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      Can the Senate Be Saved? Ben Nelson, the Manchin of Yesteryear, Has Doubts

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      A former Democratic centrist senator says too many lawmakers come to Washington to obstruct rather than be constructive.WASHINGTON — The senator adamantly insisted on bipartisanship. As his fellow Democrats enthusiastically embraced major priorities of the new president, he threatened to withhold his crucial vote unless changes were made and Republicans brought on board. He was statistically the Democrat most likely to break with his party.His name was Ben Nelson, and he was the Joe Manchin of his day in 2009, when the incoming administration of Barack Obama was being tested by Republicans and could not succeed without the vote of the Democratic centrist from Nebraska.“In a way, I think I was,” said Mr. Nelson, accepting the comparison with Mr. Manchin, the high-profile but hard-to-nail-down senator from West Virginia whose vote is pivotal to advancing the agenda of President Biden and congressional Democrats. “Though probably not with quite as much publicity about it.”Mr. Nelson, like Mr. Manchin a popular former governor, was elected to the Senate in 2000. He retired after two terms in 2012, but has kept an eye on Washington and has become discouraged by what he sees.His coming memoir is titled “Death of the Senate,” and although Mr. Nelson concedes that the institution still has a pulse, he sees it as gasping for breath even as Mr. Biden and some current centrist members struggle to produce a semblance of bipartisanship.One main problem, Mr. Nelson suggests, is that too many members of Congress come to Washington determined to stop things from happening, rather than finding ways to make things happen while extracting benefits for their constituents and, hopefully, the nation as a whole.“I wanted to get something done; therefore, by bringing some people together or through my vote, I was able to get something done more than to stop things,” said Mr. Nelson, who was also in the middle of a 2005 effort to prevent Republicans from eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominees. “Everybody wanted to get something done. Maybe they had different ideas about what should be done or how you should do it. But it wasn’t just obstructionists.”That is a big difference from the current climate, he said, where a significant number of Republicans are committed to yielding no ground to Democrats.“It is not a governable situation in D.C. right now for the president or for Congress, because you have the commitment of the Republican leader to block everything and let nothing get through,” he said.Mr. Nelson is referring, of course, to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, whose determination to blockade Mr. Obama beginning in 2009 empowered Mr. Nelson in his dealings with the Obama administration.The dynamic is similar today, as Mr. McConnell’s zeal for stopping Mr. Biden’s agenda is giving leverage to Mr. Manchin and a few other Democrats. Mr. McConnell comes in for some tough criticism in Mr. Nelson’s book, which refers to the Republican leader as someone whose main interest is to “maintain a grip on political power and partisan advantage, come hell or high water.”Mr. Nelson, a Democrat, worked with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, to bring down the cost of the stimulus bill in 2009.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesIn Mr. Nelson’s day, the situation was slightly different. Rather than the 50-50 split of today, Democrats controlled 57 votes in early 2009 — later to reach a filibuster-proof 60 for a brief period. And while Mr. Nelson was a constant target, the pool of centrists in both parties was larger then as congressional leaders and the White House sought to round up 60 votes to push through measures like an economic stimulus package and later the health care overhaul.Yet some aspects have remained remarkably similar. Then as now, Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Mr. Manchin, whose politics and constituents are more conservative than the rest of their party, come under withering pressure to drop their reservations and simply vote with the team. They also hold outsize sway, with the power to force their own leaders to jettison some priorities to accomplish major goals, and are by nature reluctant to reflexively side with their party even when the stakes are highest.As they look back on 2009, some progressive Democrats have been critical of their leaders’ willingness to bow to demands from Mr. Nelson and other moderates, saying it constrained the Obama administration. They worry that Mr. Biden is making a similar mistake in trying to bargain with Republicans and mollify Mr. Manchin.But Mr. Nelson said there was never really another option for getting things done.