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      More Black Women Run for Office, but Prospects Fade the Higher They Go

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      A Black woman has never been a governor, and only two have been senators. Despite progress at lower levels of government, and one boundary-breaking vice president, familiar barriers are slow to fall.As Representative Barbara Lee hits the campaign trail for a Senate seat in California, significant hurdles await her. The race is expected to be one of the most competitive, and expensive, in the country. Even more daunting, she will face one of the strongest glass ceilings in American politics.When Ms. Lee, 76, was first elected to Congress in 1998, the House had 11 Black women in office, and only one Black woman served in the Senate. With the swearing-in of Jennifer McClellan as the first Black woman to represent Virginia on Tuesday, the House now has 28 Black women in its ranks, a new high-water mark, but the Senate has none.“It blows my mind that in 2023, I am a first,” Ms. McClellan said in an interview Tuesday. “Frankly, it is this imagination gap that people have had for a very long time — that because they haven’t seen a Black woman in these offices, they can’t imagine it.”Over the past decade, Black women have made tremendous gains: Kamala Harris broke barriers as the nation’s first Black, Asian American and female vice president. More Black women are leading major cities, and many more have sought Senate seats and governorships.But winning those offices still poses familiar and enduring challenges for women of color, and Black women in particular. Many confront both blatant racism and sexism, along with subtler forms of racial and gender bias that, candidates and political advocates said, make it more difficult for them to raise money to pay for the costly work of hiring staff and buying advertising in expensive markets.Shirley Chisholm announcing a presidential run in 1972. Four years earlier, she was the first Black woman elected to Congress.Don Hogan Charles/The New York TimesThe numbers are stark: Only two Black women have served in the Senate in its 233-year history — Ms. Harris, who was elected in 2016 in California, and Carol Moseley Braun, the Illinois Democrat who served one term in the 1990s.Out of 64 Black women who have run for the Senate since 2010, only eight have secured major-party nominations. No Black woman has ever been elected governor and, out of the 22 who have run for the position since 2010, only four have become major-party nominees, according to data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. All of the nominees have been Democrats.“It is absolutely shameful that we do not have a Black woman in the Senate, especially given the contributions of Black women to this country,” said Stefanie Brown James, a co-founder and senior adviser at the Collective PAC, which works to elect Black candidates.Interviewed before her swearing-in, Ms. McClellan said her run for Congress after nearly two decades as a state lawmaker was much easier than her first, when she was 32 and had never held public office but had been highly involved in Democratic politics. But she said her trajectory showed the higher standards Black women must meet.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Asian Americans: In the New York governor’s election last year, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. The shift is part of a national trend.The MAGA-fication of a College: North Idaho College trustees vowed to root out the school administration’s “deep state.” A full-blown crisis followed, and the school’s accreditation is now at risk.SOS Candidate: Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois is seen by some Democrats as one of the few Democrats who could take up the challenge of a presidential campaign at a moment’s notice. For now his ambitions don’t include the White House, he says.Chicago Mayor’s Race: The mayoral runoff pits two Democrats against each other who are on opposite sides of the debate over crime and policing — a divide national Republicans hope to exploit.“We have to prove ourselves at another level that others are not required to,” she said. “I just want to emphasize that because someone’s experience may be different, it doesn’t mean it is less valuable.”Black leaders and advocates working to increase women’s representation in politics still see signs for optimism. The dearth of Black women in government has encouraged more to seek higher office. And much like the generation of Black female politicians in the mold of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, this next wave of leaders has high-profile role models. They include Ms. Harris; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court; and Stacey Abrams, whose first campaign for governor in Georgia in 2018 propelled her to prominence as a political tactician, even if her second run exposed her limitations.“The possibilities of the electoral map for Black women’s leadership has expanded over the last 10 years, and the numbers of Black women running and winning — and running and losing — are all rich data points to be able to build the blueprint forward,” said Glynda C. Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights for America, which is dedicated to helping Black women win elected office.Natalie James, a first-time candidate in Arkansas, lost in her Senate run last year. Her opponent had vastly more financial resources.Joshua Asante for The New York TimesKrystle Matthews, a former state lawmaker from South Carolina, won the Democratic nomination for a Senate seat but lost in the general election.Alex Hicks/Spartanburg Herald-Journal, via, via ReutersJennifer McClellan, after being sworn into office on Tuesday, is the first Black woman to represent Virginia in the House.John C. Clark/Associated PressThe void in the Senate in particular has served as a motivator, said A’shanti F. Gholar, president of Emerge, which recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office. “So many bills impact Black women, and we don’t have a voice in implementing them at all,” she said, citing legislation on abortion rights and the high mortality rate among Black mothers.But for Black women, the hurdles to higher office begin even before they decide to run. In races for governor, most voters still tend to picture men in the job, and they require women to provide far more evidence about qualifications, according to research by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonpartisan group working to increase the ranks of women in politics whose namesake is a Massachusetts philanthropist with no relation to the congresswoman.“Men can release their résumé, and it is taken at face value,” said Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s executive director. “Women have to show what they have accomplished in each position.”An increasingly toxic and divisive political environment that often turns Black female candidates and politicians into targets on social media has only added to the burden of entry, former candidates and campaign officials said. A prime example is Ms. Harris, who faced an onslaught of racist and sexist online attacks on her gender, identity and appearance during and after the 2020 campaign.Racism and sexism are common enough on the campaign trail, and women running for office, Black or white, are peppered with concerns about their electability. The question is pointed: Can she win?Black women often come up against another question: “Can she win enough white voters?” said Kelly Dittmar, the research director and a scholar at the Rutgers center.In fact, the number of Black women serving the House from majority-white congressional districts jumped to five in 2020 from two in 2018. But Nadia E. Brown, the chairwoman of the women’s and gender studies program at Georgetown University, said Black female candidates still have greater difficulty winning in statewide races in part because media coverage — both reflecting and reinforcing the biases of voters in general — tends to treat Black female candidates “as experts only in issues that Black women disproportionately deal with,” minimizing the scope of their experience.