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      Ex-Prosecutor in ‘Rust’ Case Suggested Role ‘Might Help’ Her Campaign

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      Andrea Reeb, part of the team that charged Alec Baldwin with manslaughter, wrote in an email in June that the case could help her campaign for the state legislature.When Andrea Reeb was hired last June as a prosecutor investigating the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust,” she emailed the district attorney in charge of the case that an announcement of her role “might help” her campaign for a seat in the state legislature.Ms. Reeb, a former district attorney who was a Republican candidate for the state’s House of Representatives, wrote to Mary Carmack-Altwies, the Santa Fe County district attorney who chose her for the case, that she did not plan to inform the press about her appointment.“At some point though,” Ms. Reeb went on in the email, “I’d at least like to get out there that I am assisting you … as it might help in my campaign lol.”Since then, Ms. Reeb won her election and, as the special prosecutor on the case, was part of the team that brought involuntary manslaughter charges against the actor Alec Baldwin, who was holding the gun that discharged on the “Rust” set on Oct. 21, 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.Last week, Ms. Reeb stepped down from the role of special prosecutor, after lawyers for Mr. Baldwin had argued that her simultaneous work for two different branches of state government — serving as a lawmaker and a prosecutor — violated New Mexico’s constitution.Correspondence between Ms. Reeb and Ms. Carmack-Altwies, which was released Tuesday in response to a request under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act, shows that Ms. Reeb had discussed her legislative campaign early on in her work on the “Rust” case. On June 9, as Ms. Carmack-Altwies discussed with Ms. Reeb bringing her onto the case, Ms. Reeb wrote, “I also won’t talk to the press and will leave that all to you Mary.” Then she made the suggestion that an announcement might help her campaign.In her response to Ms. Reeb’s email, Ms. Carmack-Altwies did not mention the campaign, but said, “I am intending to either introduce you or send it in a press release when we get the investigation!”The district attorney’s office and Ms. Reeb did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.Ms. Reeb later entered into a contract that stipulated that she would bill $125 per hour for her work on the “Rust” case.In a court filing on Tuesday, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, Luke Nikas, described the report of the email as “yet another troubling development” and wrote that “Representative Reeb’s prosecution of this case against Mr. Baldwin to advance her political career is a further abuse of the system and yet another violation of Mr. Baldwin’s constitutional rights.”In January prosecutors announced that they would file involuntary manslaughter charges against Mr. Baldwin and the armorer on the film set, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, including a charge punishable by five years in prison. Lawyers for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and Mr. Baldwin maintained that their clients were not guilty.Last month prosecutors downgraded the charges after Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had erred by charging them under a law that had not yet been enacted at the time of the shooting. Under the current charges, if convicted, he and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed face the possibility of a maximum of 18 months in prison.A lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, Jason Bowles, said in a statement Tuesday that Ms. Reeb’s comments from last June paint a “troubling picture of a prosecution that worried less about the law and facts than they did about wanting the limelight for personal political purposes.”After lawyers for Mr. Baldwin challenged the appointment of Ms. Reeb, prosecutors initially defended her continued role in the case. But she stepped down March 14, a couple of weeks before a judge was set to rule on whether she should be disqualified.Mr. Baldwin, who has said that he had no reason to believe there were live rounds on the film set when the gun went off, has pleaded not guilty in the case. A lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed has said she also intends to plead not guilty.A judge is scheduled to determine in May whether the charges against both defendants should move forward. More

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      ‘The Democratic Party in New York Is a Disaster’

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests. “Only in this country can the kid who came from the basement in Jackson Heights … ,” George Santos began, before he was momentarily overwhelmed. “To everybody watching, I want you to know that the American dream is worth fighting for. It’s worth defending, and that’s why I jumped into this race.”In another era — two or four years ago, perhaps — the Santos saga, with its absurd cascade of lies, would have been an amusing sideshow for many Democratic politicians, who would have been able to mock the chaos and move on, comfortably sure that Santos, who fabricated much of his personal and financial biography, would only further hobble a neutered Republican minority. But the new congressman, now under investigation by local and federal authorities, was instead a crucial cog in Kevin McCarthy’s House majority, having flipped the redrawn Third Congressional District in New York, an area that had been represented by Democrats for decades, by eight points.These days, New York is known as the deep-blue state where Democrats lost four seats on the way to losing the House of Representatives and effectively halting President Biden’s domestic agenda for the next two years. Kathy Hochul, who served as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before accusations of sexual harassment and assault forced him from office in 2021, won the narrowest race for governor in 28 years, beating Lee Zeldin, a Trump-supporting congressman from Long Island, by less than six points. While forecasts for a national red wave didn’t materialize — Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate were largely triumphant in tossup races across the country, and Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn remained the Senate majority leader — Democrats stumbled in territory on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley that Biden won handily just two years earlier.These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)National parties function as enormous umbrella organizations, determining the presidential primary calendar and the process for allocating delegates at the national conventions. The drudgery of running elections is left to the local and state parties, as well as individual campaigns and independent political action committees.Kathy Hochul won the narrowest race for New York governor in 28 years.Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Sipa USA, via Associated PressElsewhere in the country, state Democratic parties are much more robust than they are in New York. In Wisconsin, under the leadership of 42-year-old Ben Wikler, the party offered crucial organizing muscle in Gov. Tony Evers’s re-election win, staving off a Republican statewide sweep. The Nevada Democratic Party, despite infighting among moderates and progressives, aided Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election, investing strongly in rural voter engagement. And in California, the party chair position is publicly contested among multiple candidates, with delegates voting as Democrats traverse the state and make their case in the media.As for New York, observers across the ideological spectrum agree that the state is entering an unprecedented era, with warring political factions and a glaring power vacuum. Hochul recently became the first governor in New York history to have the State Legislature, controlled by Democrats, vote down her nominee to the state’s highest court. Progressives spearheaded opposition to the judge, Hector LaSalle, arguing that he was too conservative.In challenging Hochul from the right, Zeldin was savagely effective — “Vote like your life depends on it,” he exhorted, echoing Richard Nixon, in the final days of the campaign — in seizing on suburban anxieties around rising crime that Republicans in other states weren’t able to successfully exploit. While Manhattan and the combined might of upper-income white and middle-class Black voters thwarted Zeldin in the five boroughs, he made notable inroads with working-class Asian Americans, potentially heralding a political realignment for the city’s fastest growing demographic. Hochul’s campaign was assailed for its relative listlessness and failure to counter Republican attacks on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Nancy Pelosi chided the governor. (Hochul’s staff did not make her available for an interview.)Within the confines of New York, Democrats remain historically dominant, retaining veto-proof majorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats, as is the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. But this is a recent shift: Republicans controlled the State Senate almost continuously from the mid-1960s until 2019. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, led the state for 12 years, and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran New York City from 1994 through 2013.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Heading into 2022, Democrats were confident that after decades of Republican rule in the State Legislature, they could entirely control the state’s redistricting process, engineering favorable House maps for the fall. After a quasi-independent commission deadlocked — critics argued that it was designed to fail when Cuomo helped create it a decade ago — Democratic state legislators redrew lines that strongly favored their party. Republicans sued in court, claiming that the Democrats’ maps violated an anti-gerrymandering clause in the State Constitution. To the shock of many political insiders, the Republicans won their court battle, and an outside special master was appointed by an upstate Republican judge to quickly draw new lines. House primaries were shoved from June to August.With the special master prioritizing competitiveness, not incumbency advantage, Democrats found themselves thrown together in some of the same districts. Representative Jerry Nadler was pitted in a nasty primary against his longtime colleague Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan. (Nadler would prevail.) North of the city, Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pugilistic centrist, decided to run in a new district spanning Rockland and Westchester that included far more turf than had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a neighboring progressive.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones fumed at the time. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism” against Jones, who is Black. Maloney held his ground, and Jones was forced to move to a new district in New York City, where he would lose in an August primary. Maloney fended off a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who ran far to his left. Then, despite a titanic war chest, he fell to Mike Lawler, a Republican state legislator, by less than a point. Jones tweeted one word: “Yikes.”And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.Protesters outside City Hall in New York in January, including Jumaane Williams, argued that Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, was responsible for losing four congressional seats.Kena Betancur/VIEWpress, via Getty Images“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”Until Cuomo’s downfall, Jacobs was known as a close ally of the imperious governor. His first tenure as party chairman came under Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, but his second began in 2019, a year after Cuomo won a commanding re-election. That election cycle was notable because Cuomo overcame a primary challenge from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who targeted him from the ascendant left. Though Nixon lost, six insurgent progressives defeated members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway group of centrist Democrats who had spent the last half decade in an unusual — and incredibly infuriating to progressives — power-sharing arrangement with State Senate Republicans. The I.D.C. had existed with Cuomo’s blessing, joining with Republicans to foil liberal priorities in the State Legislature, like tuition assistance for undocumented immigrants, tougher tenant protections and criminal-justice reforms. For Cuomo, a triangulating centrist determined to avoid having to sign or veto progressive bills while harboring dreams of the national stage, the arrangement worked just fine. (In 2018, I took a break from writing to run for State Senate myself, losing in a Brooklyn Democratic primary.)Since the state party, historically, has been a creature of the governor or the most powerful Democrat in the state, Jacobs is safe as long as Hochul tolerates him. And Hochul, some Democrats say, owes Jacobs for the work he did behind closed doors to ensure that the new governor had a comfortable primary win after Cuomo resigned and immediately began to plot a comeback. Jacobs’s fear was that a divided field could pave the way for a Cuomo revival, and he worked to rapidly hustle up institutional and financial support for Hochul that helped to deter another challenger, Attorney General Letitia James, from running against her.In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.A year later, Jacobs explored ways of undercutting the established vehicle for left-wing organizing in the state, the Working Families Party, a hybrid of party activists and labor unions that had endorsed Jumaane Williams over Hochul in the primary. He cut a check to a more moderate Democrat trying to primary Jamaal Bowman, a Westchester County congressman and a member of the Squad, the prominent group of far-left members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. After Republicans swept Democrats out of power in the New York suburbs last fall, Jacobs quickly blamed the left. “New York did underperform, but so did California,” Jacobs told the politics publication City & State in November. “What do those two states have in common? Well, governmentally, we’re among the two most progressive states in the country.”Jacobs is under fire from the party’s more progressive wing, which is calling for his ouster, but so far has had Gov. Hochul’s support.