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      House Democrats Push Biden to Build a Better Midterm Message

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      House Democrats have been pressing the president to come up with a bumper-sticker-worthy slogan. The White House says it’s sharpening its message.WASHINGTON — After offering her customary lavish praise of President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got to the business at hand at a White House meeting last month on the midterm elections.Democrats, Ms. Pelosi told Mr. Biden and a group of his aides, need a more succinct and consistent message. The speaker, who has long been fond of pithy, made-for-bumper-sticker mantras, offered a suggestion she had heard from members: Democrats deliver.What Ms. Pelosi did not fully detail that February evening was that some of her party’s most politically imperiled lawmakers were revolting against Mr. Biden’s preferred slogan, “Build back better,” believing it had come to be a toxic phrase that only reminded voters of the party’s failure to pass its sweeping social policy bill. And what the president and his advisers did not tell the speaker was that they had already surveyed “Democrats deliver” with voters — and the response to it was at the bottom of those for the potential slogans they tested, according to people familiar with the research.No new campaign message was agreed to that day — or since. Mr. Biden is now absorbed by the war in Europe. Facing the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency, he is hardly consumed with the looming midterm elections, let alone trying to devise a catchy slogan. Still, his advisers acknowledge that the crisis in Ukraine presents a chance for a reset, perhaps the president’s best opportunity to restore his standing before November.Democrats are pleading with him to come up with a sharper message. With inflation hitting another 40-year high and gas prices spiking because of the boycott on Russian oil, they remain angst-ridden about their prospects in the fall, in large part because the president’s approval ratings remain in the 40s, and even lower in some pivotal states, even after a recent bump.Democrats who once thought the key to their political success would be beating back the pandemic and restoring the economy are deflated to find that falling coronavirus positivity rates and rising employment numbers — and even foreign policy leadership — have barely moved public opinion.“The economy is strong, and America is once again leading in freedom’s fight against tyranny,” Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota said. “But we all know that politics isn’t predicated on what’s real, rather on how people feel.”Representative Dean Phillips at a news conference with fellow members of the Problem Solvers Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol in December.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesRepublicans have plenty of their own divisions over message — and messengers. As long as former President Donald J. Trump retains his grip on the party, Democrats have a chance to remind up-for-grabs voters what is at stake this year and beyond.Still, White House aides acknowledge the pressure to revamp their strategy. They have been frustrated by how little credit they have received for enacting major legislation such as the Covid relief bill or bipartisan infrastructure legislation.“You tell them about the American Rescue Plan, and they say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” Mr. Biden, in a burst of candor, said at the House Democratic retreat on Friday, alluding to the $1.9 billion Covid measure he signed a year ago that is but a dim memory for most voters.The president’s advisers point to the State of the Union address — which emphasized pragmatism over bold progressive goals — as a blueprint for his message in coming months and note that, according to their research, cutting drug costs was among the most popular proposals in the speech.They also are considering a handful of executive orders that would please their base, on matters including the cancellation of some student loan debt, and are determined to enact legislation lowering the costs of prescription drugs, according to Democrats familiar with his plans.Some Democrats say they have been cheered by signs that the White House, and particularly Ron Klain, the chief of staff, are now focused on inflation after initially arguing last year that the increase was transitory. During a recent meeting with a group of House Democrats, Mr. Klain resisted a request to spend more federal dollars aiding restaurants in part because it could be seen as adding to inflationary pressures, according to an official at the meeting.To the relief of Democrats in Congress, the White House is dropping the “Build back better” catchphrase. The administration is also attempting to pin the blame on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for rising gas prices, hoping it will at least dilute Republican attacks over the issue.Mr. Biden’s midterm priorities aren’t taking a back seat to the war in Ukraine, the White House insists. Senior officials acknowledge that they regret their all-consuming focus on the Afghanistan withdrawal last summer, and as one said, they will not let the West Wing “become a bunker” at the expense of domestic politics.Democrats are counting on it.Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat who is on the ballot this fall, said he had privately urged Mr. Biden to put reducing consumer costs at the center of his agenda.