“It was either what we achieved as a compromise or perhaps nothing at all,” Mr. Nelson said. More expansive Obama-era proposals, he added, “didn’t have the votes. When people forget about vote-counting, you can be in La La Land all you want.”That is also true of Mr. Biden’s top priorities, nearly all of which lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and cannot garner even a simple majority if Mr. Manchin refuses to sign on.Mr. Nelson balked at the initial stimulus proposal put forward by the Obama administration, writing in his book that the “House, under leadership from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, basically grabbed everything off the shelves that might be deemed economic stimulus and lumped it into an $819 billion package.”Working with Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and an occasional collaborator, Mr. Nelson organized a group — a gang, as they were known at the time — to press for the cost of the stimulus to be pared down and devote more to projects guaranteed to create jobs, eliminating some of the party’s priorities. It passed with the support of all Democrats and three Republicans, and has been criticized ever since for being inadequate.Mr. Nelson then played a major role in shaping and finally approving the Affordable Care Act, holding out over a provision that he said would put an undue burden on states by requiring them to expand Medicaid.Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader who was pulling out all the stops to pass the measure, suggested that the bill include $100 million to cover the costs to Nebraska. Republicans, even some Mr. Nelson had worked closely with, quickly derided it as the “Cornhusker kickback,” and the name stuck. Mr. Nelson said that the proposal was misconstrued and was simply a place-holder as the administration worked out a more permanent solution and options for states.“For my part, I had faced a critical choice,” Mr. Nelson writes, “to legislate or to vacate. I chose to legislate. Had I chosen the path taken by the Republicans, I could have just sailed along say no, no no.”“The political consequences in my largely red state would be considerably less for vacating than the benefits accrued for legislating,” he said. “But I couldn’t have lived with myself.”Mr. Nelson supported the bill, becoming the 60th vote for its approval. But the political damage was done as the news coverage of the special provision caused his popularity to drop back home. At the same time, the health care debate was fueling the Tea Party and made the bipartisanship that drove Mr. Nelson a dirty word.“There was a new element in Congress, a kind of political virus that would virtually kill bipartisanship,” he writes in his book. “There was a restive mood emerging in the conservative areas of the country, a movement of small-government, or antigovernment activists who had been, since the TARP bailout, demanding that their elected representatives stop working on a bipartisan basis with Democrats.”Despite the gridlock and combative partisanship that has swept the Senate, Mr. Nelson said he opposed eliminating the filibuster. In fact, he would like to see the 60-vote threshold restored for executive branch nominees.He acknowledged that the push for bipartisanship can be time-consuming and frustrating, but that he believed that the Senate was still capable of a change in culture.“It doesn’t happen at all if you just quit and say, ‘I’m not trying,’” he said.But if the people in the Senate cannot change, he said, it will be up to voters to change the Senate.“The change is going to come most likely from people back home saying enough is enough,” he said. “I hope the people back home begin to ask the question of anybody running for the House and the Senate: ‘Are you going to put the county and your state ahead of party? Are you going to be a patriot or are you just going to be partisan?’ Because they aren’t equivalent.” More

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      The Author of 'Hillbilly Elegy' Is Running for Senate in Ohio

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      The author and venture capitalist will vie for the Republican nomination in one of the most wide-open 2022 Senate races.J.D. Vance, an author and venture capitalist whose best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” focused on the social and economic underpinnings of former President Donald J. Trump’s appeal to the white working class, said on Thursday that he would seek the Republican nomination for the Senate in Ohio.Mr. Vance, 36, enters the campaign as a well-known and well-financed first-time candidate facing an open field. The Republican incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, is retiring after two terms. The race is one of a few in next year’s midterm elections that could determine which party controls the upper chamber of Congress, which is now split 50-50.At his campaign kickoff event at a steel parts factory in Middletown, the city north of Cincinnati where he grew up, Mr. Vance made his backstory as a son of the Rust Belt central to his identity as a candidate.He spoke at length about his upbringing, including how his “mamaw” had “kept him on the straight and narrow” as a youth, before diving into his political pitch. He staked out populist positions on issues like inequality and Big Tech and more conservative ones on matters like immigration and abortion.