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA 67-year-old political lifer, Jacobs has an unrelated day job overseeing a string of popular and lucrative summer camps in upstate New York, in Pennsylvania and on Long Island, where he lives. Democratic business is often run out of a TLC Family of Camps office in Glen Cove, a small town on Nassau County’s Gold Coast. Politicos and journalists who want to reach Jacobs know to email his Camp TLC address; Jacobs cc’d his chief of staff at that summer-camp address to help arrange a telephone interview that lasted an hour, despite Jacobs’s initial hesitancy about going on the record.“People believe that the state party runs all the campaigns, determines the messaging, does the opposition research for every candidate and, you know, when a candidate anywhere loses, it’s the fault of the state party, and all of that is just not an accurate view of the function of the state party and what we actually do,” Jacobs said.Jacobs described the party as a “housekeeping organization” and a “coordinating entity” that works among labor unions, campaigns and other interest groups. He cited the maintenance of a voter file that campaigns use to target the electorate as among its most important work, as well as establishing campaign offices at election time. Fund-raising, too, is a big part of the work, and it’s there where Jacobs has been especially useful. A multimillionaire and prolific donor, Jacobs has given more than $1 million to various Democratic candidates and causes over the last two decades. It can be argued that it’s this wealth, in part, that has allowed him to continuously lead the Nassau County party since 2001. Few staunch Democrats are both better wired and more willing to cut checks than Jacobs.“How I run my businesses and my charitable donations and the rest would indicate, as well as my personal beliefs, would indicate that I’m really, personally, quite progressive, more so than most people would think,” Jacobs said. Rather, he argued, his message is direct: “Slow down. You’re going too fast. What you’re doing is going to lose us votes in the suburbs and rural areas.”In an unusual move for a party leader, Jacobs last year backed the rivals of several incumbent Democrats. His motivation, he told me, was “the behavior of some of these folks that are speaking on behalf of what I’d refer to as the far left. They practice the politics of personal destruction. They won’t argue the merits of what I say, but they’ll condemn me — and others, by the way, not just me — in really vitriolic terms, personal and the rest. Some of the reasons why I personally gave to some of the primaries — it was just a handful of people — it’s because of what they said about me. Personally.”Last August, Jacobs donated $2,900 — the maximum allowable amount — to a county legislator trying to unseat Bowman. The congressman won by 38 points anyway.“I don’t know Jay Jacobs,” Bowman told me. “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I’ve never met him in my life. Even though I was a newcomer in 2020, I was still duly elected, and I’m a member of the party now. One would’ve thought that the leader of the party would have reached out to have a cup of coffee or have a conversation.”Should Jacobs resign? “The short answer is yes,” Bowman answered. “But the more, I think, comprehensive nuanced answer or question is, What the hell are we even doing? You know, the whole thing about the corporate agenda, which I think Jay Jacobs and maybe even Governor Hochul and maybe others are missing is, when you talk about younger voters, millennials or Gen Z, they are not aligned with corporate interests over labor and working-class people.”But Jacobs has plenty of defenders, including county leaders across the state, who believe he’s an upgrade over his somnolent or domineering predecessors and has a realistic view of what it takes to win beyond the liberal confines of New York City. “It’s hard for me to understand this rancor from certain individuals, by the way, who never seem to be satisfied,” says Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “Only in New York could Jay win every single statewide election and hold the supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate and be chastised.”Gregory Meeks, the Queens congressman and chairman of the county organization there, echoes Jacobs’s critique: The progressive and socialist left has cost Democrats in general elections by forcing them to defend positions he believes are alienating. “Extremes cannot be the dominant part of a party, because it isolates everyone else,” Meeks says. “What’s not good for all of us is talking about defunding the police.”Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff. Among some Hochul allies, there has been quiet frustration directed at one of her top advisers, Adam Sullivan, who speaks frequently with Jacobs on Hochul’s behalf. Sullivan holds great sway in Hochul’s world because he managed her successful campaign for Congress more than a decade ago. Despite his low profile and the fact that his consulting firm, ACS Campaign Consulting, is based in Colorado, where he lives, Sullivan was one of a select few aides Hochul thanked in her victory speech. Sullivan himself disputes that there’s any behind-the-scenes friction. “The governor is completely committed to building a strong, robust party,” Sullivan says. “Everyone in her orbit is on the same page.” What isn’t clear is whether that page, and the vision for the future of the state party, includes Jacobs.Even Jacobs’s detractors acknowledge that dumping him and hunting for a replacement is only the beginning of a political project that will take many years. (Floated successors include Adriano Espaillat, a congressman who has built a strong operation among Dominican Americans in Upper Manhattan; Grace Meng, a Queens congresswoman and Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman who is the first Asian American elected to the House from New York; and Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens state senator.)All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”Through the first half of the 20th century, Tammany Hall, with origins as an Irish Catholic society in the late 1700s, was the embodiment of the local Democratic Party, using patronage to secure power and dominating state and city politics alike. Nothing equivalent rose to take its place. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would compare the state party right now to the machine that existed 50, 60, 70 years ago,” says Paterson, the former governor who later served as state party chairman during Cuomo’s tenure.New York never had a Harry Reid figure, a singularly powerful Democrat who took an obsessive interest in party building. The two Cuomos, Mario and his son Andrew, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years, and each treated the party organization as little more than a tool for self-promotion. A liberal icon to the rest of America for his soaring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mario Cuomo was assailed at home for barely lifting a finger to aid Democrats desperately trying to retake the State Senate. In 1990, The Times reported that Cuomo was hoarding more than $5 million for his own campaign while spending none for the State Senate Democrats, who were outspent 4 to 1 by Republicans. In 1994, the state party spent almost $2 million to aid Cuomo’s failed re-election effort while offering less than $30,000 apiece for the candidates for attorney general and state comptroller. By the end of the year, the party was moribund and completely broke, running up a million-dollar debt.The only Democratic governor in modern times to care about the future of the state party and down-ballot candidates was Eliot Spitzer, who won a landslide victory in 2006 and would resign, a little more than a year later, in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer was a proud liberal who wanted to break the Republican hold on the State Senate. The party, too, was trying to modernize in anticipation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president. For a brief period, under the leadership of Denny Farrell, an influential state assemblyman from Manhattan, talented operatives were hired, and Spitzer’s aides tried to implement a strategy for boosting legislative candidates.“The party itself had really dissipated,” recalls Spitzer, now a real estate developer. His team helped recruit and fund an upstate Democratic candidate who won a pivotal special election for a State Senate seat in early 2008. “It was partly fund-raising, partly finding the right candidates, partly putting the right energy into it.”Andrew Cuomo at a news conference in 2021, a few months before he announced his resignation. The two Cuomos, Andrew and his father Mario, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years.Mary Altaffer/Getty ImagesThe rise of Andrew Cuomo, who had a near-dictatorial hold on political affairs for nearly the entirety of the 2010s, put an end to nascent party-building plans. Cuomo treated Democratic politics as an extension of Cuomo politics, hoovering up resources and kneecapping Democrats he viewed as a threat. He was content to let Republicans keep the State Senate and rarely campaigned for House candidates. Donald Trump’s election, coupled with Sanders’s 2016 bid, would radicalize a new generation of Democrats. Soon, a democratic socialist candidate was winning a State Senate seat, and Working Families Party-supported insurgents were driving out the conservative Democrats who had chosen to align themselves with the Republican Party.By 2018, Ocasio-Cortez had felled one of the most powerful party bosses in New York, a sign that the left could win its battles against the establishment. “We need Democrats who are not running from their own shadow,” says Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party.The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.“What we saw is a party that did not know what role they should play,” Nnaemeka says, “and therefore played no role.”Ross Barkan writes frequently on New York and national politics. He is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid’s impact on New York City. This is his first article for the magazine. More

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      Democrats Meddle Again in a G.O.P. Primary, This Time Down-Ballot

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      In a race for a State Senate seat in Wisconsin, Democrats are replicating their midterm strategy of elevating far-right Republicans in hopes of beating them in the general election.Last year, Democrats spent millions of dollars elevating far-right candidates in Republican primary contests for governor and Congress — betting, it turned out correctly, that more extreme opponents would lose general elections.Now Wisconsin Democrats are trying to do it again, this time with mail and TV ads before a Republican primary in a special election for a State Senate seat that carries ramifications far beyond the district in suburban Milwaukee.The Democrats are helping a far-right election denier who has become a pariah within her party in her race against a less extreme, but still election-denying, conservative. They hope that with a more vulnerable opponent, Democrats can win a seat held for decades by Republicans and deny the G.O.P. a veto-proof majority in the gerrymandered chamber.“Janel Brandtjen is as conservative as they come,” reads a postcard sent to Republican voters from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which calls her “a conservative pro-Trump Republican.”The Feb. 21 primary, and the April 4 general election to follow, will serve as the latest test of how much appetite Republican voters have for the flavor of election denialism that fueled the party’s grass roots after former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss.The twist in the Wisconsin race is that both leading Republican candidates took significant public steps to try to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat. One of them, however, Ms. Brandtjen, a state representative from Menomonee Falls, has so alienated members of her own party that she was kicked out of the State Assembly’s Republican caucus, leaving Democrats giddy about the prospect of facing her in a special election for a battleground district.“If Janel Brandtjen makes it through the primary, it’s going to allow people in Wisconsin to have a clear choice of what it is that they’re voting for in the election in April,” said Melissa Agard, the Democratic leader in the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate, who said the race would be more winnable for Democrats if Ms. Brandtjen, pronounced Bran-chen, triumphed in the primary.