“The president and the administration need to be attentive to the difficulties that real people are facing in the real world,” Mr. Polis said, recounting his message to the president on a phone call with other governors last month. “He’s a good listener. It’s just a matter of how it gets translated into policies, and we haven’t seen that yet from the White House.”Other prominent Democrats have also privately voiced discontent to Mr. Biden. Those ranks include Democrats who may also run for president and some who already have. Speaking to a friend last month, Hillary Clinton expressed concern that Mr. Biden was not offering a compelling narrative to voters about his presidency, according to a person familiar with the conversation.In addition to Mr. Biden’s policy plans, his advisers say they are taking steps to focus more aggressively on the election and on building good will with restive lawmakers.Biden officials said the president and Vice President Kamala Harris had both stepped up their fund-raising efforts for the Democratic National Committee in February, engaging major donors in one-on-one video conversations that had bolstered the committee’s coffers. There are discussions about expanding the White House political operation by dispatching a senior adviser, Cedric Richmond, to the D.N.C., which administration aides are frustrated with.Also, in hopes of quieting grumbles about Mr. Biden’s lack of engagement, his advisers say they plan to open up the White House to lawmakers, hosting them at the White House movie theater and bowling alley and reviving popular events like the Easter Egg Roll and West Wing tours.Nowhere is there more alarm in the party ranks than among House Democrats, many of whom have long felt that Mr. Biden and his aides, with their decades of service in the Senate, were overly focused on the other chamber.Most outspoken are incumbents facing difficult elections.Mr. Biden with Mayor Andy Schor and Representative Elissa Slotkin in Lansing, Mich., in October.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOne of them, Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, had been privately pushing party leaders to salvage some elements of the sweeping social welfare legislation that Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia appeared to have torpedoed at the end of last year. Ms. Slotkin’s idea: Hold a summit-style gathering with House and Senate leaders and find consensus.That did not happen. Ms. Pelosi did hold a meeting in her office last month with Ms. Slotkin and other Democrats from competitive districts. The gathering devolved into a session of griping about the White House and pleas with the speaker to tell Mr. Biden to stop using the phrase “Build back better.”Ms. Slotkin declined to discuss private conversations but was blunt about her exasperation. “It would be helpful if the White House, the Senate and the House were all on the same page on those priorities,” she said.Asked if she was happier after the State of the Union, she shot back, “Words are good; deeds are better.”Some of her colleagues are voting with their feet: 31 House Democrats have said they will not run for re-election, the highest number in the caucus since 1992.Not all of the ire is aimed at Mr. Biden. Lawmakers view Ms. Pelosi as a political force but a de facto lame duck who is all but certain to join the exodus if Republicans reclaim the majority. They complain that they have received little guidance from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has sought to mollify members by talking up better-than-expected results from the redistricting process.The new maps, though, are little comfort to the lawmakers like Representative Dina Titus of Nevada, a poster child for the anguish of congressional Democrats.Representative Dina Titus of Nevada. Her tourism-dependent district was hit hard by the pandemic; Nevada still has some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesMs. Titus sought an ambassadorship but didn’t get one because Democrats couldn’t risk losing her seat. Her district became more competitive through redistricting. She is facing a primary from the left despite her largely progressive record. And she is running in tourism-dependent Nevada, which still has some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.Mr. Biden has set foot in the state only once as president, when he flew in for former Senator Harry Reid’s funeral.“They haven’t had time to come up with a plan because every day is some new crisis,” Ms. Titus said of the White House. Maybe, she wondered, there is no return to normal in polarized times.“You get expectations up that you can bring people together, you can negotiate, you got international experience, and then it’s a new world,” she said.Representative Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, another Democrat who is facing a tough re-election campaign, used the same word.“Let’s manage expectations,” Ms. Wild said, conceding that “as a party we overshot on” the social welfare measure that ran aground with Mr. Manchin.It’s hardly just swing district Democrats who are frustrated. As Mr. Biden’s approval rating has taken a significant hit among younger and nonwhite voters, other party leaders are urging him to address the concerns of those constituencies.Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York had broader advice for the president going forward: “Speak to more progressive policies, and speak to issues that impact people of color specifically.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesRepresentative Jamaal Bowman of New York said he had called Mr. Klain after Mr. Biden’s State of the Union speech to relay his alarm that the president had made the case against defunding the police without more robustly addressing police misconduct. (White House aides noted that the president had explicitly pledged “to hold law enforcement accountable.”)Mr. Bowman offered this advice for the president: “Speak to more progressive policies, and speak to issues that impact people of color specifically.”At a closed-door retreat for Senate Democrats that Mr. Biden attended on Wednesday, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia pressed the president to cancel student loan debt, according to Democrats in the room.“Good policy, good politics,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said of wiping away student debt.That advice, though, is bumping against the concerns of moderate Democrats, who are pushing Mr. Biden to pivot to the political center. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey has spearheaded what he calls a “common sense” agenda and shared it with Mr. Klain, who was interested in some elements but mostly wanted to know what could pass the Senate. More

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      Could Iowa and New Hampshire Lose First Spots in Primary Calendar?

