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    Herschel Walker’s Senate Bid in Georgia Is Powered by Fandom

    The football-star-turned-candidate has been converting Bulldogs fans into supporters. But some Republicans worry voters are blinded by his celebrity.LaGRANGE, Ga. — Most came dressed in University of Georgia jerseys, hats and T-shirts. Some carried footballs and framed posters. It was a campaign stop for a Senate candidate, but for many Georgians who came to see Herschel Walker, politics was hardly the only draw.“It’s ‘Herschel, Herschel, Herschel’ — he doesn’t even have to have his last name,” said Gail Hunnicutt, a Walker fan since he dominated the University of Georgia football program from 1980 to 1982, winning the Heisman Trophy and unending adoration from many in football-obsessed Georgia. “I’m wondering why he wants to jump into the mess of Washington politics. But we’re proud to have him there.”Mr. Walker is a risky choice for a Republican Party desperately trying to win back a Senate seat lost in the state’s Democratic wave two years ago. He has never held elected office, and he lived in Texas for the better part of the last decade. He has been accused of domestic abuse and has acknowledged violent thoughts as part of his past struggles with mental illness. He has made exaggerated and false claims about his business success, according to local news reports. And his public speeches are characterized by unclear and sometimes meandering talking points.But little of this seems to matter to the Republican voters embracing his Senate primary campaign. Mr. Walker’s one-name-only fame has propelled him to the top of the field. In less than nine months as a candidate, he has amassed $10 million in cash. He campaigns with no fear of his primary opponents and all the confidence of an all-star athlete.Lee Richter, 67, a retired coach at LaGrange College, had his hat autographed by the candidate.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA Georgia Bulldogs jersey signed by Herschel Walker during his campaign event.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“I go into these cities and give people hope,” Mr. Walker said on Monday in an interview at the meet-and-greet in LaGrange, a small town about an hour south of Atlanta. “Most everybody in Georgia knows who I am. The people that want to try to deny they know who I am aren’t from Georgia. Let’s be real.”But even some Republicans worry their party is being blinded by fandom. Mr. Walker may be on track for victory in the May 24 primary, but he faces a harder challenge against Senator Raphael G. Warnock.Mr. Warnock, the freshman Democrat, has raised more than $13 million in the last three months, according to campaign finance data, and he will be backed by national Democrats eager to prove their 2020 victories were more than just a rejection of former President Donald J. Trump, but instead were a permanent shift in a rapidly changing Southern state. Mr. Warnock’s campaign declined to comment.Mr. Walker campaigns as both a political outsider and a celebrity, drawing comparisons to Mr. Trump, whose friendship and early endorsement have lifted Mr. Walker’s prospects. But unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Walker eschews large events and spends most of his time at private fund-raisers, listening sessions and small-scale grass-roots events with limited media access. In speeches, he zigzags from hot-button issues such as transgender students’ participation in high school sports, to riffs on the mechanics of his campaign.Former President Donald J. Trump greeting Mr. Walker at an event in Atlanta in 2020.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“When I decided to run a lot of people called. The senators called and said, ‘Herschel can you raise the money? Herschel can you get people to cross over?’ I’m doing both,” Mr. Walker said, alluding to some Republicans’ concerns about his appeal to Democratic and independent voters.Despite his war chest, Mr. Walker has not yet bought any television or radio advertisements. He skipped the first primary debate in April and has not committed to attending another scheduled for May 3.That has prompted some supporters to question his strategy. Debra Jo Steele, a county party official who attended Mr. Walker’s event on Monday wearing a navy blue Trump cap, asked Mr. Walker directly why he did not attend the Senate debate.Mr. Walker said he was out of town, receiving a business leadership award. Several in the crowd hushed her down and yelled for him to call on someone else.“It would be nice to have him be in a debate and he should sharpen his skills before he goes,” Ms. Steele, the secretary of the Republican Party in Heard County, north of LaGrange, said in an interview after Mr. Walker’s remarks. “If he wins the primary, he’s going to have a debate, I’m sure, with the Democratic contender. And it’s just kind of arrogant not to be on the stage.”Herschel Walker, who is running for Senate, speaks at a campaign event in LaGrange, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesGary Black, a former state agriculture commissioner and next highest-polling candidate in the Senate race, is the loudest Republican voice against Mr. Walker. Mr. Black has tried to highlight Mr. Walker’s turbulent past and argue that he is unelectable in the fall.“If Herschel Walker is the nominee for the Republican Party in Georgia, the race will be about Herschel Walker” Mr. Black said. “If I’m the nominee, the race will be about Raphael Warnock and why we should fire him.”In March, Mr. Black’s campaign launched a website detailing the accusations of violence, complete with a two-minute advertisement listing them. A super PAC supporting Mr. Black’s candidacy, Defend Georgia, has said it plans to help spend millions on ads carrying a similar message, though none have aired. Their goal is to pull Mr. Walker below a 50 percent threshold, forcing a runoff. Recent polls show Mr. Walker winning nearly two-thirds of Republican primary voters.Mr. Walker’s ex-wife has accused him of attacking and threatening to kill her. Mr. Walker hasn’t denied the allegations, but he and his campaign have denied accusations made by two other women who say he threatened and stalked them. In his book published in 2008 and later interviews, he attributed past erratic and threatening behavior to a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.“He obviously had a very public fall with mental health and has gotten back up,” said Mallory Blount, a spokeswoman for Mr. Walker’s campaign.For some Republicans, that explanation is part of Mr. Walker’s appeal.“He’s adjusted to every circumstance in every situation, where he was,” said Ms. Hunnicutt. When asked if she could see herself supporting any other Republican in the race, she replied quickly.“No,” she said. “And I know who they are.” More

