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      Can Brandon Presley Help Mississippi Break from the Past?

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      It’s been 23 years since a Democrat was elected governor of Mississippi and 41 years since a Democrat was elected one of the state’s U.S. senators. The Republican lock on the state — along with the policies and noxious traditions that have kept it in the basement among U.S. states for most indicators of social health — sometimes seems impenetrable.Mike Espy, the former Democratic congressman from Mississippi and U.S. agriculture secretary, tried twice to become senator, in 2018 and 2020, but never got more than 46 percent of the vote. Jim Hood, then state attorney general, did a little better in the 2019 governor’s race, getting nearly 47 percent of the vote, but the current Republican governor, Tate Reeves, prevailed.This year, with Mr. Reeves up for re-election in November, there are once again hopes that Mississippi could take a few steps up from the bottom and elect a governor willing to make a break from the past. And even though Donald Trump won the state by more than 16 percentage points in 2020, there are reasons to think it could happen.For one thing, thanks to a significant scandal involving the misappropriation of welfare funds, Mr. Reeves is extraordinarily unpopular for an incumbent Republican, with 60 percent of voters saying they would prefer another candidate, according to a Mississippi Today/Siena College poll that came out last week. For another, he has a promising and energetic Democratic opponent named Brandon Presley who has been polling fairly well and is making a strong case that the state desperately needs a change, advocating a series of popular policies that could make a real difference in the lives of Mississippians, particularly those on the lower economic rungs. The contest is already turning into one of the most interesting races of 2023.Mr. Presley, 45, is one of three elected members of the state Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, and is the former mayor of Nettleton, a small town in the bright-red northeast section of Mississippi. He talks energetically about the need to expand Medicaid and save rural hospitals, and why it’s important to eliminate the extremely regressive state grocery tax, and would rather discuss the lives of poor families than his own family ties to a certain popular singer of the same last name from Tupelo, up the road from Nettleton. (Elvis was his second cousin.)His most effective tactic is his unrelenting attack on Mr. Reeves and the welfare scandal that has swirled around him and the previous Republican governor, Phil Bryant. A 2020 state audit found that as much as $94 million in federal anti-poverty money was improperly diverted to two nonprofit groups that used it for favors to lobbyists, celebrities and some lawmakers. The celebrities included Brett Favre, the former N.F.L. quarterback, who, according to text messages uncovered by the nonprofit news site Mississippi Today, arranged to spend $5 million in welfare funds for a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi, his alma mater. At the same time, the state was rejecting a large majority of requests from families for Mississippi’s meager $170 a month in welfare payments.Mr. Reeves was lieutenant governor when all this was going on, and several people at the center of the scandal have been his friends and supporters. Last summer, his administration fired the lawyer who had been officially assigned to investigate the scandal and recoup the money, after the lawyer issued a subpoena to the university’s athletic foundation regarding the volleyball money. Though Mr. Reeves hasn’t been implicated in the diversion of most of the money, Mississippi Today published text messages in August showing that the former state welfare director, who pleaded guilty to federal and state fraud and theft charges last fall, said he was acting on behalf of Mr. Reeves when he siphoned $1.3 million of the welfare money to a fitness program run by the governor’s longtime personal trainer, Paul LaCoste.That was all Mr. Presley needed.“I got in this when I saw, as all Mississippi did, millions of dollars aimed at working families got diverted by Tate Reeves and his cronies,” he told me last week. “His own personal trainer, who taught Tate Reeves how to do jumping jacks, got a $70,000 vehicle and was paid $11,000 a month, while we’ve got children going hungry in Mississippi. Well, it made me want to puke.”Mr. Presley is funny and garrulous and is often described as the best natural politician in the state, with an easygoing manner that appeals to voters of all types. He grew up as the son of a low-income single mother and speaks with real empathy about the tens of thousands of poor families, Black and white, who can’t get clean drinking water, proper health care or broadband internet after decades of largely racist neglect by the state.His most significant plan is to fully expand Medicaid in Mississippi, which Mr. Reeves — along with Republicans in nine other states, mostly in the South — refuses to do. As The New York Times recently reported, health care is in a serious crisis in the state, where five hospitals have closed since 2005 and 36 percent of the remaining rural hospitals are at risk of closing from lack of funds. Mississippi’s stubbornness has cost it about $1.35 billion a year in federal funds to hospitals and health care providers, money that could be used for 100,000 poor adults who now have no guaranteed health coverage.