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.A Chaotic Majority: The defining dynamic for House Republicans, who have a slim majority, may be the push and pull between the far right and the rest of the conference. Here is a closer look at the fractious caucus.A New Kind of Welfare: In a post-Roe world, some conservative thinkers are pushing Republicans to move on from Reagan-era family policy and send cash to families. A few lawmakers are listening.Flipping the Pennsylvania House: Democrats swept three special elections in solidly blue House districts, putting the party in the majority for the first time in a dozen years by a single seat.Some Republicans agree.The Republican State Leadership Committee, the leading national organization that backs G.O.P. state legislative candidates, is broadcasting digital ads promoting State Representative Dan Knodl before the primary. And Country First, a political action committee started by former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — who retired from Congress after voting to impeach Mr. Trump — has bought digital ads calling Ms. Brandtjen “an embarrassment.”Like Ms. Brandtjen, Mr. Knodl was among the 91 state legislators from several states who signed a letter urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. He shares Ms. Brandtjen’s vehement opposition to abortion rights.Ms. Brandtjen, who said in December 2020 that there was “no doubt” Mr. Trump had won that year’s election in Wisconsin, became a favorite of the former president’s in 2021 after being appointed to lead the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee.From that perch, she amplified a range of false claims about the 2020 election; invited conspiracy theorists to testify before the panel; sought to initiate an Arizona-style review of Wisconsin’s ballots; and appeared at rallies aiming to pressure her Republican colleagues to withdraw the state’s 2020 electoral votes — an impossible act under the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Trump praised her in his official statements and had her speak at a rally for midterm candidates he held in Wisconsin in August 2022.But Ms. Brandtjen, a longtime figure in local conservative politics dating to her time two decades ago as a gadfly at Menomonee Falls village board meetings, did not fully draw the ire of her fellow Republicans until she endorsed the Trump-backed primary opponent of Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, who has been the state’s most powerful Republican official since 2019, when Democrats took over the governor’s office.After Mr. Vos narrowly prevailed, he removed her as the elections committee chairwoman and organized his fellow Assembly Republicans to expel Ms. Brandtjen from the party’s caucus.Asked Monday about his preference in the State Senate special election, Mr. Vos replied in a text message: “Lol. Let me quote Sarah Huckabee Sanders, ‘normal vs crazy.’ I would vote normal.”A third Republican candidate in the race, Van Mobley, the president of the village of Thiensville, was among just a handful of Wisconsin elected officials who backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. He is far less known in the district than Ms. Brandtjen and Mr. Knodl, a bar owner from Germantown. None of the three Republican candidates responded to messages.The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, a lawyer who is unopposed in her primary, is running television ads aimed at raising Ms. Brandtjen’s profile.A parade of women in Ms. Habush Sinykin’s ads call Ms. Brandtjen “too conservative” and cite her opposition to abortion rights and her citation as “pro-life legislator of the year” from a Wisconsin organization that opposes abortion rights.In all, Ms. Habush Sinykin has spent $166,000 on advertising, while neither Ms. Brandtjen nor Mr. Knodl has bought any television or digital ads, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.Ms. Habush Sinykin declined a request to be interviewed about the campaign and her advertisements. Democratic polling of the race suggests that she could beat Ms. Brandtjen in a general election but would have a far tougher race against Mr. Knodl.“We’re continuing to highlight Janel Brandtjen and how she would be a disaster in the State Senate,” said Joe Oslund, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “We’re going to continue to put her extremism front and center for voters.”Wisconsin Republicans hold a 21-11 advantage in the State Senate after the state adopted new G.O.P.-drawn legislative maps ahead of the midterm elections. If a Republican wins the special election to the Senate, the party will hold a veto-proof majority and will have the votes to impeach Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, his appointees to state cabinet posts and state judges.Like many once solidly Republican suburban areas, the district, which covers parts of four counties in Milwaukee’s northern and northwestern suburbs, has trended toward Democrats in recent years. Mr. Trump won the district by 12 percentage points in 2016, but that advantage narrowed to five points in 2020. In 2018, Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, won the district by 20.5 points, but last year the G.O.P. nominee for governor, Tim Michels, carried it by just four points.The seat opened up when Alberta Darling, a 78-year-old moderate Republican who was first elected in 1992, announced her retirement in November. Mr. Evers praised her as “a diligent leader who’s always carried herself with poise, class, and grace.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Sweep in 3 Special Elections Gives Democrats Control of Pennsylvania House

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      Three Democratic victories flipped the House for the first time in a dozen years by a single seat in the battleground state.Democrats swept three special elections in solidly blue House districts in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, putting the party in the majority by a single seat and breaking a Republican legislative monopoly that has recently focused on election restrictions and anti-abortion bills.All three races were in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh and is the state’s No. 2 county by population, after Philadelphia.Control of the Pennsylvania House had been shrouded by uncertainty since the midterms in November, grinding legislative business to a halt while the parties clashed over ground rules and the timing of the special elections.Democrats had appeared to flip the chamber in the fall for the first time in a dozen years, but one lawmaker’s death and the election of two others to higher offices delayed the final outcome.The party’s majority — 102 seats to 101 seats — brings clarity to the last unresolved legislative races in a fiercely contested state.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsDeepfake Rules: In most of the world, the authorities can’t do much about deepfakes, as few laws exist to regulate the technology. China hopes to be the exception.Lessons for a New Generation: Finland is testing new ways to teach students about propaganda. Here’s what other countries can learn from its success.Covid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutionsA ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. In the 32nd District, Joe McAndrew, a former executive director of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, defeated Clayton Walker, a Republican pastor. The seat had been held by Tony DeLuca, a Democrat who was the longest-serving member of the Pennsylvania House before his death in October from lymphoma. Still, Mr. DeLuca was overwhelmingly re-elected in the heavily Democratic district.In the 34th District, Abigail Salisbury, a Democratic lawyer, prevailed against Robert Pagane, a Republican security guard and former police officer. Ms. Salisbury will fill the seat of Summer Lee, a Democrat who in November became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. Last year, Ms. Salisbury had previously lost to Ms. Lee in a Democratic primary for the legislature..