“They are not seen as the go-to people on tax policy or the go-to people on immigration reform,” she said.Money, however, is perhaps the biggest hurdle. “For Black women to win, the money has to come early, and it has to come often, and it has to come in competitive amounts,” said Ms. James of the Collective PAC. The donations they receive tend to be fewer and smaller, researchers and Black political operatives and activists said.Despite the obstacles, the support networks have grown, and in recent election cycles Black women have made headway in hard-to-win places. In 2020, Marquita Bradshaw, a Tennessee Democrat and environmental activist, was the only Black woman to secure a major-party nomination for Senate.Last cycle, all four Black women nominated for Senate came from Southern states.In Florida, Representative Val Demings raised about $81 million, the third-highest fund-raising amount of any Senate candidate, to take on Senator Marco Rubio. He raised nearly $51 million — and won.In the Senate race in North Carolina, Cheri Beasley, a Democrat and former chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, raised more than double what her Republican opponent, Representative Ted Budd, pulled in, but was outmatched in outside spending by Republicans. That plus Mr. Budd’s endorsement by former President Donald J. Trump seemed to tip the scales in an otherwise sleepy race.The two other Black women who won nominations for Senate races last cycle — Krystle Matthews, a former state lawmaker from South Carolina, and Natalie James, a first-time candidate in Arkansas — never raised anywhere near the several million dollars required to mount competitive campaigns in those deep-red states, each bringing in only around $100,000.A Stacey Abrams sign in Georgia in November. Ms. Abrams lost her race for governor.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. James, a real estate agent and political activist from Little Rock, helped organize mass protests after the murder of George Floyd. She has been considering running again, she said, as she has watched Ms. Lee roll out her campaign.Among those talked about as future candidates for Senate or governor are trailblazers like Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell of Massachusetts, the first Black woman to hold statewide office, and Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat who is the first woman and first Black person to represent Delaware in Congress.In the California race to succeed Senator Dianne Feinstein, Ms. Lee, the highest-ranking Black woman in the House, has several advantages. She serves on powerful House appropriations and budget committees and has gained national recognition as a leading antiwar voice in Congress. But she started behind her competitors in fund-raising, and her rivals, Representatives Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, built national profiles and donor networks during the Trump administration.Ms. Lee, whose announcement video underscored the racism she has confronted, said she was first inspired to run by Ms. Chisholm, who took her on as an organizer and director during her historic 1972 presidential bid and, Ms. Lee said, taught her to dismantle unjust rules.But Ms. Lee had been challenging the status quo long before. As a high school student, she successfully challenged cheerleader tryouts that were overseen by a small committee and excluded women of color. The rule changes she helped usher in allowed the entire student body to pick its squad members, and Ms. Lee became the school’s first Black cheerleader.As she now runs for the Senate, she said, a common refrain she hears from white voters and potential donors is: “We love you, Barbara. We think you would make a great senator. But Adam Schiff, he just looks like a senator.”“It is the same situation as years ago, when I did not look like what a cheerleader should look like,” she said. “But all of this is positive because I am challenging that.” More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Rise From Unknown to Heir Apparent

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      Asthaa Chaturvedi, Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicAs the race to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate gets underway, one figure has emerged as a particularly powerful rival to Donald J. Trump.That person, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has broken away from the pack by turning his state into a laboratory for a post-Trump version of conservatism.On today’s episodePatricia Mazzei, the Miami bureau chief for The New York Times.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis high-profile tour and book release could be the first steps to announcing a potential candidacy.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBackground readingMr. DeSantis will soon get a chance to check off his wish list of proposals for Florida, including expanding gun rights.In his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” Mr. DeSantis offers a template for governing.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Patricia Mazzei More

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      J.B. Pritzker Is Democrats’ ‘Break Glass’ Candidate

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      CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois sat comfortably in an office board room high above the Loop on Monday and halfheartedly batted away the notion that he was preparing a run for the White House.The billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune may be seen by some Democrats as the “in case of emergency break glass” candidate, one of the few prominent politicians who could stand up a White House run at a moment’s notice. Although President Biden has said he intends to mount a campaign, that has not eased Democrats’ obvious worry: the famously dilatory Hamlet on the Potomac might decide not to run for re-election at 81, and worry could turn to panic.But while Mr. Pritzker declined to provide a yea or nay on whether he would run, he added that a last-minute swap of an understudy for Mr. Biden was “such an odd hypothetical if you ask me.”“I think it assumes a lot of things about someone who’s 80 in this world today. No kidding, you know, 80 is a lot different today than it was in the ’80s,” he said with his signature aw-shucks wave.Politicians hate hypotheticals, or say they do to dodge questions, but if Mr. Biden cannot or will not run, the Democratic Party would have 3.6 billion reasons — Forbes’s most recent estimate of Mr. Pritzker’s net worth — to turn to the Illinois governor.“I intend to be impactful in the 2024 elections, helping Democrats run for Congress, helping Democrats run for United States Senate, and helping Joe Biden win re-election,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesFour months after winning a second term by 12.5 percentage points, Jay Robert Pritzker, 58, has maintained his political operation and his ambition. His influence and money reach far beyond state lines, and a string of progressive victories in the last year has raised his stature.“He would run for two good reasons,” said Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Peoria who served as a transportation secretary in the Obama administration. “He’s a billionaire who’s not afraid to spend his own money, and he’s very progressive, which is where the Democratic Party is today.”Indeed, Mr. Pritzker has turned center-left Illinois into an island of prairie progressivism, much as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who won re-election last year by 19 points, has enacted a blood-red “Florida Blueprint” that he is now pitching to the wider nation ahead of an expected campaign.And while Mr. DeSantis has created a conservative bastion in Florida over the wishes of millions in his diverse state, Mr. Pritzker’s policies have rankled much of Illinois beyond Chicagoland. Under his leadership, the legislature has approved a $15 minimum wage, legalized recreational cannabis, ended cash bail, guaranteed access to abortions and gender-affirming care and banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 6The race begins. More

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      ‘Different From the Other Southerners’: Jimmy Carter’s Relationship With Black America