“If you look at every issue in this country,” Mr. Vance said, “every issue I believe traces back to this fact: On the one hand, the elites in the ruling class in this country are robbing us blind, and on the other, if you dare complain about it, you are a bad person.”Mr. Vance will benefit from $10 million pledged toward his campaign by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Mr. Thiel was an early backer of Mr. Vance who hired him and later invested in the fund Mr. Vance now runs. But in the Republican primary, Mr. Vance will face a number of candidates who are well known in Ohio G.O.P. politics, including Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer, and Jane Timken, a former chair of the state Republican Party.Mr. Trump won Ohio twice by comfortable margins. Courting his voters — thousands of whom showed up for a rally he held last weekend outside Cleveland — will be crucial to winning a statewide Republican primary contest. Mr. Vance attended the event, Mr. Trump’s first since his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but he did not speak there.After the 2016 publication of “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance leveraged his fame into a part-time career as a fixture on the speaking circuit and as a media commentator. Lately, he has staked out a position among the more populist voices in his party who are targeting social media companies, China and the left wing of the Democratic Party.The arc of Mr. Vance’s short time as a quasi-political figure has followed the prevailing mood among Republican office holders since Mr. Trump won in 2016. At first, he was deeply critical of the former president, calling him “noxious” and saying he worried Mr. Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”But today Mr. Vance is a prolific tweeter and occasional Fox News guest who has adopted Trumpian culture war language, denouncing “wokeness” and calling for more restrictive immigration policies.His Republican opponents have already started dusting off his old anti-Trump statements as a way of suggesting that he is insincere and has lost touch with working-class Ohio.Mr. Vance today is in a much different place than the young man he describes in “Hillbilly Elegy,” who struggled to overcome adversity; a mother who had a long history with substance abuse; family members who could not control their anger; and opioid-addicted friends and neighbors.He served in the Marines, graduated from Yale Law School and joined Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm. “Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a movie directed by Ron Howard that was released last year. More

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      Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

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      He made headlines by fighting for an oil pipeline and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud. After 25 years of obscurity, he re-emerged with a quixotic presidential campaign.Mike Gravel, a two-term Democratic senator from Alaska who played a central role in 1970s legislation to build the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline but who was perhaps better known as an unabashed attention-getter, in one case reading the Pentagon Papers aloud at a hearing at a time when newspapers were barred from publishing them and later mounting long-shot presidential runs, died on Saturday at his home in Seaside, Calif. He was 91.The cause was myeloma, his daughter, Lynne Mosier, said.Defeated in his bid for a third Senate term in 1980, Mr. Gravel remained out of the national spotlight for 25 years before returning to politics to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates in 2007, calling for a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to enact laws by referendums. But when the voting began in 2008, he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.He nonetheless persisted, showing the same commitment to going it alone that he had displayed by nominating himself for vice president in 1972, staging one-man filibusters and reading the Pentagon Papers aloud — efforts that even senators who agreed with him regarded as grandstanding.But the pipeline was a lasting achievement, and one that forced him to develop allies. Senator Gravel (pronounced gruh-VELL), like most of his state’s leaders, favored construction of a pipeline to bring crude oil 800 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to the ice-free port of Valdez.But the project, formally proposed in 1969, was slowed or blocked in federal courts over environmental questions.Mr. Gravel seized the issue in 1973 by proposing legislation that would exempt the project from any further court intervention under the National Environmental Policy Act.Other pipeline supporters — including his Republican fellow Alaska senator, Ted Stevens — were wary because the environmental law was a proud accomplishment of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, the chairman of the Interior Committee, which dealt with many Alaska issues.Senator Jackson favored the pipeline and said he believed that a thorough review would show that it could be built without damage to the environment. But he insisted that breaching the environmental act would be an “unfortunate precedent.”The Nixon administration backed Mr. Gravel and his call for swift action. His measure won, 50 to 49, with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew casting the deciding vote. The House quickly agreed, and the pipeline, which opened in 1977, made oil the center of Alaska’s prosperity.Senator Gravel in 1971, the year he drew national notice by reading aloud from the Pentagon Papers at a Senate subcommittee hearing. He was elected to the Senate from Alaska in 1968 and served two terms.