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      Adam Schiff Announces Senate Run in California

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      Mr. Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump and later served on the House panel investigating the Capitol riot, will seek the seat held by Senator Dianne Feinstein.WASHINGTON — Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who emerged as one of President Donald J. Trump’s chief congressional tormentors from his perch atop the House Intelligence Committee, announced on Thursday that he would seek the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein.Mr. Schiff, 62, is the second member of California’s Democratic congressional delegation to join the 2024 race, after Representative Katie Porter. He enters the campaign with the largest national profile, built from his position as the manager of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. He later served on the House committee responsible for investigating the origins of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Ms. Feinstein, 89, has not said whether she will run again in 2024 but is widely expected not to do so as she faces Democratic worries about her age and ability to serve. Last year, she declined to serve as president pro tem of the Senate, and in 2020 she ceded her post as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee after coming under pressure from her party during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.More on CaliforniaA Wake of Tragedy: California is reeling after back-to-back mass shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.Storms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised people in the state with an unrelenting period of extreme weather that has caused extensive damage across the state.New Laws: A new year doesn’t always usher in sweeping change, but in California, at least, it usually means a slate of new laws going into effect.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Schiff served in California’s State Senate before being elected to a Los Angeles-area House seat in 2000.In Congress, he became a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who tapped him to play a leading role in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial and then on the Jan. 6 committee. Last fall, Mr. Schiff passed on a chance for a slot on the post-Pelosi House leadership team to focus on a planned run for the Senate.During and after the Trump years, Mr. Schiff became one of the most prodigious fund-raisers in Congress. During the 2018 election cycle, he raised $6.3 million, and then his fund-raising surged to $19.6 million in 2020 and $24.5 million in 2022 — without a competitive election of his own to wage. He has not faced a serious challenge since arriving in Congress, winning each of his general elections by at least 29 percentage points.According to the latest Federal Election Commission reports, Mr. Schiff had $20.6 million in campaign money at the end of November, compared with $7.7 million for Ms. Porter and $54,940 for Ms. Lee.Other California Democrats considering running include Representative Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley. Because of California’s all-party primary system, the election is not likely to feature a competitive Republican candidate; in 2016 and 2018, two Democrats advanced to the Senate general election. Last year, a Republican won 39 percent of the vote against Senator Alex Padilla, who had been appointed to finish Vice President Kamala Harris’s term.California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents, has not hosted a highly competitive contest for an open Senate seat since 1992, when Ms. Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, a fellow Democrat, were both elected for the first time.Ms. Feinstein, who is in her sixth term, has been trailed by questions about her fitness to serve. Problems with her short-term memory have become an open secret on Capitol Hill, though few Democrats have been willing to discuss the subject publicly.She has made no moves to suggest she will seek re-election in 2024. She has not hired a campaign staff and, in the latest campaign finance report for the period ending in September, had less than $10,000 in cash on hand, a paltry sum for a sitting senator. More

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      The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs

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      Rural America has become the Republican Party’s life preserver.Less densely settled regions of the country, crucial to the creation of congressional and legislative districts favorable to conservatives, are a pillar of the party’s strength in the House and the Senate and a decisive factor in the rightward tilt of the Electoral College. Republican gains in such sparsely populated areas are compensating for setbacks in increasingly diverse suburbs where growing numbers of well-educated voters have renounced a party led by Donald Trump and his loyalists.The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party is driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Even so, Republicans are grasping at a weak reed. In a 2022 article, “Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History,” Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, notes that “Between 2010 and 2020, rural America lost population for the first time in history as economic turbulence had a significant demographic impact. The rural population loss was due to fewer births, more deaths, and more people leaving than moving in.”The shift to the right in rural counties is one side of a two-part geographic transformation of the electorate, according to “The Increase in Partisan Segregation in the United States,” a 2022 paper by Jacob R. Brown, of Princeton; Enrico Cantoni, of the University of Bologna; Ryan D. Enos, of Harvard; Vincent Pons, of Harvard Business School; and Emilie Sartre, of Brown.In an email, Brown described one of the central findings of the study:In terms of major factors driving the urban-rural split, our analysis shows that rural Republican areas are becoming more Republican predominantly due to voters in these places switching their partisanship to Republican. This is in contrast to urban areas becoming increasingly more Democratic largely due to the high levels of Democratic partisanship in these areas among new voters entering the electorate. These new voters include young voters registering once they become eligible, and other new voters registering for the first time.There are few, if any, better case studies of rural realignment and the role it plays in elections than the 2022 Senate race in Wisconsin. The basic question, there, is how Ron Johnson — a Trump acolyte who derided climate change with an epithet, who described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement” and who proposed turning Social Security and Medicare into discretionary programs subject to annual congressional budget cutting —- got re-elected in Wisconsin.In 2016, Johnson rode Trump’s coattails and the Republican trail blazed by the former governor Scott Walker to a 3.4 point (50.2 to 46.8) victory, and swept into office, in large part by running up huge margins in Milwaukee’s predominately white suburbs. That changed in 2022.Craig Gilbert, a fellow at Marquette Law School and a former Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, conducted a detailed analysis of Wisconsin voting patterns and found that Johnsonperformed much worse in the red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee than he did six years earlier in 2016. Johnson lost Wauwatosa by 7 points in 2016, then by 37 points in 2022. He won Mequon in Ozaukee County by 28 points in 2016 but only by 6 in 2022. His victory margin in Menomonee Falls in Waukesha County declined from 32 points six years ago to 14 points.So again, how did Johnson win? The simple answer: white rural Wisconsin.As recently as 17 years ago, rural Wisconsin was a battleground. In 2006, Jim Doyle, the Democratic candidate for governor, won rural Wisconsin, about 30 percent of the electorate, by 5.5 points, “Then came the rural red wave,” Gilbert writes. “Walker carried Wisconsin’s towns by 23 points in 2010 and by 25 points in 2014.” In 2016, Johnson won the rural vote by 25 points, but in 2022, he pushed his margin there to 29 points.In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters in a single sentence: “First, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, second, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and third a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”These controversies included two Supreme Court abortion decisions, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (in 1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (in 1992); the 1989 appointment of Ralph Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition; the fire-breathing speeches of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention (Buchanan: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war for the soul of America”); and the 1993 “gays in the miliary” debate, to name just a few.