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      After complaints about disenfranchisement and logistical snafus, the party is reconsidering Iowa and New Hampshire’s coveted spots in the presidential nominating process.For years, Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have battled criticism from others in the party who argued that the two states are not racially diverse enough to kick off the Democratic nomination process.But after a disastrous 2020 cycle, in which Iowa officials struggled to tabulate votes and neither state proved predictive of President Biden’s eventual victory, Democratic leaders are exploring with new urgency whether to strip the two states of what has been a priceless political entitlement: their traditional perch at the start of the party’s presidential calendar.Several ideas are expected to be heard on Friday by the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee, which governs the nominating process. One calls for an application process for states based on several criteria, including diversity. Another idea, raised at a meeting in January, would consolidate all four of the current early-voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — into a single first voting day before Super Tuesday.The debate has taken on new urgency in response to a steady drumbeat of criticism by activists, elected officials and some members of the rules and bylaws committee. The concerns raised include fears that Iowa’s caucus system disenfranchises some voters and that neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is racially diverse enough to act as a stand-in for the Democratic voting base.In the last election cycle, logistical challenges including late-arriving votes and inaccurate data also highlighted the shortcomings of Iowa’s caucus process and muddied its ability to name a winner.“To me it’s not about one state, it’s not about punishing,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee and for Hillary Clinton who serves on the rules and bylaws committee.“We have a chance to show our values in our process,” Mr. Elleithee said. “Diversity, inclusion, and, given the job of the D.N.C. is to elect Democrats, by putting our people in front of as many battleground states as possible.”Members of the rules and bylaws committee, several of whom did not respond to requests for comment, have been told to expect to work on the issue throughout the summer with the intention of setting a firm nomination calendar by the fall.“We are not close to making a decision,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee who also serves on the rules and bylaws committee. On Friday, she said, “we start the conversation.”In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primaries.David Degner for The New York TimesIn January, during a virtual meeting of the same body, Mr. Elleithee and others made the case for overhauling the nominating calendar and were met with relatively little pushback — which some members took as a sign that even the delegations from Iowa and New Hampshire recognized that some change may be inevitable.State officials in Iowa and New Hampshire have fiercely resisted previous proposals to downgrade their primacy in the party’s nominating calendar, publicly and privately whipping allies to their side, but they have not yet begun to do so, according to committee members. Still, they said that any change to the system would be expected to demonstrate the party’s acknowledgment of the importance of smaller states and rural voters.Scott Brennan, an Iowan who sits on the rules and bylaws committee, did not respond to a request for comment but argued after the January meeting that Iowa’s small-state status has allowed barrier-breaking politicians to thrive.“Barack Obama was able to come to Iowa, the little-known senator from Illinois, and ultimately become the nominee,” Mr. Brennan said then.Mr. Brennan also referenced Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who is now the secretary of transportation. When Iowa’s caucuses were eventually tabulated in 2020, Mr. Buttigieg became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, with a narrow victory over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.“Folks like that have chances to really shine,” Mr. Brennan said. “If Iowa is not first in the process, I think that goes away.”Ms. Brazile, who in 2000 became the first Black woman to direct a major presidential campaign, said the party benefited when states like Nevada and South Carolina were added to the early nominating schedule to improve the representation of Black and Latino voters.Supporters in South Carolina waited to meet President Biden before the state’s Democratic primary in February 2020.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“It’s very important that our primary calendar reflect those values,” Ms. Brazile said at the rules and bylaws committee meeting in January. “We need to thank South Carolina and Nevada for giving us quality nominees over the years. That diversity has uplifted the party and also the values we hold as American citizens.”Previous efforts to change the nomination calendar to minimize the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire have hit political roadblocks. Ambitious elected officials, often eyeing the next presidential cycle, have sought to avoid upsetting state officials in Iowa and New Hampshire, who have historically guarded their first-in-the-nation status with extreme urgency. Presidents have often felt indebted to voters in those states, quelling criticisms before they reach the highest levels of the party.But Mr. Biden owes no such obligation. In 2020, he became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either in Iowa or New Hampshire. On the night of the New Hampshire primary — where Mr. Biden finished fifth — he fled to South Carolina and argued against the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, highlighting the dearth of Black voters in those states as a reason the results should be downplayed.“Tonight, I’ve just heard from the first two states, not all the nation,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “Up till now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency in the Democratic Party — the African American community.”He went on to win the South Carolina primary in a landslide. More

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      Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties

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      The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.Any indictment of the lawyer — Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s 2016 hacking of its servers — is likely to attract significant political attention.Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie — whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmann’s, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign — of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia.The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Another partner at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, was then serving as the general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Elias, who did not respond to inquiries, left Perkins Coie last month.In their attempt to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers are said to have insisted that their client was representing the cybersecurity expert he mentioned to Congress and was not there on behalf of or at the direction of the Clinton campaign.They are also said to have argued that the billing records are misleading because Mr. Sussmann was not charging his client for work on the Alfa Bank matter, but needed to show internally that he was working on something. He was discussing the matter with Mr. Elias and the campaign paid a flat monthly retainer to the firm, so Mr. Sussmann’s hours did not result in any additional charges, they said.Last October, as Mr. Durham zeroed in the Alfa Bank matter, the researcher who brought those concerns to Mr. Sussmann hired a new lawyer, Steven A. Tyrrell.Speaking on the condition that The New York Times not name his client in this article, citing a fear of harassment, Mr. Tyrrell said his client thought Mr. Sussmann was representing him at the meeting with Mr. Baker.“My client is an apolitical cybersecurity expert with a history of public service who felt duty bound to share with law enforcement sensitive information provided to him by D.N.S. experts,” Mr. Tyrrell said, referring to “Domain Name System,” a part of how the internet works and which generated the data that was the basis of the Alfa Bank concerns.Mr. Tyrrell added: “He sought legal advice from Michael Sussmann who had advised him on unrelated matters in the past and Mr. Sussmann shared that information with the F.B.I. on his behalf. He did not know Mr. Sussmann’s law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign and was simply doing the right thing.”Supporters of Mr. Trump have long been suspicious of Perkins Coie. On behalf of Democrats, Mr. Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to look into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. That resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The F.B.I. cited some information from the dossier in botched wiretap applications.Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.Mr. Durham has also apparently weighed bringing some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. Outside lawyers for the firm recently met with the special counsel’s team and went over the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing that it was insufficient for any legal sanction.The lawyers for Perkins Coie and the firm’s managing partner did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.Mr. Sussmann, 57, grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University and then Brooklyn Law School. He spent 12 years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department, where he came to specialize in computer crimes. He has since worked for Perkins Coie for about 16 years and is a partner in its privacy and cybersecurity practice. Mr. Sussmann and his firm have been particular targets for Mr. Trump and his supporters.In October 2018, a Wall Street Journal columnist attacked Mr. Sussmann, calling him the “point man for the firm’s D.N.C. and Clinton campaign accounts,” apparently conflating him with Mr. Elias. Perkins Coie responded with a letter to the editor saying that was not Mr. Sussmann’s role and that the unnamed client on whose behalf he spoke to the F.B.I. had “no connections to either the Clinton campaign, the D.N.C. or any other political law group client.”Four months later, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Sussmann by name in a slightly garbled pair of Twitter posts, trying to tie him to the Clinton campaign and to the Steele dossier.Raising the specter of politicization in the Durham inquiry, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann are said to have argued to the Justice Department that Mr. Baker’s recollection was wrong, immaterial and too weak a basis for a false-statements charge. There were no other witnesses to the conversation, the people familiar with the matter said.In a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client,” but also said Mr. Sussmann had told him “he had cyberexperts that had obtained some information that they thought should get into the hands of the F.B.I.”However, Mr. Durham’s team is said to have found handwritten notes made by another senior F.B.I. official at the time, whom Mr. Baker briefed about the conversation with Mr. Sussmann, that support the notion that Mr. Sussmann said he was not there on behalf of a client. It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at trial under the so-called hearsay rule.A lawyer for Mr. Baker declined to comment.Mr. Durham has been under pressure to deliver some results from his long-running investigation, which began when then-Attorney General William P. Barr assigned him in 2019 to investigate the Russia inquiry. Out of office and exiled from Twitter, Mr. Trump has issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?” More

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      F.E.C. Dismisses Case Against Democrats Over Outreach to Ukraine

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      The Federal Election Commission voted 4 to 2 not to pursue accusations that Democrats in 2016 sought help from Ukraine to damage Donald J. Trump’s campaign.The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint by an ally of President Donald J. Trump accusing the Democratic Party and one of its former consultants of violating campaign finance laws by working with Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign by damaging Mr. Trump’s.An unusual bipartisan combination of members of the commission voted against pursuing a complaint filed in 2017 by Matthew G. Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor and staunch defender of Mr. Trump who was later appointed acting attorney general.He filed the complaint after Mr. Trump and his White House began publicly calling for investigations of the matter in an effort to deflect attention from revelations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign advisers met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.Mr. Whitaker claimed in his complaint that the Democratic National Committee and a consultant who had worked for it, Alexandra Chalupa, violated a prohibition on foreign donations by soliciting damaging information and statements from Ukrainian government officials about Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time.The commission — which is composed of three members selected by each party — voted 4 to 2 in April that there was not probable cause to believe that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee broke the law, according to documents released Wednesday.The four commissioners voted against a recommendation by the commission’s general counsel to find probable cause that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee violated the foreign donation ban by trying to arrange an interview in which Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president at the time, might say something critical about Mr. Manafort.While the four commissioners issued statements disputing the general counsel’s characterization