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      Democrats in Virginia Pick Jennifer McClellan in Special House Primary

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      Ms. McClellan, who is favored to win in the Democratic-leaning district in February, could become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress.Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia state senator, won a Democratic primary in a special House election in the state’s Fourth Congressional District, according to the local Democratic Party. The victory early Wednesday puts her on a path to become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress.The special election, to fill the seat held by Representative A. Donald McEachin until his death late last month, is scheduled for Feb. 21. Mr. McEachin, a Democrat, overwhelmingly won re-election in the midterms, but died weeks later at the age of 61 after a yearslong battle with colorectal cancer.Because the district leans Democratic — it is a predominantly Black and Latino region that stretches from Richmond into rural counties along the North Carolina border — Ms. McClellan is highly favored to win in February. She will face Leon Benjamin, a Republican and local pastor. Ms. McClellan, whose State Senate district largely overlaps with that of the House seat she is seeking, ran unsuccessfully for governor last year in a crowded primary field, but the effort elevated her statewide profile. She won the special primary with nearly 85 percent of the 27,900 votes cast, according to the state’s Democratic Party.In the final days of the one-week primary campaign, an overwhelming majority of Virginia Democrats coalesced around Ms. McClellan’s candidacy. All eight members of Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation threw their support behind her, as did scores of state lawmakers and several national groups supporting women and candidates of color. Ms. McClellan centered her message on her Virginia roots and legislative accomplishments. In an interview on Friday, she said being a Black woman had helped shape her policies, particularly on workers’ rights and maternal health.Her top Democratic rival was State Senator Joe Morrissey, a self-described rebel within the party. Mr. Morrissey, a former defense lawyer, was disbarred twice and spent time in jail for aiding the delinquency of a minor in 2014. The minor involved later became his wife. In January 2022, then-Gov. Ralph Northam pardoned Mr. Morrissey for his conviction in the case.Mr. Morrissey has voted against Democratic policies and has signaled his opposition to proposed state policies protecting abortion access. More

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      Did George Santos Also Mislead Voters About His Jewish Descent?

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      Genealogy websites cited by The Forward suggest that Mr. Santos’s grandparents were born in Brazil and were not “Holocaust refugees,” as he has claimed.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the incoming House Democratic leader, on Wednesday accused Representative-elect George Santos of being a “complete and utter fraud,” as a new report cast doubt on Mr. Santos’s account of his Jewish descent.“His whole life. Made up,” Mr. Jeffries said at a news conference in Washington. “Did you perpetrate a fraud on voters of the Third Congressional District of New York?”Hours before Mr. Jeffries spoke, The Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York City, reported that Mr. Santos, a Republican, may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry, a claim he made on his website and in statements during his political campaign.In his current biography, Mr. Santos says that his mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”But according to The Forward — which cited information from myheritage.com, a genealogy website; Brazilian immigration cards; and databases of refugees — Ms. Devolder’s parents seemed to have been born in Brazil before World War II. CNN later published a similar report that also cited interviews with several genealogists.Ms. Devolder died in 2016, according to an online obituary. Mr. Santos said in a 2020 interview that his family converted to Christianity in Brazil, and on Ms. Devolder’s Facebook page, which links to Mr. Santos’s, she regularly shared Christian imagery and had “liked” numerous Facebook pages associated with Brazil-based Christian organizations.Mr. Santos’s campaign, his lawyer and a political consulting firm that had been fielding reporter inquiries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.Who Is George Santos?: The G.O.P. congressman-elect from New York says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But his résumé appears to be mostly fiction.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.The Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential conservative group that has hosted Mr. Santos and billed him as a Jewish Republican, said that it had reached out to Mr. Santos’s office regarding The Forward’s reporting.“These allegations, if true, are deeply troubling,” the coalition’s director, Matt Brooks, said. “Given their seriousness, the congressman-elect owes the public an explanation, and we look forward to hearing it.”Mr. Santos, whose victory in a district covering parts of Long Island and Queens helped his party secure a narrow majority in the House next year, has not directly answered questions about his background raised by an article in The New York Times earlier this week.The Times’s report found that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about key details of his résumé that were on his campaign website at various points during his two bids for Congress, including his college graduation and his purported career on Wall Street.It also found that Mr. Santos did not include key details about his business, the Devolder Organization, on financial disclosure forms. The Devolder Organization, which was registered in 2021 in Florida, had been dissolved by state officials in September after it failed to file an annual report. On Tuesday, Mr. Santos filed paperwork to reinstate it.The claim that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents fled Jewish persecution was added to his campaign website sometime between April and October, according to a review of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. An earlier version of Mr. Santos’s biography said simply that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents “fled the devastation of World War II Europe.”Though Mr. Santos has identified as Catholic, he has more often trumpeted his Jewish heritage on the campaign trail, even as he described himself as a nonobservant Jew. As early as June 2020, when he was making his first bid for Congress, he wrote on Twitter that he was the “grandson of Holocaust refugees.”On Sunday night, Mr. Santos attended a Hanukkah party on Long Island being held by the Republican Jewish Coalition. He also spoke last month at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas.In his remarks in Washington, Mr. Jeffries did not address the new questions about Mr. Santos’s heritage. But he said that The Times’s reporting left him with doubts as to Mr. Santos’s suitability for office that he believed the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, needed to address.