“The 1992 election represented a milestone,” Hopkins writes:For the first time in the history of the Democratic Party, its strongest electoral territory was located exclusively outside the South, including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Maryland in the Northeast; Illinois in the metropolitan Midwest; and the Pacific Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California — all of which have supported the Democratic candidate in every subsequent presidential election.In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points, and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes, in a separate 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992—2018,” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”The same process took place in House elections, Hopkins observes:The proportion of House Democrats representing suburban districts rose from 41 percent after the 1992 election to 60 percent after 2018, while the share of Democratic-held seats located in urban areas remained fairly stable over time (varying between 33 percent and 41 percent of all party seats) and the share of rural districts declined from 24 percent to 5 percent of all Democratic seats.Hopkins pointedly notes that “The expanded presence of suburban voters and representatives in the Democratic Party since the 1980s was accompanied by a dramatic contraction of Democratic strength in rural areas.”Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton Administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade, and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called ‘Third Way’ made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”The diminution of partisan economic differences resulted in the accentuation ofthe very cultural differences that Gingrich-era Republicans sought to emphasize — on issues like homosexuality, immigration, public religion, gun rights, and minority politics. These issues are more galvanizing to the Upper Midwest regions adjacent to the South (West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana) — which are trending more conservative.The Upper Midwest, Gest continued, isa region unto itself — defined by manufacturing, unions, and social conservatism. As the manufacturing industry has moved offshore, union power declined and one of the richest, most stable parts of America became uniquely precarious inside a single generation. It is now subject to severe depopulation and aging, as younger people who have upskilled are more likely to move to cities like Chicago or New York. They have total whiplash. And Trump’s nostalgic populism has resonated with the white population that remains.Gest is outspoken in his criticism of the Democratic Party’s dealings with rural communities:Democrats have effectively redlined rural America. In some corners of the Democratic Party, activists don’t even want rural and white working class people in their coalition; they may even deride them. Rural and white working class Americans sense this.One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and ‘white-adjacent’ members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement is a driving force in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.In their 2022 paper, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment. Jacobs and Munis write:“Rural America,” Jacobs and Munis write,continues to grow older, poorer, and sicker — urban America wealthier and more diverse. These stark material divisions have contributed to partisan schisms, as individuals increasingly live in places that are politically homogeneous. A consequence of this is that, as Bill Bishop concludes, Americans “have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”In their 2022 paper “Symbolic versus material concerns of rural consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what Trujillo and Crowley call “symbolic” issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed though legislation.The hurdle facing Democrats is reflected in a comment James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, emailed to me, describing the roots of rural discontent with Democratic urban America:The disrespect is felt most acutely by the fact that dominant cultural institutions, including mass media, are predominantly urban in location and orientation. Smaller towns and outlying areas see themselves as misunderstood and mischaracterized by these media, as well as dismissed as out-of-touch and retrograde by urban populations. There is a considerable amount of truth in their perceptions.A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, the opposite of rural voters 54 percent Republican, 38 percent Democratic. 53 percent of those living in urban areas say rural residents have “different values,” while 58 percent of those living in rural communities say urban residents do not share their values. 61 percent of those living in rural communities say they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.I asked Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at Saint Joseph’s University who wrote “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” with her husband Patrick J. Carr, who died in 2020, to describe the state of mind in rural America. She wrote back by email:My best guess would be that it comes down to brain drain and college-educated voters. It has always been about the mobility of the college educated and the folks getting left behind without that college diploma. Not one high school dropout we encountered back when we wrote about Iowa managed to leave the county (unless they got sent to prison), and the kids with degrees were leaving in droves.Those whom Kefalas and Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa etc. (states where the public university is just exporting their professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare, it’s more like apartheid.”Urban rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the “calcification” of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded into the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.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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      2023’s Biggest, Most Unusual Race Centers on Abortion and Democracy

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      The election for a swing seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has huge policy stakes for the battleground state. Cash is pouring in, and some of the candidates have shed any pretense of judicial neutrality.In 10 weeks, Wisconsin will hold an election that carries bigger policy stakes than any other contest in America in 2023.The April race, for a seat on the state’s evenly divided Supreme Court, will determine the fate of abortion rights, gerrymandered legislative maps and the governor’s appointment powers — and perhaps even the state’s 2024 presidential election if the outcome is again contested.The court’s importance stems from Wisconsin’s deadlocked state government. Since 2019, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has faced off against a Republican-controlled Legislature with near-supermajority control thanks to one of the country’s most aggressive partisan gerrymanders, itself approved last year by the Wisconsin justices.Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has been left to arbitrate a host of thorny issues in the state, and has nearly always sided with Republicans. But now, with a conservative justice retiring, liberals hope to reverse many of those decisions by taking control of the open seat and its 10-year term.