“This will go down in history one of the dumbest decisions ever made in this state,” Mr. Presley said. “Our health care system is on fire because Tate Reeves is not willing to help working Mississippians, just because of some petty, cheap, childish politics.”The state has a $3.9 billion budget surplus and could easily afford its 10 percent share of the expansion cost, but Mr. Reeves would rather use the money to help prosperous earners by getting rid of the income tax, which most low-income people do not pay. Mr. Presley, on the other hand, is campaigning to eliminate the grocery tax, which at 7 percent is the highest in the nation and hurts poor people the most. Though he is too politic to say so, the grocery tax is yet another legacy of Mississippi’s structural racism, which helps explain why there is more hunger in the state than in any other.Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of state voters say they will support only a candidate for governor who wants to get rid of the grocery tax, and 55 percent will support only a candidate who wants to expand Medicaid. But that same poll shows Mr. Reeves ahead of Mr. Presley by 11 points. (The Presley campaign says its internal polling shows the race to be within the margin of error.) To a large degree, that contradiction can be explained by rote party identification in the state, but it’s also because nearly two-thirds of voters don’t know enough about Mr. Presley yet, particularly in African American areas.“In those neighborhoods, he’s still a white guy that nobody knows,” said State Representative Robert L. Johnson III, the House Democratic leader, who is Black and has been supportive of Mr. Presley. “But he’s not afraid to embrace the African American vote in this state. He’s made commitments to do things that other candidates don’t do. It’s early yet, but the governor has been so bad that I think this time might be different.”Mr. Presley has won the endorsement of Bennie Thompson, the Democratic congressman from Jackson who carries a lot of weight among Black voters, and he has one new advantage: In 2020, voters abolished the Jim Crow-era requirement that candidates for governor have to win not only the popular vote but also the most votes in a majority of the 122 state House districts, a law intended to keep Black candidates out of statewide offices. (Mr. Reeves did not support the repeal.)“I think he can win,” Mr. Espy told me. “He’s very likable, a good retail politician, and Tate Reeves is so very, very unpopular. But he’s got a big job. He needs to raise the money and do more Black outreach.”Mr. Presley said his campaign would do everything possible to get a high turnout among Black voters, noting that the issues he cares about, particularly Medicaid and the grocery tax, resonate well in those precincts.One thing that he doesn’t bring up that much, unless asked, is his support for Mississippi’s extremely restrictive abortion law, which bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger or the pregnancy was caused by rape. That law has an outsize effect on low-income women who can’t afford to travel outside the state for an abortion.Mr. Presley described himself as “pro-life and Christian.” But he quickly said that to him, being “pro-life” means being pro-hospital, pro-doctor and pro-emergency room, supporting full funding of the state education budget and ending the scams that have prevented federal and state welfare money from going to the families who need it.His position on abortion and his support for gun rights will not win him many friends in the national Democratic Party, but Mississippi is not like the rest of the nation. Winning there and finally beginning to reverse the detestable policies of the past — an enormously difficult task — will require a candidate who can bring together an unusual coalition of voters with very different interests, and Mr. Presley may be the one to do it. It’s been done next door in Louisiana, where Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat in a similar mold, and if it can happen in Mississippi, it might bring hope to thousands of other voters who have ceaselessly struggled for better lives in the Deep South.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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      Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, Climate Champion, Won’t Seek Re-Election

