Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Speaker, Speaker, What Do You See? I See MAGA Looking at Me.

      by

      Bret Stephens: Gail, remember “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the unforgettable Lionel Shriver novel about a woman whose son murders his classmates? Maybe someone should write the sequel: “We Need to Talk About What They Did to Kevin.”Gail Collins: A book-length disquisition on Kevin McCarthy, Bret? I dunno. Always thought his strongest suit was that he was too boring to hate. But now that he’s apparently promised the Republican right wing everything but permission to bring pet ocelots to the House floor, I can see it.Bret: Too boring to hate or too pathetic to despise? I’ve begun to think of McCarthy almost as a literary archetype, like one of those figures in a Joseph Conrad novel whose follies make them weak and whose weakness leads them to folly.Gail: Love your literary allusions. But let’s pretend you’re in charge of the Republican Party — tell me what you think of him in general.Bret: A few honorable exceptions aside, the G.O.P. is basically split between reptiles and invertebrates. McCarthy is the ultimate invertebrate. He went to Mar-a-Lago just a short while after Jan. 6 to kiss the ring of the guy who incited the mob that, by McCarthy’s own admission, wanted to kill him. He hated Liz Cheney because of her backbone. But he quailed before Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has a forked tongue. He gave away the powers and prerogatives of the office of speaker in order to gain the office, which is like a slug abandoning its shell and thinking it won’t be stepped on. A better man would have told the Freedom Caucus holdouts to shove it. Instead, as a friend of mine put it, McCarthy decided to become the squeaker of the House.Gail: OK, Kevin is House squeaker forever.Bret: If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the whole spectacle has shown voters what they get for voting for this Republican Party.Gail: Hey, you’re still in charge of Republicans. Now that they’re sort of in command, do you have hopes they’ll make progress on your priorities, like controlling government spending? Without, um, failing to make the nation’s debt payments ….Bret: Buried in the noise about McCarthy’s humiliation is that his opponents had some reasonable demands. One of them was to give members of Congress a minimum of 72 hours to read the legislation they were voting on. Another was to limit bills to a single subject. The idea is to do away with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending packages that Congress has lately become way too fond of.Gail: Yeah, I can buy into that one.Bret: On the other hand, the idea that this Republican clown show is going to accomplish anything significant — particularly since doing so would require them to work with a Democratic president and Senate — is roughly the equivalent of Vladimir Putin leaving the vocation of vile despot to become a … cannabis entrepreneur. Not going to happen.So what do Democrats do?Gail: Well, one plus is that we don’t have to worry about the Republican House passing some terrible, nutty legislation since the Senate is there to put a halt to it. Interesting how much better obstruction looks when your party is doing the obstructing ….Bret: It’s almost — almost — enough to be grateful to people like Herschel Walker and Blake Masters for being such deliriously awful candidates.Gail: When it comes to positive action, like keeping the government running, I’d like to think the moderate Dems and the moderate Republicans could get together and come to some agreement on the basics. Do you think there’s a chance?Bret: What was the name of that Bret Easton Ellis novel? “Less Than Zero.” Bipartisanship became a four-letter word for most Republicans sometime around 2012. If we can avoid another useless government shutdown, I’ll consider it a minor miracle.On the other hand, all this is good for Democrats. In our last conversation, I predicted that McCarthy wouldn’t win the speakership and that Joe Biden would decide against a second term. I was wrong on the first. Now I’m beginning to think I was also wrong on the second, in part because Republicans are in such manifest disarray. What is your spidey sense telling you?Gail: Yeah, Biden knows 80 is old for another run, but the chance to take on Donald Trump again is probably going to be irresistible.Bret: Assuming it’s going to be Trump, which, increasingly, I doubt.Gail: You really think it’s going to be Ron DeSantis? My theory is that if the field opens up at all, there’ll be a swarm of Republican hopefuls, dividing the Trump opposition.Bret: It’ll be DeSantis or you can serve me a platter of crow. Never mind that Trump still managed to seal the deal for McCarthy’s speakership by winning over a few of the last holdouts. It still took him 15 ballots.Gail: But about Biden — if he did drop out, Democrats would have to figure out what to do about Kamala Harris. A woman, a minority, with the classic presidential training job. Yet a lot of people haven’t found her all that impressive as a potential leader.My vote would be for him to announce he’s not running instantly, and let all the other potential heirs go for it.Bret: How do you solve a problem like Kamala? My initial hope was that she’d grow into the job. That hasn’t seemed to happen. My second hope was that Biden would give her a task in which she’d shine. Didn’t happen either. My third hope was that Biden would ask her to fill Stephen Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court and then nominate Gina Raimondo or Pete Buttigieg to the vice presidency, setting either of them up to be the front-runner in ’24 or ’28. Whoops again. Now Dems are saddled with their own version of Dan Quayle, minus the gravitas.Gail: Not fair to compare her to Dan Quayle. But otherwise OK with your plan. Go on.Bret: I also think Biden should announce he isn’t going to run, both on account of his age and the prospect of running against someone like DeSantis. But the argument is harder to make given the midterm results, Republican chaos, the sense that he’s defied the skeptics to pass a lot of legislation and the increasingly likely prospect that Ukraine will prevail over Russia this year and give him a truly historic geopolitical win.I just hope that if he does run, he switches veeps. It would … reassure the nation.Gail: So happy to hear you’re on a Biden fan track. Does that apply to his new plan for the Mexican border, too?Bret: Not a Biden fan, exactly, though I do root for a successful presidency on general principle. As for the border plan, the good news is that he finally seems to be recognizing the scale of the problem and promising tougher enforcement. It’s also good that he’s doing more for political refugees from oppressive countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.Gail: And next …Bret: The right step now is to start pushing for realistic bipartisan immigration reform that gives Republicans more money for border wall construction and security in exchange for automatic citizenship for Dreamers, an expanded and renewable guest-worker visa that helps bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and a big increase in the “extraordinary ability” EB-1 visas for our future Andy Groves and Albert Einsteins. What do you think?Gail: I was waiting for you to get to the border wall itself, which we disagree about. Terrible symbol, awful to try to maintain and not always effective.Bret: All true, except that it paves the way for a good legislative compromise and can save lives if it deters dangerous border crossings.Gail: Moneywise, the border states deserve increased federal aid to handle their challenges. A good chunk should go to early childhood education, which would not only help the new arrivals but also local children born into non-English-speaking families.The aid should also go to states like New York that are getting busloads of new immigrants — some from those Arizona and Texas busing plots, but a good number just because they’re the newcomers’ choice destination.I believe there was a bipartisan plan hatched in the House that included citizenship for Dreamers — an obvious reform that, amazingly, we haven’t yet achieved. But bipartisan plans aren’t doing real well right now.Bret: It’s still worth a shot. I’m sorry Biden didn’t invest the kind of political capital into immigration reform that he did into the infrastructure and climate change bills. And if Republicans wind up voting down funding for a border wall out of spite for Dreamers, I can’t see how that helps Republicans or hurts Democrats. Supporting them seems like smart politics at the very minimum.Before we go, Gail, one more point of note: We just passed the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. I was happy to see Biden honor the heroes of that day at a White House ceremony. Also happy to see the Justice Department continue to prosecute hundreds of cases. And appalled to watch Brazil’s right-wing loons try to imitate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists by storming their own parliament. Any suggestions for going forward?Gail: Well, what we really need to see is an effort by Republicans, some of whom were endangered themselves during the attack, but virtually none of whom have shown any interest in revisiting that awful moment — only one member of the party showed up for that ceremony.Now that Kevin McCarthy has his job in hand, let’s see him call for a bipartisan committee to come up with some suggestions. Ha ha ha.Sorry — don’t want to end on a snippy note.Bret: Not snippy at all. Truthful. We could start by requiring a civics course for all incoming members of Congress. Maybe some of them might learn that their first duty is to the Constitution, not to themselves.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Chaos and Concessions as Kevin McCarthy Becomes Speaker