“It’s an open question to me as to whether this is the type of individual that the incoming majority should welcome to Congress,” Mr. Jeffries said.Mr. McCarthy, the top House Republican, who is trying to shore up support for his bid to become the House’s next speaker, has not commented on The Times’s findings.A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy has not responded to emails or phone calls about Mr. Santos, who voiced his support for Mr. McCarthy’s potential speakership hours after The Times warned him of its report on Sunday night.Legal experts have said it is unlikely that the House of Representatives could deny Mr. Santos his seat in Congress. There are procedures that allow losing candidates to contest the results of a House election. But a Supreme Court decision in 1969 limited the House from preventing candidates from taking office unless they did not meet the Constitution’s age, citizenship and state residency requirements.Some Democrats and government watchdog groups have called for further investigation of Mr. Santos’s past claims and financial disclosure forms, either by the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics or by federal prosecutors.Representative-elect Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York City and a former assistant U.S. attorney, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed there were two possible federal crimes that prosecutors should investigate.The first issue, he said, was whether Mr. Santos had willfully and intentionally made false statements in his financial disclosure forms. Such a violation, he said, would require investigators to make sure that there was a clear and knowing intent to omit or misrepresent information.“As someone who had to make those disclosures, they’re done under penalty of perjury,” Mr. Goldman said.But Mr. Goldman, who was the chief investigator in the first impeachment case against former President Donald J. Trump, said that he believed the authorities should explore whether Mr. Santos’s apparent misstatements could be considered part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.Such a charge would be an aggressive approach, Mr. Goldman said. (It was used on Monday by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol against Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Santos has previously backed.)Prosecutors would need to prove that Mr. Santos had interfered with a federal election by willfully disseminating misinformation, and that he had worked with others to do so.“I think it’s worthy of investigation to see whether his efforts to repeatedly and pervasively lie about pretty much anything rises to the level of an effort to defraud the voters of his district to vote for him,” Mr. Goldman said. More

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      Why No One in Politics Wants to Talk About the Sam Bankman-Fried Scandal

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      The fallout from the crypto controversy is widely spread — and it has hit both parties.Back in May, months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange imploded seemingly overnight, he suggested that he might be willing to spend as much as $1 billion in political donations during the 2024 presidential election.It was an astronomical sum to throw around — Bankman-Fried later called it “a dumb quote on my part” — but at the time, the crypto kingpin was still an object of curiosity rather than ridicule.Billboards with his frizzy-haired visage popped up in Manhattan; journalists examined his growing political empire and his “schlubby” personal style. Endless articles were written about “effective altruism,” his utilitarian-tinged philanthropic philosophy. At one point, Forbes pegged his net worth as high as $26.5 billion; Fortune ran a cover, cringe-inducing in hindsight, asking, “The Next Warren Buffett?”It’s hard to quickly sum up the extent of the influence operation Bankman-Fried, 30, and his associates built during his meteoric ascent. My colleagues have described it as “a network of political action committees, nonprofits and consulting firms” that “worked to court politicians, regulators and others in the policy orbit.”Last week, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, and a federal grand jury indicted him on eight charges that include wire and securities fraud and money laundering, along with conspiracy to commit those offenses. He has agreed to be extradited to the United States as soon as Wednesday, a decision one of his lawyers said defied “the strongest possible legal advice.” Bankman-Fried has denied wrongdoing.The extraordinary financial scandal has also become a sticky political morass, sucking in dozens of lawmakers and groups. Prosecutors also accused Bankman-Fried last week of defrauding the Federal Election Commission by running what’s known as a straw-donor scheme — making political contributions under someone else’s name.Bankman-Fried’s contributions, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said last week, “were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators when in fact the contributions were funded by Alameda Research,” a hedge fund closely tied to Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, “with stolen customer money.”FTX, under new management, said on Tuesday that it wanted to recoup that money, and is threatening legal action if the cash is not returned voluntarily. It’s not clear how much is considered stolen, but Bankman-Fried and his associates poured at least $70 million into various campaigns over 18 months.In 2022, Bankman-Fried donated about $40 million to various candidates and political committees, overwhelmingly to Democrats. Those donations were “mostly for pandemic prevention,” Bankman-Fried has insisted. But a less lofty aim of his influence-peddling, clearly, was to shape federal regulations in his company’s favor.Before his arrest, Bankman-Fried told Tiffany Fong, a YouTube journalist, that he had also donated about the same amount to Republicans in ways, he suggested, that would not necessarily pop up in federal campaign finance reports.What to Know About the Collapse of FTXCard 1 of 5What is FTX? More

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      What Really Saved the Democrats This Year?