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      How a white politician from the South who once supported segregationist policies eventually won the enduring support of Black voters.ATLANTA — Without Black voters, there would have been no President Jimmy Carter.In 1976, African Americans catapulted the underdog Democrat to the White House with 83 percent support. Four years later, they stuck by him, delivering nearly identical numbers even as many white voters abandoned him in favor of his victorious Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.This enduring Black support for Mr. Carter illuminates two intertwined and epochal American stories, each of them powered by themes of pragmatism and redemption. One is the story of a white Georgia politician who began his quest for power in the Jim Crow South — a man who, as late as 1970, declared his respect for the arch-segregationist George Wallace in an effort to attract white votes, but whose personal convictions and political ambitions later pushed him to try to change the racist environment in which he had been raised.The other is the story of a historically oppressed people flexing their growing electoral muscle after the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed obstacles to the ballot box. Certainly, for some Black voters, candidate Carter was simply the least bad option. But for others, the elections of 1976 and 1980 were an opportunity to take the measure of this changing white man, recognizing the opportunity he presented, and even his better angels.“His example in Georgia as a representative of the New South, as one of the new governors from the South, was exciting, and it was appealing,” said Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat whose Georgia congressional district includes Mr. Carter’s home. “It carried the day in terms of people wanting a fresh moral face for the presidency.”Mr. Carter’s support for Black Americans sheds light on the political evolution of the man, who at 98, is America’s longest living president. (Mr. Carter entered hospice care earlier this month.)Mr. Carter at an event in Georgia during the fall 1976 presidential campaign.Guy DeLort/WWD, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesMr. Carter greeting supporters in New York City in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesThe foundation of his relationships with Black voters and leaders was built in his home base of Plains, in rural Sumter County, Ga. Its Black residents can recall his efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies and practices that targeted the majority Black community.Jonathan Alter, in his 2020 biography “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” noted that Mr. Carter, as a school board member, had made a number of moves to accommodate or uphold the local segregationist system of the 1950s, at one point trying to shift resources from Black schools to white schools in the name of sound fiscal management.But Bobby Fuse, 71, a longtime civil rights activist who grew up in Americus, Ga., a few miles from Plains, recalled that Mr. Carter had also shown moments of real character. Among other things, he noted Mr. Carter’s objection to his Baptist church’s refusal to allow Black people to worship there.“I wouldn’t have voted for anybody running against Jimmy Carter, more than likely,” said Mr. Fuse, who said he had first voted for Mr. Carter in his successful 1970 governor’s race. “Because I knew him to be an upright man different from the other Southerners.”There were seeds of this difference early in the life of Mr. Carter. But as a young politician, it did not always translate into action. And the repressive environment of the mid-20th century meant that he had no Black voters to woo when he started his first foray into electoral politics with a 1962 bid for a South Georgia State Senate seat. Due to racist restrictions, hardly any Black people were registered to vote in his district at the time.Mr. Carter waved to the crowd as he and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived at Plains Baptist Church to attend services in 1976.Associated PressPresident Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, with former President Bill Clinton and Mr. Carter at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHistorians say that Mr. Carter, early in his career, was both a creature and a critic of the strict segregationist system he had been born into. He largely kept his head down as civil rights advocates fought and sacrificed to change the status quo, with serious, and sometimes dangerous, protests and crackdowns flaring up in Sumter County.Later, once he had achieved positions of power, he was outspoken about renouncing racial discrimination, seeking means to redress it and trying to live up to those principles. During his presidency, he famously enrolled his daughter, Amy, in a public school in Washington, D.C. Decades after leaving the White House, he offered a full-throated rebuke of Barack Obama’s Republican critics, calling their attacks racism loosely disguised as partisanship during his presidency.“He saw his role as an elder statesman,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. “The fact that you have an elderly white president, from the South, who is there saying, ‘Look, the emperor has no clothes; that argument has no weight; that dog won’t hunt,’ is something that he didn’t necessarily have to do.”Mr. Carter had grown up with Black playmates in the tiny community of Archery, Ga. As a boy, his moral and spiritual north star had been a Black woman, Rachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter property. He slept many nights on the floor of her home when his parents were out of town. Mr. Alter, the biographer,  wrote that she had taught him about nature and had impressed him with her selflessness. Mr. Alter wrote that Mr. Carter had even been teased in his all-white elementary school for “sounding Black.”Traffic in Warm Springs, Ga., as visitors arrived to hear Mr. Carter speak in 1976.Gary Settle/The New York TimesRachel Clark, the wife of a worker on the Carter family’s farm, whom Mr. Carter credited with teaching him morals.National Park ServiceBy the mid-1950s, Mr. Carter returned from a stint as a naval officer and settled in Plains, where he built on the family’s successful peanut business. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which dismantled the old separate-but-equal regime for American schools, had inflamed white Southerners. Despite his efforts to appease white parents while on the school board, he was also, Mr. Alter notes, “the only prominent white man in Plains” who declined to join the local chapter of the racist White Citizens’ Council.After winning his 1962 State Senate race, Mr. Carter, a man of searing ambition, set his sights on the governor’s mansion but was defeated in 1966. He ran again and won in 1970, with a campaign full of unsubtle dog whistles to aggrieved white voters that included promises to restore “law and order” to their communities and, according to Mr. Alter, the dissemination of a “fact sheet” that reminded white voters that Mr. Carter’s Democratic opponent, former Gov. Carl Sanders, had attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral.In the Democratic primary, Black voters took notice: Mr. Sanders, in the runoff, garnered roughly 90 percent of their votes. But by the general election, Mr. Carter was campaigning heavily in Black churches.The dog-whistle strategy had generated its share of bitterness and criticism. But a course correction followed, in the form of Mr. Carter’s inaugural address.“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he said.Mr. Carter’s supporters at the Democratic convention.H. Christoph/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMembers of the Concord Baptist Church congregation listening to Mr. Carter speaking in Brooklyn in 1980.Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times“It was really dramatic for all of us, because he said it in that forum, as he was being sworn in,” Mr. Fuse recalled. “And hopefully we were going to see some activity from that.”They did. Mr. Carter expanded the presence of Black Georgians in state government, from senior officials to state troopers, and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office.Black skeptics were converted into allies in other ways. In an interview this week, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who would serve as ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Carter, recalled having “a real prejudice to overcome” when the two men first met as Mr. Carter was running for governor.When the matter of Fred Chappell, Sumter County’s notoriously racist sheriff, came up, Mr. Carter called him a “good friend.” Mr. Young was taken aback: Mr. Chappell had once arrested Dr. King after a protest. When Dr. King’s associates tried to bring him blankets to ward off the cold, Mr. Chappell refused them and turned on the fan instead.Later, however, Mr. Young said he had gotten to know Mr. Carter’s family, including his mother, Lillian. Mr. Young, too, came to trust him. “I decided that he was always all right on race,” Mr. Young said. “He never discriminated between his Black friends and white friends.”Mr. Carter, as president, meeting in 1977 with his commission for the appointment of Black Americans to the federal judiciary in the Fifth Circuit.Harvey Georges/Associated PressAndrew Young, right, campaigning for Mr. Carter in Boston in 1976.Mikki Ansin/Getty ImagesIt went the same way with other influential civil rights leaders in Georgia, including Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr. According to the author and journalist Kandy Stroud, the elder Mr. King sent a telegram to voters lauding Mr. Carter’s appointment of Black judges and his support for a fair housing law, among other things. “I know a man I can trust, Blacks can trust, and that man is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.By the time Mr. Carter started his 1976 bid for the White House, it was these leaders who spread the message beyond Georgia voters that Mr. Carter was worthy of their trust. They helped bolster the “peanut brigade,” the nickname for the team of staff members and volunteers spread across the country to campaign for him, making it a mix of Black and white Carter supporters.“They had to tell these people in the rest of the country, ‘Yeah, he’s governor of Georgia, but he’s a different kind of governor of Georgia,’” Mr. Fuse said.In a recent interview, the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled that the King family had lobbied him to support Mr. Carter in 1976. That went a long way, he said, but so did Mr. Carter’s presentation. “A Southern guy that would stand up and talk about racism?” he said. “This was the kind of guy that my uncle trusted down South. And he connected with us for that.”As a presidential candidate, however, Mr. Carter again showed his propensity for trying to have it both ways in a racially divided country.George Skelton, a Los Angeles Times columnist, recently recalled covering the candidate as he campaigned in Wisconsin and watching as he seemed to give contradictory messages on school busing to separate groups of Black and white voters within the span of a single day.Mrs. Coretta King accepting the Presidential Medal on behalf of her late husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1977.Associated PressMr. Carter, second from right, shaking hands with Black seniors at the Watts Labor Community Action Council in Los Angeles, in 1976.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAnd in a speech about protecting neighborhoods, Mr. Carter used the phrase “ethnic purity,” creating a mini-scandal. Soon after, Mr. Young told him that the use of the phrase had been a “disaster for the campaign.” Mr. Carter issued an apology.But Mr. Carter also found common cultural ground with Black voters nationwide, many of whom shared his Christian faith. They saw how comfortable he was in Black churches. “‘Born again’ is the secret of his success with Blacks,” Ethel Allen, a Black surgeon from Philadelphia, told Ms. Stroud at the time.As president, Mr. Carter sought “to mend the racial divide,” said Kai Bird, another Carter biographer. Mr. Bird noted that food aid was significantly expanded under Mr. Carter, benefiting many poor Black residents in rural areas. Mr. Bird also noted that the Carter administration had toughened rules aimed at preventing racially discriminatory schools from claiming tax-exempt status.If that explains why Black voters stuck with Mr. Carter in 1980, it may have also sown the seeds of his defeat. “I think all of these decisions were too much for white America,” Mr. Bird said. “Ronald Reagan came along and appealed much more to white voters.”Mr. Fuse agrees. All these years later, he still laments the fact that Mr. Carter was denied a second term. Instead of focusing on the problems that plagued Mr. Carter’s time in office — the inflation, the energy crisis, the American hostages stuck in Tehran — Mr. Fuse spoke, instead, about that hope that Mr. Carter had engendered in 1976, and not just for Black voters.“When this white man comes along who’s grinning with a broad smile after Watergate, he lifted our spirits,” Mr. Fuse said. “He lifted everybody’s spirits.” More

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      Michigan G.O.P. Leadership Race Fixates on Election Deniers

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      Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo, both Trump loyalists who resoundingly lost their midterm races, are the front-runners to lead the state party.LANSING, Mich. — Trump loyalists are expected to cement their takeover of Michigan’s Republican Party during its leadership vote on Saturday, most likely elevating one of two election deniers whose failed bids for office in November were emblematic of the party’s midterm drubbing in the state.Matthew DePerno, an election conspiracy theorist who is under investigation in a case involving voting equipment that was tampered with after the 2020 presidential race, is widely considered a front-runner from a field of 11 that includes no high-profile members of the Republican old guard.His closest rival appears to be Kristina Karamo, another vocal champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s election falsehoods. Both lost resoundingly last fall: Mr. DePerno, in his run for attorney general, by eight percentage points and Ms. Karamo by 14 points in the secretary of state race.The selection of either Mr. DePerno or Ms. Karamo would signal a recommitment to Mr. Trump as the state party’s north star, even though voters rejected many of his favored candidates in the midterms. The fractured state G.O.P. appears to have either purged or alienated more moderate voices and is now plotting a defiant course as the 2024 presidential election approaches.Mr. Trump urged Republican delegates to back Mr. DePerno during a telephone rally on Monday, saying that winning Michigan in 2024 was critical to his returning to the presidency. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has sowed conspiracy theories about election fraud, also endorsed Mr. DePerno and showed up Friday night during a packed event to support him at The Nuthouse, a sports bar near the convention center. A vehicle with video billboards on its sides touting Ms. Karamo’s candidacy circled the bar outside.Kristina Karamo at the party convention in Lansing, Mich., this past week. She lost her secretary of state race by 14 points in November.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesA consultant for Mr. DePerno, Patrick Lee, declined to answer questions about the leadership vote or the status of a prosecutor’s inquiry into the voting machines breach. But Mr. DePerno, a lawyer who has maintained that he did not break the law, used the call with Mr. Trump to cast himself as an aggressive tactician who would return the state Republican Party to viability.Ms. Karamo did not respond to requests for comment.The party’s hard-right transformation has exasperated more traditional Republicans, who said in interviews that refusal to heed the lessons of the midterms would deepen the competition gap politically and financially between the G.O.P. and Democrats in a battleground state.Former Representative Peter Meijer, whom Republican primary voters ousted last year after he voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said in a recent interview that the state party was on the wrong track.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“In our state, this civil war is benefiting no one but the Democrats,” he said. “Part of what the Republican Party in the state of Michigan needs to get back to is being a broad tent. To me, the fundamental challenge is, how do you rebuild trust in the state party after losses like we saw in November?”Democrats swept the governor’s race and other statewide contests last fall, in addition to flipping the full Legislature for the first time in decades.