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesMr. Gravel drew much more national notice on June 29, 1971. The New York Times and other newspapers were under court injunctions to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret, detailed government study of the war in Vietnam.He read aloud from the papers to a subcommittee hearing that he had quickly called after Republicans thwarted his effort to read them to the entire Senate. He read for about three hours, finally breaking down in tears and saying, “Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies — because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” (In a major ruling on press freedom, the injunction against The Times was overturned by the Supreme Court the next day.)Mr. Gravel acknowledged many years later that his political ambition had led him to express support for the Vietnam War at the start of his political career, although he said he had personally opposed it.In his 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ernest Gruening, one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, Mr. Gravel said the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and not the United States was the aggressor. In 2007, while running for president, he told an NPR interviewer, “I said what I said back in 1968 because it was to advance my career.”He told Salon magazine the same year that Alaskans did not share Mr. Gruening’s opposition to the war at the time, and that “when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him.”Mr. Gravel won that primary, stressing his youth (he was 38 to Mr. Gruening’s 81) and campaigning in the smallest of villages, where he showed a half-hour movie about his campaign. He went on to defeat his Republican rival, Elmer E. Rasmuson, a banker and former mayor of Anchorage, in the general election.Senator Gravel in Miami Beach in July 1972, shortly before the Democratic National Convention there. He nominated himself for vice president.UPIHe won again in 1974, aided by the pipeline issue. But he lost the 1980 Democratic primary to Senator Gruening’s grandson, Clark Gruening. Mr. Gravel accused Mr. Gruening, who had announced that he would not take special interest money, of being “dishonest” because, he said, Jews who had made individual contributions amounted to a special interest group “that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the U.S.”Mr. Gravel had enjoyed little support from his party, depending instead on political action committees. His main issue was his all-out opposition to legislation designating more than 104 million acres in Alaska for new national parks, wildlife refuges and conservation areas.But when the Senate broke his filibuster against the bill and passed it just before the primary, it was a fatal blow to his campaign. He lost to Clark Gruening, who went on to lose the general election to Frank Murkowski.Senator Gravel had first sought national office by nominating himself for vice president at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Thirty-four years later, after returning to the real estate business and disappearing from the public eye, he announced his candidacy for the presidency.In the early primary debates for the 2008 election, he found much more public interest in the Iraq war than in his ideas about allowing citizens to enact laws, so he stressed his opposition to it, calling the Democratic senators who were seeking the nomination “gutless wonders” for not bringing the war to a halt.He was not invited to the later debates because of his low poll standings and fund-raising totals. He soldiered on, largely unnoticed during the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire, where he did the most campaigning, he got just 404 votes, or one-seventh of 1 percent, in the state’s primary.In March, he formally quit the Democratic contest and unsuccessfully sought the nomination of the Libertarian Party. His best showing came a few weeks later, when he got four-fifths of 1 percent in the North Carolina Democratic Primary.Maurice Robert Gravel was born in Springfield, Mass., on May 13, 1930, to Alphonse and Maria (Bourassa) Gravel. His father was a contractor. Both his parents were French Canadian immigrants from Quebec, and the future senator did not speak English until he was 7.Mr. Gravel attended American International College in Springfield, served in the Army in the Counterintelligence Corps and then drove a cab in New York City while studying economics at Columbia University.He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and set off for Alaska, which was not yet a state. He worked in real estate and as a brakeman on the snow-clearing trains of the Alaska Railroad before starting his political career.Alaska attained statehood in 1958, and Mr. Gravel was elected