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In the 35th District, Matt Gergely, a Democrat who is the chief revenue officer of McKeesport, Pa., defeated Don Nevills, a Republican who operates a tattoo shop and ran unsuccessfully for the seat in November. Austin Davis, a Democrat who previously represented the district, was elected as lieutenant governor in the fall.The power shift dealt another blow to Republicans coming off the midterms, when the party failed to meet heightened expectations in Pennsylvania and nationally that were generated by economic turmoil and President Biden’s lackluster job approval ratings.In November, Pennsylvania voters consistently rejected Republicans in marquee races featuring candidates endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, who espoused false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.Democrats flipped a U.S. Senate seat and held onto the governor’s office when Josh Shapiro, who was previously Pennsylvania’s attorney general, defeated Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator and an election denier, in an open-seat race.After losing control of the House, Republicans will be unable to override a veto by the governor.In a potential end-run around the governor, G.O.P. lawmakers have resorted to trying to amend the state Constitution in order to pass a voter ID bill. The complex amendment process, which ultimately requires putting the question to voters, is the subject of pending litigation.But both chambers of the General Assembly need to pass the bill this session in order to place it on the ballot.First-time voters and those applying for absentee ballots are currently required to present identification in Pennsylvania, but Republicans want to expand the requirement to all voters in every election and have proposed issuing voter ID cards. Critics say the proposal would make it harder to vote and could be a privacy risk.Mr. Shapiro has not ruled out compromising with Republicans on some voting rules, but has said that he would not support any proposal that hinders voting.Republicans, now likely to be thwarted legislatively, have also sought to use the constitutional amendment process to place new restrictions on abortion in Pennsylvania. More

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      3 Special Elections Will Determine Control of the Pennsylvania House

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      Democrats have a good chance of winning a majority in the chamber after a month in which three vacancies have paralyzed it.For a month, the Pennsylvania legislature has been frozen by a handful of vacancies in the State House of Representatives that made the difference between Democratic and Republican control, and by representatives’ inability to agree on basic operating rules.Special elections on Tuesday could bring the General Assembly back to life.Those elections will fill three vacant House seats in Allegheny County — home to Pittsburgh — where Democratic candidates won in November but either did not take office or quickly stepped down. In the 32nd District, the winner, Tony DeLuca, died shortly before Election Day but too late to have his name removed from the ballot. The 34th District’s representative, Summer Lee, was elected to the United States House, and the 35th District’s representative, Austin Davis, was elected as lieutenant governor.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Governors’ Races: Three contests in the South this year will provide a preliminary under-the-radar test of the 2024 election — and further gauge Donald J. Trump’s clout.Arizona Senate Race: Kari Lake, the fiery former news anchor who narrowly lost a race for governor of Arizona last year, said that she is considering a Republican campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2024.North Carolina’s Supreme Court: The court’s new G.O.P. majority will rehear two major voting rights cases decided two months ago, heightening the debate over partisan influences on state courts.Democrats’ Primary Calendar: Upending decades of political tradition, members of the Democratic National Committee voted to approve a sweeping overhaul of the party’s primary process.If Democrats sweep the special elections, as is expected given that all three districts are heavily blue, they will secure the narrowest of majorities in the Pennsylvania House, 102 seats to 101, after 12 years of Republican control. If Republicans win any of the three races, they will have a thin majority.In the 32nd District, the candidates are Joe McAndrew, a former executive director of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, and Clayton Walker, a Republican pastor. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic; there was no Republican candidate last year, and, even in death, Mr. DeLuca won 86 percent of the vote over a Green Party candidate.In the 34th District, Abigail Salisbury, a Democratic lawyer who ran unsuccessfully against Ms. Lee in the State House primary last year, is her party’s candidate against Robert Pagane, a Republican security guard and former police officer. Ms. Lee was uncontested in the general election in November.In the 35th District, Matt Gergely, a Democrat who is the chief revenue officer of McKeesport, Pa., is facing Don Nevills, a Republican small-business man and Navy veteran. Mr. Nevills received only 34 percent of the vote against Mr. Davis in November.Democrats in Pennsylvania control the governorship but are in the minority in the State Senate. Winning all three races, and thus a House majority, would allow them to block legislation that Republicans have been advancing in recent years, including restrictions on abortion and voting access. If Republicans retain control of both chambers of the legislature, they will be restrained in many respects by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s veto but will be able to bypass it to put constitutional amendments before voters.If Democrats win the chamber and stay united, they can put operating rules in place and start passing legislation after a month of parliamentary paralysis. However, they would need to work with the Republican majority in the State Senate to move anything to Mr. Shapiro’s desk.Up in the air is the fate of Speaker Mark Rozzi, a Democrat who got the job because Republicans, with their temporary 101-to-99 majority, could not unite around one of their own. They chose Mr. Rozzi as a compromise candidate to garner Democratic support. But most Democrats prefer State Representative Joanna McClinton, and they can elect her if they win the majority — though Mr. Rozzi indicated in an interview with The Associated Press that he would try to keep the job.Defying historical midterm election trends, Democrats flipped several state legislative chambers in November, among them, notably, both the Michigan House and the Michigan Senate. In addition to the legislative implications, those victories — including the Pennsylvania House majority, if Democrats secure it on Tuesday — could provide an extra barrier to any Republican efforts to interfere with the administration or results of the 2024 elections. More

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      Will Trump Face Criminal Charges in Georgia Election Inquiry?