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      Mr. Inslee, 72, a former presidential candidate and a leading Democratic proponent of policies to slow climate change, said he would not seek a fourth term.Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, the nation’s longest-serving current governor and one of the Democratic Party’s leading climate defenders, will not seek a fourth term in office next year, he announced on Monday.“Serving the people as governor of Washington State has been my greatest honor,” he said. “During a decade of dynamic change, we’ve made Washington a beacon for progress for the nation. I’m ready to pass the torch.”Mr. Inslee, 72, who before becoming governor was elected to Congress eight times, ran for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination on a platform of sharply reducing the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. He dropped out of the race in August 2019 when it became clear he would not meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold to appear in presidential debates.During President Donald J. Trump’s years in office, Mr. Inslee placed himself on the vanguard of the Democratic opposition to Mr. Trump’s policies. Mr. Inslee and the Washington State attorney general, Bob Ferguson, filed a series of lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s administration, challenging policies on its ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, its separation of migrant children from their parents and its unwinding of climate regulations.Mr. Ferguson, who has long had eyes on succeeding Mr. Inslee, is now considered one of the front-runners in an open-seat race to replace him at the helm of a solidly Democratic state. Though in 2012 Mr. Inslee won his first election for governor by just three percentage points, by 2020 he carried the state by more than 13 points. More

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      Kentucky Governor’s Race Splinters Republicans Ahead of Primary

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      Kentucky Republicans are fighting over a nominee to challenge the Democratic governor, with a longtime Mitch McConnell ally squaring off against a wealthy former Trump administration ambassador.As he spoke to about a dozen voters in a dimly lit Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of Louisville, Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s popular attorney general, explained how he viewed the tightening battle for the Republican nomination for governor.“Some folks in this race have been running on ads, and I’ve been running on a record,” said Mr. Cameron, who has long been seen as a rising Republican political talent and is a close ally of Senator Mitch McConnell. He was taking a clear swipe at his top rival, Kelly Craft, a former ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration who is married to a coal billionaire and has pumped more than $4.2 million into TV advertising.About 50 miles south, in a packed room at Jeff’s Food Mart in Campbellsville, Ms. Craft was not shy about wielding her wealth as a political weapon.“This may be one of the most expensive gubernatorial races in this cycle, and I have the personal resources,” she said.The unsettled race and escalating hostilities are unwelcome developments for Kentucky Republicans as they search for the strongest nominee to bring down Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat whose party loyalties in a crimson state have not stopped him from becoming one of the nation’s most popular governors. Even Republicans concede that he will be difficult to beat in November, and the contest has quickly become the most closely watched statewide election remaining this year.Ryan Quarles, the agricultural commissioner, has campaigned aggressively in rural stretches of the state.Pool photo by Timothy D. EasleyThe Republican primary on May 16 is pitting two pillars of the state’s party apparatus, Mr. Cameron and Ms. Craft, against each other, with a third, well-liked Republican, Ryan Quarles, the agricultural commissioner, acting as an amiable wild card. Polling has been scant, though the few public surveys suggest that Mr. Cameron’s once-dominant lead is shrinking.This churning political mixture has largely frozen the party and its major supporters in place. No one wants to be on the wrong side of the Craft family, collectively one of the biggest Republican donors in the country. And few are eager to damage Mr. Cameron, with his ties to Mr. McConnell, his early endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump and what some in the party view as his potential to rise to powerful positions within the G.O.P.It is not total war: The divisions fall short of the infighting between far-right and establishment candidates that consumed Michigan and Pennsylvania Republicans last year. Instead, the Kentucky Republicans, broadly similar in ideology, are jockeying for conservative primacy on issues like the border, education and vaguely defined “wokeness,” maneuvering that resembles the early contours of the Republican primary for president.The closeness of the race and the negative tone of the ads have caught many by surprise in Kentucky.When Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Cameron last June, the attorney general seemed poised to cruise to the nomination. He is the first Black attorney general in Kentucky history, and the first Republican to hold the post in about 70 years, with strong name identification and rising political celebrity that stem in part from his prime-time speech during the 2020 Republican National Convention.Ms. Craft did not enter the race until four months after Mr. Cameron’s announcement. On Wednesday, she explained to voters in Campbellsville that she had “waited to get in this race because I didn’t see anybody that could get the job done.”Soon after in December, Ms. Craft began an aggressive ad campaign, airing a mix of biographical spots to help increase her name recognition and numerous ads attacking Mr. Cameron. Commonwealth PAC, a super PAC supporting her candidacy that is partly funded by $1.5 million from her husband, Joe Craft, has aired exclusively negative ads against Mr. Cameron, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.Mr. Cameron greeting supporters at a Lincoln Day dinner in Guston, Ky., last week. The scarce public polling in the race suggests that his advantage has diminished. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesOne of the ads from Commonwealth PAC sought to tie Mr. Cameron to Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney leading the indictment of Mr. Trump, by quoting them both as supporting a bail overhaul. Beyond that, they share little in common — other than being Black law enforcement officials.In an interview last Tuesday, Mr. Cameron called the ad “laughable on its face.”He added, “I hope that Kelly Craft, once this primary’s over, will decide to spend some of that money helping me when I’m the nominee.”Ms. Craft defended her ads in an interview last Wednesday.“What I’m focused on is pointing out truths and giving Kentuckians facts,” she said. “So you may think it’s negative. I’m looking at it as telling the truth.”From December to late March, Ms. Craft, with help from her allies, was the only major candidate for governor with ads broadcast across Kentucky’s seven media markets.Mr. Quarles, who has spent slightly less than his two main competitors, has aggressively campaigned in rural stretches of the state, racking up more than 235 endorsements from local officials, including county judges, mayors and magistrates.His first ad, released on Wednesday as part of an initial six-figure purchase, highlights how he “grew up on my family farm in rural Kentucky.” Known in Frankfort for a decade, Mr. Quarles has capitalized on longstanding relationships for support.“A celebrity versus the resources versus old school,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican operative in the state, summing up the contest between the three top contenders.“Cameron is the front-runner, but there’s no doubt this race has gotten close and remains fluid,” added Mr. Jennings, who like many other Republicans has remained neutral.Indeed, many of the major forces in Kentucky Republican politics are staying on the sidelines. Mr. McConnell has not issued an endorsement and does not plan to do so, according to people close to him, and his vast network of operatives in the state has largely not picked sides. Senator Rand Paul is also not endorsing a candidate. And most of Kentucky’s congressional delegation — except Representative James Comer, who endorsed Ms. Craft — has stayed out of the race.For Republicans, part of the challenge of defeating Mr. Beshear has to do with the G.O.P. dominance of the state. Republicans hold supermajorities in the Legislature, making it difficult for the governor to wield much power without a veto. Yet that has kept Mr. Beshear from contentious showdowns with Republicans on hot-button issues, and has let him focus on using state resources to help repair infrastructure and improve the economy.Lacking the money of Ms. Craft, Mr. Cameron has tried to emphasize his endorsement from Mr. Trump. In an eight-minute interview, Mr. Cameron mentioned the endorsement four times.He is quick to point out that Ms. Craft, whose stump speech focuses heavily on her tenure in the Trump administration, does not have the former president’s backing.“Despite what some others might tell you,” Mr. Cameron told a crowd at a Lincoln Day dinner in Meade County, “President Donald J. Trump has endorsed this campaign for governor.”On the issues, Mr. Cameron and Ms. Craft have little daylight between them. Education is a central tenet, with both pledging to fire the current commissioner of education, and deriding what they call a “woke” agenda in schools. Both embrace nationalized issues like the Southern border despite living in a state nearly 1,000 miles from Mexico.Ms. Craft speaking last week at Jeff’s Food Mart in Campbellsville, Ky. She has often focused on education, and has expressed full-throated support for the coal industry.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThey have also made combating the opioid epidemic, and fentanyl in particular, key planks. Mr. Cameron often notes that his office is working to bring in just under $900 million from settlements to address the drug scourge and empower law enforcement. Ms. Craft has told the emotional story of her daughter’s struggle with addiction and has called for harsher penalties for drug dealers.Ms. Craft also offers ardent support to the state’s coal industry, and her placards pledge to “beat back Joe Biden’s E.P.A.”In his remarks in Shepherdsville last Tuesday, Mr. Cameron highlighted his many battles with Mr. Beshear.“When Governor Beshear decided to shut down churches, I went into federal court and, after nine days, got churches reopened in Kentucky,” Mr. Cameron said, referring to early pandemic regulations.At her stop in Campbellsville, Ms. Craft held aloft a copy of “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up Black and queer, as an example of books she wanted banned in the classroom.