      by

      More from our inbox:Should Babies Sit in First Class on the Plane?A Chatbot as a Writing ToolSupport Family Farms Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “McCarthy Wins Speakership on 15th Vote After Concessions to Hard Right” (nytimes.com, Jan. 7):So Kevin McCarthy is finally speaker of the House. It took 15 votes to get him there.But considering the concessions he had to make, the unruly nature of right-wing Republicans and the razor-thin margin, the next two years are likely to be a nightmare for Mr. McCarthy.Sometimes be careful what you wish for.Allan GoldfarbNew YorkTo the Editor:It’s easy to blame Republicans for the debacle of the House leadership vote and all its predictable miserable consequences. But where were the 212 Democrats in all this?Sure, I can see the rationale behind a show of support and unity for Hakeem Jeffries at the outset. He’s much deserving and would have done a fine job. But that’s a battle Democrats were never going to win.Deep into the voting rounds when it became apparent that there would be no win for Kevin McCarthy without further empowering the right-wing extremists, wouldn’t it have been smarter for Democrats to have gotten together to nominate some (any!) moderate Republican and hope to deny both Mr. McCarthy and the extremists their day?Democrats are just as bad as Republicans in putting party loyalty ahead of what’s best for the American people.Russell RoyManchester, N.H.To the Editor:Re “How a Battle for Control Set the Table for Disarray” (news article, Jan. 8):As Emily Cochrane points out, in getting elected speaker, Kevin McCarthy accepted making changes to the rules of the House that are not merely a weakening of the powers of the speakership, but also a danger to the country. If Congress cannot agree to raise the debt ceiling, the United States could default on its debt for the first time. The mere threat is a clear and present danger.Is it possible that some Republican members of the House could, even though they voted for Mr. McCarthy, nonetheless join Democrats in voting against the most dangerous changes in the rules?If, instead, all House Republicans regard their vote for Mr. McCarthy as a vote for the concessions he made to become speaker, then each and every one of them has as much responsibility for the damage these rules will do the country as the radicals who insisted on the changes.Jeff LangChapel Hill, N.C.The writer is a former chief international trade counsel for the Senate’s Committee on Finance.To the Editor:What a day. I imagine that the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection will go down in history as the day the Democrats commemorated all the patriotic heroes who fought to save our democracy, while simultaneously the Republicans in Congress could be seen doing their level best to destroy it.Sharon AustryFort WorthTo the Editor:It’s not just the far-right representatives who can disrupt the workings of the House. The concession to change the rules to allow a single lawmaker to force a snap vote to oust the speaker gives the Democrats a filibuster-like power.If they want to stop a particular vote for a Republican-sponsored bill, all the Democrats have to do is keep calling for votes to remove the speaker. That vote would take precedence until the Republicans give up and take their bill off the agenda.By insisting on having the power to disrupt the workings of the House, the far-right Republicans have given the same power to the Democrats.Henry FarkasPikesville, Md.To the Editor:Teachers seeking to explain to their students the meaning of a Pyrrhic victory, look no further than Kevin McCarthy!Peter RogatzPort Washington, N.Y.Should Babies Sit in First Class on the Plane? Brian BritiganTo the Editor:Re “Um, Perhaps Your Baby Will Fit in the Overhead Bin?” (Travel, Jan. 7):This article has particular relevance for me, as someone who has traveled more than 100,000 miles every year for the last 25 years. I have seen a number of variations on this theme of babies in first class.The alternative to having one first-class or business seat with an infant on one’s lap is to buy two seats or even three seats in coach, which allow for the parent to have the option of holding the child or placing the child in a travel seat. It would also be fairer for airlines to require that parents buy an actual seat for an infant when it comes to purchasing seats in business or first class.There is a clear difference between a domestic first-class cabin for a two-hour flight and an overnight transcontinental flight where the entire point of paying $5,000 for a seat is to be able to sleep so one may function the next day during back-to-back meetings.My heartfelt advice to those parents contemplating their options is to buy a Comfort Plus or premium coach seat for you as well as for your infant to have ample space and to be a good citizen.Ronnie HawkinsWashingtonTo the Editor:A few years ago, my husband and I flew on Scandinavian Airlines from D.C. to Copenhagen. There were perhaps half a dozen babies on the plane, but we heard not a peep from any of them for the length of the flight. Why? The plane had fold-down bassinets in the bulkheads, and people traveling with babies were assigned those seats.Of course, there are no surefire ways to prevent disruptive passengers, whether they’re children or adults, but the airlines in this country disregard their own role in this mess by making flying such a miserable experience for everyone.Debra DeanMiamiA Chatbot as a Writing Tool Larry Buchanan/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Fourth Grader or Chatbot?” (The Upshot, Jan. 4):I have been a teacher of writing for the past 38 years, and my first reaction to ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence chatbot, was dread: How could I prevent my students from using this technology? My second reaction was to wonder how I might use it myself.Once we are done with denial and hand-wringing, teachers need to think about how we can use A.I. to help teach student writing. This tool can help generate ideas, offer suggestions, map out structures, transform outlines to drafts and much more that could demystify the writing process.The technology is here to stay; our job will be to advance the education of our students by using A.I. to develop their writing and thinking skills.Huntington LymanMiddleburg, Va.The writer is the academic dean at The Hill School in Middleburg.Support Family Farms Antoine CosséTo the Editor:Re “What Growing Up on a Farm Taught Me About Humility,” by Sarah Smarsh (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 25):I am just one generation removed from the family dairy farm, and my cousins still operate one in Idaho and their lives are tough. In the words of Ms. Smarsh, they’re “doing hard, undervalued work.”Ms. Smarsh makes a strong case against giant agricultural corporations and their “torturous treatment of animals.”Currently, the majority of farm production is driven by corporate greed. However, small-farm, organic-raised meat and produce are expensive alternatives, which are out of reach for low-income, food-insecure families.More moral, sustainable food production is a policy issue that our lawmakers should address. Ms. Smarsh is right: Family farms are being “forced out of business by policies that favor large industrial operations.”Mary PoundAlexandria, Va. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Face Obstacles in Plan to Reorder Presidential Primary Calendar