“Sadly, it looks like they want an encore,” said former Representative Fred Upton, a Republican who declined to run for re-election last year after also voting to impeach Mr. Trump.Matthew DePerno at a rally in October. Mr. DePerno lost his bid for attorney general in Michigan by eight points.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesGarrett Soldano, an unsuccessful G.O.P. candidate for governor last year who has balked at acknowledging Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory, is running for co-chairman on the same pro-Trump “America First” ticket as Mr. DePerno..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.They both have called for reinventing the party’s donor base to include more grass-roots supporters, as has Ms. Karamo, a departure from recent history when Michigan Republicans had become reliant on prolific donors like Ron Weiser, its departing chairman, and the powerful DeVos family. But the party’s financial reserves have dwindled.Meshawn Maddock, the party’s departing co-chair, has attributed Republican losses in the state to the lack of support from longstanding donors, saying in a private briefing in November that big donors would rather “lose this whole state” than help the party’s candidates because they “hate” Mr. Trump, The Detroit News reported. Ms. Maddock did not respond to requests for comment.Both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo were badly out-raised by their opponents in last year’s election, raising questions about their ability to mine cash from political donors.“Donors have said, ‘we’re not buying the crazies that you’re selling,’” said Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser for the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, and a former Republican who previously served as executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.Some current and former Republican leaders in the state have suggested that Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s estranged former education secretary who raised the idea of using the 25th Amendment to have him removed from office after the Capitol riot, is pulling back from the state party.The DeVos family did not marshal dollars for Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo last year, but it did pour $2.9 million into a super PAC supporting Tudor Dixon, a Trump-endorsed Republican who lost the governor’s race, according to campaign finance records, and it gave at least $1 million to Michigan Republicans during the most recent campaign cycle. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for the DeVos family, said they “invest based on enduring first principles, not fleeting flash points of the day” and in “those they believe have a serious and credible plan to win.”Michigan’s Republicans will pick a new chair during a leadership vote on Saturday. Emily Elconin for The New York TimesMr. DePerno and Mr. Soldano have outlined an intent to pack the party’s leadership ranks with Trump loyalists, close primaries to just Republicans and ratchet up the distribution of absentee ballot applications to G.O.P. voters — despite what Mr. DePerno said was lingering opposition to voting by mail within the party’s ranks.Mr. Soldano echoed Mr. DePerno during a Facebook Live broadcast on Monday, saying that relying on Election Day votes had become a flawed strategy for Republicans.“We can’t just scream anymore, ‘Hey, just show up and vote,’ because it didn’t work,” he said.While Mr. DePerno has nabbed the big-name endorsements, Ms. Karamo has her fans as well — including Mr. Forton, who said that if he doesn’t get enough votes to win he would support her instead.He highlighted that after the November election — when Ms. Karamo lost the secretary of state’s race — she did not concede, while Mr. DePerno eventually did.“To a lot of us, that makes her somewhat of a heroine,” Mr. Forton said of Ms. Karamo’s defiance.But Mr. DePerno’s legal entanglements — including the open investigation into his role in accessing voting machines after the 2020 election — have also burnished his standing with right-wing stalwarts, according to Mr. Timmer. He described Mr. DePerno as having the “it” factor for many convention delegates.“It’s similar to Trump,” he said.Last August, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat who went on to defeat Mr. DePerno in the November election, asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to consider criminal charges against him and eight other election deniers in connection with what Ms. Nessel characterized as the illegal tampering with voting machines used in the 2020 election.Ms. Nessel referred to Mr. DePerno as “one of the prime instigators of the conspiracy,” but said it would not be appropriate for her to conduct an investigation into her political opponent.D.J. Hilson, the special prosector in the case, an elected Democrat from Muskegon County, said in an email on Feb. 10 that the investigation was still open. He declined to comment further and would not say whether Mr. DePerno had been subpoenaed. More

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      Education Issues Vault to Top of the G.O.P.’s Presidential Race

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      Donald Trump and possible rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are making appeals to conservative voters on race and gender issues, but such messages had a mixed record in November’s midterm elections.With a presidential primary starting to stir, Republicans are returning with force to the education debates that mobilized their staunchest voters during the pandemic and set off a wave of conservative activism around how schools teach about racism in American history and tolerate gender fluidity.The messaging casts Republicans as defenders of parents who feel that schools have run amok with “wokeness.” Its loudest champion has been Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week scored an apparent victory attacking the College Board’s curriculum on African American studies. Former President Donald J. Trump has sought to catch up with even hotter language, recently threatening “severe consequences” for educators who “suggest to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, who has used Twitter to preview her planned presidential campaign announcement this month, recently tweeted “CRT is un-American,” referring to critical race theory.Yet, in its appeal to voters, culture-war messaging concerning education has a decidedly mixed track record. While some Republicans believe that the issue can win over independents, especially suburban women, the 2022 midterms showed that attacks on school curriculums — specifically on critical race theory and so-called gender ideology — largely were a dud in the general election.While Mr. DeSantis won re-election handily, many other Republican candidates for governor who raised attacks on schools — against drag queen story hours, for example, or books that examine white privilege — went down in defeat, including in Kansas, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.Democratic strategists, pointing to the midterm results and to polling, said voters viewed cultural issues in education as far less important than school funding, teacher shortages and school safety.Even the Republican National Committee advised candidates last year to appeal to swing voters by speaking broadly about parental control and quality schools, not critical race theory, the idea that racism is baked into American institutions.Still, Mr. Trump, the only declared Republican presidential candidate so far, and potential rivals, are putting cultural fights at the center of their education agendas. Strategists say the push is motivated by evidence that the issues have the power to elicit strong emotions in parents and at least some potential to cut across partisan lines.In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 on a “parents’ rights” platform awakened Republicans to the political potency of education with swing voters. Mr. Youngkin, who remains popular in his state, began an investigation last month of whether Virginia high schools delayed telling some students that they had earned merit awards, which he has called “a maniacal focus” on equal outcomes.Mr. DeSantis, too, has framed his opposition to progressive values as an attempt to give parents control over what their children are taught.