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      How Chuck Schumer Plans to Win Over Trump Voters

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      In his 100 days address this week, Joe Biden outlined his plans for a big, bold legislative agenda to come. He previewed a two-pronged economic package: the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. He spoke about the need to pass universal background checks for firearms, comprehensive immigration reform, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.The success of that agenda hinges on whether 50 Senate Democrats — ranging from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin — can come together and pass legislation. They don’t have a single vote to spare. And the person responsible for making that happens is the New York senator and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer.Schumer has a theory of politics that he believes can hold or even win Democrats seats in 2022. It’s not a complicated theory: For Democrats to win over middle-of-the-road voters — including those who voted for Donald Trump — they need to prove that government is actually helping them. But to do that, the government needs to actually help those voters, in clear and visible ways. That means passing big, bold legislation. And the institution Schumer leads — the Senate — is the primary obstacle to that happening.So I invited Schumer on the show to talk about how exactly he plans on doing that. How do you win over Trump voters? What kinds of economic policies can help deliver Democrats victory in 2022? How should the party approach topics like race and gender? How will he pass bills, like the For The People Act, that can’t go through budget reconciliation? And, of course, what do you do about the filibuster?(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday.)Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. More

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      In Setback for Trump, Doug Collins Will Not Run in Georgia in 2022

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      Mr. Collins, a former Republican congressman and ardent defender of former President Trump, was seen as an experienced potential challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock or Gov. Brian Kemp.ATLANTA — Doug Collins, a former U.S. congressman and ardent defender of former President Donald J. Trump, announced on Monday that he would not seek any statewide office in 2022, at once narrowing the field of Republican candidates for Senate in Georgia and removing a potential intraparty challenge to Gov. Brian Kemp.Mr. Collins’s decision is a setback for Mr. Trump’s hopes of fielding a strong, experienced Republican candidate for Senate or governor next year. Mr. Collins was widely seen as more likely to run for Senate; his announcement now deprives the Trump-supporting wing of the Georgia Republican Party of an experienced challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock, a freshman Democrat who won a special election in January and will be up for re-election to a full term next year.Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. and University of Georgia football star, has been rumored to be considering a run, and Mr. Trump has urged him to jump into the race. Kelvin King, a contractor and Trump supporter, announced his candidacy earlier this month, and Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL and former White House fellow in the Trump administration, has filed paperwork stating his intention to run.Other ambitious Georgia Republicans seeking higher office may also end up trying their luck in the primary. Mr. Warnock is a political newcomer, and Republicans are hoping that his election this winter, as well as that of Senator Jon Ossoff, a fellow Democrat, were anomalies explained in part by the false claims of election fraud pushed by Mr. Trump and his allies, which may have depressed turnout in those Senate races.Moreover, national Republicans are likely to spend big to defeat Mr. Warnock in the general election in an effort to wrest control of the Senate away from the Democrats. It is expected to be one of the most hotly contested and closely watched elections in the country next year.Mr. Collins was also seen as a potential primary challenger to Mr. Kemp, the Republican incumbent who drew the ire of Mr. Trump for refusing to acquiesce to the former president’s demands to try to subvert the election results.Mr. Trump has vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp and may get behind other pro-Trump statewide candidates in advance of the November 2022 election. Vernon Jones, a former Democrat turned Trump ally, announced his candidacy for governor earlier this month.Mr. Trump had hinted at the idea of backing Mr. Collins for statewide office, although he mentioned him as a potential candidate for governor, rather than senator, at a rally in Georgia in December.As Mr. Trump continues to seek retribution against Republicans in Georgia, he also endorsed another loyal ally, Representative Jody Hice, in March for a bid to unseat the current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in the state’s Republican primary. Mr. Raffensperger also enraged Mr. Trump by declining to help him overturn the presidential election results in the state. More

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      Bill Brock, G.O.P. National Chairman After Watergate, Dies at 90