to the State House of Representative in 1962. He served as speaker in 1965 and 1966 before leaving for an unsuccessful primary challenge to a four-term Democratic congressman, Ralph Rivers. Mr. Rivers then lost to the Republican candidate, Howard Pollock.Two years later, Mr. Gravel was elected to the Senate.After his defeat in 1980, Mr. Gravel returned to the real estate business but did not do well. He went bankrupt, as did his company.Mr. Gravel at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2008 campaign, at Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., in April 2007. He was a quirky fixture in several early debates, but when the voting began he never got 1 percent of the total in any primary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe is survived by his wife, Whitney (Stewart) Gravel; two children from his first marriage to Rita Martin, which ended in divorce, Martin Anthony Gravel and Lynne Denise Mosier; two sisters, Marie Lombardi and Sister Marguerite Gravel; four grandchildren and a great-grandson.In 2019, Mr. Gravel had one last political hurrah: He filed to run for president one more time, although he said he was running not to win but to qualify for the debates and “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage.” He discouraged people from voting for him. His campaign was run by two teenagers, primarily on Twitter; Mr. Gravel himself had little involvement.After not qualifying for the first two debates, Mr. Gravel ended his campaign in August 2019 and announced that he would use some of his remaining campaign funds to establish a progressive think tank, the Gravel Institute.Into his later years Mr. Gravel held fast to his belief in direct democracy. He detailed his ideas for a fourth branch of the federal government, calling it the Legislature of the People, which would allow voters to pass new laws directly, circumventing in particular the Senate, which he saw as hopelessly corrupt.“What you need to have, and what I seem to have, is unreserved faith in the people,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2019. “There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy. That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative is minority rule by the elites of society.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. William McDonald and Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      Herschel Walker's Cryptic Video Could Upend Georgia Senate Race

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      If the Georgia college football legend Herschel Walker declares his candidacy it could put former President Donald J. Trump’s power as a kingmaker to the test.ATLANTA — In his 1980s prime, Herschel Walker, the Georgia college football legend, ran the ball with the downhill ferocity of a runaway transfer truck. There was no question about which way he was headed.But that was not the case this week, as Mr. Walker tweeted out a cryptic 21-second video that sent the state’s political players into a frenzy of decoding and guesswork.Did the video amount to an announcement that the Heisman-winning Mr. Walker — spurred on by the sis-boom-bah urging of his old friend Donald J. Trump — plans to enter the Republican primary for a chance to run next year against the Democratic senator the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock?That was one plausible interpretation of the clip, in which a smiling Mr. Walker, who lives in Texas, revs the motor of a sports car.“I’m getting ready,” Mr. Walker says, as the camera pans to the car’s Georgia license plate. “And we can run with the big dogs.”If Mr. Walker indeed jumps into the Senate race, it will go a long way toward firming up the 2022 pro-Trump roster in Georgia, where the former president has vowed to handpick G.O.P. candidates to exact revenge on the Republicans who declined to support his false contention that he was the true winner of the 2020 election in the state, which he in fact lost by about 12,000 votes.Mr. Walker, who once played for Mr. Trump’s professional team, the New Jersey Generals, in the short-lived United States Football League, urged Republicans to stick by Mr. Trump in the weeks after Election Day as departing president pressed his unfounded claims of voter fraud. In March, Mr. Trump, in a statement, said it would be “fantastic” if Mr. Walker ran for Senate.“He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL,” Mr. Trump said. “He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”But a Walker candidacy may also prove to be the most high-stakes test of whether Mr. Trump’s fervent wish to play kingmaker will serve his party’s best interests in a hotly contested swing state that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.Though Mr. Walker is the most revered player in the modern history of the football-crazy state — Bulldog fans still talk about where they were when they saw his jaw-dropping performance in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, the way other Americans talk about the moon landing — the former running back also brings a complicated post-football story.Mr. Walker, 59, says that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, an affliction formerly known as multiple personality disorder. His forthrightness on the topic of mental illness, outlined in his 2008 book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder,” has earned him praise in some quarters. But others have doubted the diagnosis, calling it a convenient way to excuse bad behavior.In a 2005 application for a protective order, Mr. Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, alleged that Mr. Walker had a history of “extremely threatening behavior” toward her. In one instance, she has said, he put a gun to her temple. In his book, Mr. Walker admitted to numerous instances of playing Russian roulette.Mr. Walker could not reached for comment for this article, but in a 2008 interview with The New York Times, he said he had the disorder under control with the help of therapy.Leo Smith, a Republican political consultant in Georgia, said that he hopes Mr. Walker will remain on the sidelines. “As a political consultant, I’d recommend that Mr. Walker influence politics through fund-raising and donations, not as a candidate,” he said.Senator Raphael G. Warnock of Georgia, center, greeting Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta on Friday. Some believe Mr. Walker’s Twitter video was a sign he plans to run against Mr. Warnock next year.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBut Randy Evans, a former ambassador to Luxembourg appointed by Mr. Trump, said that Mr. Walker may prove to be a “transformational” candidate who crosses boundaries of party and race (Mr. Walker is Black). “He’s got the demeanor to do it,” Mr. Evans said. “I recognize fully the difficulties of brand-new people who run who’ve never run before, but I thought Senator Tuberville did a pretty good job in Alabama, and that Herschel Walker would do a great job in Georgia.”Mr. Evans was referring to Tommy Tuberville, the staunchly pro-Trump Republican and big-time college football coach who easily won election to the Senate in November. But while Mr. Trump remains popular among Republicans in both Alabama and Georgia, the latter has seen Democrats make big inroads in part because of demographic change and a distaste for Trumpism in some important areas, including the suburbs north of Atlanta.Mr. Trump has already endorsed Representative Jody Hice, a hard-right conservative and Baptist preacher who plans to run for Secretary of State in Georgia against the incumbent Brad Raffensperger. Like Mr. Walker, Mr. Hice supports Mr. Trump’s bogus claims of a rigged election, and a Trump endorsement may be enough to hand him a primary victory.But a number of Republicans are quietly concerned that both Mr. Hice and Mr. Walker may wither in the scrutiny of a general election. Suburban, centrist women are likely to take note of Mr. Walker’s ex-wife’s story, as well as Mr. Hice’s comment that he approved of women in politics, so long as “the woman’s within the authority of her husband.”If Mr. Walker does enter the race, he will be the best known among a Republican field that already includes Kelvin King, a construction executive; Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL; and Gary Black, the state agriculture commissioner. There is also a possibility that former Senator Kelly Loeffler, who lost the seat to Mr. Warnock in the January runoff election, could try for a rematch.Mr. Warnock is the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — the home church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His victory in January, as well as the victory of his fellow Georgia Democrat, Senator Jon Ossoff, served as a stinging rebuke to Mr. Trump a few weeks after his own loss in the state.Mr. Warnock must defend his seat so soon after his election because he is serving out the remainder of a term begun by former Senator Johnny Isakson, a Republican who stepped down because of poor health. Mr. Warnock is likely to run emphasizing his support for social programs and support for Georgia businesses.“Whether it’s Trump’s handpicked candidate Herschel Walker, failed former Senator Kelly Loeffler, or any other candidate in this chaotic Republican field, not one of them is focused on what matters to Georgians,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, in a statement.Debbie Dooley, the president of the Atlanta Tea Party, said that she is hoping that Georgia might see a general election in which all four candidates for the two top offices, senator and governor, are Black, allowing voters to take racial matters out of the decision-making process and instead have a clear choice between “competing ideologies.”In the governor’s race, Ms. Dooley is hoping that Vernon Jones, a Black, pro-Trump candidate not endorsed by Mr. Trump, will defeat Gov. Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. And she is assuming, like many other Georgians, that Stacey Abrams will run for governor on the Democratic side.In the Senate race, Ms. Dooley said she wants to see Mr. Walker jump into the primary and win it. “That’s who Trump wants,” she said, although she added that doing so would betray one loyalty: She is a die-hard Alabama fan.“Roll Tide,” she said. More

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      Trump endorses Kelly Tshibaka, Murkowski’s challenger in Alaska’s Senate race.