that Ms. Chalupa’s communications with the embassy prompted the ban, they also offered very different ideological concerns.The three Republican commissioners said in a statement accompanying the decision that they had “grave constitutional and prudential concerns” about the general counsel’s reading of the law, which they cast as an overreach. Ms. Chalupa’s communication with the embassy, they wrote, “did not ask that Ukrainian officials convey a thing of value within the meaning of a ‘contribution’ to the D.N.C.”The Republicans were joined in voting against probable cause by Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner since 2002, who cited concerns about Russian disinformation as a basis for her vote.Bipartisan votes have become more rare in commission enforcement matters in recent years, as Democratic commissioners who tend to favor stricter campaign finance rules have sometimes found themselves at loggerheads with their Republican colleagues, who tend to oppose campaign finance restrictions as burdensome infringements on free speech.The result has been deadlocked votes that effectively block the pursuit of cases.The dismissal of the complaint by Mr. Whitaker came amid a flurry of deadlock votes as the commission works its way through a backlog of matters related to the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Whitaker’s complaint, which was filed in his capacity as the executive director of a conservative watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, asserted that the Trump Tower meeting presented “comparable circumstances” to the Ukrainian matter.The complaint was based on an article in Politico revealing that Ms. Chalupa had discussions with officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington about Mr. Manafort’s work for Russia-aligned Ukrainian politicians.Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the report, with the president suggesting on Twitter that his attorney general should investigate the matter, and his press secretary telling reporters, “If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the D.N.C., who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.”Andrii Telizhenko, a former official at the embassy who was quoted in the article discussing Ms. Chalupa, was penalized in January by the Treasury Department for being part of what it called “a Russia-linked foreign influence network” that spread “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations” about President Biden during the 2020 campaign.While the Treasury Department did not accuse Mr. Telizhenko of spreading disinformation during the 2016 campaign, Ms. Weintraub said in a statement that the assertions by the Treasury Department and others “completely undermined the credibility of the complaint” based on his claims.Mr. Telizhenko, who provided testimony to commission staff, said in an interview that he stood by his claims, and rejected claims of connections to the Russian influence network cited by the Treasury Department.Nonetheless, the F.E.C.’s handling of the matter is something of a repudiation to Mr. Trump, particularly given that Republican commissioners he nominated voted that there was not probable cause to believe a violation had been committed.Ms. Chalupa, the Democratic National Committee and the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust did not respond to requests for comment. 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      The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why.

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      A devastating email breach of the D.N.C. roiled Democrats in the final months of 2016. An unassuming security official made it his mission to prevent a recurrence.As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020.It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign.That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races.By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week.That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.Mr. Lord left the team Yahoo affectionately calls “The Paranoids,” took a six-figure pay cut and headed to Washington in January 2017 to become the D.N.C.’s first chief information security officer.The way he saw it, the D.N.C.’s 2016 breach wasn’t so much a cybersecurity issue as it was a problem of workflow and corporate culture.Mr. Podesta’s aide, for instance, had asked a staff member to vet whether the infamous Russian spearphishing email was safe, and the aide responded that the email was “legitimate.” It was a typo; he later said he had meant to write “illegitimate.” By the time anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipes, and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, were being dissected online by the news media and conspiracy theorists.“After that, few would even pick up a flier, let alone a hose to help in 2017,” Mr. Cornale said. “Bob showed up with five fire trucks while putting on his suspenders, and ran in to the house.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Lord told his staff on Friday that he was leaving, clearing the way for the D.N.C. to get a replacement to get ahead of whatever adversaries may have planned for the midterms.Over the past four years, Mr. Lord has been a persistent and pervasive presence, speaking at every all-hands meeting, reminding employees that staving off the next cyber threat would come down to individual accountability: not reusing passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, running software updates. He urged them to use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to lock down their Venmo accounts; he also advised them to avoid clicking on suspicious links.A “Bobmoji”— a digital caricature of Mr. Lord — hangs above the men’s urinal and adorns the walls of the women’s restroom, reminding staff members of the checklist.Mr. Lord has had significantly smaller security budgets than he did at Yahoo, or that of any government agency and technology companies that Russia breached over the past year. And so he became something of a digital Marie Kondo — the Japanese tidying expert — decluttering the D.N.C.’s networks, excising old software and canceling extraneous vendor contracts, then took those extra discretionary funds and put them towards cybersecurity. But he knew cybersecurity technologies can go only so far. “If adding security technologies could fix our cybersecurity problems, we would have fixed things 25 years ago,” he said in an interview.His real legacy, D.N.C. staff members said, is that he single-handedly changed a culture.“To survive in Bob’s role, you have to drive people a little crazy,” Nellwyn Thomas, chief technology officer at the D.N.C., said.When the committee sent out an innocuous email asking staff members to enter their T-shirt size and address for some free swag, not a single employee complied, employees said.Mr. Lord had proudly turned them paranoid. More

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      How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden

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      A study by a liberal group found a reverse coattails effect in 2020: Down-ballot candidates may have helped elect President Biden, rather than the other way around.Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.But her run may have helped another candidate: Joseph R. Biden Jr.The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates. That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found. The analysis was carried out using available precinct-level data in eight states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and New York — and controlling for factors like education to create a comparison between contested and uncontested districts.The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.“The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.”The idea isn’t new, but it is the first time that a comprehensive study has been done on the possibility of such a reverse coattails effect, and it comes as the Democratic Party ramps up its strategizing for the midterm elections next year.In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts. The hope was that if there was at least one Democrat running in every county, it would help the party build a larger base for future elections. Mr. Dean was met with skepticism from national strategists who believed in a more conventional method of focusing limited campaign resources on swing districts. After his tenure, the strategy fell out of favor.What tends to derail any such 50-state, all-districts strategy are the limited resources that both parties have in any election, and the realpolitik considerations that inevitably lead them to pour disproportionate amounts of money into certain races seen as particularly important and winnable.“If you have candidates dedicated to ground game, then it could be helpful, but usually campaigns at the lower end of the spectrum don’t have that kind of money, and it’s certainly not done by parties as much anymore,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster. He said that one reason for this could be that controlling messaging down the ballot is hard to do when campaigns at the top of the ticket have different approaches to issues from those of local candidates.For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.Mr. Morales Rocketto expressed hope that the study would start a conversation among Democrats on how they invest in state and local races.During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic campaigns for the Senate, like Amy McGrath’s in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s in South Carolina, raised huge sums of money, in some cases topping $90 million for a single campaign. By comparison, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it raised $51 million for legislative races in 86 chambers across 44 states.“Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”And what those losses look like is already known, Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued.“When Republicans took control of 21 state legislative chambers in 2010, we lost control for a near decade to win the United States Congress,” she said. “We now have a challenge with keeping the United States Senate, and Republicans are eroding our voting rights in these state legislatures.”Since the presidential election, Republican-run legislatures across the country have been drafting bills to restrict voting access, prompting Democratic calls for additional local party infrastructure. The way to get that investment and attention from the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Morales Rocketto said, is to highlight how a bottom-up approach can help the party at the national level, too.Ms. Post echoed that sentiment. “So much of the building blocks of American democracy are truly built in the state,” she said.Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”Mr. Hobart said that both parties should want to have strong candidates running for office up and down the ballot, because parties never know what districts will become competitive. For Republicans in 2020, some of those surprise districts were along the southern border of Texas, which had previously been a relatively blue region.“It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”The new study will be just one consideration as the D.N.C. reviews its strategy for state legislative and other down-ballot races in the midterms. The committee is pledging to increase investment in such races, both to help win traditional battleground states and to grow more competitive in red-tinted states that are trending blue.Officials at the D.N.C., who declined to speak on the record about the study, pointed to Kansas, which has a Democratic governor but voted for former President Donald J. Trump by 15 percentage points, as an example of a state where they’d like to put the study’s findings into action.Democrats in the state are gearing up to try to re-elect Gov. Laura Kelly, and Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, said he hoped to test the theory. He said that having Democrats campaign in deep-red districts required a different type of field organizing.“There are some counties where if the state party can’t find a Democrat, we can’t have an organized county party, because the area is so red,” he said. “But if we can run even the lone Democrat we can find out there, and get a few of those votes to come out — you know the analogy: A rising tide lifts all Democratic ships.”Some Democratic strategists in Kansas noticed that phone-bank canvassers had more success with voters during the general election when they focused on congressional and local candidates, rather than headlining their calls with Mr. Biden. They’re hoping that building local connections in the state will help Ms. Kelly’s campaign.In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits. That was five percentage points better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016.Ms. Carter said she had tried to start grass-roots momentum in the district. “For me, running for office was never an ambition,” she said. “It was more so out of the necessity for where I live.”Ms. Carter’s district has grown exponentially during the last decade, bringing with it changing demographics and different approaches to politics. She knew through previous political organizing and her own campaigning that many people in her district, including friends and family, didn’t know when local elections were, why they were important or what liberal or conservative stances could look like at a local level.Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.“I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      The Presidential Primary Calendar Stinks. Now’s the Time to Shake It Up.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Presidential Primary Calendar Stinks. Now’s the Time to Shake It Up.Democrats should take the opportunity to reform an out-of-touch system.Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.Feb. 19, 2021Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York TimesDon’t freak out, but Nevada’s Democrats are already looking ahead to the next presidential election — and, more specifically, how to pick their nominee.On Monday, a bill was introduced in the State Assembly that would replace the current caucus system with a primary. As conceived, the move threatens to throw the party’s national nominating calendar into conflict and chaos.It’s about time.Nevada’s nominating process has had a rocky run of late. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the caucuses, but complex delegate-selection rules led to chaos at the state party’s convention, when Bernie Sanders’s fans became convinced that the process had been “hijacked” for Mrs. Clinton. (Intraparty death threats are rarely a good sign.) The 2020 cycle was less explosive but still bumpy. Mr. Sanders scored a clear win, but there were initially competing claims for second place, the reporting of results was delayed, and Pete Buttigieg’s campaign claimed “irregularities.”Not all of this is poor Nevada’s fault. Caucuses are a convoluted, vaguely anti-democratic way to pick a nominee. The rules are mind-numbing and the process time-consuming, giving an unfair advantage to party activists and people with numerous hours to kill. If anything, Nevada’s 2020 headaches could have been far worse if the party hadn’t scrambled at the 11th hour to shore up its systems in response to the epic failure of the Iowa caucuses.For those who have already repressed the debacle, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses suffered a meltdown last year. The system “crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field,” The Times found. The results were not reported for days and, even then, were a hot mess. More than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, incomplete or flat-out impossible under the rules.It’s not as though the caucus states weren’t aware of the potential for trouble. Post-2016, as part of a push to simplify and clarify the nominating process, the Democratic National Committee urged the state parties to shift to primaries. Most did. The few that refused were instructed to adopt measures to make voting more inclusive. Iowa and Nevada toyed with remote telephone voting, but those plans fell apart over security concerns.Despite adopting changes, including setting up caucus sites in casinos to accommodate workers and providing for early voting, Nevada Democrats have now decided that “the only way we can bring more voices into the process is by moving to a primary,” the state party chairman said in a statement.This is the sensible — and democratic — thing to do. But there’s a hitch.Nevada Democrats aren’t looking simply to shift to a primary system. They are looking to host the first primary election of the presidential cycle. “Nevada’s diverse population and firsthand experience in issues relating to climate change, public lands, immigration, and health care provide a unique voice that deserves to be heard first,” said Jason Frierson, the Assembly speaker, in announcing the bill.Nevada is a lovely, diverse state with much to recommend it. But its attempt to claim pole position in the presidential primaries will not be well received by New Hampshire, which has held that honor for more than a century. New Hampshire so values its first-primary status that state law requires that the state hold its vote at least seven days before any “similar election.” A caucus is considered different enough not to pose a conflict, but if Nevada tries easing toward a primary: Fight on. New Hampshire’s longtime secretary of state has already told the local media, in effect: Relax. I’ll handle it.It’s hard to blame early states for clinging to their privilege. Leading the presidential calendar means they get lavished with time, attention and obscene amounts of money from the candidates, the parties and the legions of journalists who cover the circus. Their voters and their issues receive preferential treatment. Who knows how many Iowa diners would fail if not for all the candidates and journalists jockeying to hobnob with “real Americans”?That said, oceans of words have been devoted to why Iowa and New Hampshire should not have a lock on early voting. Especially for Democrats, these lily-white states are hardly representative of the party’s electorate. This cycle, Joe Biden’s abysmal showing in both Iowa and New Hampshire had many declaring his candidacy deader than disco.After South Carolina Democrats, dominated by Black voters, saved Mr. Biden’s bacon, the calls to overhaul the nominating calendar grew even louder and more pointed. “A diverse state or states need to be first,” Tom Perez told The Times as he was wrapping up his tenure as head of the D.N.C. last week. “The difference between going first and going third is really important.”Yes it is.There is, in fact, a strong argument to be made that no state — even a superdiverse one — should have a permanent claim on that privilege. Many worthy states would love to have their parochial concerns receive saturation coverage during an election. And the denizens of small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire are no more entitled to having candidates fawn all over them than those in North Carolina or Ohio or Maine. The current nominating scheme is not the only option. Plenty of alternatives have been floated, including a system of rotating regional primaries. It’s past time to give them a serious look.Nevada Democrats are aiming to shake things up. The national party should seize the opportunity to shake even harder, reforming a system that’s increasingly out of touch with voters.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tom Perez on Democrats’ Mistakes and Why Iowa Shouldn’t Go First

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTom Perez on Democrats’ Mistakes and Why Iowa Shouldn’t Go FirstIn an interview, the former D.N.C. chairman discussed a possible bid for Maryland governor and said Iowa and New Hampshire starting the presidential nominating process was “unacceptable.”Former D.N.C. chairman Tom Perez  is considering a bid for Maryland governor.Credit…Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021, 8:56 a.m. ETFor the past four years, Tom Perez had perhaps the most thankless job in American politics: chairman of the Democratic National Committee.During that time Mr. Perez, the first Latino to lead the committee, oversaw the rebuilding of the party apparatus from an indebted hollowed-out mess after years of neglect during the Obama administration to a cash-flush organization with more than twice as many employees as it had when he took over in February 2017.But Mr. Perez, who was urged to seek the party chairmanship by former President Barack Obama after serving under him as labor secretary, hardly had a smooth tenure. He faced internal dissent in 2018 for stripping superdelegates of their voting power in presidential contests and took public and private fire throughout 2019 from more than half of the party’s two dozen presidential candidates, who bellyached about, among other things, standards that Mr. Perez had set to qualify for debates.Mr. Perez spoke with The New York Times on Thursday about his experience running the party, the results of last year’s elections and his future political plans. His final day working for the party committee was Friday. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.Do you think that the D.N.C. should have devoted more attention and resources to down-ballot contests given the results in state legislative and congressional races?The thing about this election cycle that is really regrettable is that we had record turnout. And we should be celebrating that on a bipartisan basis, because we did really well. We won the presidency. We have the House. We have the Senate. And Republicans won in a number of critical races. That’s undeniable. They won a number of Senate seats. They won a number of congressional seats. And they won because a lot of their people turned out. And instead, what Donald Trump and the far right chose to do is to invest in this fiction that there was some sort of massive voter fraud, which is inaccurate.The reality is we won a series of really important races. And they won a number of down-ballot races. Those are the facts of 2020. And that’s why we’re absolutely drilling down deeper to answer the question of how did we do well for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden in Arizona and not so well in some of the State House and State Senate races. Really important question. It certainly wasn’t for lack of investment. And that’s why we’re looking to understand what else do we have to do.Why was Latino support for Democrats so much softer in 2020 after four years of Trump than it was in 2016 and elections before that?Do we need to do more with Latino voters? Absolutely. And I am very committed to that. We did more than the party has ever done. But again, every cycle, we need to build on what we did before. And that’s exactly what we will do. The misinformation campaigns in South Florida were very real. And they involved both domestic and foreign actors.And the appeals to socialism in South Florida were more successful. They made those same socialism arguments in Arizona. But they fell flat. And they fell flat, in no small measure, because we had a really aggressive and longstanding organizing infrastructure in Arizona that enabled us to counteract that.Will the 2022 and 2024 elections be a referendum on President Biden’s handling of the pandemic and the economy?What voters are going to ask themselves is the same question they always ask. “Am I better off than I was two years ago? Am I seeing results that are improving my life?” As they are able to return to normalcy, whatever normalcy is going to look like post-Covid, I think that they will appreciate that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led during this crisis.Should Iowa and New Hampshire keep going first in the presidential nominating process?That will be up to the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.I’m aware. But what does the private citizen Tom Perez think?A diverse state or states need to be first. The difference between going first and going third is really important. We know the importance of momentum in Democratic primaries.I’ll try one more time. Could you make a case for defending Iowa and New Hampshire going first?The status quo is clearly unacceptable. To simply say, “Let’s just continue doing this because this is how we’ve always done it,” well, Iowa started going as an early caucus state, I believe, in 1972. The world has changed a lot since 1972 to 2020 and 2024. And so the notion that we need to do it because this is how we’ve always done it is a woefully insufficient justification for going first again.This is the Democratic Party of 2020. It’s different from the Democratic Party in how we were in 1972. And we need to reflect that change. And so I am confident that the status quo is not going to survive.How far down the road are you in thinking about running for governor of Maryland?I’m seriously considering a run for governor in Maryland.We need a governor who can really build strong relationships with the Biden administration, will build strong relationships with every one of the jurisdictions in Maryland.Marylanders are just like everybody else. We want an end to this pandemic. We want to put kids back to school. We want to put people back to work. The pandemic has disproportionately touched women and communities of color in Maryland. And I’ve had the fortune of working in local government, and with the nonprofit faith communities and state government there.So I’m currently listening. I’m on a listening tour in Maryland. And I think we need leadership, really, with a bold vision of inclusion and opportunity because ZIP code should never determine destiny in any community across America.Has Larry Hogan been a good governor for Maryland?I appreciate the fact that Larry Hogan has said critical things about Donald Trump. I appreciate that. What we really need, I think, in Maryland is leaders who will sweat the details of governance. The pandemic rollout, the vaccination process has been nothing less than chaotic in Maryland. We’ve had an unemployment insurance crisis, people waiting months and months to get their unemployment benefits. That’s just a failure of leadership at a state level.I didn’t hear a yes or no on Hogan.I applaud that he tried to get some tests from South Korea. But then it turned out that the tests didn’t work. And he covered it up. And there’s always going to be moments where mistakes are made. And good leaders fess up to those mistakes. But he tried to sweep it under the rug.Again, it’s great to see a governor who criticizes Donald Trump. But we need governors who do a hell of a lot more than just criticize.What would you be doing differently to accelerate vaccine distribution and reopen schools faster?I would be on the phone every day with county executives making sure: “What do you need? What do you not have? What do you have? What can we do?” I would be relentlessly reaching out to our colleagues in the federal government to say: “Here’s what we need. Here’s what’s going on.” I would have a war room set up and, again, every single day, say: “You value what you measure. You measure what you value. What are we doing?”Donald Trump is partly to blame for this. He was a disaster. But you look at other states — other states have been able to work around that and are doing better. Our vaccination rates do not compare well. We’re the richest state in the United States — Maryland — but we have way too many people who are on the outside looking in.You said good leaders admit their mistakes. What were the biggest mistakes you made at the D.N.C.?I wish that we could have won more elections. And so I’m looking back at what we did and some of the races we didn’t win. I was really frustrated in January and early February of 2017, because Donald Trump was in power and he was issuing all sorts of executive actions that were turning life upside down for so many people. That was in the middle of the D.N.C. race because the election wasn’t set until the end of February. So we got a late start. And I think that was a mistake.It was frustrating to see Feb. 27, a month into the administration, and I’m just showing up at work for the first time. So I think we have to be very mindful. And if there are periods of time in the future where we’re in a similar situation, where we’ve lost the White House, we better make sure we start early because I had to play a lot of catch-up. And that was a mistake.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More