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      In the Democratic Party, despite its better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, internecine combat has been playing out in disputes over the party’s nominees and the policies they propose. At the nuts-and-bolts level of candidate selection, the debate has become intensely emotional and increasingly hostile.Strategists in the progressive wing of the party call centrists “corporate sellouts.” Centrists, in turn, accuse progressives of alienating voters by promoting an extremist cultural and law enforcement agenda.I asked Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist Welcome PAC, for his views on state of the intraparty debate. He emailed back:Far-left political science deniers refuse to accept the fact that moderate candidates still outperform those at the extremes. While there may be fewer swing voters now, the closeness of elections maximizes their importance. All the data points to moderate outperformance — from political science research to election results to common sense.Take the Dec. 16 analysis of the 2022 election by another centrist group, Third Way, “Comparing the Performance of Mainstream v. Far-Left Democrats in the House”: “Far-left groups like Sanders-style Our Revolution and AOC’s Justice Democrats constantly argue that the more left the candidate, the better chance of winning, saying their candidates will energize base voters and deliver victory,” Lanae Erickson, Lucas Holtz and Maya Jones of Third Way wrote.In an effort to test the claim of progressive groups, they note, “We conducted case studies analyzing districts with comparable partisan leans and demographically similar makeups to discern how Democratic congressional candidates endorsed by the center-left New Democrat Action Fund (NewDems) performed in the 2022 midterm elections versus those endorsed by far-left organizations.”Their results:In total, NewDems flipped seven seats from red to blue, picked up two critical wins in new seats, and helped elect 18 new members to Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. The NewDems Fund has now flipped 42 seats from red to blue since 2018, while Our Revolution and Justice Democrats have not managed to flip a single Republican-held seat over the last three cycles.I asked Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, if the organization had flipped any House seats from red to blue. He replied by email:This was not the goal of Our Revolution. Our Revolution’s goal in the 2022 elections was to push the Democratic Caucus in a progressive direction, and we succeeded with nine new members joining the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.In part because of Our Revolution’s support, he continued:The Congressional Progressive Caucus is growing by nine newly elected members, all of whom were endorsed by Our Revolution. That includes: Summer Lee, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez, Maxwell Frost, Becca Balint, Andrea Salinas, Jasmine Crockett, Jonathan Jackson, and Val Hoyle. Our Revolution’s success didn’t include just those running for Congress. Our Revolution’s success expanded to local races including St. Louis Board of Alderman President-elect Megan Green, whose victory creates a blue island in a state that is a sea of red.Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, emailed in response to a similar inquiry of mine that his group does not focus on shifting seats from red to blue: “We haven’t run really races in those areas. We’ve been focused on blue seats where the incumbent is corporate-backed and out of touch with their district.”Instead, Shahid wrote: “After the 2022 election cycle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus stated the incoming membership is the largest in its history at 103 members. The top three leaders are also all Justice Democrats: Rep. Pramila Jayapal as chair; Rep. Ilhan Omar as deputy chair; and Rep.-elect Greg Casar as whip.”In addition, Shahid argued, “Progressives have a lot to do with Democrats’ ambitious agenda under President Biden. Our work at Justice Democrats engaging in competitive primaries, win or lose, has been a big part of it — moving Democratic incumbents on key issues.”If, Shahid contended, “you think of politicians as balloons tied to the rock of public opinion, then progressives have substantially moved the rock,” adding thatmoderates have shifted in turn. John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock are not the same kind of Third Way moderates that might have run in purple states in the pre-Trump era. They embrace reproductive rights, bold climate action, a $15 minimum wage, eliminating the filibuster, student debt cancellation, and immigrant rights — things many moderates ran away from in the Obama era. The center of the party has shifted closer to the base and away from the consensus among Washington and Wall Street donors.While this debate may appear arcane, the dispute involves two different visions of the Democratic Party, one of a governing party guided by the principles of consensus and restraint, the other of a party that represents insurgent, marginalized constituencies and consistently challenges the establishment.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, was adamant in his criticism of Third Way, declaring in an email: “Every cycle, Third Way cooks the books with a false accounting of how races were run and won.”Green continued:The truth is: In swing seat after swing seat, Democrats won by running on economic populist positions that have long been supported by progressives and opposed by corporate Democrats — such as protecting and expanding Social Security benefits and fighting the pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street banks that fund Third Way. If there was one thing that caused Democrats to unnecessarily lose races this year, it was corporate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer blocking the president’s economic agenda for a year so that the impact of things like lower-price prescriptions were not felt by voters in time for the election.Green objected to Third Way’s comparison