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      A former senator, he sought to broaden his demoralized party’s base by appealing to women and Black voters and was later labor secretary under Reagan.Bill Brock, the former Tennessee senator who as party chairman revived and broadened the Republican Party machinery after Watergate to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, died on Thursday at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 90.The cause was pneumonia, said Tom Griscom, a spokesman for the family.Mr. Brock voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a representative from Tennessee — a vote he later regretted — but as party leader he became an insistent voice for greater Republican efforts to win over Black voters.As chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1977 through 1981, he clashed with Reagan over the Panama Canal treaties and the site of the 1980 national convention. (Mr. Brock argued for Detroit, a Black majority city; Reagan preferred Dallas.) But after winning the nomination, Reagan kept him on as party chairman and later chose him to be the United States trade representative and then secretary of labor.Mr. Brock won the chairmanship of his party at a time when it was demoralized in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard M. Nixon, commanding the allegiance of only 20 percent of Americans, according to New York Times/CBS News polls.Republicans had lost the White House in 1976 and had suffered serious losses in congressional elections that year, as they had in 1974. Mr. Brock himself was among the 1976 casualties, losing his Senate re-election bid to James Sasser, a Democrat.Though he had backed President Gerald R. Ford over Reagan in the 1976 nomination race, Mr. Brock was seen as a compromise candidate between the preferred choices of Ford and Reagan: James A. Baker III, Ford’s 1976 campaign manager, and Richard Richards, the Utah Republican chairman and a Reagan backer.Mr. Brock with Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles during the 1980 presidential campaign. The two clashed at times, but Reagan kept Mr. Brock on as R.N.C. leader in the name of party unity.Associated PressEven before becoming chairman, Mr. Brock said in 1975 that the party had suffered because Republicans were perceived as “old, middle class, upper income.” When he was elected to lead the national committee in 1977, he said: “The party cannot just open its doors. It has to go out and bring people in, and in doing so give them a real voice in our leadership and in the development of our objectives. That means stirring the waters.”He worked to develop a “farm team” of candidates for local and legislative offices and the party operatives to help them win. More visibly, he strove to appeal to blue-collar workers, young people, women and Black Americans. He barnstormed the country in favor of Representative Jack Kemp’s plan for heavy tax cuts in 1978, and two years later put R.N.C. money into television advertisements with the tag line “Vote Republican for a Change.”His effort to expand the party’s appeal, particularly to Black voters, led him to campaign for Detroit to be the site of the 1980 national convention. Reagan’s backers on the national committee had wanted Dallas, but Mr. Brock prevailed narrowly.Mr. Brock had angered Reagan in 1977 by refusing to use party money in a campaign against the treaties, signed by President Jimmy Carter, that turned the Panama Canal over to Panama. Some Reagan allies wanted to punish Mr. Brock for his resistance by blocking his re-election as party chairman in 1980, but Reagan heeded advice to keep Mr. Brock on in the name of party unity.As trade representative, Mr. Brock worked out voluntary quotas on Japanese automobile sales in the United States in 1981, and focused trade energies away from manufacturing and toward services, investments and intellectual property. He began a practice of working on bilateral free trade agreements (a pact with Israel was the only one he completed), and laid the groundwork for the Uruguay Round of trade talks and the World Trade Organization that emerged from it in 1995.Mr. Brock shifted to the Labor Department in 1985. He made friends with labor (and enemies among some Reagan disciples) by supporting affirmative action programs and enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act. More broadly, he sought to redirect the department’s efforts toward job training and productivity.He left the Labor Department in 1987 to run Bob Dole’s unsuccessful bid for the 1988 presidential nomination.A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., who later moved to Annapolis, Md., Mr. Brock made his last venture in elective politics to run for the Senate from Maryland. In 1994, a generally great year for Republicans, he was soundly beaten by Paul Sarbanes, the incumbent Democrat.His other major interest after leaving government was working on two national commissions to reform American education with the goal of producing a work force ready for the 21st century. He also started a trade consulting firm in Washington.During the 2016 primary season Mr. Brock opposed Donald J. Trump’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination and spoke publicly and ruefully about a loss of civility in American politics.William Emerson Brock III was born on Nov. 23, 1930, to William E. Jr. and Myra (Kruesi) Brock. He grew up in a Democratic family and attended schools in Chattanooga and nearby Lookout Mountain.He graduated from Washington & Lee University in Virginia and served in the Navy, then went into