“We’ve got to take the woke out of the schools,” she said.John Allen, 74, of Taylor County, who came to see Ms. Craft at Jeff’s Food Mart, spoke approvingly of such positions.“What she said in her speech today is exactly the way I feel,” he said. “I’m tired of all this woke agenda stuff. I’m just tired of it. And I think everybody else is, too, and I’m tired of somebody telling me what I can say and can’t say. They’ve got to understand what the First Amendment really is.”But some voters are still making up their minds.Rose Greene, 62, of Meade County, said she had initially leaned toward Mr. Cameron over Ms. Craft. She had friends who had gone to church with him, and she liked his economic positions.“But then I’ve been seeing her commercials,” she added. More

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      Georgia’s Hot Mess Is Headed Your Way

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      Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.Republicans elsewhere should keep watch. Democrats too. What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism. And while every state’s political dynamics are unique, a variation of the Peach State drama could be headed your way soon — if it hasn’t begun already.The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.Why should anyone care about the state of the Georgia G.O.P.? Well, what is happening in Georgia is unlikely to stay in Georgia — and has repercussions that go beyond the health and functionality of the Republican Party writ large. After election deniers failed to gain control of statewide offices across the nation in 2022, many of them refocused their efforts farther down the food chain. In February, The Associated Press detailed the push by some of these folks to become state party chairmen, who are typically chosen by die-hard activists. In Michigan, for instance, the state G.O.P. elevated the Trumpist conspiracy lover and failed secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo to be its chairwoman.MAGA zealots don’t simply present ideological concerns, though their politics do tend toward the fringes. Too many embraced the stop-the-steal fiction that the electoral system has been compromised by nefarious Democrats and must be “saved” by any means necessary. Letting them oversee any aspect of the electoral process seems like a poor idea.If this development persists, Republicans more interested in the party’s future than in relitigating its past might want to look at how Kemp & Company have been trying to address their intraparty problems — and what more could and should be done to insulate not only the party’s less-extreme candidates, but also the democratic system, from these fringe forces. There are risks that come with ticking off election deniers and other Trumpian dead-enders. But the greater risk to the overall party, and the nation, would be declining to do so.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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      Arizona Supreme Court Turns Down Kari Lake’s Appeal in Her Election Lawsuit

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      The justices refused to hear Ms. Lake’s claims disputing her loss in the governor’s race, but sent one part of her lawsuit back to a trial court for review.Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted.In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit.“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.”But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.The decision dealt another setback to Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor whose strident election denialism helped her to gain the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, contending on Twitter that remanding the signature verification aspect of her case back to the trial court was vindication.“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” Ms. Lake wrote. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”Ms. Lake had argued that “a material number” of ballots with unmatched signatures were accepted in Maricopa County. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling on the matter, effectively saying that she would have to show the numbers that prove the election outcome “would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”She fell to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was Arizona’s secretary of state, by just over 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million ballots cast in the battleground state — less than one percentage point.Representatives for Ms. Hobbs, a defendant in Ms. Lake’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ms. Lake has repeatedly pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Maricopa County, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who helps oversee elections, said in a statement, “Since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”He added, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”Ms. Lake’s chief strategist, Colton Duncan, vowed that Ms. Lake’s lawyers would expose more fraud and corruption.“Buckle up, it’s about to get fun,” he said. More