      by

      The party is radically reshuffling the early-state order, but Georgia and New Hampshire present challenges.Democratic efforts to overhaul which states hold the first presidential primaries entered a new and uncertain phase this week, with hurdles to President Biden’s preferred order coming into focus even as several states signaled their abilities to host early contests, a key step in radically reshaping the calendar.But in Georgia, Democrats face logistical problems in moving up their primary. And New Hampshire, the longtime leadoff primary state, has officially indicated that it cannot comply with the early-state lineup endorsed by a D.N.C. panel, under which the state would hold the second primary contest alongside Nevada.That panel backed a sweeping set of changes last month to how the party picks its presidential nominee, in keeping with Mr. Biden’s vision of putting more racially diverse states at the beginning of the process.Democratic nominating contests have for years begun with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. Under the new proposal, the 2024 Democratic presidential primary calendar would begin in South Carolina on Feb. 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on Feb. 6, Georgia on Feb. 13 and then Michigan on Feb. 27.Those states — several of which played critical roles in Mr. Biden’s 2020 primary victory — had until Thursday to demonstrate progress toward being able to host contests on the selected dates. According to a letter from the co-chairs of the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, Nevada, South Carolina and Michigan have met the committee’s requirements for holding early primaries.Both Georgia and New Hampshire are more complex cases.In the letter, sent on Thursday, the committee’s co-chairs recommended that the two states be granted extensions to allow for more time to work toward meeting the requirements of the new calendar.“We expected both the New Hampshire and Georgia efforts to be complicated but well worth the effort if we can get them done,” wrote Jim Roosevelt Jr. and Minyon Moore, in a letter obtained by The New York Times. They added, “We are committed to seeing out the calendar that this committee approved last month.”Under the new D.N.C. proposal, Georgia would host the fourth Democratic primary in 2024. A onetime Republican bastion that helped propel Mr. Biden to the presidency, Georgia also played a critical role in cementing the Democratic Senate majority and has become an undeniably critical battleground state. Atlanta has been vying to host the Democratic National Convention and is considered one of the stronger contenders.President Biden, if he seeks re-election, could decide against filing in the New Hampshire primary, a state where he came in fifth place in 2020.David Degner for The New York TimesBut there are challenges in moving up Georgia’s Democratic primary. Republicans have already agreed to their own early-voting calendar, keeping the order of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, and rules from the Republican National Committee are clear: States that jump the order will lose delegates, and party rules have already been set (though the R.N.C. is in a period of tumult as its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, faces a challenge to her leadership).In Georgia, the primary date is determined by the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. Officials from his office have stressed that there is no appetite to hold two primaries or to risk losing delegates.“This needs to be equitable to both political parties and held on the same day to save taxpayers’ money,” Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, said in a statement this week.Georgia Democrats hoping that the money and media attention that come to an early primary state might persuade Gov. Brian P. Kemp, a Republican, to intercede for them may be disappointed, too.“The governor has no role in this process and does not support the idea,” Cody Hall, an adviser to Mr. Kemp, said on Wednesday night.The situation is fraught for different reasons in New Hampshire, which has long held the nation’s first primary as a matter of state law. Neither the state’s Democrats nor its Republicans, who control the governor’s mansion and state legislature, are inclined to buck the law, playing up the state’s discerning voters and famed opportunities for small-scale retail politicking.That tradition puts New Hampshire’s Democrats directly at odds with the D.N.C. mandate to host the second primary in 2024. Officials in the state have signaled their intent to hold the first primary anyway, risking penalties.In a letter to the Rules and Bylaws Committee before the deadline extension, Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, wrote that the D.N.C.’s plan was “unrealistic and unattainable, as the New Hampshire Democratic Party cannot dictate to the Republican governor and state legislative leaders what to do, and because it does not have the power to change the primary date unilaterally.”He noted a number of concessions New Hampshire Democrats would seek to make, but urged the committee to “reconsider the requirements that they have placed,” casting them as a “poison pill.”The early-state proposal is the culmination of a long process to reorder and diversify the calendar, and Mr. Roosevelt and Ms. Moore said later Thursday that the tentative calendar “does what is long overdue and brings more voices into the early window process.”D.N.C. rules stipulate consequences for any state that moves to operate ahead of the party’s agreed-upon early window, as well as for candidates who campaign in such states.If New Hampshire jumps the line, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, assuming he runs, could decide against filing in the New Hampshire primary, a state where he came in fifth place in 2020.While few prominent Democratic officials expect, as of now, that he would draw a major primary challenge if he runs — making much of the drama around the early-state calendar effectively moot in 2024 — a lesser-known candidate could emerge and camp out in New Hampshire, some in the state have warned.The eventual calendar is not set in stone for future elections: Mr. Biden urged the Rules and Bylaws Committee to review the calendar every four years, and the committee has embraced an amendment to get that process underway.And there are still a number of steps this year.The Rules and Bylaws Committee is expected to meet to vote on the proposed extensions. The D.N.C.’s. winter meeting, where the five-state proposal must be affirmed by the full committee, is scheduled for early February in Philadelphia, and there is certain to be more jockeying ahead of that event.“The first real inflection point is the meeting of the full D.N.C.,” Mr. Roosevelt said in an interview late last month. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Does a Newly Elected G.O.P. Assemblyman Really Live in Brooklyn?