“If you change control of the Supreme Court from relatively conservative to fairly liberal, that will be a big, big change and that would last for quite a while,” said David T. Prosser Jr., a conservative former justice who retired from the court in 2016.The contest will almost certainly shatter spending records for a judicial election in any state, and could even double the current most expensive race. Wisconsinites are set to be inundated by a barrage of advertising, turning a typically sleepy spring election into the latest marker in the state’s nonstop political season. The seat is nonpartisan in name only, with officials from both parties lining up behind chosen candidates.Indeed, the clash for the court is striking because of how nakedly political it is.While past state judicial candidates and United States Supreme Court nominees have largely avoided weighing in on specific issues — instead pitching opaque judicial philosophies and counting on voters or senators to read between the lines — some of the Wisconsin contenders are making all but explicit arguments for how they would rule on topics that are likely to come before the court.Judge Janet Protasiewicz has argued that abortion should be “a woman’s right to choose.”Caleb Alvarado for The New York TimesJanet Protasiewicz, a liberal county judge from a Milwaukee suburb, is leading the charge on both fund-raising and the new approach to judicial campaigning, shedding the pretense that she does not hold firm positions on the hottest-button issues. She turned heads this month at a candidate forum when she declared the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps “rigged.”In an interview last week, Judge Protasiewicz argued that abortion should be “a woman’s right to choose”; said that Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011 law effectively ending collective bargaining rights for most public employees was unconstitutional; and predicted that, if she won, the court would take up a case seeking to invalidate the Republican-drawn state legislative and congressional maps put in place last year.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.A Key Senate Contest: Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat, said that he would run for the Senate in 2024 in a potential face-off with Senator Kyrsten Sinema.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.“Obviously, if we have a four-to-three majority, it is highly likely that we would be revisiting the maps,” she said.The other liberal candidate, Judge Everett Mitchell of Dane County, which includes Madison, the state capital, said in an interview that “the map lines are not fair.”Both candidates have also expressed full-throated support for the right to an abortion, which became illegal last summer under a law that was enacted in 1849 but that is being challenged by the state’s Democratic attorney general in a case likely to come before the court this year.Their declarations signify how the race is transmogrifying into a statewide election like any other in Wisconsin, a perpetual political battleground. Like November’s contests for governor, state attorney general and the Senate, the court election is set to be dominated by a focus on abortion rights (for Democrats) and crime (for Republicans).“We’re still on the November hangover where the top two issues were crime and abortion,” said Mark Graul, a Republican political operative in the state who is a volunteer for Jennifer R. Dorow, a conservative Waukesha County judge in the Supreme Court race. Judge Dorow presided over the trial last fall of a man convicted of killing six people by driving through a 2021 Christmas parade.Jennifer R. Dorow, a conservative Waukesha County judge, presided over the trial last fall of a man convicted of killing six people by driving through a 2021 Christmas parade.Caleb Alvarado for The New York TimesJudge Dorow and another conservative, Dan Kelly, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who lost a 2020 election to retain his seat, will compete against the two liberals in an officially nonpartisan Feb. 21 primary to replace Justice Patience D. Roggensack, who is retiring.The top two will advance to an April 4 general election, with the winner joining a court that is otherwise split between three conservative and three liberal justices.In narrowly divided Wisconsin, a one-seat edge is all the majority needs to change the state’s politics.In recent years, in addition to approving the Republican-drawn maps, the court has ruled that most drop boxes for absentee ballots are illegal; struck down Mr. Evers’s pandemic mitigation efforts; stripped regulatory powers from the state schools superintendent, a Democrat; allowed political appointees of Mr. Evers’s Republican predecessor to remain in office long past the expiration of their terms; and required some public schools to pay for busing for parochial schools.Many of those cases, which Democrats hope to roll back, were brought to the court by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a think tank and legal organization that has served as the leading edge of the state’s conservative movement. The group’s founder, Rick M. Esenberg, said the court’s role ought to be upholding laws precisely as legislators have written them — not proposing major changes to them.“Having control of the judiciary shouldn’t mean that you can make new policy,” Mr. Esenberg said. “Some judicial candidates have spoken as if that’s exactly what’s at stake. And for them, it may well be.”The conservative candidates, Justice Kelly and Judge Dorow, have been less forthright about how they would rule, but both have left ample clues for voters. Justice Kelly last year participated in an “election integrity” tour sponsored by the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Judge Dorow, who was so well known in the Milwaukee suburbs that people dressed as her last Halloween, said in a 2016 legal questionnaire that the worst U.S. Supreme Court decision was Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision that struck down anti-sodomy laws.From left, Judge Dorow, Dan Kelly, Everett Mitchell and Judge Protasiewicz at a forum in Madison this month.John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressBoth have ties to former President Donald J. Trump. In 2020, Mr. Trump endorsed Justice Kelly and praised him at a Milwaukee rally. Judge Dorow’s husband, Brian Dorow, was a security official for Trump campaign events in Wisconsin. Neither Justice Kelly nor Judge Dorow agreed to be interviewed.The race has already broken state fund-raising records for a judicial race. Judge Protasiewicz — whose campaign on Tuesday released a cheeky video teaching Wisconsinites how to say her name: pro-tuh-SAY-witz — raised $924,000 last year, more than any Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate ever in the year before an election. Judge Dorow and Justice Kelly each raised about one-third as much, while Judge Mitchell collected $115,000.Far more money will flow in from outside groups and the state’s political parties, which have no limits on what they may receive and spend. Both parties are expected to direct tens of millions of dollars to their favored general election candidates.Justice Kelly has the support of the billionaire Uihlein family, whose political action committee pledged last year to spend millions of dollars on his behalf. So far, the Uihleins’ contributions have amounted to just $40,000 — a pair of maximum individual contributions to his campaign. Last year the Uihlein-backed super PAC spent $28 million in Wisconsin’s Senate race; Richard and Liz Uihlein contributed an additional $2.8 million to the state Republican Party.Dan Curry, a spokesman for Fair Courts America, the Uihleins’ political action committee, declined to answer questions about the family’s spending plans in the Supreme Court race.The enormous stakes in the race so far have not been matched by commensurate public interest. Marquette University Law School, which conducts Wisconsin’s most respected political polls, has no plans to survey voters about the Supreme Court election, said Charles Franklin, the poll’s director.Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said there was no question that spending on the race would eclipse the most expensive U.S. judicial race on record, a $15 million campaign in 2004 for the Illinois Supreme Court, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Mr. Wikler, who has spent recent weeks stumping for cash from major Democratic donors, said he hoped to make the race a national cause célèbre for liberals along the lines of Jon Ossoff’s 2017 House campaign in Georgia or the referendum on abortion rights in Kansas last year.Last year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that most drop boxes for ballots were illegal, a decision that could be revisited with a new justice.Lauren Justice for The New York TimesHe cited the court’s 4-to-3 ruling in December 2020 that rejected the Trump campaign’s effort to invalidate 200,000 votes cast in Milwaukee County and Dane County — an argument that has resonated with top Democrats in Washington worried that a more conservative court could reach an opposite conclusion in the future.