the family business in Tennessee, becoming a vice president of the Brock Candy Company. It had been founded by his grandfather William E. Brock, who served as a Democratic senator from Tennessee from 1929 to 1931, appointed to fill a vacancy.Mr. Brock in his office in Annapolis, Md., in 2000. His last venture in elective politics was to run unsuccessfully for the Senate from Maryland in 1994.Justin Lane for The New York TimesMr. Brock married Laura Handly, who was known as Muffet, in 1957. She died of cancer at 49 in 1985, when Mr. Brock was labor secretary. He later married Sandra Schubert Mitchell.He is survived by his wife; three sons from his first marriage, William E. IV, John and Oscar (who has been active in Republican politics in Tennessee); a daughter, Laura Hutchey Brock Doley, also from his first marriage; two stepchildren, Julie Janka and Stephen Cram; two brothers, Pat and Frank; 17 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Brock won a House seat in 1962 and served four terms before challenging Albert Gore Sr. in his bid for a fourth Senate term in 1970. Mr. Gore’s opposition to the Vietnam War had made him a prime target of the Nixon White House, which funneled money and advisers to Mr. Brock.The Brock campaign ran advertisements attacking the incumbent, a Democrat, over busing and prayer in schools, and painted him as out of touch with ordinary Tennesseans, proclaiming in billboards, “Bill Brock Believes in the Things We Believe In.” That message, rather than anything Mr. Brock said himself, led the journalist David Halberstam to write in Harper’s Magazine that the slogan was a coded message to white racists, concluding that Brock had run a “shabby racist campaign.”In an interview for this obituary in 2009, Mr. Brock said that the racism charge had infuriated him. The billboard message, he said, had been intended only to paint Mr. Gore as out of touch with his state.But the accusation, he said, did cause him to engage in “some fairly serious soul-searching” about how some white Tennesseeans might have heard the message approvingly as a racist appeal. His concerns intensified when he became a national party leader. He said his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act — calling his own vote “stupid” in retrospect — had made the party seem “exclusionary.”“I felt, and still do, that any party that does not pay attention to every constituency group in the United States does not deserve support from any of those groups,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to get them. But it does mean you have to try. It does mean you have to listen. It does mean you have to understand their concerns, or else you’re in the wrong business. The longer I stay around, the more strongly I feel about that.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Republicans Fear Flawed Candidates Could Imperil Key Senate Seats

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      Races in Missouri and Alabama, with others to come, reflect the potential risks for a party in which loyalty to Donald Trump is the main criterion for securing nominations.The entry of two hard-right candidates this week into Senate races in Missouri and Alabama exposed the perils for Republicans of a political landscape in which former President Donald J. Trump is the only true north for grass-roots voters.Strong state parties, big donors and G.O.P. national leaders were once able to anoint a candidate, in order to avoid destructive demolition derbies in state primaries.But in the Trump era, the pursuit of his endorsement is all-consuming, and absent Mr. Trump’s blessing, there is no mechanism for clearing a cluttered primary field. With the former president focused elsewhere — on settling scores against Republicans who advanced his impeachment or showed insufficient loyalty — a combative Senate primary season is in store for the 2022 midterms, when Republicans who hope to regain the majority face a difficult map. They are fighting to hold on to five open seats after a wave of retirements of establishment figures, and even deep-red Missouri and Alabama pose potential headaches.A scandal-haunted former Missouri governor, Eric Greitens, entered the race on Monday to replace the retiring Senator Roy Blunt. His candidacy set off a four-alarm fire with state party leaders, who fear that Mr. Greitens may squeak through a crowded primary field, only to lose a winnable seat to a Democrat.In Alabama, the entry of Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch but lackluster Trump supporter, into the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Richard C. Shelby raised a different set of fears with activists: that Mr. Brooks, who badly lost a previous statewide race, would cause waves of Republican voters, especially women, to sit out the off-year election and crack open the door in a ruby red state for a Democrat.Both candidacies are likely to pose challenges for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who has weighed in to cull potentially flawed candidates in the past and has said he may do so again this time. Last year, a super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell intervened in a Senate primary in Kansas against Kris Kobach, a polarizing figure whose candidacy threatened the loss of a seat that was ultimately won by the G.O.P. establishment’s favorite, Roger Marshall.Mr. Trump has so far stayed out of the potential pileups to fill the open Senate seats — the others to date are in Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Alabama and Missouri, both Republican strongholds, afford the G.O.P. a margin of error even with a flawed candidate, a cushion not available in the more competitive traditional battleground states.In announcing his candidacy on Fox News on Monday, Mr. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, sought to appeal to Mr. Trump and Trump voters, boasting of having routed “antifa” from Missouri as governor and pledging to be a “fighter” who would be committed to “defending President Trump’s America First policies.”Mr. Greitens, who took office in 2017, resigned the next year amid accusations of physical and sexual abuse by a woman he had been involved with in an extramarital affair before his election. Still, he remains popular with a core of Republican voters. Many Republican officials fear that in a multicandidate primary, which appears likely, he could win with around 30 percent of the vote.“There is a high level of concern,” said Gregg Keller, a Republican strategist in Missouri, where Democrats have been shut out of major statewide victories for nearly a decade.Mr. Keller, who is unaligned in the race, said nominating Mr. Greitens would be “the only way Republicans stand a chance of losing this seat.” He added, “It would be an incredible self-own and would put the seat in play.”On Wednesday, a second candidate entered the race, Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who had joined a Texas-led lawsuit by attorneys general to overturn the 2020 election results, which was rejected by the Supreme Court. At least three other Republicans have shown interest in the race, including Representative Ann Wagner, a moderate from the St. Louis suburbs.Mr. Greitens claimed while announcing his candidacy that he had been “completely exonerated” in the scandals that led to his resignation. But he elided important details. Accused by a hair stylist of binding her hands, spanking her, taking seminude pictures and threatening to release them if she disclosed their affair, Mr. Greitens was charged with felony invasion of privacy. The case fell apart, but the Republican-led Legislature moved to impeach Mr. Greitens anyway. An explosive investigation by the Missouri House concluded that the woman’s accusations were credible.Representative Mo Brooks was one of the first Republicans to announce that he would object to the Electoral College certifying President Biden’s victory.Elijah Nouvelage/ReutersSeparately, the attorney general at the time, Josh Hawley, now the state’s junior senator, turned up evidence that led to a felony count against Mr. Greitens related to political fund-raising, which Mr. Hawley described as “serious charges.”Mr. Greitens, 46, stepped down in May 2018 after reaching a deal with prosecutors that led to the campaign finance charge being dropped. A state ethics commission later found he had not engaged in wrongdoing in the finance case.“His claim to have been totally exonerated is a fraud and misrepresentation of the facts,” said Peter Kinder, a former Republican lieutenant governor. “An overwhelmingly Republican Legislature was prepared to impeach him and was within days of doing that.”Mr. Greitens has both grass-roots supporters and high-profile enemies in the Missouri G.O.P., including Mr. Kinder, who lost to him in a 2016 primary for governor, and Mr. Hawley.After Mr. Blunt this month announced his plans to retire, Mr. Trump called Mr. Hawley to ask about whom he should support, according to a person familiar with the conversation. They agreed to stay in touch as the field develops, and Mr. Hawley could be expected to steer Mr. Trump away from the former governor.In an argumentative interview on Wednesday with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Greitens said the Missouri House’s 24-page report about him had been “discredited,” but he would not say how. He claimed, without evidence, that his accuser, two of her friends and her former husband, all of whom testified under oath, were “lying.” “Why did you quit?” Mr. Hewitt asked Mr. Greitens, referring to his resignation. “SEALs don’t quit.”In Alabama, the fear of some Republicans about a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Brooks, the highest-profile candidate in an emerging field, traces to the lacerating sting of 2017, when the Democrat Doug Jones won a Senate seat after G.O.P. voters failed to show up to support the party’s nominee, the scandal-plagued Roy Moore.Mr. Brooks, a six-term congressman from northern Alabama, was one of the first Republicans to announce that he would object to the Electoral College certifying President Biden’s victory. He faced calls for censure from Democrats after an incendiary speech he made at the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 before the riot at the Capitol. In announcing his candidacy on Monday, he aired once again his and Mr. Trump’s false accounts of the election. “In 2020, we had the worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” he said. Few individual cases and no evidence of widespread fraud have been confirmed.But in Alabama, Mr. Trump’s fraud narrative is hardly a controversial view among Republican voters. Both Mr. Brooks, 66, and the only other announced candidate to date, Lynda Blanchard — a major G.O.P. donor who was ambassador to Melania Trump’s native Slovenia — have aggressively sought Mr. Trump’s endorsement. But it is entirely possible he will withhold one in the interest of not alienating potential future allies, political observers say.The bigger danger with Mr. Brooks, in the view of some party strategists, is that he simply fails to excite Republican voters in an off-year election. He finished an unimpressive third in a 2017 primary to fill an open Senate seat, winning fewer than one in five Republican votes.“The danger becomes that there will be nothing to motivate Republicans to go to the polls,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist in Alabama, “which would put us at the peril that we have been in in the past, when a large majority of Republican voters did not see a candidate that motivated and inspired them to go vote.” More