      by

      Lester Chang, a newly elected Republican representing a Brooklyn district, faces questions over whether he lives in the borough or in Manhattan.As Democrats returned to Albany to begin the 2023 legislative session on Wednesday, the politically explosive question of whether to remove a newly elected Assembly Republican hung over their triumphant homecoming.Democrats elected the first woman as governor of New York and retained their supermajorities in both chambers in November. But their return to the State Capitol this week was consumed by a divisive debate over whether to expel Lester Chang, a Republican war veteran who staged a surprise victory last year to unseat an entrenched 36-year Democratic incumbent in Brooklyn.Mr. Chang’s Democratic foes have accused him of actually living in Manhattan, not Brooklyn, thus failing to meet the residency requirements — a claim Mr. Chang has forcefully denied.Democrats in the Assembly are navigating uncharted territory as they consider whether to oust Mr. Chang from the lower chamber, setting up the potential of a protracted legal battle and sparking accusations from Republicans that Democrats are undermining the will of voters.“Any challenges to his eligibility should have been presented long before the election, not after the results were certified,” said Will Barclay, the Republican minority leader in the Assembly. “Blocking his path to being seated is not a precedent that should be set.”There is also intraparty distress: Some Democrats have raised concerns that removing Mr. Chang, who is Chinese American, could lead to political blowback from Asian Americans, a bloc of voters that has increasingly gravitated toward Republicans in recent elections.Ron Kim, a Democrat from Queens who is Korean American, described the situation as a political “tough spot,” saying that “a lot of Chinese voters feel like this is an effort to take away a Chinese person who was elected by the people in that community.”“In the short run, if you move forward with removing him, there will be a strong backlash from the Asian community,” he said. “In the long run, you also don’t want to see someone with even an ounce of a fraudulent background.”Following an Assembly hearing and subsequent report last month, Mr. Chang’s fate hung in the balance Wednesday, when lawmakers gaveled themselves into session and took part in a host of ceremonial duties, taking oaths of office and re-electing their respective legislative leaders.It was at first unclear if Democrats would seek to block Mr. Chang from taking office altogether, but he was ultimately allowed to take his seat this week.He received a name plate in the Assembly chamber, participated in a ceremonial swearing-in on Tuesday, and signed a formal oath of office that was sent to the New York State Department of State, according to a spokesman for Assembly Republicans. On Wednesday, in a show of solidarity, Republicans erupted into thunderous applause when Mr. Chang cast his first vote, for Mr. Barclay as leader of the chamber, in the cavernous Assembly.“It’s a distraction from the people’s business,” Mr. Chang, who became the first Asian American to represent Brooklyn in the Assembly, said in an interview on Wednesday.The last time the Assembly expelled one of its own was over a century ago in 1920, when several socialist lawmakers were voted out during the anti-communist Red Scare.Democrats may challenge assemblyman Lester Chang’s presence in Albany on residency grounds. Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesDemocrats in the Assembly met privately on Tuesday for about three hours to discuss the issue. Many lawmakers voiced their support for removing Mr. Chang, but others said they were more ambivalent about taking such an extraordinary step, according to people familiar with the closed-door discussions.Running in a South Brooklyn district that is heavily Democratic, Mr. Chang stunned Democrats in November when he narrowly defeated Peter J. Abbate Jr., a Democrat who had comfortably held the seat since 1986. His victory, in a diversifying district that is now majority Asian American, was part of a stronger than expected showing by Republicans who ran on a tough-on-crime platform statewide.Reeling from the defeat, Democrats began raising questions about whether Mr. Chang had met the residency requirements outlined in the State Constitution: In a redistricting year like 2022, candidates are required to have been a resident of the county that they are running in for at least one year before Election Day.Democrats pointed to the fact that, in 2021, Mr. Chang voted in Manhattan, where he has a rent-stabilized apartment he once shared with his late wife and that he didn’t change his voting registration until earlier last year. But Mr. Chang has argued that he also maintained a residence in the same house in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up, and where his mother, who suffers from dementia, still lives and whom he now cares for.“Home is home, 50 years, you can’t erase that,” Mr. Chang said. “I have my baseball cards, I have my yearbooks, I have all those memories. That’s home.”The imbroglio over Mr. Chang’s residency — and what constitutes a residence for the purposes of running for office — played out during a tense hearing held by the Assembly judiciary committee on Dec. 21 in which a special counsel hired by Democrats repeatedly sought to poke holes into Mr. Chang’s account, citing different records in which Mr. Chang listed his Lower Manhattan apartment as his residence.Mr. Chang and his legal team sought to rebuff those efforts, in part, with affidavits signed by Mr. Chang’s sister and neighbors, who said Mr. Chang had maintained a residence in Brooklyn. They also accused Democrats of trying to overturn Mr. Chang’s election, pointing to the fact that they did not object to Mr. Chang’s candidacy in the courts before Election Day, the norm when disputing residency requirements.“This residency issue was raised only after Lester Chang won,” Mr. Chang’s lawyer, Hugh H. Mo, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The Democrats were blindsided, they didn’t expect him to win.”The hearing was part of an investigation into Mr. Chang’s residency that was ordered by Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, after the election.Mr. Heastie has argued that the inquiry is purely a constitutional matter, not a political consideration, but has acknowledged the optics of potentially undermining the democratic process.“There’s a sense of the constitution needs to be respected,” Mr. Heastie told WNYC on Wednesday. “But I’ll also say that I don’t want to make it seem like it’s been lost on the members that an election did happen.”A subsequent report by the special counsel, released on Dec. 31, outlined evidence showing Mr. Chang may have lived in Manhattan — it said he was effectively a “visitor” in Brooklyn — but stopped short of making a recommendation.An expulsion could very well be contested in the courts, and the Assembly may decide to refer the matter to Letitia James, the state attorney general. If so, the ambiguity around his residency could end up benefiting Mr. Chang, according to Jerry H. Goldfeder, an election lawyer.“Under the executive law, she can bring a lawsuit to remove him,” he said. “But, frankly, because it’s not an open-and-shut case, it’s doubtful a court would do it.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Josh Shapiro to Nominate Al Schmidt as Pennsylvania’s Elections Chief