of the results of the New Democrat Coalition PAC, which has official standing with the House, with the result of such outside groups as Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.If, however, the endorsees of the New Democrat Coalition are compared with the endorsees of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition PAC candidates flipped a total of 42 seats from red to blue, 32 in 2018, three in 2020 and seven in 2022, while the candidates endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus flipped a total of eight over the three cycles, all in 2018, according to officials of both groups. The Progressive Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition have roughly equal numbers of members.Joe Dinkin, of the Working Families Party, dismissed the Third Way study as the “conclusions of the corporate flank of the Democratic Party” that have been subject to “very little scrutiny.”In the newly elected Congress, Dinkin wrote:This will be the most progressive Democratic caucus in memory, if not ever. 16 of the new 34 Democratic members of Congress were backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. The Congressional Progressive Caucus will have 103 members, or roughly 48 percent of the entirety of the Democratic caucus — a roughly 50 percent increase over the last decade.Dinkin continued:Centrist incumbents saw some significant losses. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney, a leading moderate, decided after redistricting to run in the bluer NY-17 over his former NY-18, a tougher district which included most of his former constituents, even though it meant leaving the incumbent Democrat in NY-17 without a district. Maloney lost that bluer seat. The Democrat who ran in NY-18, the redder seat SPM abandoned, was Pat Ryan — he won, and won with crucial support from the Working Families Party. Several other incumbent moderates lost their seats too, like former Republican and Blue Dog Tom O’Halleran.The intraparty debate boils down to a choice between two goals.If the objective is strengthening the left in the Democratic House Caucus, the way to achieve that goal is to nominate the most progressive candidate running in the primary. On that score, the size of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has grown, since its founding in 1991, to 103 members (as noted above). Overall, the composition of the Democratic electorate continues to shift to the left as have the votes of House Democrats, albeit slightly.If winning more seats is the top priority, the preponderance of evidence suggests that nominating moderate, centrist candidates in districts where Republicans have a chance of winning is the more effective strategy, with the caveat that a contemporary moderate is substantially more liberal than the moderate of two decades ago.Most — though by no means all — scholarly work supports the view that moderate candidates in competitive districts are more likely to win.Zachary F. Peskowitz, a political scientist at Emory, argued in an email:Candidates who are ideologically aligned with their constituencies will win more votes, on average, than relatively extreme candidates. If your goal is to win majorities in the House and the Senate, nominating moderate candidates in the most competitive districts and states — where the majority will be determined — is the best way to do it. If, instead, your goal is to push elite discourse in a liberal direction and are less concerned about immediately winning a governing majority, then nominating extremist candidates is a reasonable approach.Contrary to the argument that a more progressive candidate can mobilize base voters, Peskowitz argued that “nominating extremist candidates might increase turnout, but not enough to compensate for ceding moderates’ votes to your opponent. Moreover, there is a risk that an extremist will also mobilize the opposition to turn out to vote.”In sum, Peskowitz wrote:Progressive-aligned candidates who won the primaries in competitive districts or states did not fare well in the general election. Mandela Barnes lost the Wisconsin Senate contest to incumbent Ron Johnson and ran behind Wisconsin’s other statewide Democratic nominees. Josh Riley lost New York’s 19th Congressional District and Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the only progressive Democrat who successfully dethroned a Democratic incumbent in this cycle’s primaries, lost Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. Summer Lee in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District was the one example of a progressive endorsed non-incumbent who won a seat that wasn’t a Democratic lock. Moderate Democratic candidates, such as Abigail Spanberger and Haley Stevens, performed strongly, holding on to seats in challenging districts.Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, has examined the debate over moderate-versus-progressive candidates extensively, including in a 2018 paper with Daniel M. Thompson, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in U.S. Elections.”Hall and Thompson write: “We find that extremist nominees — as measured by the mix of campaign contributions they receive — suffer electorally, largely because they decrease their party’s share of turnout in the general election, skewing the electorate towards their opponent’s party.”