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.Taking Aim at Trump: The Koch brothers’ donor network is preparing to get involved in the Republican primaries, with the aim of turning “the page on the past”  — a thinly veiled rebuke of Donald J. Trump.Trump’s Support: Is Mr. Trump the front-runner to win the Republican nomination? Or is he an underdog against Ron DeSantis? The polls are divided, but higher-quality surveys point to an answer.Falling in Line: With the vulnerabilities of Mr. Trump’s campaign becoming evident, the bickering among Democrats about President Biden’s potential bid for re-election has subsided.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: Upending decades of political tradition, members of the Democratic National Committee voted to approve a sweeping overhaul of the party’s primary process.Last year, he signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, banning instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades.Democrats decried that and other education policies from the governor as censorship and as attacks on the civil rights of gay and transgender people. Critics called the Florida law “Don’t Say Gay.”Polling has shown strong support for a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. topics in elementary school. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last year, 70 percent of registered voters nationally opposed instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary grades.“The culture war issues are most potent among Republican primary voters, but that doesn’t mean that an education message can’t be effective with independent voters or the electorate as a whole,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who worked for Mr. DeSantis during his first governor’s race in 2018.Gov. Glenn Youngkin made education during the pandemic a key part of his winning platform in blue Virginia.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s approach to education is a far stretch from traditional issues that Republicans used to line up behind, such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers who raise test scores. But it has had an impact.Last week, the College Board purged its Advanced Placement course on African American Studies after the DeSantis administration banned a pilot version, citing readings on queer theory and reparations for slavery. The College Board said the changes were not a bow to political pressure, and had been decided in December.Mr. DeSantis next rolled out an initiative to end diversity and equity programs in universities, to require courses in Western civilization and to weaken professors’ tenure protections.Mr. DeSantis’s communications staff did not respond to a request for comment.The current era of Republican culture-driven attacks on education began in 2020 during the pandemic with a tandem crusade against mask mandates in schools and the supposed influence of critical race theory.Yet, the political power of opposition to the critical race theory — which became a grab bag for conservative complaints about the teaching of American history and racial inequality — largely petered out by last year’s midterm general elections. A September polling memo by the Republican National Committee warned candidates that “focusing on C.R.T. and masks excites the G.O.P. base, but parental rights and quality education drive independents.”Of $9.3 million spent on campaign ads that mentioned critical race theory in 2022, in nearly 50 races for House, Senate and governor, almost all was spent during the primaries, according to an analysis by AdImpact. The issue was raised in only eight general election ads. The theme of “parents’ rights,” invoked in ads worth $9.8 million in 19 races, proved a more popular general election topic; it was used in 14 of those races.Conservative groups in 2022 also supported hundreds of candidates in local school board races with limited success. In nearly 1,800 races nationwide, conservative school board candidates who opposed discussions of race or gender in classrooms, or who opposed pandemic responses such as mask requirements, won just 30 percent of races, according to Ballotpedia, a site that tracks U.S. elections.“The Republicans do a great job of creating issues that aren’t issues,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who has worked for President Biden. He predicted that, in 2024, education issues that are now being raised by potential Republican presidential candidates would figure in the primary but would turn off voters in the general election.“The big lesson of 2022 is that Republicans didn’t have an economic agenda,” Mr. Anzalone said. “All they talked about was incredibly extreme positions, like on abortion and guns. Will they also talk about only extreme positions on these other things?”Kristin Davison, a political adviser to Mr. Youngkin, said that his 2021 campaign in blue Virginia was successful in part because it delivered nuanced and tailored messages on education. The campaign micro-targeted messages to each segment, including voters most interested in school choice, those opposed to critical race theory and those concerned about safety, she said.The strategy aimed to reverse Democrats’ historical advantage on which party voters trust on education.“Governor Youngkin started a movement in Virginia, standing with parents and going on offense on education,” she said.Republicans point to a May 2022 survey for the American Federation of Teachers union showing that voters in battleground states had slightly more confidence in Republicans than in Democrats, 39 percent to 38 percent, to handle education issues.Geoff Garin, whose firm, Hart Research, conducted that poll, said later surveys showed that Democrats had regained the advantage on education, a gain he attributed to Republicans’ focus on race being out of sync with parents.In a December survey by Hart for the teachers’ union, voters who were asked for the most important problems facing schools ranked teacher shortages and inadequate funding at the top. Critical race theory and “students being shamed over issues of race and racism” were near the bottom.“In addition to focusing on things that voters see as the wrong priorities, I expect that Republicans will deepen their problems with suburban voters by identifying so closely with book banning and whitewashing the treatment of race in schools and society,” Mr. Garin said.As Mr. DeSantis rolled out his latest plans last week to push Florida public universities to the right, he called universities’ diversity statements akin to “making people take a political oath.”Mr. DeSantis is believed to be weighing a presidential bid, but so far Donald Trump is the only declared candidate.USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters ConnectDays earlier, Mr. Trump presented an education agenda of his own in a scripted 4-minute, 33-second video. It attacked many of the same targets that have made Mr. DeSantis both an intensely disliked figure to national Democrats and a star of Republicans, many of them once Trump supporters.After spending the past two years focused on the lie of a stolen 2020 election, Mr. Trump is playing catch-up, starting with education proposals.In his video, the former president called to cut school funding for critical race theory as well as “inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.”He also proposed measures that seemed to echo those of Mr. Youngkin, including putting “parents back in charge” and investigating school districts for “race-based discrimination,” singling out “discrimination against Asian Americans.”Francis Rooney, a former Republican congressman from Florida and a Trump critic, said that the former president’s education proposals were an effort to become relevant on issues that drive conservative voters.“I think he’s becoming Mr. Me-Too,” he said of the former president. More

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      3 Races for Governor to Watch This Year

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      Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIn Mississippi, the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, appears to have avoided a rugged Republican primary field, despite his lackluster approval ratings and a water crisis in Jackson. Two potential G.O.P. challengers skipped the race: Philip Gunn, Mississippi’s House speaker, and Michael Watson, the secretary of state. More

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      Anti-Gay? Anti-Science? Antisemitic? Run for Governor of North Carolina!