      by

      Josh Shapiro, who will take office as governor this month, says he will nominate Al Schmidt, a longtime Republican official from Philadelphia, to be secretary of the commonwealth.Pennsylvania’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, will nominate a Philadelphia Republican who resisted Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results to serve as the state’s chief election official, Mr. Shapiro said Thursday.For Mr. Shapiro, who will be sworn into office on Jan. 17, his choice for secretary of the commonwealth represents both an olive branch to moderate Republicans and a public affirmation of belief in the state’s election systems. Al Schmidt, Mr. Shapiro’s pick for the job, is a former Philadelphia city commissioner and longtime political figure.“Al Schmidt has a proven track record of defending our democracy, protecting voting rights and standing up to extremism — even in the face of grave threats,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement released by his office. “I know he is ready to continue the hard work of preserving and strengthening our democracy.”For a decade, Mr. Schmidt, 51, held the Republican-designated seat on Philadelphia’s three-member city commission, which oversees municipal elections. He also served as executive director of the Philadelphia G.O.P. and as a senior adviser to the Republican Party of Pennsylvania.Still, Mr. Schmidt was relatively unknown outside Philadelphia until Mr. Trump, after the 2020 election, applied public pressure on him to stop counting absentee ballots. In 2021, Mr. Schmidt testified to the Senate that Mr. Trump’s comments had led to death threats that he said were intended to “intimidate and coerce us into not counting every valid vote.”“After the president tweeted about me, my wife and I received threats that named our children, included my home address and images of my home, and threated to put their ‘heads on spikes,’” Mr. Schmidt said. “What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children.”Last summer, Mr. Schmidt appeared before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and revealed written threats received by members of his family from Mr. Trump’s supporters, including one that read “Heads on spikes. Treasonous Schmidts.”Mr. Schmidt said in the statement released by Mr. Shapiro’s office that he would work to ensure that elections “remain free and fair here in Pennsylvania, and that we do more to ensure every eligible voter can make their voice heard.”Mr. Schmidt, whose nomination will need to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled State Senate, is the first cabinet appointment announced by Mr. Shapiro since November, when he defeated Doug Mastriano, a Republican and prominent election denier. Mr. Mastriano, a retired Army colonel, chartered buses to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that led to the attack on the Capitol; he campaigned on a platform of restricting ballot access in Pennsylvania.In an interview last month, Mr. Shapiro said he hoped that Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature would agree to change the state’s law that forbids the processing of absentee ballots and early votes before Election Day. The ballot procedures, which can drag out the counting, helped fuel the Trump-inspired threats against Mr. Schmidt.He also described the role for which he eventually nominated Mr. Schmidt.“I’m going to appoint a pro-democracy secretary of state,” he said in the interview. “We will respect the will of the people, certify the winners, whether we agree with the pick or not. That’s going to be my charge to my secretary of state.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Kevin McCarthy’s Business Ties Complicate His Rise to Power

      by

      To land the House speaker position, the California Republican will have to win over opponents who question his ties to Silicon Valley and his commitment to right wing causes.The House, divided.Michael Reynolds/EPA, via ShutterstockKevin McCarthy, Inc.Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, is still working on landing the House speaker gig after six failed attempts. It’s the first such House floor showdown in a century, and business is at the heart of his woes.Mr. McCarthy’s critics say he’s too friendly with Big Tech. The ultraconservatives who have stymied his rise to power list a number of big objections with Mr. McCarthy. They say that he isn’t sufficiently committed to right-wing causes and that he hasn’t pushed back enough against perceived anti-conservative bias on social media. Yet the would-be speaker published a policy proposal over the summer to “Stop the Bias and Check Big Tech” if Republicans took control of the House.Mr. McCarthy’s messaging has not convinced hard-line party members. His hot-and-cold ties to Silicon Valley haven’t helped his standing either. Jeff Miller, a political adviser to Mr. McCarthy, also represents Apple and Amazon, and two former staff members are now Big Tech lobbyists. Meanwhile, Mr. McCarthy has benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in donations from tech companies and executives.The Republican leader has also alienated onetime corporate allies. Lobbyists once bet big on Mr. McCarthy, but relations have soured somewhat after he embraced former President Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to corporations with perceived ties to the left.The Chamber of Commerce endorsed 23 Democrats for the House in 2020 and 15 won. That put the speakership out of reach for Mr. McCarthy at that time and he’s reportedly been sore since. The Republican pushed for Suzanne Clark, the Chamber’s C.E.O., to be removed but the organization was unmoved, and issued a statement in support of her.Even before Mr. McCarthy’s failure this week, lobbyists were giving up on him and Washington insiders — including Paul Ryan, the former Republican House speaker now at the executive advisory firm Teneo — were telling executives to stay out of the political fray.Meanwhile, the business of the government is stuck. Until Republicans resolve their internal conflicts, the House is at a standstill. Members have not been sworn in, administrative tasks and constituent services have been delayed and legislative work is on the back burner. Mr. McCarthy and his allies held talks with the holdouts last night to find a resolution. Democrats could step in to help (members of both parties have apparently discussed it), but that doesn’t appear to be on the table right now.Mr. McCarthy has vowed to continue for as long as it takes. In 1923, it took nine ballots to elect a speaker. The House is scheduled to meet again at noon.