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      Former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Kelly Tshibaka on Friday in her race against Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, giving his support to an outsider candidate who promoted false claims of election fraud last year and has written articles in support of gay conversion therapy.“Lisa Murkowski is bad for Alaska,” Mr. Trump said in a statement, criticizing her vote to confirm Deb Haaland as secretary of the Interior Department. “Murkowski has got to go!”Ms. Murkowski was censured by the Alaska Republican Party in March for her vote to convict Mr. Trump during his second impeachment trial. The state party said it did not want her, a moderate Republican who has represented the state since 2002, to identify as a Republican in the 2022 election.The National Republican Senatorial Committee, however, has endorsed Ms. Murkowski, noting that its position is to defend Republican incumbents.Despite her political vulnerabilities, Ms. Murkowski has overcome challenges from the right before. In 2010, she became the first sitting senator in half a century to win an election as a write-in candidate, defeating a popular Republican nominee aligned with the Tea Party.Ms. Tshibaka, who is little known in the national political arena, served most recently as commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration before resigning to run for Senate.Hoping to seize on the popularity of Mr. Trump, who twice won Alaska by wide margins, Ms. Tshibaka has positioned herself as a “MAGA”-loving outsider, promoting false theories of voter fraud in the 2020 election.As a student at Harvard Law School, she endorsed “coming out of homosexuality,” writing approvingly of a day “dedicated to helping homosexuals overcome their sexual tendencies and move towards a healthy lifestyle,” according to archives of her work unearthed by CNN’s KFile. She also urged gay people to participate in “pastoral counseling” and “accountability groups.”More recently, she has hired Mr. Trump’s current advisers and former campaign managers, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, as well as his former campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, as advisers.Mr. Trump has been following the race closely, his advisers said, hoping to unseat Ms. Murkowski. He met with Ms. Tshibaka two weeks ago at Trump Tower, according to a person familiar with the meeting.The top four candidates from Alaska’s all-party primary will advance to a general election, which will be ranked choice. More

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      St. Louis Couple Who Aimed Guns at Protesters Plead Guilty to Misdemeanors

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      Mark McCloskey and Patricia McCloskey of Missouri will pay a total of nearly $3,000 in fines and give up the weapons used in the confrontation.A St. Louis couple who gained national notoriety last year after they were filmed pointing guns at demonstrators walking near their home each pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge on Thursday and agreed to pay a total of nearly $3,000 in fines. The couple, both lawyers, also agreed to give up the guns they had brandished in the confrontation.Patricia McCloskey pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment and will pay a $2,000 fine. Her husband, Mark, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat from Missouri, pleaded guilty to fourth-degree assault and will pay a $750 fine.As part of the plea deal, Ms. McCloskey gave up the Bryco handgun she brandished during the June 2020 confrontation, and Mr. McCloskey agreed to relinquish ownership of the weapon he used, an AR-15 rifle. Neither will face jail time under the plea deal.In a brief interview, Joel J. Schwartz, a lawyer for the McCloskeys, said, “They are very happy with the disposition of the case and will have the fine paid as early as possible and look forward with moving on with their life and focusing on his campaign for the U.S. Senate.”Outside the courthouse, Mr. McCloskey agreed with prosecutors that he had put the protesters in danger. “That’s what the guns were there for, and I’d do it again anytime the mob approaches me,” he said.Patricia McCloskey and her husband, Mark, aimed firearms at protesters who marched through their neighborhood last June.Lawrence Bryant/ReutersRichard Callahan, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, said in a statement that the plea agreement was reasonable, in part, because no shots had been fired, nobody had been injured and the McCloskeys had called the police. “The protesters, on the other hand, were a racially mixed and peaceful group, including women and children, who simply made a wrong turn on their way to protest in front of the mayor’s house,” Mr. Callahan said.On June 28, 2020, protesters, many of whom were Black, marched past the McCloskeys’ home, which is on a private street, on their way to the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, a Democrat, who lives nearby. Ms. Krewson had angered local residents after she went on Facebook Live and read the names and addresses of people who had said the police should be defunded.The McCloskeys said they had felt they were