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      The 2024 governor’s race in North Carolina just got underway. You care.Not because this state is the nation’s ninth most populous, though that’s reason enough. But because what happens here is a referendum on how low Republicans will sink and how far they can nonetheless get.Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina announced his candidacy last week. At present he’s the likeliest Democratic nominee. He’s a mostly conventional choice, with a long résumé of public service and unremarkable politics. I say “mostly” because he’s in one way a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Jewish governor.The likeliest Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is also a trailblazer. He’d be the state’s first Black governor. But that’s the beginning, middle and end of anything forward-looking and progress-minded about him, and he’s extremism incarnate: gun-loving, gay-hating and primed for conspiracy theories, with a garnish of antisemitism to round out the plate.Robinson hasn’t formally declared a bid, and he could face and be foiled by a primary challenge from a less provocative rival. But as Tim Funk noted in an article in The Assembly about Robinson’s flamboyantly combative speeches during Sunday worship services across the state, he was recently introduced in Charlotte as “the next governor of North Carolina.”Heaven forbid. His election would almost certainly retard the state’s economic dynamism by repelling the sorts of companies and educated young workers attracted to it during the six years that Gov. Roy Cooper, a moderate Democrat who cannot run for another term, has been in office.And if 2024 smiles on Republicans, Robinson could indeed emerge victorious. Both of the state’s senators are Republicans; the newer one, Ted Budd, beat his Democratic opponent, Cheri Beasley, by more than three percentage points in November. In two other statewide elections that month, for seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court, Republicans also prevailed. And Stein’s re-election as attorney general in 2020 was a squeaker. He won by just two-tenths of 1 percent.He came out of the gate last week focusing as much on the brief against Robinson as on the case for himself, making clear that a Stein vs. Robinson race would in large measure hinge on the question of how much bigotry and divisiveness Republican and independent voters in North Carolina are willing to endorse, indulge or be persuaded to overlook. Given what a national mirror this state is, the answer will have relevance and resonance far beyond it.We’re approaching a crossroads in North Carolina, my home for the past 18 months, and I can already feel the anxiety rising, including my own.Funk captured Robinson well in that Assembly article: “In the Gospel According to Mark Robinson, the United States is a Christian nation, guns are part of God’s plan, abortion is murder, climate change is ‘Godless … junk science,’ and the righteous, especially men, should follow the example of the Jesus who cleansed the temple armed with a whip, and told his disciples to make sure they packed a sword.”Robinson’s religion is indeed the whipping, slashing kind. It mingles cruelty and snark. When Paul Pelosi was assaulted in his home by a hammer-wielding intruder, Robinson didn’t offer prayers for his recovery. He expressed doubt that Pelosi was an innocent victim — and mocked him.He has referred to homosexuality as “filth” and to the transgender rights movement as “demonic.” He’s preoccupied with the devil, whose hand he saw in the movie “Black Panther,” which was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic marxist,” he railed in a Facebook post that could have used some copy-editing.His whole persona could use some copy-editing. It’s all exclamation points.But that’s his power, too. “Mark Robinson is extremely popular with the Republican base and the Republican rank and file,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me. (He has no relation to Roy.) “The reality is that he’s a compelling speaker. And just as many Republicans thought that Donald Trump went too far but at the same time were happy he gave the finger to ‘the establishment,’ Mark Robinson has many of the same advantages.”Another factor that could work perversely in his favor: He wasn’t in politics before his current stint as lieutenant governor, a position that doesn’t require him to take votes or issue vetoes or anything like that. “So his profile is self-created,” Cooper said. He can tweak his stances or outright change his script without any actual record, at least beyond his many wild statements, to contradict him.But Mac McCorkle, a longtime Democratic strategist who is now a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy (where I also teach), said that while North Carolinians have elected their share of firebrands like Robinson to Congress, they have made different choices for the very different job of governor, who guides the day-to-day functioning of the state.“Do people want somebody prosecuting the culture wars when there’s a hurricane?” McCorkle asked. He’s inclined to think not. “We haven’t had a shouter as governor, well, ever.”But then we hadn’t had a spectacle like the far-right rebellion against the ascent of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in at least a century and a half. We hadn’t had a House speaker coddle the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene until Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republican Party has gone off the rails but keeps hurtling forward, damage be damned. We’d be foolish in North Carolina to trust that we won’t be part of the wreckage.For the Love of SentencesAndy MurrayAsanka Brendon Ratnayake/Associated PressRepresentative Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, reacted on Twitter to one of the assignments given to a new House Republican from New York: “I’m thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal — the top prize in Mathematics — for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers.” (Thanks to Caryl Baron of Manhattan and Norma Johnson of Northampton, Mass., among others, for nominating this.)In an obituary for David Crosby in The Los Angeles Times, Steve Chawkins wrote that many of Crosby’s finest songs from the 1960s and 1970s were, half a century later, still “stirring the hearts of fans who had long since traded their mescaline for Medicare.” (John Russial, Eugene, Ore., and Lee Margulies, Ventura, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Peter C. Baker revisited the classic children’s book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” by Judith Viorst: “‘I went to sleep with gum in my mouth,’ the book begins, and that would be a good opening sentence on its own — Kafka with a splash of David Sedaris — but from there it careens forward, one clause tripping into the next, undisciplined by anything so polite as a comma.” (Liz Lesnick, Manhattan)In The Washington City Paper, Noah Gittell noted that “The Son,” which is the writer and director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to his 2020 movie “The Father,” “is not the sequel its