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The Justice Department moves to seize Robinhood stock tied to Sam Bankman-Fried. Federal prosecutors argued on Wednesday that the $465 million worth of shares in the online brokerage weren’t part of the FTX bankruptcy estate. Bankman-Fried bought the shares through an investment vehicle with money borrowed from Alameda Research, FTX’s trading affiliate.Walgreens will sell abortion pills. The pharmacy giant said it would dispense mifepristone, becoming the first national chain to do so after the F.D.A. announced new rules for dispensing the drug. CVS and Rite Aid said they were still reviewing the agency’s new policy.China defends its handling of the Covid outbreak. Facing criticism from the World Health Organization and President Biden over the accuracy of its coronavirus tally, Beijing fired back on Thursday, saying the situation was “controllable.” It also plans to reopen its border with Hong Kong on Sunday after a three-year closure.The man behind the college admissions scandal is sentenced. Rick Singer, whom prosecutors accused of orchestrating a $25 million cheating scheme that involved actors, business executives, doctors and more, must serve three and a half years in prison. Singer, who had become an informant, received the longest sentence of anyone tied to the scandal.CES kicks off today. Enormous crowds are expected to return to the tech trade show in Las Vegas this year, after the pandemic clamped down on in-person attendance. Expect plenty of announcements about new televisions, smart-home gadgets, electric cars and more.The bleeding continues at Big Tech Amazon said on Wednesday that it would drastically expand its planned layoffs to a staggering 18,000 jobs as it seeks to rein in costs. Coupled with Salesforce’s plans to lay off about 8,000 employees, it’s the latest sign that tech giants are still grappling with the consequences of overhiring during the pandemic boom.Amazon’s cuts amount to around 6 percent of its corporate work force and will be focused on human resources and what the e-commerce giant calls its Stores division: its main online site, its field operations and warehouses, its physical stores and other consumer teams. (Hourly warehouse workers aren’t part of the tally.) That’s up from the roughly 10,000 the company had been weighing earlier.Salesforce is also laying off 10 percent of its employees and cutting back on office space. The move comes after a series of shake-ups at the business software giant, including the announced departures of Bret Taylor, its co-C.E.O. (reportedly after strains in his relationship with Marc Benioff, the company’s co-founder) and Stewart Butterfield, the C.E.O. of Slack, the messaging app Salesforce bought for nearly $28 billion.It’s a notable retrenchment for Salesforce, whose reputation over the past decade has become one of ever-growing ambition: The company is the largest private employer in San Francisco, and its flagship office tower is the city’s tallest.Both rounds of layoffs arose out of overexpansion. Amazon more than doubled its work force during the pandemic, to 1.5 million, as it became an indispensable seller to locked-down households. Salesforce nearly doubled its head count over the past three years, to 80,000 in October.Those hiring sprees have since run into a slowing global economy, with Amazon having warned in the fall that it could see its worst growth rate since 2001. “We hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff wrote in a letter to employees.Amazon and Salesforce aren’t alone: Meta recently laid off 13 percent of its work force, while Snap and Twitter have also resorted to huge job cuts. Overall, the tech industry laid off over 153,000 workers last year, according to Layoffs.fyi. Things may not get better this year, with analysts cautioning that tech companies’ customers may further clamp down on spending, potentially leading to yet more cost cuts.“The parallels with Russia and Ukraine are hard to ignore. We must not make the same mistakes with Xi Jinping that we did with Vladimir Putin.” — Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO, urged a robust and unified response to deter China from attacking Taiwan. His comments, made during a visit to Taipei, highlighted worries in Europe over China’s growing assertiveness in Asia.The Fed’s big challenge: exuberant marketsInvestors got the post-Christmas “Santa Claus rally” they were hoping for, a buying spree that was fueled in part by slumping energy prices. But the big cloud hanging over markets remains: the prospect that central banks will be emboldened to tame inflation with more interest rate increases.Fed officials gave investors an unambiguous warning on Wednesday: Don’t start pricing in a dovish pivot anytime soon. Many on Wall Street are banking on the U.S. central bank to end its policy of jumbo rate increases in the first half of 2023, and to begin cutting by year-end.But the Fed sees any pivot prediction as misguided, warning that such thinking could complicate its efforts to bring prices under control. Minutes from a December Fed meeting released on Wednesday, did not mince its words. “No participants anticipated that it would be appropriate” to cut rates.As the Times’s Jeanna Smialek reported, policymakers are concerned that markets might misinterpret any decision to slow the pace of rate moves in the near term as a sign that the Fed believed it was making enough progress in bringing inflation closer to its 2 percent target. (The I.M.F. has also weighed in, saying that it doesn’t believe the U.S. has “turned the corner on inflation yet” and that the Fed should “stay the course.”)The markets still don’t seem to be getting the message. “Right now data signals are mixed — like an ink blot, investors can see what they want,” Elsa Lignos, RBC Capital Market’s global head of FX Strategy, said in a note to clients this morning. She pointed out that manufacturing prices were in decline, but that job vacancies remained elevated, suggesting wages could continue creeping higher.A late-afternoon surge on Wednesday helped the S&P 500 and Nasdaq close higher. Between the Dec. 27 open and Wednesday’s close, the S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent, capping off the seventh consecutive annual Santa rally, measured by the stock market’s performance over the seven trading days that follow Christmas. The most bullish on Wall Street see such rallies as a sign that investors will keep buying well into the new year.Investors and Fed officials will be closely watching Friday’s jobs report. The Fed is concerned that the labor market is still too tight, belying the recent headline-grabbing layoffs at tech giants. A jobs report showing big gains in wages and hiring could force the Fed to remain locked in to its “higher for longer” rates policy, adding to additional market volatility.THE SPEED READ DealsShares in GE HealthCare Technologies rose 8 percent in their debut on Wednesday, after being spun off from General Electric. (Bloomberg)Western Digital has reportedly resumed talks to buy Kioxia, a Japanese memory chip maker. (Bloomberg)A unit of Tokyo Gas is said to be in advanced talks to buy the U.S. natural gas producer Rockcliff Energy for about $4.6 billion. (Reuters)Fanatics reportedly plans to divest its 60 percent stake in Candy Digital, a sports N.F.T. company. (CNBC)PolicyEuropean regulators fined Meta 390 million euros after finding it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads. (NYT)The S.E.C. has objected to Binance.US’s $1 billion bid to purchase the bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital. (Reuters)Silvergate, a bank, was forced to sell assets at a steep loss to cover $8.1 billion in customer withdrawals after the collapse in November of FTX. (WSJ)Best of the restA self-described Tesla fan filed a Tesla trademark for a boat and jet without the company’s knowledge. (Bloomberg)Amazon, SiriusXM and Spotify are cutting back on their spending on new podcasts. (Bloomberg)The stars of the 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet” sued the movie’s distributor, Paramount, for $500 million over being made to film a nude scene while they were teens. (NYT)A Princeton student said he had created a program to detect whether an essay was written by the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. Meanwhile, New York City’s education department banned the use of ChatGPT on some city devices and internet networks. (Insider, Chalkbeat New York)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Surprise in Pennsylvania: Republicans Back a (Former?) Democrat for Speaker