“Wisconsin is extremely important for the presidency,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said in an interview. “The Supreme Court is the firewall to an extreme Legislature that wants to curtail voting rights. And so this election is very important, not just for Wisconsin, but for the country.”Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general who leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, plans to campaign in the state after the primary.For Wisconsin Democrats, the election is an opportunity to imagine a world in which they can exert some control over policy rather than simply trying to block Republican proposals, after a dozen years of playing defense.In an interview last month, Mr. Evers called the race “a huge deal.” His election lawyer, Jeffrey A. Mandell, said that if a liberal candidate won, Mr. Mandell would ask the State Supreme Court to take direct action to invalidate the state’s legislative maps on Aug. 2, the day after the new justice is seated.Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator, said the campaign would focus almost entirely on abortion rights — because the next justice will be in position to overturn the state’s ban and because, she argued, the midterms showed that it was a winning issue.“It’s going to be abortion morning, noon and night,” Ms. Roys said, “even more than November was.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Voter Fraud Unit in Arizona Will Shift Focus to Voter Rights

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      Kris Mayes, the state’s new Democratic attorney general, is shifting gears on election issues in an office her Republican predecessor created.Arizona’s new Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, is redirecting an election integrity unit her Republican predecessor created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression. The shift by Ms. Mayes is one of her first acts since she took office this month.The unit’s former leader, Jennifer Wright, meanwhile, has joined a legal effort to invalidate Ms. Mayes’s narrow victory in the November election.“Under my predecessor’s administration, the election integrity unit searched widely for voter fraud and found scant evidence of it occurring in Arizona,” Ms. Mayes said in a statement provided by her office on Monday. “That’s because instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.”The former attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, created the office to investigate voter fraud complaints in Arizona, a battleground state.Ms. Mayes said in the statement that she did not share the priorities of Mr. Brnovich, whom she described as being preoccupied with voter fraud despite isolated cases. The office has five pending voter fraud investigations, as of late October, and a spokesman for Ms. Mayes said on Monday that there was no plan yet for how to proceed with them.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.2024 Presidential Race: As the 2024 primary approaches, the wavering support of evangelical leaders for Donald J. Trump could have far-reaching implications for Republicans.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.Mr. Brnovich did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Republicans in Arizona have amplified conspiracy theories and fraud claims since the 2020 election and the midterms last year, when the attorney general’s race ended with a recount that was decided by 280 votes.Ms. Mayes said that protecting voting access and limiting voter suppression would be at the forefront of her administration.“I will also use this unit to protect elections officials, election volunteers and poll workers against threats of violence and against interference in our elections,” she said. In addition, the unit will seek to defend vote-by-mail rules, which she said “90 percent of Arizonans enjoy and in many cases depend on.”Ms. Wright, a former assistant attorney general who had led the election integrity unit for Mr. Brnovich, announced last week that she had begun a new role as a lawyer for Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican who lost to Ms. Mayes and is planning to continue his legal efforts to try to overturn the election.Ms. Wright referred questions on Monday about her new role to the campaign of Mr. Hamadeh, who was part of a group of prominent election deniers seeking statewide office in Arizona during the midterms.In December, his legal efforts to overturn his election loss were dismissed in court and a recount confirmed his defeat. The outcome dealt another blow to Arizona Republicans who entered the midterms with heightened expectations for victory, seizing on high inflation and President Biden’s flagging job approval numbers. Instead, Democrats won most of the marquee statewide offices.Election deniers pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims. They also tried to seize on the undercounting of 500 ballots in Pinal County, outside Phoenix, which officials attributed to human error and which has been the basis of Mr. Hamadeh’s latest efforts to overturn the election.“Not only do I believe Abe is right, but I also believe that he will be successful in his election contest, and that is why I have joined this fight,” Ms. Wright said in a statement provided by Mr. Hamadeh’s campaign. “I look forward to getting Kris Mayes out of the office she should have never occupied in the first place.”In Arizona, a cauldron of election denialism, Mr. Brnovich represented somewhat of an enigma, defending the state’s vote count after the 2020 presidential election. His stance drew the ire of former President Donald J. Trump, who sharply criticized Mr. Brnovich last June and endorsed Mr. Brnovich’s Republican opponent, Blake Masters, who won the Senate primary but lost in the general election.But Mr. Brnovich has also suggested that the 2020 election revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast last spring, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.” More

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      Representative Ruben Gallego Running for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate Seat

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      Representative Ruben Gallego of Phoenix is set to challenge Ms. Sinema from the left, after she resigned from the Democratic Party.Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix, announced on Monday that he would run for the Senate in 2024, setting up a potential face-off with Senator Kyrsten Sinema over her seat that could carry high stakes for Democrats’ control of the upper chamber.Mr. Gallego, a 43-year-old former state lawmaker and U.S. Marine veteran, began his campaign with a video in which he declares his run to a group of fellow veterans at American Legion Post 124 in Guadalupe, Ariz., near Phoenix. In it, he highlights his humble Chicago origins and his combat experience in Iraq, and he pledges to fight to extend the American dream to more families.“It’s the one thing that we give every American, no matter where they’re born in life,” he says, crediting belief in the dream for his own climb into the halls of Congress. Ms. Sinema, whose opposition to key elements of her party’s agenda had angered Democrats, left the party in December and registered as an independent. Democrats in Arizona quickly turned their attention to her seat. It is expected that Ms. Sinema will seek re-election, but she has not yet announced her intentions.In his campaign ad, Mr. Gallego sought to draw sharp contrasts between himself and Ms. Sinema, taking subtle swipes at the first-term senator over her leadership and ties to corporate interests.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.2024 Presidential Race: As the 2024 primary approaches, the wavering support of evangelical leaders for Donald J. Trump could have far-reaching implications for Republicans.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.