“Turnout,” they add, “appears to be the dominant force in determining election outcomes, but it advantages ideologically moderate candidates because extremists appear to activate the opposing party’s base more than their own.”Hall and Thompson compared general election results from 2006 to 2014 in House races that involved close primary contests between a moderate and a more extreme candidate. They found that instead of lifting turnout, there were “strong, negative effects of extremist nominees on their party’s share of turnout in the general election.” Extremist nominees, they observed, “depress their party’s share of turnout in the general election, on average.”Hall and Thompson conclude that it is moderates who have a turnout advantage in general elections. They make two points.First, “We have found consistent evidence that extremist nominees do poorly in general elections in large part because they skew turnout in the general election away from their own party and in favor of the opposing party.”And second, “Much of moderate candidates’ success may actually be due to the turnout of partisan voters, rather than to swing voters who switch sides. In fact, our regression discontinuity estimates are consistent with the possibility that the bulk of the vote-share penalty to extremist nominees is the result of changes in partisan turnout.”An earlier study, from 2010, “Securing the Base: Electoral Competition Under Variable Turnout,” by Michael Peress, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, produced similar results: “My results indicate that the candidates can best compete by adopting centrist positions. While a candidate can increase turnout among his supporters by moving away from the center, many moderate voters will defect to his opponent.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, agreed that “moderate candidates perform better in general elections,” but, he added, “that advantage is declining as baseline partisanship drives most results regardless of candidates. Because we have national partisan parity, small candidate advantages can still be important.”The moderation factor, Grossman wrote by email, “was more pronounced on the Republican side because Republicans ran more extreme candidates and those candidates had less experience. There continues to be no evidence in either party that extreme candidates mobilize their side more than they mobilize the other side or turn off swing voters.”The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime critic of the Democrats’ progressive wing, contends in a recent essay, “Ten Reasons Why Democrats Should Become More Moderate,” that adoption of an extreme progressive stance is not only “dead wrong,” but also that “Democrats need to fully and finally reject it if they hope to break the current electoral stalemate in their favor.”In the 2022 election, Teixeira writes,the reason why Democrats did relatively well was support from independents and Republican leaning or supporting crossover voters — not base voters mobilized by progressivism. These independents and crossover voters were motivated to support Democrats where they did because many Democrats in key races were perceived as being more moderate than their extremist Republican opponents.According to Teixeira:As the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the last four years, they have actually done worse among their base voters. They’ve lost a good chunk of their support among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanics, and among young voters. Since 2018, Democratic support is down 18 margin points among young (18-29 year old) voters, 20 points among nonwhites and 23 points among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in orientation and they’re just not buying what the Democrats are selling.Teixeira’s final point:Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to embrace patriotism and dissociate themselves from those who insist America is a benighted, racist nation and always has been. Large majorities of Americans, while they have no objection to looking at both the bad and good of American history, reject such a one-sided, negative characterization. That includes many voters whose support Democrats desperately need but who are now drifting away from them.A postelection analysis conducted by officials of Impact Research, the firm that polls for President Biden, provides further support for a moderate strategy by emphasizing the crucial importance in the 2022 contest of winning support from independent voters.In their Dec. 7 study, “How Democrats Prevented a Red Wave,” John Anzalone, founder of Impact, and Matt Hogan, a partner, wrote:That Democrats’ win over independents was critical since Republicans appear to have bested them in turnout based on both finalized geographic data and exit polls. The latter found that Republicans had a 3- to 4-point advantage in party ID and that each party won about 95 percent of their own partisans. It was therefore Democrats’ performance with independents, not turnout, that helped prevent a red wave.A key factor in Democrats’ ability to win over independents, according to Anzalone and Hogan,was that these voters wanted more bipartisanship and felt Democratic candidates were more likely to deliver it. By an 11-point margin (53 percent to 42 percent), voters preferred a candidate who would “work in a bipartisan manner and compromise” over one who would “stay true to their beliefs.” Among independents, the preference for bipartisanship more than doubled to 24 points. Democrats benefited from this desire by winning the voters who preferred a bipartisan approach by a 30-point margin.As a practical matter, the debate between proponents of moderation and proponents of progressivism may be less of a dilemma for the Democratic Party than an ongoing process in which the party, its voters and its elected officials move leftward, often turbulently. At the same time, the Democratic Party has a storied history of cannibalizing its own — and Republicans are catching up quickly. It is getting harder to see a peaceable and productive resolution between the two parties or inside them.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In Virginia, Democrats Sprint to Select Nominee for Special House Election