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      The House Jan. 6 committee report offered fresh evidence that former President Donald J. Trump was at the center of efforts to overturn election results in Georgia.A few weeks after losing the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, with a plan for keeping himself in office. During the call, he asked John C. Eastman, an architect of the strategy, to lay it out: Trump supporters in states that the president had lost would act as if they were official Electoral College delegates, an audacious scheme to circumvent voters.After the plan was put in motion, Ms. McDaniel forwarded an “elector recap” report to Mr. Trump’s executive assistant, who replied soon after, “It’s in front of him!”Such details, from the report released in December by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, offer fresh evidence that Mr. Trump was not on the periphery of the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia but at the center of it.For the last two years, prosecutors in Atlanta have been conducting a criminal investigation into whether the Trump team interfered in the presidential election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. With the wide-ranging inquiry now entering the indictment phase, the central question is whether Mr. Trump himself will face criminal charges.Legal analysts who have followed the case say there are two areas of considerable risk for Mr. Trump. The first are the calls that he made to state officials, including one to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he needed to “find” 11,780 votes. But the recently released Jan. 6 committee transcripts shed new light on the other area of potential legal jeopardy for the former president: his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors in the weeks after the 2020 election.The Atlanta prosecutors have moved more quickly than the Department of Justice, where a special counsel, Jack Smith, was recently appointed to oversee Trump-related investigations. This month, the Fulton County Superior Court disbanded a special grand jury after it produced an investigative report on the case, concluding months of private testimony from dozens of Trump allies, state officials and other witnesses.Election personnel count absentee ballots in Atlanta in November 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe report remains secret, although a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine if any or all of it will be made public. Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the investigation could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, will need to make her case to a regular grand jury if she seeks indictments, which would likely come by May. That means the nation could be in for months more waiting and speculating, particularly if a judge decides after this week’s hearing not to make public the report’s recommendations.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in a statement Monday that they would not be at Tuesday’s hearing, adding that Mr. Trump “was never subpoenaed nor asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      After Election Problems in Houston, Republicans Seek to Overturn Results

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      A growing number of contests to elections in Texas’ Harris County are a broad attempt to cast doubt on an Election Day that officials concede had problems.HOUSTON — Jon Rosenthal has seen some close races, but his re-election to the Texas State House in November, in a Houston district redrawn to be a virtual lock for Democrats, was not one of them. Mr. Rosenthal won by 15 points.So it came as a surprise when his Republican challenger in the race contested the results, petitioning the State Legislature to order a new election.Another surprise came late Thursday when the Republican candidate for the top executive position in Harris County, which includes Houston, announced that she, too, would contest her much narrower loss, by about 18,000 votes, to the progressive Democrat who is the county’s incumbent chief executive, Lina Hidalgo. By Friday, more than a dozen losing Republican candidates had filed suits to contest the results of their races.Election Day in Harris County, Texas’ largest county, saw a range of problems at polling places, including some that opened late and others that ran out of paper for printing voted ballots. A court ordered the polls to stay open an extra hour to compensate; then the Texas Supreme Court stepped in and halted the extra voting.Republicans, who have been watching closely for election issues in races around the country, seized on the difficulties in Harris County, which is becoming a Democratic stronghold. Candidates called into question the reliability of the results in a bitter and expensive campaign that failed to dislodge Ms. Hidalgo and a slate of Democratic judges.“It is inexcusable that after two months, the public is no further along in knowing if, and to what extent, votes were suppressed,” said Alexandra del Moral Mealer in explaining her decision to contest her loss to Ms. Hidalgo, adding that her challenge was “fundamentally about protecting the right to vote in free and fair elections.”Candidates called into question the reliability of the results in a bitter campaign that ended with Republicans failing to oust Lina Hidalgo and a slate of Democratic judges. Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesElection contests are not uncommon in Texas, often involving down-ballot races in small counties where the margins are often notably slim. But the challenges in Harris County appeared to be uniquely broad in their attempt to cast doubt on much of the voting process in an election that involved 1.1 million votes. They followed calls from state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, for an investigation into the county’s handling of the election. The local district attorney opened an inquiry in November.The election contests in Harris County have at times resembled the one mounted in Arizona by the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, who has sought to overturn her loss by claiming that election officials in one major county deliberately disenfranchised her voters. A judge dismissed her claims last month for lack of evidence.But the latest contests in Texas have little precedent, said the Harris County attorney, Christian Menefee, a Democrat. “To my knowledge, this is the first election contest filed in Harris County that is wholly focused on these kinds of process failures,” Mr. Menefee said in an interview.The sprawling Texas county has shifted more decisively in the direction of Democrats in the last few election cycles, following in the direction of other major Texas population centers.For a variety of reasons, it has struggled to conduct elections smoothly, drawing repeated scrutiny from Republican lawmakers in the State Capitol. The county’s size has been a challenge, covering an area nearly the size of Delaware with 2.5 million registered voters and more than 700 polling places. It has struggled with newly mandated voting systems and has not had steady leadership at its elections office, with three different administrators since 2020.An audit of the 2020 election, conducted by the secretary of state, highlighted a range of issues, including instances where Harris County did not handle its electronic records properly, though there was no evidence of widespread fraud.Several steps that the county took during the coronavirus pandemic to make it easier to vote in Houston — such as limited 24-hour voting and drive-through polling places — also drew criticism from Republicans, who argued that the changes had made the election less secure. The Republican-dominated State Legislature, in its last session, took steps to curtail many of the measures.Voters waited in line at Damascus Missionary Baptist Church on Election Day in Houston in November.