“We could argue different ways about how to do it, but at the core, if you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly,” he says in the video, which was released in English and Spanish. “I’m sorry that politicians have let you down, but I’m going to change that.”A head-to-head matchup between Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema in the general election is likely to split the coalition of Democrats and independents who have powered Democratic victories in Arizona in recent elections. The divide could provide an opening for a Republican to retake a seat that has helped Democrats retain their narrow majority in the Senate.Democrats in Arizona previously made motions that they intended to rally behind Ms. Sinema’s Democratic challenger. Mr. Gallego’s campaign team includes veterans from Senator Mark Kelly’s re-election bid in Arizona, as well as Democratic consultants who served on the successful 2022 Senate campaigns for Raphael Warnock in Georgia and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Mr. Gallego’s campaign also has taken on Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist focused on mobilizing Latino voters.Representative Greg Stanton, a Democrat who had also shown interest in running for the seat, said this month that now was “not the right time,” clearing the path for Mr. Gallego in the primary.Among the Republicans weighing Senate runs are Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed news anchor who last year lost her race for governor, and Blake Masters, who was defeated in a Senate race by Mr. Kelly.For both Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema, the greatest factor will be the Republican nominee, said Mike Noble, a longtime nonpartisan pollster based in Phoenix.A center-right candidate could consolidate Republican and right-leaning independent voters, most likely narrowing the chances for both Ms. Sinema and Mr. Gallego. A hard-right candidate like Ms. Lake or Mr. Masters, on the other hand, would most likely intensify the contest between Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema for moderates and the state’s large independent electorate, about one-third of voters.“Heading into next year’s election, Kyrsten Sinema would like nothing else for Christmas than to have Kari Lake as the Republican nominee come 2024,” Mr. Noble said. “They both would love it.”Ms. Sinema was elected to the Senate in a groundbreaking victory in 2018, in the first Democratic triumph since 1976 in a contest for an open Senate seat in Arizona. Her victory pointed to broader political shifts in the state. Once a longtime conservative bastion, Arizona has become a national battleground as the state’s Republican Party has veered further right, while growing numbers of Latino and independent voters have pushed the state to the center.Ms. Sinema embraced solidly centrist positions in defeating her Republican opponent. Voter drives to register more Latinos, who generally vote Democratic in Arizona, also paid off for Ms. Sinema. But distaste for the senator has been growing among Latino activists and other parts of her Democratic base as she has positioned herself as a bulwark against major parts of her former party’s agenda, mainly attempts to increase taxes on corporate America and Wall Street.National Democrats have been tight-lipped about their approach to the 2024 race, as some worry that a full-on offensive against Ms. Sinema in the general election might inadvertently help elect a Republican.Mr. Gallego, who has been among Ms. Sinema’s fiercest critics, had been fielding input from his family over the holidays over whether he would run. He would be the first Latino senator from Arizona should he prevail.In his campaign video released Monday, he describes his hard upbringing as one of four children raised by a single mother in Chicago. He made it to Harvard and worked to pay his way through school before enlisting in the Marine Corps. His combat experience on the front lines in Iraq, where he came under heavy fire and lost some of his closest friends, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder but also inspired him to go into public service, he said.The ad positions Mr. Gallego as an advocate of strong government and a fighter for working-class families who he said “feel they are one or two paychecks away from going under.”“The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates,” he said. “It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.” More

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      Biden’s Classified Documents Scandal Is Really Bad for 2024

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      Remember the iconic image of a smiling Joe Biden in his 1967 Corvette Stingray? It conjured charming Uncle Joe, a retro-cool guy who’d been around the track and knew how to handle it.Four months after President Biden called Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents “irresponsible,” that vintage car — parked at the president’s home in Delaware next to his own boxes containing classified material — has been transformed into a shiny symbol of hypocrisy. If you went into a G.O.P. whataboutism lab and asked for a perfect gaffe, you’d come out with the president snapping last week to a Fox News reporter, “My Corvette is in a locked garage.”Well, the storage room at Mar-a-Lago is locked, too.Just two weeks ago, Democrats were chortling over chaos in the G.O.P., convinced that far-right Republican control of the House would help them in 2024. Then they experienced the exquisite torture that comes with the slow release of politically damaging information, in this case the acknowledgment of classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s former offices and Wilmington home. Now he’s fully in the barrel — targeted by powerful congressional committees, aggressive reporters looking for scoops and a methodical new special counsel, Robert Hur, to match Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump.The optical equivalence between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden is phony, of course. Mr. Trump is a grifter who appears to have intentionally taken hundreds of classified documents, bragging that he kept the folders marked “classified” or “confidential” as “‘cool’ keepsakes.” He said of his stash of classified documents, according to several advisers, “It’s not theirs; it’s mine,” and seemingly defied a subpoena to return the documents, thereby exposing him to possible prosecution for obstruction of justice. Mr. Biden, by contrast, was sloppy and slow to search for and disclose the existence of about 20 stray classified documents but is fully cooperating with authorities.Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, this distinction cannot easily survive the miasma of congressional and special counsel subpoenas, relentless questions from reporters and fresh allegations of impropriety that signal the arrival of a new episodic political drama. Many voters with better things to do with their time than parse the nuances of presidential record keeping may casually conclude that both men are careless, lying politicians.On one level, the classified documents imbroglio is just an acrimonious prelude to the 2024 campaign, a story that will surface, disappear, then surface again with tiresome predictability. But Mr. Biden’s new problems run deeper than that. They represent both a challenge to his core political brand of honor and decency and the start of a more intense, potentially combative period of scrutiny for a president poised to seek re-election. All of which suggests that we may look back on January of 2023 as the end of a relatively brief era in American political life — a period, for all its turmoil, when two Democratic presidents avoided being enmeshed in the grinding machinery of scandal that has otherwise characterized Washington for half a century.All 10 American presidencies since 1973 have faced investigation by a special counsel or independent prosecutor, except one: Barack Obama’s. For eight years, Mr. Obama and his vice president and other high-ranking officials were seen as figures of unusual rectitude, and the impression of integrity returned when Mr. Biden took office after four years of wall-to-wall corruption. But now this sharp ethical contrast with Mr. Trump has been dulled. That complicates the president’s expected re-election campaign — and could even short-circuit it.Most Democrats still think Mr. Biden is honest, and they view his accomplishments on the economy, climate, infrastructure and defending democracy as far more significant than this lapse. But it’s hard to exaggerate the level of Democratic exasperation with him for squandering a huge political advantage on the Mar-a-Lago story and for muddying what may have been the best chance to convict Mr. Trump on federal charges. Mr. Biden’s more serious problem may be with independents, whom he carried by nine points in 2020. Unforced errors can take a toll with them. Even as the classified documents story eventually fades — it will most likely not be a first-tier issue next year — swing voters may see him in a harsher light.To understand why, it’s