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      After a congressman’s death last month, Jennifer McClellan, a state senator who lost a bid for governor in 2021, is the front-runner and could become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress.Democrats in Richmond, Va., the state capital, are scrambling to organize a primary election on Tuesday after the death of a congressman just weeks ago, and the race’s front-runner could become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress since the state was founded in 1788.Representative A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who overwhelmingly won re-election in the midterms last month, died on Nov. 28 at the age of 61, following a yearslong battle with colorectal cancer.Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, set the special election for Mr. McEachin’s seat for Feb. 21. Because Mr. McEachin’s district leans Democratic — the Fourth Congressional District is a predominantly Black and Latino region that stretches from Richmond into rural counties along the North Carolina border — the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary is highly favored to win the special election in February. Mr. McEachin defeated his Republican opponent by 30 points in November.Democrats organized Tuesday’s party-run primary for just one week after the governor’s announcement, a rushed timeline made all the more complicated by holding an election five days before Christmas.“The governor definitely chose the shortest amount of time, which has made us have to put together this nomination contest on the shortest time frame,” said Alexsis Rodgers, chairwoman of the Fourth Congressional District Democratic Committee.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.Who Is George Santos?: The G.O.P. congressman-elect from New York says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But his résumé appears to be mostly fiction.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A front-runner quickly emerged: State Senator Jennifer McClellan, a veteran lawmaker who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2021. In the first 24 hours of declaring her candidacy, she raised more than $100,000, according to her campaign.Two of the state’s top Black elected officials initially expressed interest, Ms. McClellan and Lamont Bagby, a state delegate. They lead the influential Virginia Legislative Black Caucus — Mr. Bagby is the caucus chair and Ms. McClellan is the vice chair.Last week, however, Mr. Bagby dropped out and endorsed Ms. McClellan. Other Democrats soon followed with endorsements of Ms. McClellan, including all eight members of Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation, Mr. McEachin’s widow and scores of national Democratic groups.A flag at the U.S. Capitol marked the death of Representative A. Donald McEachin in late November.Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesMs. McClellan, who has run what she called a one-week get-out-the-vote campaign and has knocked on doors with several state leaders, centered her message on her Virginia roots and legislative accomplishments. In an interview on Friday, she said being a Black woman helped shape her policies, particularly on workers’ rights and maternal health.“I bring a new perspective to the office that will help me represent the district and those who have not had a voice, in ways that other candidates cannot,” she said. She listed her noteworthy firsts — she was the first Black woman to hold her State Senate seat and was the first person to serve in the State House of Delegates while pregnant.Democrats in the district will hold a so-called firehouse primary on Tuesday. Named for the polling places where they are typically held, such elections are organized and funded by party representatives rather than local or state election officials. Democratic voters in the primary will be required to sign a pledge stating they will vote for the party’s nominee during the general election.Ms. McClellan’s main Democratic opponent is State Senator Joe Morrissey, a self-described rebel within the party. Mr. Morrissey, a former defense lawyer, was disbarred twice and spent time in jail for aiding the delinquency of a minor in 2014. The minor involved later became his wife. In January 2022, then-Gov. Ralph Northam pardoned Mr. Morrissey for his conviction in the case.Mr. Morrissey has voted against Democratic policies and has signaled his opposition to proposed state policies protecting abortion access. John Fredericks, a prominent Virginia Republican and radio host, cut an ad for Mr. Morrissey and has been encouraging his listeners to vote for him in the Democratic primary.State Senator Joe Morrissey has voted against Democratic priorities and has the support of a prominent Virginia Republican.Daniel Sangjib Min/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated PressHowever, Mr. Morrissey’s criminal justice work in Richmond’s Black communities has earned him support in the district. He has also won against tough odds before. In 2019, he defeated an incumbent Democratic state senator.Representatives for Mr. Morrissey did not respond to requests for comment.During an episode of his radio show on Thursday, Mr. Morrissey railed against Democrats’ handling of the primary, saying that setting the primary election on a weekday instead of the weekend, as well as by placing zero voting locations in his home district, unfairly disadvantaged his supporters.“I don’t care that you don’t like me,” he said, addressing Democrats in the district. “That’s fine. That’s your prerogative. Go vote against me.” He added, “But what you’ve done is you have set back the voting gains that we’ve made for the last 10 years in order to get the person you want.”Other Democrats in the race include Joseph Preston, a former state delegate who served for one year, and Tavorise Marks, a businessman from the area.Virginia Republicans have already elected their nominee for the seat. Leon Benjamin, a pastor and Navy veteran whom Mr. McEachin handily defeated in November, won the Republican nomination on Saturday, in a ranked-choice primary held by the district G.O.P. committee. More

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      How Latinos Voted in Key House Races

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      Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesBoth parties lavished attention on South Texas, where Republicans have made gains. Mayra Flores, a Republican, won a special election this summer, but then lost the Brownsville district. And in a sign of the tossup quality of Latino voters in the midterms, Monica De La Cruz, a Republican, captured the neighboring district. More

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      How About Some Predictions for the New Year?

