another nonprofit managed by Arabella, the New Venture Fund, which is set up under a section of the tax code barring it from partisan political spending, received more than $27.6 million from the Wyss Foundation from 2016 through 2019.Tax filings by the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund do not indicate how they spent the funds from Mr. Wyss’s groups, nor do tax filings submitted by the Sacramento-based Fund for a Better Future, which passes money from donors to groups that push to shape the political process in a way that helps Democrats. The Fund for a Better Future has received the majority of its funding — nearly $45.2 million between the spring of 2016 and the spring of 2020 — from the Berger Action Fund.The Sixteen Thirty Fund, New Venture Fund and Fund for a Better Future did not answer questions about how they spent funds from Mr. Wyss’s organizations, except to say that the money did not go to partisan campaign efforts.Sixteen Thirty and New Venture have helped create and fund dozens of groups, including some that worked to block Mr. Trump’s nominees and push progressive appointments by Mr. Biden.Among the groups under the umbrella of Sixteen Thirty and New Venture is the Hub Project, which was started by Mr. Wyss’s philanthropic network in 2015 as a sort of incubator for groups backing Democrats and their causes, as first reported by The Times. It created more than a dozen groups with anodyne-sounding names that planned to spend $30 million attacking Republican congressional candidates before the 2018 election.In response to questions about donations being passed through to other organizations, Mr. Floyd said the board of the Berger Action Fund has begun in recent years placing “a greater emphasis on supporting other nonprofit organizations or grant-making organizations, like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, that help identify, support and grow promising public interest projects.”Several officials from the Hub Project were hired by the Biden administration, including Rosemary Enobakhare, a former Environmental Protection Agency official in the Obama administration who returned to the agency under Mr. Biden; Maju Varghese as director of the White House Military Office; and Janelle Jones as chief economist for the Labor Department.Molly McUsic — the president of the Wyss Foundation and the Berger Action Fund, and a former board member of the Fund for a Better Future and the Sixteen Thirty Fund — was a member of the Biden transition team that reviewed Interior Department policies and personnel. 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