      by

      Representative Mark Rozzi, long a moderate Democrat, pledged not to caucus with either party as speaker of the closely divided state House of Representatives. Many questions remain.HARRISBURG, Pa. — The new legislative session began at noon on Tuesday, and despite the cheery bouquets and wide-eyed family members, the statehouse was humming with nervous anticipation. For weeks, it had been unclear which party could claim a majority in the state House of Representatives: the Democrats won more seats in November, but because of a death and two resignations, the Republicans had more members for now.The election of a speaker, the new House’s first piece of business, was going to put this fiercely debated question to the test.After a long afternoon of suspense, and to the surprise of nearly everyone in the House, the choice was made: a moderate Democrat from the Reading area, nominated by two Republicans, who was on almost no one’s radar and who pledged in his first speech to be “the commonwealth’s first independent speaker.”“I’m sure a lot of you didn’t see this coming today,” the new speaker, Representative Mark Rozzi, said at the rostrum.Harrisburg is not the only capital where the mere act of deciding who is in charge has proved fraught in the early days of the new year. Before the session in Pennsylvania began, the repeated botched attempts by Republicans in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to elect a speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives were playing out on televisions in the Pennsylvania statehouse. Meanwhile, Democratic state representatives next door in Ohio helped elect a Republican House speaker there who is not as conservative as the candidate backed by most Republicans in their supermajority.The fights in Washington and Ohio were ideological, but the maneuvering in Pennsylvania was largely about strategy, given the bizarre circumstances leading up to Tuesday’s vote. Democrats outperformed expectations on Election Day in Pennsylvania, winning a U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s office and, perhaps most surprising of all, control of the state House, where they had been out of power for more than a decade.It was only a one-seat majority, though, and one of the winning candidates had died a few weeks before the November election. Then, in early December, two Democrats who had been re-elected to the House and at the same time had been elected to higher offices resigned their House seats.At issue in the weeks that followed was whether “majority” meant the party that the voters in the most districts had chosen, or the party that had the most members at the moment the session began. The Democrats argued for the former, the Republicans the latter. The question was put to the courts, even as Republicans and Democrats held dueling swearing-in ceremonies last month for House majority leader.Democrats are heavily favored to win the special elections to fill the three vacant seats, but the first of those votes won’t take place until at least Feb. 7. So the looming question as the session opened Tuesday was which party would control the House for now, while Republicans have a 101-99 advantage.Few lawmakers, it seemed, began the day Tuesday thinking of Mr. Rozzi as a candidate for speaker. Members recited the Pledge of Allegiance at a swearing-in ceremony.Matt Smith/Associated PressThe significance was not just symbolic, even in a state where power was already divided, with a Republican-controlled State Senate and a Democratic governor. Republicans hoped to vote on several constitutional amendments that would not require Gov. Josh Shapiro’s signature; one would require voters to show identification at the polls and another would give the legislature the power to reject regulations put in place by the executive branch. Democrats were worried that the Republicans would also change the rules of the House if they briefly won control, making it hard to elect a new speaker after the Democrats retook the majority.Caucuses and party leaders gathered all morning on Tuesday to discuss strategy, talks that continued in the afternoon in smaller huddles on the House floor. A vote to adjourn without picking a speaker deadlocked at 100-100, with one Republican voting with the Democrats.Then the clerk called for nominations for speaker. What came next were a series of surprises. First, Representative Jim Gregory, a Republican representing a district outside Altoona, stood and named Mr. Rozzi, a Democrat.“As we are gathered in this chamber today, we must look at our razor-thin majorities,” Mr. Gregory said, urging the members to put “people over politics.” Then another lawmaker, the Republican House whip, seconded the nomination.All eyes turned toward the Democrats, and specifically toward Representative Joanna McClinton, the Democratic leader, who had been expected to become the first Black woman to serve as speaker of the Pennsylvania House. Ms. McClinton announced that she supported the nomination of Mr. Rozzi.With 16 Republicans, including party leaders, joining all of the Democrats, Mr. Rozzi won the speakership, defeating a traditionally conservative Republican who only minutes earlier had been the presumptive Republican choice.Virtually no one in the House other than Mr. Gregory and Mr. Rozzi, it seemed, had recognized Mr. Rozzi as a candidate when the day began. Mr. Gregory said afterward that he raised the idea with Republican leaders shortly before nominating him on the floor. Mr. Gregory had developed a good working relationship with Mr. Rozzi, but he also saw nominating him as a way to outflank an almost assured Democratic majority.“Here in Pennsylvania, we play two different games: Some people play checkers, and some people play chess,” Mr. Gregory said after the vote. “And I think what you just witnessed is a Democrat member who was in the majority leave the majority to go independent.”As the Republicans saw it, Mr. Rozzi’s move would mean that the Democrats could not achieve a majority even after the special elections. In the halls of the capitol afterward, Republicans mulled how such an evenly split House would operate: who would control committees, for example, and how they would be divvied up.But it had all happened so quickly that on Wednesday, there were far more questions than answers. Mr. Rozzi, who has been a reliable moderate Democrat during his tenure in the House, is best known for his efforts on behalf of victims of childhood sexual abuse. Having spoken openly of being raped by a priest as a child, Mr. Rozzi sponsored, along with Mr. Gregory, a constitutional amendment allowing victims to sue their abusers long after criminal statutes had expired. Mr. Rozzi pushed for a bill to extend the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases, an issue he discussed in 2016 with the governor at the time, Tom Wolf.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesIf the House and Senate vote on it early in the new session, that amendment could be on the ballot as soon as this May. Mr. Gregory said that making sure the House moved quickly on the amendment was the main reason that he and Mr. Rozzi had begun discussing their plan for the speakership.While Mr. Rozzi did emphasize in his initial remarks before the House that he aimed to be an independent speaker, pledging not to caucus with either party, it remained unclear what that would mean in practice.In a private meeting with Democrats after the vote on Tuesday, Mr. Rozzi assured them that he still considered himself a Democrat, comments first reported by SpotlightPA, a state news outlet, and confirmed by a Democratic House member.In response, the House Republican leader, Representative Bryan Cutler, said in a statement that Republicans “continue to believe what he committed to publicly in his address and what he promised to our leaders privately about fully becoming an Independent has not changed.”On Tuesday evening, after hours of hushed meetings, Mr. Rozzi briefly addressed a crowd of reporters in the capitol rotunda who were hungry for any information that would make sense of the day’s events.“I look forward to talking to you more about my plans as speaker, but such a heavy discussion deserves considered forethought,” the new House speaker of the fifth-largest state said, standing in the glare of spotlights at a hastily assembled lectern. “And as this was unexpected, I will be making no further comments tonight. Thank you.”Many of the lingering questions may not be answered until the House reconvenes, at a time to be set by the speaker. As of Wednesday afternoon, no date had been announced. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Gov. Andy Beshear’s Race in Kentucky Will Test Democrats’ Survival Strategies