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      Gail Collins: How about some predictions for the new year, Bret?I’ll start: House Republicans will flunk all their deficit-decreasing promises. The skyrocketing sales of those Trump digital trading cards will collapse and plunge streaking back to earth.Bret Stephens: C’mon, Gail — those are safe bets!Gail: OK, how about a pre-new year prediction? This week, the Jan. 6 committee will recommend criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, but the man’s never going to jail.Bret: Another pretty safe bet, I’m afraid.Gail: Sigh. Back to the future: What do you have in the way of thoughts about what’s going to happen in 2023?Bret: I’ll go bold, or semi-bold, so long as you promise not to hold these predictions against me in a year.Gail: Well, OK … maybe.Bret: First, the crypto collapse will continue and the whole crypto phenomenon will be exposed as the tulip bulb mania of our day.Second, President Biden will announce, after considerable holiday reflection, that he will not run for re-election, especially since he’s increasingly unlikely to face a rematch with the former guy.And third, Kevin McCarthy will not be the next speaker of the House.Gail: Well, I’ll give you number one — would never want to be known as a crypto collaborator. Sure hope you’re right on two: As I’ve said before, I’d love to see Biden follow Nancy Pelosi’s lead and give up the top leadership job for some other useful-but-not-in-charge-of-the-world gig.And on three: Fine, but who exactly are the Republicans going to pick? Any faves?Bret: Well, nobody in the current House Republican leadership. All of them are election deniers. And Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, gets special awfulness points because her ethics are purely situational. Also, nearly every House Republican who voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6 is gone, so that further reduces my options.Gail: The woes of rational Republicans …Bret: I guess the House has the option of electing a speaker who is not a member. In that case, I’d probably look to a Republican I could respect, like Rob Portman, the outgoing senator from Ohio whose seat is being taken by J.D. Vance. Though, really, I doubt Portman would want the job. Today’s definition of a sane Republican is a retired Republican, a former Republican, or both.Gail, let’s look back on the old year, too. What do you rank as the best moment? And what was the worst?Gail: As a political person I’d have to say the elections were the best. Not just that the Democrats did much better than expected, but that many of the loathsome Trumpian Republicans were rejected in races a rational member of their party would have won.Bret: We are in total accord in the politics department. But I’d expand the categories a bit. The best moment, in terms of statesmanship, was President Volodomyr Zelensky’s Churchillian riposte to the American offer to get him out of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s invasion: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”Gail: I agree — that’s a keeper.Bret: The best moment in terms of courage has come from the magnificent women of Iran, leading a revolution against their misogynistic rulers. The best moment, cosmically, were the images of deep space and distant time taken by the Webb telescope. And probably the best moment, as far as future generations are concerned, was the fusion breakthrough by the brilliant scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It gave me faith not only that human ingenuity will ultimately solve our long-term energy and climate challenges, but also that the United States can continue at the frontiers of discovery.Gail: Super choices. Now we’ve got to tackle the worst. And I’m sorry to say that pretty much every year it’s a story about mass shooting. Actually, many stories about mass shootings: innocent citizens mowed down when they’re shopping, or going to school, or working at extremely nonviolent jobs or just out having a good time. Who can ever forget that student slaughter at Uvalde? And it was just a month ago that a gunman in Colorado killed five people and injured at least 18 others at an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub.Bret: Not to mention the everyday gun violence that barely gets reported because it’s so ubiquitous.Gail: And unlike some of our other political crises — say, the Supreme Court ruling on abortion — the gun situation just doesn’t seem to get the political push it needs to get better. Will try to block the memory of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent quote-unquote joke about how it would have been so much better if the folks attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 had been better armed.You?Bret: Agree again. I’d add that repulsive dinner between Donald Trump, Kanye West and the Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes.Gail: Hmm. Mixed feelings on that one. True, Trump’s guest list was remarkably repulsive, even for him. But that kind of behavior shows he’s dreadful in ways even some of his previous supporters can appreciate. Which is kinda useful, given his already announced candidacy for a return to the White House.Bret: As in, “the worse, the better”? Not sure I agree: I think it was yet another case of “defining deviancy down,” as Pat Moynihan famously put it.Switching topics, Gail, we’ve got a huge migration crisis at the southern border, and it looks like it might get a lot worse as soon as the Title 42 policy permitting immediate deportations ends this week. Democrats seem … pretty nonchalant about this. Your thoughts?Gail: Bret, since the Republicans’ big new idea seems to be impeaching the secretary of Homeland Security, I don’t think you’ll win with a partisan critique.Bret: Impeachment is a dumb idea, but it wouldn’t hurt Biden to consider new management in that department. How about Bill Bratton, the former police commissioner of New York City and Los Angeles?Gail: I don’t have a good solution, but my immediate action plan would be to radically increase staffing at the border, raise the salaries of border patrol agents, expand and improve detention facilities and, on our side, get the Dreamers a clear and simple path to citizenship.Now, I’m very interested in your thoughts — except you already know we’re going to fight about anything involving the building of a wall.Bret: Like John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, I