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesOn Election Day in November, the county experienced problems at a number of polling places, including several that were significantly delayed in opening and others that reported running out of paper ballots.A judge ordered polling places in the county to remain open for an extra hour after the Texas Organizing Project, a nonprofit, filed suit over the issues, claiming that voters were being prevented from casting ballots. The Texas Supreme Court stepped in and stayed the ruling in response to a challenge from the Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton. The court eventually allowed about 2,000 provisional ballots that were cast during the extra voting time to be added to the official count.The county elections administrator, Clifford Tatum, has defended the election process and said the issues that came up reflected small problems in an otherwise well-run election. “Overall, Election Day was a success,” a postelection report from Mr. Tatum’s office concluded.But the report, released last week, also found that the county’s voting system was in “an immediate need of upgrades or replacements” to correct software issues, simplify voting day setup and create a system for the elections administrator to know in the moment whether problems reported at polling places had been resolved.The Harris County Republican Party has focused on a broad range of issues that arose on Election Day, including not only sites that ran out of paper ballots but also others where poll workers incorrectly fed paper ballots into the voting machines.In its report, the election administrator’s office said that officials at 68 voting centers reported running out of the initial allotment of paper on Election Day, and that only 61 of them said they had received deliveries of more paper.But it remained unclear how many voters were turned away because of the paper shortages, in part because, according to the report, some of the election judges “declined to speak after reportedly being advised not to do so by the Harris County Republican Party.”A spokeswoman for the county Republican Party, Genevieve Carter, denied any such instructions. “We encouraged them to provide their firsthand account of any issues that occurred,” she said. “Our goal is to get to the bottom of what went wrong during this election.”The party’s lawyers and leaders have not claimed that they can prove their candidates should have won. Instead, they have argued that the scope of the problems on Election Day were so great — including, they claimed, allowing some voters to cast ballots who were no longer eligible to do so in the county — that the true results in the election cannot be known; they are demanding that new elections be held. (More than two-thirds of the ballots were cast either during early voting or by mail, not on Election Day.)“We have a systematic cancer that has invaded our election process,” said the chair of the county Republican Party, Cindy Siegel.Democrats have not raised public challenges, but have privately complained that the repeated issues in the election process in Houston were not being adequately addressed, giving Republicans fuel for their efforts to pass new restrictive laws and, now, election contests.Jon Rosenthal said he believed the challenge to his election was frivolous, and that allowing it to go forward in the State House could cause future headaches for lawmakers. Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesOnly the candidates themselves can initiate the contests, and so far at least 14 have done so, including Ms. Mealer, a first-time candidate who received millions in campaign contributions from top Houston-area donors; Mr. Rosenthal’s challenger, Michael May; a candidate for county district clerk; and nine Republican judicial candidates.One of the earliest challenges came from a judicial candidate, Erin Lunceford, who lost by 2,743 votes, and filed suit late last year. Ms. Lunceford’s suit includes 19 separate claims of issues with the way votes were handled or counted during the November election and asks the court to void the judicial election and “declare that the true outcome of the election cannot be ascertained.” Ms. Lunceford is represented by Andy Taylor, an election lawyer for the county Republican Party.Ryan MacLeod, a lawyer for the Democrat who won the race, Tamika Craft, described the suit in court papers as a “stunt to make headlines” after an election was lost, and said that “no allegations are supported by facts” and that no evidence had been provided.In the latest challenge on Thursday to the outcome of the race for Harris County judge — effectively the county’s chief executive — Ms. Mealer’s lawyers focused primarily on the paper ballot issues, arguing that they had been concentrated in high-turnout Republican areas and that county officials had “suppressed the voting rights” of residents in those places.Ms. Hidalgo’s office referred questions to the county attorney, Mr. Menefee, who described the challenges as “frivolous attempts to overturn the votes of more than a million residents.”Unlike the other challenges, Mr. May’s contest to his loss against Mr. Rosenthal does not go before a judge, because it involved a State House race. Instead, under Texas law, it will be considered by state legislators, who reconvene this month. The House could decide that the challenge is frivolous and reject it quickly, or choose to investigate the allegations by gathering testimony and evidence before deciding whether the result should be voided and a new election held.Mr. May, in his petition, cited the paper ballot issues and argued that eligible voters were turned away and unable to cast ballots. He has not provided evidence and did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Rosenthal said he believed the challenge was frivolous and that allowing it to go forward could cause future headaches for lawmakers.“If there is life given to this, and there is no consequence for bringing something this frivolous, you’re setting up for election challenges across the state,” he said. “You could have dozens of challenges per cycle.” More