necessary to look back more than a dozen years. From the first moments of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Republicans attacked him for everything from having been born in Kenya (a racist lie pushed by Mr. Trump, among others) to wearing tan suits. Even when it distracted Mr. Obama, he brushed it all off his shoulders.That’s because the Obama-Biden administration set an exceptionally high ethical standard and usually met it. Mr. Obama’s scandal-less White House liked to keep things “tight,” as he put it — sometimes too tight. If any appointee stepped out of line, the response was often to fire first and ask questions later, as Shirley Sherrod, a Black official at the Agriculture Department, learned in 2010 after Fox News aired a highly edited tape taken from a right-wing website that made it seem she had delivered a racist speech to the N.A.A.C.P. Ms. Sherrod’s remarks were in fact taken badly out of context, but by the time this was recognized, she had already been dismissed. (The agency subsequently offered to rehire her.)Essentially all Obama-era “scandals” collapsed under scrutiny or never touched his White House. Oceans of ink were spilled chronicling the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel company that received loan guarantees from the Energy Department. But no improper conduct was ever established, and the overall loan guarantee program actually turned a profit for the government. Likewise, a poorly planned and ill-fated sting at the U.S.-Mexico border called Operation Fast and Furious brought inconclusive congressional hearings and a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder but did not tarnish Mr. Obama.Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities are closer to home. His allies are reportedly claiming the story will blow over because it’s just D.C. noise, but that was not Hillary Clinton’s experience with her emails and server. In the same way that the grueling Benghazi hearings from 2014 through 2016 softened Mrs. Clinton up for later attacks, the Biden documents story may give new life to unproven allegations about his connections to unsavory Chinese executives in business with members of his family. Did foreign nationals have access to the mishandled classified documents? That’s highly unlikely. But Republican lawmakers will use Democratic charges about security breaches at Mar-a-Lago as an excuse to open outlandish lines of inquiry.And the G.O.P. now has subpoena power to delve into red-meat targets like the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and any communications on it that involved the current president. James Comer, the new chair of the House Oversight Committee, will almost certainly haul Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden, the president’s brother, before the committee to testify about their suspiciously lucrative deals with foreign firms and the way their business intersected disastrously with Hunter Biden’s squalid personal life.To navigate the coming storm, Joe Biden needs to up his political game — no small feat for a man of his age — and avoid becoming his own worst enemy. First, he will have to keep his famous temper out of public view. If Uncle Joe morphs into Testy Joe, over his son or his handling of classified documents or anything else, his problems will worsen. Beyond an improving economy and a successful conclusion to the war in Ukraine, the best medicine for his political ailments would be a surprising legislative victory. In the new Congress, 18 House Republicans represent districts that Mr. Biden carried in 2020. If Mr. Biden can persuade just a handful of them to vote against defaulting on the national debt and sending the global economy into a depression — a harder task than it sounds because of all-but-inevitable right-wing primary challenges — he’ll get credit for averting a major economic crisis.But even if Mr. Biden puts wins on the board, survives venomous Republican lawmakers and gets off with a slap on the wrist in the special counsel’s report, the classified documents story has likely stripped him of a precious political asset with some independents and Democrats: the benefit of the doubt. The general feeling that Mr. Biden — like Mr. Obama — is clean and scandal-free has been replaced by the normal Washington assumption of some level of guilt.Republicans are ferocious attack dogs, especially when they have something to chew on. And Mr. Biden, a better president than candidate, has never had the nimbleness necessary for good defense. When he first ran for president in 1988, he was forced to withdraw amid minor charges of plagiarism that a more dexterous politician might have survived. Over the years, his skills on the stump deteriorated. He performed poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020 and recovered in South Carolina and won the nomination only because Democrats concluded en masse that he was the best candidate to beat Mr. Trump.That remains the prevailing assumption inside the Democratic Party: He did it before and can do it again. But it’s not clear that rank-and-file voters agree. Last year a New York Times/Siena College poll showed nearly two-thirds of Democrats didn’t want Mr. Biden to run. While his standing improved after the midterms, he’s down in the first polls released since the documents story broke.The president is now an elderly swimmer in a sea of sharks. And some of them may even be Democrats. It’s not hard to envision an ambitious primary challenger arguing, more in sorrow than in anger, that he or she supports most of the Biden record but elections are about the future and the party needs a more vigorous candidate. (Mr. Biden would be 86 at the end of a second term.) Democratic leaders will be shocked and appalled by the upstart’s temerity in spoiling the party’s impressive unity. But New Hampshire is full of anti-establishment independents, and basically the entire state is furious with Mr. Biden for proposing to bump its primary to the second week of the schedule. He could easily lose or be weakened there, opening the door for other Democrats. Which ones? That’s what primaries are for.In the meantime, the president isn’t looking good in polls pitting him against Republicans in hypothetical 2024 matchups. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump have been running about even, a depressing finding for Democrats. And if the G.O.P. nominates a younger candidate like Ron DeSantis, Mr. Biden could be the octogenarian underdog in the general election.Imagine instead that the president takes a leaf from Nancy Pelosi and decides not to run. Mr. Comer and the clownish members of his committee would probably end up training most of their fire on Democrats not named Biden. Democrats would “turn the page,” as Mr. Obama recommended in 2008, to a crop of fresher candidates, probably governors, who contrast better with Mr. Trump and would have good odds of beating a younger Republican. And the smiling old gentleman in the Corvette — his shortcomings forgotten and his family protected — would assume his proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history.Jonathan Alter, a longtime political journalist, writes the newsletter Old Goats and has written books on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.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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      States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024