promise not to mention the wall.Gail: A gift for the holidays!Bret: The administration and the courts have a point that Title 42, as a public-health measure, is an awkward legal tool to control the border. Problem is, it’s what we’ve got. And we already have a crisis as far north as New York City as officials deal with a migration crisis on a scale we’ve never seen before. If we don’t control it — not over the coming years, but right now — we’re going to have a full-scale humanitarian crisis here in the United States, along with a cudgel that nativists will use for a generation against those of us who support a generous but controlled immigration policy.Gail: I guess we’re at least in agreement that something must be done.Bret: The other thing to worry about for next year is a possible recession. The housing and manufacturing sectors are already in a big slump. Job cuts in our own industry, too. Even Goldman Sachs is laying off thousands of employees, which can’t be a good sign. Your advice?Gail: Well, a good time for the government to create some more jobs — including maybe some in border security, as I was saying. And a very bad time to dillydally about funding basic operations in the new year.Bret: You know, I wouldn’t be against restarting something like the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps.Gail: I can understand the Republicans wanting to flex their muscles — even itty-bitty muscles — when they take control of the House. But they’re going to be so distracted by showboating over crime, immigration and Hunter Biden that they’d be well advised to let the Democrats do as much as they can on budgetary matters now.How about you?Bret: Gail, what else? Cut government red tape when it comes to permitting and other barriers to doing business in America. Cut taxes to offset the effects of rising interest rates. Increase the number of EB-5 visas tenfold, to 100,000 a year, to attract job creators to the United States. Allow large infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL pipeline to create thousands of blue-collar jobs and enhance our energy security in North America.I know these suggestions must come as a total surprise to you ….Gail: I’m shocked! Guess we’ll be going into the new year continuing to disagree about what’s red tape and what’s critical protection of the consumer, the environment and —Well, we’ve got all of 2023 to argue about that. But there’ll be no more World Cup debates! Before we go, tell me your thoughts about Argentina’s big win.Bret: Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!Greatest. Game. Ever.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Sam Bankman-Fried and Allies’ Political Donations Under Scrutiny by US

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      Federal prosecutors appear to be focusing on possible wrongdoing by cryptocurrency executives, rather than by Democratic or Republican politicians. But the inquiries widen an explosive campaign finance scandal.WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are seeking information from Democrats and Republicans about donations from the disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and two former executives at the companies he co-founded.In the days after Mr. Bankman-Fried was arrested on Monday and charged with violations including a major campaign finance scheme, the prosecutors reached out to representatives for campaigns and committees that had received millions of dollars from Mr. Bankman-Fried, his colleagues and their companies.A law firm representing some of the most important Democratic political organizations — including the party’s official campaign arms, its biggest super PACs and the campaigns of high-profile politicians such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries — received an email from a prosecutor in the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. The email sought information about donations from Mr. Bankman-Fried, his colleagues and companies, according to people familiar with the request, who insisted on anonymity to discuss an ongoing law enforcement matter.The prosecutors have reached out to representatives of other Democratic campaigns that received money linked to the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which Mr. Bankman-Fried co-founded, according to two other people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors are also investigating donations to Republican campaigns and committees by another FTX executive who was a top financier on the right, according to a person familiar with the situation.So far, Mr. Bankman-Fried is the only executive to face charges. Since emerging as a leading political megadonor in the months before the 2020 election, he has donated nearly $45 million, primarily to Democratic campaigns and committees that are now scrambling to distance themselves.There has not been any suggestion that political campaigns and groups engaged in wrongdoing related to the donations they received. The Justice Department’s inquiries appear to be an effort to gather evidence against Mr. Bankman-Fried and other former FTX executives, rather than against their political beneficiaries.But the prosecutors’ requests widen what has quickly become one of the biggest campaign finance scandals in years, as both Democrats and Republicans grapple with questions about their eagerness to tap into a stream of cash from a murky and largely unregulated industry that emerged suddenly as a powerful political player.The fallout has been swift and is only growing, as lawmakers, operatives for political action committees and their lawyers try to minimize the damage.Some politicians — including Mr. Jeffries, the incoming Democratic leader in the House, and Representative-elect Aaron Bean, a Republican from Florida — either returned donations linked to FTX or gave the money to charity after the company became embroiled in scandal. Other groups say they are setting the cash aside for possible restitution to victims of the alleged scheme.Prosecutors said FTX was a “house of cards” through which Mr. Bankman-Fried and others diverted customer money to buy expensive real estate in the Bahamas, invest in other cryptocurrency firms, provide themselves with personal loans and make political contributions of tens of millions of dollars intended to influence policy decisions on cryptocurrency and other issues.What to Know About the Collapse of FTXCard 1 of 5What is FTX? More