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      N.C. Elections Board Rejects G.O.P. Effort to Toss 60,000 Ballots

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      The ruling comes in a dispute over a State Supreme Court race that the Democratic incumbent won by 734 votes.The North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected on Wednesday a Republican bid to throw out more than 60,000 votes in a closely contested election for a State Supreme Court seat that an incumbent Democrat won by 734 votes.Two recounts showed that Associate Justice Allison Riggs, the incumbent, had eked out a slim victory out of some 5.5 million ballots that were cast. The losing judge, Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, argued that the state’s failure to enforce technical aspects of registration and election laws should disqualify scores of thousands of voters, most or all of whom cast otherwise legal ballots.The Democrat-controlled elections board disagreed, in a series of votes that went largely along party lines. Republicans on the board called for further hearings to gather more evidence on the issues.“The idea that someone could have been registered to vote, came to vote and then has their vote discarded is anathema to the democratic system,” the board’s Democratic chairman, Allan Hirsch, said at the meeting.The chairman of the state Republican Party denounced the decision, saying that “the board’s continued efforts to engineer political outcomes for Democrats is shameful.”Judge Griffin, who currently sits on the State Court of Appeals, could appeal the ruling to a State Superior Court, kicking off a legal process that could end at the same State Supreme Court where Justice Riggs sits. Republicans hold a 5-to-2 majority on the court, which has been bitterly divided along partisan lines in recent years.The ruling on Wednesday also rejected attempts by three Republican state legislators to overturn their narrow losses on the same grounds.In a protest against the election results filed last month, Judge Griffin argued that upward of 60,000 voters should be disqualified because the state failed to enact one part of a 2004 law requiring new voters to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when applying to vote. Voters who failed to list numbers should be ineligible, he said, even if they were unaware of the requirement.His complaint also sought to disqualify overseas voters who failed to submit a photo ID with their ballots in accordance with a new voter ID law. Those overseas voters also were not told of the requirement.Lawyers for Justice Riggs, as well as the state Democratic Party, argued that federal law bars throwing out votes for lack of a driver’s license or Social Security numbers. They also said that state law setting out the rules for overseas votes does not require a photo ID. More

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      Trump and Harris Campaigns Met to Talk Tactics. It Wasn’t Pretty.

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      Leaders of the Trump and Harris campaigns met this week to talk tactics. It wasn’t pretty.Reader, we wrote you this newsletter in a tense room in Cambridge.The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sen. Laphonza Butler Discusses the Election During Her Last Days in Office

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      An interview with Senator Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, during her final week in the Senate.Laphonza Butler will have served as a senator from California for only about 15 months. But she has been a close ally of Vice President Kamala Harris for 15 years.This week, I spoke with Butler, whose long partnership with Harris — they first met when Butler was a Los Angeles-based union leader — gives her an intriguing perspective on why her party lost the presidential election and how it might rebuild.Harris hasn’t said much publicly about why she lost. In Butler’s view, some of the fault starts with President Biden, who she believes broke what was a clear campaign promise by running for re-election. But just blaming Biden isn’t enough: Democrats, she says, must stop talking and start listening. Really listening.Butler was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein in September 2023. Because she decided not to run for re-election, this week is her last in the body: On Monday, Representative Adam Schiff will be sworn in as the state’s newest senator.This interview was edited for length and clarity.LL: Why do you think Harris lost?LB: The American people wanted a change. They wanted a candidate who they thought represented change. And I think that might simply be it.Should Biden not have run?President Biden said initially that he was going to be a transitional leader. I think that is the expectation that people had. So in that sense, I think that he probably would have been better to remain in that posture. We can’t deny the success of his presidency. When history looks back, his presidency will be one of the most impactful in my lifetime, for sure. But I think once you sort of create an expectation with people, there is the need to hold to that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Rahm Emanuel Flip the Script Again?

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      There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.More on that in a moment. When I meet him for breakfast this week at a New York City hotel, what he wants to talk about is a looming crisis in Asia. “What started as two wars in two theaters is now one war in two separate theaters,” he says of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “We need to ensure that it does not expand into a third theater.”How soon might that happen? I mention 2027, a year that’s often seen as China’s target date for reunification with Taiwan, if necessary by force.“I think it’s actually 2025,” he answers.What Emanuel has in mind are Asia’s other flashpoints, including along the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, where Russia is “poking” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, “to do something” and where South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, and also in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are coming to blows over Beijing’s illegal maritime claims. Unlike with Taipei, to which America’s obligations are deliberately ambiguous, with Manila and Seoul our defense commitments are ironclad.That could mean war for the United States on multiple unexpected fronts. Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.The Chinese, Emanuel says, “have a theory of the case in the Indo-Pacific. We have a theory of the case. Their attempt is to isolate Australia, isolate the Philippines and put all the pressure on that country,” often through abusive trade practices. “Our job is to flip the script and isolate China through their actions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wisconsin Democratic Chair Says He Is the One to Revive a Distressed Party