      by

      Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky is popular. Is that enough to win in a state where Democrats have struggled?The first concrete sign that this year’s race for governor of Kentucky would be a hot one came in August, when Beth Drennan’s latest grand champion, a 17-pound uncooked country ham, sold at a charity auction for the cool price of $5 million.For the second year running, the co-buyers of the ham, along with a local bank, were a Kentucky power couple: Joe Craft, a wealthy coal-industry executive, and his wife, Kelly, a former ambassador to Canada and the United Nations under President Donald Trump.“I thought it would go for about half that,” said Drennan, whose company has produced 14 prizewinning hams since she and her husband bought it in 1999.Kelly Craft has since announced her run for governor, joining a crowded field of Republicans seeking to knock off Gov. Andy Beshear, that rarest of creatures: a red-state Democrat.None of those other Republicans are able to throw around seven figures for a charity ham. But Craft has never run for office, and money alone won’t be enough to win the primary, which is scheduled for May and will pit her against more established Kentucky politicians like Daniel Cameron, the well-known attorney general.The race should tell us some important things about American politics in 2023. How much will Republicans will be drawn into the whirlwind around Trump, whose involvement in primaries in 2022 left him damaged in the eyes of many Republicans? And can a talented Democratic politician again defy his state’s conservative bent?Canny political maneuveringBeshear, whose father, Steve, ran the state from 2007 to 2015, has become one of the country’s most popular governors, after winning office in 2019 over a widely detested incumbent by just over 5,000 votes.The reasons aren’t complicated: He focuses relentlessly on local issues — like the flooding that devastated the eastern part of the state last year — talks often about his faith and tries to keep national politics at bay. He brands his regular news conferences as a “Team Kentucky Update.”Beshear’s ideology is hard to pin down, though Republicans see him as a doctrinaire Democrat in disguise. He has supported some tax cuts while opposing others. He raised pay for state troopers but restored voting rights to felons, albeit with a lengthy list of exceptions. He issued an executive order last year to allow medical cannabis, angering Republicans, who said he had overstepped his authority.Beshear has also vetoed legislation requiring school districts to set aside money for charter schools, though Republicans overrode it. And last year, when Republicans sent Beshear a bill barring transgender girls from participating in school sports under their gender identity, he said it was most likely unconstitutional. Explaining his veto, he wrote that public officials had an obligation to show “compassion, kindness and empathy, even if not understanding” to transgender children.Beshear got a boost in 2021 when Ford announced plans to invest $5.8 billion to build two plants to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles, creating 5,000 jobs — conveniently located in a Republican-leaning county south of Louisville. And when Ford announced an additional $700 million plan for truck manufacturing in the state, Beshear capitalized by declaring Sept. 27 “KenTRUCKy Day.”President Biden’s unpopularity in Kentucky — he lost the state by 26 percentage points in 2020 — will complicate Beshear’s re-election hopes. When The Associated Press interviewed Beshear in December, he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in having Biden campaign for him.“This campaign isn’t going to be about national figures,” Beshear said. “It’s going to be about the people of Kentucky.”But he avoided getting drawn into an extended discussion of whether he thought Biden was doing a good job, telling his interviewer, “There are things that I think have been done well, and there are things that I wish would have been done better.”Potential weaknessesBeshear’s approach is very much in line with how national Democrats think about how to win in red states — with Gov. Laura Kelly’s re-election last year in Kansas being a recent example.“Getting things done for people, having a real tangible record of success, is really good politics,” Marshall Cohen, the longtime political director of the Democratic Governors Association, said in a recent podcast interview. “You’ve got to show up, you’ve got to talk about issues that people care about, and you have to create a brand for yourself that’s not just D and R.”Beshear “has not made a ton of mistakes,” Tyler Glick, a Republican public affairs consultant in Kentucky, told me. But he predicted that the governor’s handling of the pandemic would be a problem, and in particular his decision to have state troopers monitor church attendance in April 2020 when several churches moved to ignore the state’s stay-at-home order.The struggle to overhaul the state’s computer system for processing unemployment insurance could also hurt Beshear, said Tres Watson, a former spokesman for the Republican Party of Kentucky.Beshear is set to join Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell in Kentucky this week as the two Washington leaders promote last year’s infrastructure bill, which included $1.64 billion for a long-stalled upgrade of a dilapidated bridge spanning the Ohio River between Kentucky and Cincinnati.McConnell has called securing the federal money for the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project “one of the bill’s crowning accomplishments.” Beshear, who had vowed to fund the improvement without tolls, hailed it as an example of “what’s possible when we prioritize people over politics.”And for Biden, the Kentucky visit is the latest of his trips to promote the infrastructure bill — and, just as importantly, to position the president as a pragmatist who is willing to work with Republicans on popular, meat-and-potatoes issues. As it happens, the northern tip of Kentucky is a swing area; Beshear won two out of three counties there in 2019.Daniel Cameron, left, Kentucky’s attorney general, with Senator Mitch McConnell at a rally in Lexington in 2019. Cameron is one of the leading candidates in this year’s Republican primary for governor.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA crowded G.O.P. fieldThe Republican primary has been fairly tame — but that is likely to change.“You throw six, seven people in a pot and start stirring it around, crazy things can happen,” said Scott Jennings, a longtime Kentucky political hand who is neutral in the race.Craft will be competing against Cameron, a protégé of McConnell who has already secured Trump’s endorsement; Agricultural Commissioner Ryan Quarles, who has a large network of supporters across the state; and at least eight others so far.Craft was endorsed immediately by Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Beshear’s campaign blasted her as “an out-of-touch billionaire” who would “likely spend millions and millions of dollars to try to convince Kentuckians she cares about them.” Craft and her husband have given generously to Republican candidates and committees over the years.Just before the holidays, Kentucky circles were buzzing about the decision by Savannah Maddox, a far-right state lawmaker, to drop out of the race. Some thought it signaled that former Gov. Matt Bevin, whom Beshear defeated in 2019 and occupies a similar “liberty” lane in Kentucky Republican politics, might jump in. The deadline for entering the race is Friday, and speculation about Bevin’s intentions is rampant.Cameron burst onto the national scene in 2020, drawing gushing reviews from Republicans when he delivered a sharp attack on Democrats and Biden — linking them to what he cast as the excesses of the social justice protests that swept the country after the police killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis.“The politics of identity, cancellation, and mob rule are not acceptable to me,” Cameron, who is Black, said at the time. “Republicans trust you to think for yourselves and to pursue your American dream however you see fit.”Some thought Cameron might wait until McConnell’s retirement to run for Senate, but he instead jumped into the governor’s race. He has used his platform as attorney general to draw a sharp contrast with Beshear on abortion rights and the pandemic.But Trump’s endorsement of Cameron did not scare off Craft, who is already raising more money than anyone else in the field. According to the first report filed to the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance, she raised just over $750,000 during the three months that ended on Sept. 30, while Cameron had brought in a little over $400,000 — putting him behind Quarles, who raised nearly $560,000. (Beshear raised more than $1 million.)Craft is the only Republican who has done any advertising so far. Her first television spot, titled “Where I’m From,” introduces her as an authentic child of rural Kentucky whose life path has taken her from a small-town upbringing “to the University of Kentucky, to the boardroom and all the way to the United Nations.”It shows footage of Craft with Trump, who chose her for two ambassadorships, but doesn’t linger on their connection — nor does she mention his name. “People said I was just some small-town girl,” she says, “but my dad showed me that it’s where I’m from that got me to where I am today.” (Craft hosted a fund-raising event for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at her home in 2021, raising the interesting prospect that he might wade into the Republican primary in Kentucky.)Kentucky has been a red state for years, but only recently did voter registration trends catch up with reality. Republicans now make up 45.5 percent of the electorate, versus 44.6 percent for Democrats, according to the secretary of state.More ominously for Beshear, Republicans flipped five state legislative seats in 2022, including a blowout defeat of State Representative Angie Hatton, a rural Democrat who was one of the party’s leaders. But ousting a well-funded, popular governor is another matter. Beshear’s seasoned team figures he needs to win at least 20 percent of the Republican vote to survive; Democratic polling has found that Beshear has a 40 percent approval rating among Republicans.“Andy Beshear is going to be difficult to be beat,” Jennings said. “I don’t think any Republican should be under any illusion that this should be an easy victory.”What to readRepresentative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, fell short in the first three votes in his bid to become speaker. The House will return at noon Wednesday. Follow live updates.As Nancy Pelosi’s time as speaker comes to a close, Carl Hulse takes stock of a leader whose “presence will be felt for years in the climate, health care, public works and social legislation she ushered through to signatures by two Democratic presidents.”Jennifer Medina reports from Florida, where influential Hispanic evangelical pastors are carefully eyeing the 2024 rivalry between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More