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      Republicans are focused on voter ID rules and making it harder to cast mail ballots, while Democrats are seeking to expand access through automatic voter registration.The tug of war over voting rights and rules is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats fight to get new laws on the books before the 2024 presidential election.Republicans have pushed to tighten voting laws with renewed vigor since former President Donald J. Trump made baseless claims of fraud after losing the 2020 election, while Democrats coming off midterm successes are trying to channel their momentum to expand voting access and thwart efforts to undermine elections.States like Florida, Texas and Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of state government, have already passed sweeping voting restrictions that include criminal oversight initiatives, limits on drop boxes, new identification requirements and more.While President Biden and Democrats in Congress were unable to pass federal legislation last year that would protect voting access and restore elements of the landmark Voting Rights Act stripped away by the Supreme Court in 2013, not all reform efforts have floundered.In December, Congress updated the Electoral Count Act, closing a loophole that Mr. Trump’s supporters had sought to exploit to try to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.Now the focus has returned to the state level. Here are some of the key voting measures in play this year:Ohio Republicans approve new restrictions.Ohioans must now present a driver’s license, passport or other official photo ID to vote in person under a G.O.P. measure that was signed into law on Jan. 6 by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican.The law also set tighter deadlines for voters to return mail-in ballots and provide missing information on them. Absentee ballot requests must be received earlier as well.Republicans, who control the Legislature in Ohio, contend that the new rules will bolster election integrity, yet they have acknowledged that the issue has not presented a problem in the state. Overall, voter fraud is exceedingly rare.Several voting rights groups were quick to file a federal lawsuit challenging the changes, which they said would disenfranchise Black people, younger and older voters, as well as those serving in the military and living abroad.Texas G.O.P. targets election crimes and ballot initiatives.Despite enacting sweeping restrictions on voting in 2021 that were condemned by civil rights groups and the Justice Department in several lawsuits, Republican lawmakers in Texas are seeking to push the envelope further.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.G.O.P. Debates: The Republican National Committee has asked several major TV networks to consider sponsoring debates, an intriguing show of détente toward the mainstream media and an early sign that the party is making plans for a contested 2024 presidential primary.An Important Election: The winner of a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April will determine who holds a 4-to-3 majority in a critical presidential battleground state.Dozens of bills related to voting rules and election administration were filed for the legislative session that began this month. While many are from Democrats seeking to ease barriers to voting, Republicans control both chambers of the Texas Legislature and the governor’s office. It is not clear which bills will gain the necessary support to become laws.Some G.O.P. proposals focus on election crimes, including one that would authorize the secretary of state to designate an election marshal responsible for investigating potential election violations.“Similar bills have passed in Florida and in Georgia,” said Jasleen Singh, a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We should be concerned about whether this will happen in Texas as well.”Under another bill, a voter could request that the secretary of state review local election orders and language on ballot propositions and reject any that are found to be “misleading, inaccurate or prejudicial,” part of a push by Republicans in several states to make it harder to pass ballot measures after years of progressive victories.One proposal appears to target heavily populated, Democratic-controlled counties, giving the state attorney general the power to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate voter fraud allegations if local officials decline to do so. Another bill goes further, allowing the attorney general to seek an injunction against local prosecutors who don’t investigate claims of voter fraud and pursue civil penalties against them.A 19-year-old registering to vote in Minnesota, where Democrats introduced a bill that would allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. Tim Gruber for The New York TimesDemocrats in Minnesota and Michigan go on offense.Democrats are seeking to harness their momentum from the midterm elections to expand voting access in Minnesota and Michigan, where they swept the governors’ races and legislative control.In Minnesota, the party introduced legislation in early January that would create an automatic voter registration system and allow applicants who are at least 16 years old to preregister to vote. The measure would also automatically restore the voting rights of convicted felons upon their release from prison and for those who do not receive prison time as part of a sentence.In Michigan, voters approved a constitutional amendment in November that creates a nine-day early voting period and requires the state to fund absentee ballot drop boxes. Top Democrats in the state are also weighing automatic voter registration and have discussed criminalizing election misinformation.Pennsylvania Republicans want to expand a voter ID law.Because of the veto power of the governor, an office the Democrats held in the November election, Republicans in Pennsylvania have resorted to trying to amend the state constitution in order to pass a voter ID bill.The complex amendment process, which ultimately requires putting the question to voters, is the subject of pending litigation.Both chambers of the Legislature need to pass the bill this session in order to place it on the ballot, but Democrats narrowly flipped control of the House in the midterms — and they will seek to bolster their majority with three special elections next month.“If the chips fall in a certain way, it is unlikely that this will move forward and it might quite possibly be dead,” said Susan Gobreski, a board member of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “But it ain’t dead yet.”Gov. Josh Shapiro has indicated an openness to compromise with Republicans on some voting rules.“I’m certainly willing to have an honest conversation about voter I.D., as long as that is something that is not used as a hindrance to voting,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview in December.First-time voters and those applying for absentee ballots are currently required to present identification in Pennsylvania, but Republicans want to expand the requirement to all voters in every election and have proposed issuing voter ID cards. Critics say the proposal would make it harder to vote and could compromise privacy.Mr. Shapiro has separately said he hoped that Republicans in the 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, have been a flash point in a series of election lawsuits filed by Republicans.Georgia’s top election official, a Republican, calls to end runoff system.Early voting fell precipitously in Georgia’s nationally watched Senate runoff in December after Republicans, who control of state government, cut in half the number of days for casting ballots before Election Day.Long lines at some early-voting sites, especially in the Atlanta area, during the runoff led to complaints of voter suppression.But the G.O.P. lost the contest, after a set of runoff defeats a year earlier that gave Democrats control of the Senate.Now Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who is Georgia’s secretary of state and its top election official, wants to abandon the runoff system altogether, saying that the condensed timeline had put added strain on poll workers.Critics of ranked-choice voting cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican.Ash Adams for The New York TimesRepublicans in Alaska want to undo some voting changes approved in 2020.After a special election last year and the midterms, when Alaska employed a novel election system for the first time, some conservatives reeling from losses at the polls have directed their ire at a common target: ranked-choice voting.At least three Republican lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to repeal some of the electoral changes that were narrowly approved by voters in 2020, which introduced a “top-four” open primary and ranked-choice voting in general elections. In addition to deciding winners based on the candidate who receives the most votes, the bills also seek to return to a closed primary system, in which only registered party members can participate.Supporters of the new system contend that it sets a higher bar to get elected than to simply earn a plurality of votes.But critics have called the format confusing. Some have blamed it for the defeat of Sarah Palin, the Republican former governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee, in a special House election in August and again in November for the same office.They also cited the system as being instrumental to the re-election last year of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a centrist Republican who angered some members of her party when she voted to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6 attack.Still, Republican foes of ranked-choice elections could face hurdles within their own party. According to The Anchorage Daily News, the incoming Senate president, a Republican, favors keeping the system in place.Nebraska Republicans aim to sharply curb mail voting.Nebraska does not require voters to provide a reason to vote early by mail, but two Republican state senators want to make wholesale changes that would mostly require in-person voting on Election Day.Under a bill proposed by Steve Halloran and Steve Erdman, G.O.P. senators in the unicameral legislature, only members of the U.S. military and residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities could vote by mail.The measure would further require all ballots to be counted on Election Day, which would become a state holiday in Nebraska, along with the day of the statewide primary.The League of Women Voters of Nebraska opposes the bill and noted that 11 of the state’s 93 counties vote entirely by mail under a provision that gives officials in counties with under 10,000 people the option to do so.