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      Ben Wikler, who has led the Wisconsin Democratic Party since 2019, announced a bid to be national party chair with a platform to “unite, fight, win.”Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman and a prolific party fund-raiser with deep connections in Washington, announced on Sunday that he was entering the race to lead the Democratic National Committee.Mr. Wikler, 43, has led Wisconsin Democrats since 2019, and he has served as a top official at MoveOn, the progressive advocacy group. He said in an interview that he aimed to do for the national party what he did in Wisconsin, where he presided over the rebuilding of a party weakened by years of full Republican control of the state’s government.Mr. Wikler, whose start in politics came in part as a research assistant for Al Franken, joins a field of party-chair hopefuls that includes Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic chairman; Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor; and James Skoufis, a little-known New York state senator. While Mr. Martin has said he has endorsements from 83 of the 448 voting members of the D.N.C. (and Mr. O’Malley has said he has endorsements from three, and Mr. Skoufis does not have any), Mr. Wikler would not say his level of support when asked.That was not the only question Mr. Wikler declined to answer in an interview this weekend. He would also not say which state he thinks should vote first in the 2028 presidential primary or whether President Biden should have sought re-election.“My platform in this race is unite, fight, win,” Mr. Wikler said. “Uniting starts not with recriminations but with reckoning and with curiosity and data. And then you use all that to inform the way that you fight the next battle.”Jaime Harrison, the departing party chairman, is not seeking re-election. Others considering entering the race include former Representative Max Rose of New York; Chuck Rocha, a strategist who worked on Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2020; and Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state legislator. Mr. Harrison has scheduled the meeting for the vote to replace him for Feb. 1 in Oxon Hill, Md.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Weigh Dumping Jerrold Nadler for Jamie Raskin in House Judiciary Committee

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      Some House Democrats want to oust aging committee leaders like Representative Jerrold Nadler in favor of younger lawmakers who they see as better suited to take on the president.House Democrats are considering pushing aside some of their most senior leaders from top posts in the next Congress, driven by a worry that aging members are not up to the task of countering President-elect Donald J. Trump and his loyal Republican allies in Congress.The debate has grown most intense in recent days as dozens of Democrats have been privately pressing Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to challenge Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York for his position as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. They are doing so out of concern that Mr. Nadler will be ineffective in pushing back against any efforts by Mr. Trump to abuse his power.Mr. Nadler, 77, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, has made it clear he has no plans to step aside. And while Mr. Raskin, 61, is mulling a challenge, he has not yet decided whether to pursue one, according to colleagues familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.“As a New Yorker, I have stood up to Donald Trump my entire career,” Mr. Nadler wrote in a letter to colleagues announcing his run for re-election to the post, in which he emphasized his history of going after Mr. Trump. “When he became president, I led the Judiciary Committee’s efforts to hold him accountable for his various abuses of power, culminating in two historic impeachments.”Mr. Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law, developed a progressive fan base for his work as the lead impeachment manager against Mr. Trump in 2021 and as the top Democrat on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that year. He is seen by many colleagues as more aggressive, articulate and shrewd than Mr. Nadler when it comes to taking on the former and future president.Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been among those privately encouraging him to challenge Mr. Nadler, according to the people familiar with the internal discussions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Note to Democrats: It’s Time to Take Up Your Hammers

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      I would prefer to live in a world where the recent news that more than 146,000 New York City schoolchildren experienced homelessness during the last school year was regarded as a crisis demanding immediate changes in public policy. But if helping children isn’t enough to move New York’s political leaders to action — and, by all indications, it most certainly is not — they might consider doing it for the sake of the Democratic Party.There is a straight line from homeless schoolchildren to Donald Trump’s election victory.Homelessness is the most extreme manifestation of the nation’s housing crisis. America simply isn’t building enough housing, which has driven up prices, which has made it difficult for millions of households to keep up with monthly rent or mortgage payments. Every year, some of those people suffer at least a brief period of homelessness.Popular anger about the high cost of housing, which is by far the largest expense for most American households, helped to fuel Mr. Trump’s comeback. He recorded his strongest gains compared with the 2020 election in the areas where living costs are highest, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank.The results are more than a backlash against the party that happened to be in power. The animating principle of the Democratic Party is that government can improve the lives of the American people. The housing crisis is manifest proof that government is failing to do so. And it surely has not escaped the attention of the electorate that the crisis is most acute in New York City, Los Angeles and other places long governed by Democrats.Republicans promise to cut taxes and they cut taxes. Democrats promise to use tax dollars to solve problems and one in eight public school students in New York experienced homelessness last year. It is the ninth straight year the number of homeless schoolchildren in New York topped 100,000.The good news is that Democrats still have the power to do better. While the party will soon be sidelined in Washington, it is primarily local and state laws that impede home building, including zoning laws that limit development, building codes that raise costs and local control measures that give existing residents the power to prevent growth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inverted Morality of MAGA

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      I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More