in imminent danger from the protesters. Images of the couple pointing their weapons at protesters circulated widely, garnering national attention.The day after the protest, President Donald J. Trump retweeted a video of the gun-toting couple. In July, the Circuit Attorney’s Office in St. Louis filed felony charges against them. In August, they spoke at the Republican National Convention.The couple maintained that they had acted in self-defense, in order to prevent the demonstrators from entering their home and harming them. “I really thought it was storming the Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it,” Mr. McCloskey told KSDK, a local television station, last year. In an interview on Fox News, Mr. McCloskey said, “We chose to stop them from coming in.” Mr. McCloskey also told KSDK, “My wife doesn’t know anything about guns” but had felt compelled to defend their home.Republicans and conservatives rallied to the couple’s defense. Mr. Trump later said the prosecution of the couple was “a disgrace.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, had said the case against the McCloskeys “is a politically motivated attempt to punish this family for exercising their Second Amendment rights.”The attention helped catapult Mr. McCloskey into politics. Last month he announced he would run as a Republican for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Roy Blunt, a Republican, who earlier announced he would not seek re-election next year. More

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      Val Demings to Challenge Marco Rubio for Florida Senate Seat

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      Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat who was floated as a potential vice-presidential pick in 2020, will challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, in a 2022 race likely to be fought over the legacy of a third Sunshine Stater — former President Donald J. Trump.The announcement on Wednesday by Ms. Demings, the former police chief of Orlando and one of the managers of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, was expected for weeks.But it came as welcome news to embattled Democrats in the state, giving them a high-profile and well-funded opponent against a tough and wily incumbent who once scorned, and now supports, Mr. Trump.Ms. Demings, who is Black, made it clear she would not abide by the middle-of-the-road messaging favored by recent Democratic candidates like former Senator Bill Nelson. In her kickoff announcement, she made a direct appeal to her party’s diverse, urban base, speaking bluntly about her race, gender and experiences growing up in segregated Jacksonville in the 1960s.“When you grow up in the South poor, Black and female, you have to have faith in progress and opportunity,” she said in a video posted on her Twitter page early Wednesday, showing her walking past a church in her hometown. “My father was a janitor, and my mother was a maid. She said, ‘Never tire of doing good, never tire.’”Mr. Rubio, responding with his own Twitter post, previewed his counter messaging, attacking Ms. Demings as a “far-left liberal Democrat” and “do-nothing” member of Congress.Two other Democrats from the Orlando area, Representative Stephanie Murphy and former Representative Alan Grayson, are also considering jumping into the race.Ms. Demings faces a daunting task. Florida Democrats have been battered by mounting losses in a perpetual battleground state trending red, capped by Mr. Trump’s comfortable win in the state last year.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has emerged as a leader of the Trump wing of the party and is said to be considering a 2024 presidential run, also faces re-election next year.The presence of Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Rubio on the same ballot is almost certain to boost turnout on both sides and elicit massive small-donor contributions in a state with several big, expensive media markets.Ms. Demings seemed to be leaning toward the governor race earlier this year: When Representative Charlie Crist declared his Democratic candidacy against Mr. DeSantis this spring, her team released a polished biographical video on the same day.Nikki Fried, a Democrat who serves as Florida agriculture commissioner, is also running for governor. She is one of the few statewide officials who is a Democrat; Florida’s other senator, Rick Scott, is a Republican.In 2016, Mr. Rubio easily defeated his Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy, then a congressman. But that same year Mr. Trump demolished him in the Republican presidential debates, mocking him as “Little Marco” and hammering him for supporting a bipartisan immigration bill that would have offered undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.Over the past four years Mr. Rubio has focused on policy work and avoided high-profile political fights, careful to support Mr. Trump when he could, while politely parting with him over several foreign policy issues, including Mr. Trump’s ill-fated overtures to North Korea, China and Russia.The former president reciprocated in April, offering his onetime critic a “Complete and Total Endorsement” to quell rumors of a primary challenge against Mr. Rubio from the right. More