“This is an extreme bill and would be very unpopular,” MaryLee Mouton, the league’s president, said in an email. “When most states are moving to expand voting by mail, a bill to restrict vote by mail would negatively impact both our rural and urban communities.”In the November election, Nebraskans overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative that created a statewide photo ID requirement for voting.A Republican bill in Missouri would hunt for election fraud.In Missouri, where Republicans control the governor’s office and Legislature, one G.O.P. bill would create an Office of Election Crimes and Security. The office would report to the secretary of state and would be responsible for reviewing election fraud complaints and conducting investigations.Its investigators would also be authorized to enter poling places or offices of any election authority on Election Day, during absentee voting or the canvass of votes. More

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      Gillibrand, Looking Left, Launches Campaign For a Third Term

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      Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York will be a heavy favorite to defend her seat in 2024, but a primary challenge could still emerge.Ending months of speculation about her future, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a liberal Democrat from upstate New York, announced in recent days that she would seek a third full term next year.Ms. Gillibrand, 56, enters the contest as a heavy favorite. The seat is considered safely Democratic, particularly in a presidential election year. And she has $4.4 million in cash and a string of recent legislative accomplishments — campaign assets she outlined in a memo rolling out her run last week.On Thursday, Ms. Gillibrand said she was confident she would win despite Republicans’ strong performance in the state in November. She also dismissed rumors that had swirled among New York Democrats in recent months that she might give up the seat.“I love being senator of New York, and I think my ability to deliver for our state has never been greater,” she said in a phone interview from Israel, where she was part of a Senate delegation visiting the country.The most pressing question facing her campaign now is whether anyone from her own party will try to challenge her. After a string of high-profile primaries from the left in New York, Democratic strategists, politicians and donors have spent months speculating whether an ambitious young member of Congress, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ritchie Torres, would take on Ms. Gillibrand.Since her appointment in 2009, the senator has made herself one of the chamber’s most vocal proponents for women and families and has shed some moderate stances on guns and immigrations to become a reliably liberal vote. Those positions could make her difficult to defeat, particularly after she passed long-term priorities this term to combat gun trafficking and overhaul the way military sexual assault cases are adjudicated.But some critics have said that since an ill-fated run for president in 2020, Ms. Gillibrand has at times appeared aloof from her home state and restless for another office, fueling speculation about her intentions. Nor has she benefited — fairly or not — from comparisons with the state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, whose omnipresence at even the smallest New York political gatherings and stature as the Senate majority leader have often left her in his shadow.In the interview, Ms. Gillibrand said that she was committed to her current role and had “unfinished work” on Capitol Hill, including a national paid family and medical leave plan.She detailed plans for a campaign to address concerns about crime, which helped Republicans notch their best performance in decades, and to increase outreach to urban and suburban communities that slipped from the party last fall. And she said that another run for the White House was “not in the cards for me in the next cycle.”She also dismissed the threat of a primary. “I’m not concerned about that, and I would put my record against anyone,” she said.Among the most frequently discussed potential challengers are Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a national leader of the party’s left wing, and Mr. Torres, a more moderate second-term congressman. Both are young, charismatic, ambitious lawmakers of color who live in the Bronx and could, in theory, put together compelling campaigns. But so far, there are no signs that either one is taking serious steps toward a direct confrontation.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez allowed a similar bubble of speculation to build around whether she would challenge Mr. Schumer in 2022 but ultimately did not pursue it. Her spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, declined to comment for this story.Mr. Torres recently cut a $10,000 check to Ms. Gillibrand’s re-election fund, one of her aides said — not typically a sign of antagonism. Asked by text on Wednesday if he was considering a primary, Mr. Torres said, “The answer to your question is ‘no.’”Strategists close to New York’s Working Families Party and other left-leaning groups said their movement was now debating how to recalibrate after embarrassing losses in high-profile citywide and statewide races in 2021 and 2022. Besides, with her liberal track record, Ms. Gillibrand is not a top target.“From where I am sitting, I don’t see a real appetite for a challenge,” said Camille Rivera, a Democratic strategist well connected in New York’s left-leaning political circles.But Ms. Rivera said the senator does need to make some changes. “She definitely does need to be more present, but I found that she does a lot of work,” Ms. Rivera continued. “Mostly it’s taking on harder local issues like homelessness, affordable housing and mental health. ”It is no clearer whom Republicans might put forward to challenge Ms. Gillibrand. Chele Farley, the party’s nominee who lost to Ms. Gillibrand by 33 points in 2018, said she was “focused on supporting the new Republican House majority” and had not thought about 2024.Associates of Lee Zeldin, the former Republican congressman who came within six points of defeating Gov. Kathy Hochul last fall, said he had spoken about the race, but they discounted the chances he would run. In a statement, Mr. Zeldin said he was fielding calls about “various positions in government” but did not have “any update on that front to announce at this time.”Behind the scenes, Ms. Gillibrand has set a busy pace in recent weeks, leaving nothing to chance. She has met with prominent labor leaders, county Democratic leaders across New York and several deep-pocketed donors.Many of those Democratic leaders appear to be doing their best to keep a clear field for her.A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Angelo Roefaro, said the senior senator from New York would be fully supportive of Ms. Gillibrand’s campaign. Prominent union leaders made the point more starkly.“My advice to anyone thinking of a primary is, don’t do it,” said John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents 34,000 New York transit workers.“She’s the exact type of Democrat that has what it takes to stop the Republicans from swiping even more ground in New York State,” added Mr. Samuelsen, who recently had lunch with Ms. Gillibrand in Washington. “And she’s exactly the kind of Democrat that will fend off a challenge from the progressive left.” More