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      Eric Greitens and Mo Brooks Announce Senate Bids in Missouri and Alabama

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      The hard-right Republicans’ entry to the races for open Senate seats heralded fiercely contested G.O.P. primaries in the two deeply conservative states.A pair of hard-right politicians announced Senate bids in Missouri and Alabama on Monday night, igniting what are expected to be contentious primary races for open seats in two conservative states.In Missouri, Eric Greitens, the former governor who resignedafter a scandal involving allegations of sexual misconduct and blackmail, said he would run for the seat being vacated by Senator Roy Blunt, who surprised Republicans this month when he announced plans to retire after next year. And in Alabama, Representative Mo Brooks, a staunch backer of former President Donald J. Trump, joined the race to succeed Senator Richard Shelby, who has also said he will not seek re-election in 2022.The two announcements, along with a new conservative challenge to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who withstood Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the state’s election results last year, offer the clearest signal yet that Republicans may face the kind of combative primary season some party leaders had hoped to avoid.Since Mr. Trump lost the election, Republicans have struggled to unify around a consistent message against the new administration, spending far more time fighting among themselves over loyalty to the former president and the culture war issues that animate his base.Historically, the president’s party loses seats in its first midterm elections, as the national mood turns against the new administration. But Republicans will face a challenging map in 2022, with few opportunities to flip Democratic-held seats. Party leaders fear that nominating far-right candidates could complicate their ability to hold seats amid a series of Republican retirements, even in more conservative states like Alabama and Missouri.Mr. Brooks cast himself as one of the former president’s strongest supporters as he announced his Senate bid at a Huntsville gun range, where he was introduced by Stephen Miller, a former adviser to Mr. Trump.“I have stood by his side during two impeachment hoaxes, during the Russian collusion hoax and in the fight for honest and accurate elections,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “The president knows that. The voters of Alabama know that, and they appreciate it.”Mr. Brooks, 66, a six-term congressman, was one of the first members of Congress to publicly declare that he would object to certifying President Biden’s election victory. He faced calls for censure from Democrats after remarking at the rally that preceded the Capitol riot in January that it was time to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Mr. Brooks has said the phrase was misconstrued as advocating for the violence that followed.“Nobody has had President Trump’s back more over the last four years than Mo Brooks,” Mr. Miller said in his opening remarks. “Now I need you to have his back.”Polling shows that the vast majority of Republican voters remain devoted to the former president. In a Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll last month, nearly half of Trump voters even said they would abandon the G.O.P. completely and join a Trump party if he decided to create one.But Mr. Brooks isn’t the only Republican in the race eager for Mr. Trump’s blessing in a state that the former president won by over 25 percentage points. Lynda Blanchard, a businesswoman and former Trump ambassador, has already entered the contest, which is expected to attract a number of other candidates.Mr. Greitens, 46, is also running under the banner of the former president, though it remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will endorse his bid.Once considered a rising Republican star, Mr. Greitens faced months of allegations, criminal charges, angry denials and court proceedings after explosive allegations of an affair, sexual misconduct and blackmail involving his former hairstylist became public. He resigned in 2018, less than two years into his term; he was never convicted of a crime.Renounced by his biggest donors and former strategists, Mr. Greitens has been championed by some in Mr. Trump’s orbit and is a frequent guest on a podcast hosted by the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.In an interview on Fox News announcing his bid, Mr. Greitens claimed he had been “exonerated” by investigators and had resigned only for his family.The prospect of the disgraced former governor running again has alarmed some Republicans who fear he could cost the party what is considered to be a relatively safe seat. Some strategists worry that Mr. Greitens could emerge with a plurality if a large number of Republican candidates enter the race. More