title implies, nor is it the second film in a trilogy that concludes with ‘The Holy Ghost.’” (Randolph Richardson, Southbury, Conn.)In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay marveled at the stamina of the Scottish tennis player Andy Murray, whose spirited play in a recent match seemed to surprise his younger opponent: “Murray looked like he was running around a cottage, trying to close the windows amid a thunderstorm.” (Steve Garvey, Monroe Township, N.J.)In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson described the importance of a journalist’s inquisitiveness: “Explaining complex ideas in simple terms requires pulling myself out of a pit of ignorance using the rope of other people’s expertise.” (Bernie Cosell, Pearisburg, Va. )In The Times, Pete Wells noted that a plate of fried fish at the restaurant Masalawala & Sons “comes with a small dish of kasundi, a condiment that starts with freshly ground mustard. American yellow mustard has the same relationship to kasundi that a butter knife has to a chain saw.” (Karlis Streips, Riga, Latvia)Also in The Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom reflected on reactions to a TikTok stitch of hers: “I knew a lot of the anger had to do with my critics being Extremely Online, a condition where social media compels us to read thinly, strip out all context and get to the part where we can be insulted as efficiently as possible.” (Bronwyn Alfred, Worcester, Mass., and Paul Spitz, Cincinnati)And Maureen Dowd sat down with Nancy Pelosi, who is no longer the speaker of the House: “I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain.” (Gloriana Roig, Manhattan, and Faith Delaney, Emerald Isle, N.C., among many others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, put “Sentences” in the subject line and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Watching and DoingThandiwe Newton in “God’s Country”IFC FilmsI learned a new word the other day. More than a word, really. A role. A job. “Spokescandy.” That’s, um, a candy that speaks for its whole class of candies. The way a press aide speaks for a politician, only fattening. And if you’re scratching your head, well, get ready to scratch harder when you read this very amusing and very depressing article by Daniel Victor on M&M’s, footwear, Tucker Carlson and Maya Rudolph. It falls squarely into the robust category of contemporary American life as a satire of itself.In this charming take on the queues of New York in The Times, Dodai Stewart noted that the city that never sleeps “often stops in its tracks.”It’s never a mistake to follow the Washington Post critic Robin Givhan to the intersection of politics and fashion, and she spends some time there in this glance at the crew necks of George Santos.After Academy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, Oscar analysts noted that the best actress field omitted two Black women who were thought to be in contention: Danielle Deadwyler, who starred in “Till,” and Viola Davis (“The Woman King”). I want to mention a third Black woman who never even generated significant award-season buzz, but should have: Thandiwe Newton. Her performance in “God’s Country” as a college professor at violent odds with two white hunters who trespass on her land is heartbreaking, even if the movie itself goes curiously slack for stretches when it should be gathering in intensity. It’s streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.In advance of the Tuesday, Feb. 7, release of the paperback edition of my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found,” I did an interview with Preet Bharara for his excellent podcast, “Stay Tuned With Preet.” You can listen here. Our discussion ranged far and wide, taking in politics, restaurants and more. On Saturday, Feb. 11, I’ll be at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village, near my Chapel Hill, N.C., home, for a discussion centered on the book. Here are the event details.On a Personal Note (Odd Neighborhood Names)Rattanachai Mok-Ngam/EyeEm, via Getty ImagesWow. In my item last week about the absurd appellation of my North Carolina neighborhood (the Highlands), I invited you to send me any oddly named enclaves and streets around you. And more than 550 of you did. Thank you!It’s going to take me a while to read through all of those emails, so what follows is the fruit of just a smattering of them. But as I work through as many of the rest as possible, I’ll occasionally write and publish brief addenda to this dispatch.Before today’s amusing collection, a serious thought, or rather question, that several of you, including Karen Akerhielm of Greenville, S.C., raised. “Why do so many towns in the South have neighborhoods that still contain the word ‘plantation’?” she asked, noting that in Greenville, “there is Kilgore Plantation (a very upscale residential neighborhood) as well as Plantations at Haywood and Stoneledge Plantation (both apartment complexes). I’m sure they’re trying to evoke the idea of Southern mansions and warm hospitality, but how can you use the word plantation without making people think about slavery?”I don’t think you can. Renaming is in order. And it’s occurring, as this 2020 article in The Washington Post and this NPR report from the same year explain. It can’t happen fast enough.And there are many, many other names available. Your emails made that charmingly clear.Karen Baierl of South Bend, Ind., remembered that her parents once resided in a suburban Milwaukee subdivision called Parc du Chateau. “They lived on La Fontaine Court and some of the other streets in the subdivision are Marseille Drive, Colline Vue Boulevard, La Rochelle Court, and Le Chateau Drive. This is a subdivision in the middle of the Midwest, truly one of the least French spots in the country.”Beth Gianturco of Williamsville, N.Y., marveled at how seriously a neighborhood in the Buffalo suburbs near her takes the first two syllables of its name. Royalwoods comprises Viscount Drive, Dauphin Drive, Infanta Drive, Contessa Court, Rana Court, Pasha Court and Pharaohs Court.Brian Hood of Seattle wrote: “I was once a construction worker and helped build a housing development with the name Boulevard Lane. It struck me as so absurd at the time and still does. ‘Wide Grand Street Narrow Alley’?”To continue this oxymoronic streak, Steven Cobb of Salisbury, N.C., noted that a street near his former home in Louisville, Ky., was called Wooded Meadow Way. “To my thinking, it’s either woods or a meadow — it can’t be both.” On a visit to Melbourne, Fla., he spotted the Turtle Run neighborhood. “Because it’s near the ocean, ‘turtle’ is appropriate,” he wrote. “But I never saw one do more than crawl, even to get across the busy road in front of the subdivision.”And for a segue in the spirit of the tortoise and the hare, Edward Jeremy Hutton of Harpers Ferry, W.Va., remarked on the bunny love of the Briar Run development in nearby Ranson, W.Va., with streets named Peter Rabbit Drive, Cotton Tail Drive, Cottontail Court, Fuzzy Trail Drive, Whiskers Way, Thumper Drive, Jack Rabbit Lane, Bugs Court, Velveteen Court, Trix Court, Flopsy Court and Mopsy Court. Hippety, hoppety, someone got carried away. More