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    Democratic Dollars Flow Once Again to Likely Lost Causes

    New fund-raising figures show emerging Democratic stars like Marcus Flowers in Georgia and Gary Chambers Jr. in Louisiana, with no clear path to victory.Gary Chambers Jr. burst onto the national scene in 2020 with a viral video of him castigating the racism of the East Baton Rouge school district. Now, he has captured the hearts and wallets of young liberals with a video for his improbable Senate campaign that shows him smoking a large joint and calling for the legalization of marijuana.He has almost no paths to victory over a sitting Republican senator in a red state like Louisiana. But he has raised $1.2 million.The same most likely goes for the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a gay minister who has raised $1.4 million to oust Representative Madison Cawthorn, the far-right Republican, from his North Carolina seat. And for Marcus Flowers, a cowboy-hat-wearing veteran in Georgia who raised $2.4 million just in the first three months of the year to try to dislodge Marjorie Taylor Greene from a heavily Republican district.Every election year in recent cycles, celebrity Democratic candidates have emerged — either on the strength of their personalities, the notoriety of their Republican opponents or both — to rake in campaign cash, then lose impossible elections. Some Democrats say such races are draining money from more winnable campaigns, but the candidates insist that even in losing, they are helping the party by pulling voters in for statewide races, bolstering the Democratic brand and broadening the party’s appeal.“We are asking folks to join us, join us in winning this race and doing the organizing we need,” Ms. Beach-Ferrara said in an interview, “and to say we can’t look at the map and say we aren’t running there. When you do that you get a Madison Cawthorn in office.”As first-quarter fund-raising numbers roll in, the stars are emerging. The biggest bucks belong to incumbents. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican widely viewed as vulnerable this year, was criticized six years ago for anemic fund-raising; this time around, he raised nearly $8.7 million in the first quarter. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat facing a difficult re-election, raised $13.6 million against the $5.2 million raised by his main Republican opponent, Herschel Walker.Competitive races are already awash in money. Representative Val Demings, Democrat of Florida, raised more than $10 million to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, who raised $5.8 million.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Then there’s Mr. Flowers, whose $2.4 million haul in the first quarter easily topped Ms. Greene’s $1.1 million, in a Northwest Georgia district that has given Republicans 75 percent of the vote since it was created in 2012.Mr. Flowers has proved remarkably adept at raising small-dollar donations with a barrage of emails — sometimes multiple emails each day — that capitalize on the behavior of the far-right congresswoman he is running against. An Army veteran who served in combat, he has emphasized his military service, talking tough while attacking Ms. Greene’s sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters and far-right conspiracy theories.Jon Soltz, the co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, a liberal veterans organization that gave Mr. Flowers the maximum allowable contribution, said support was not necessarily about winning the seat but holding Ms. Greene in check and using his run to elevate her profile as the face of the Republican Party in suburban districts that are more winnable.“She can’t be free to travel around the country and spew her lies and disinformation,” Mr. Soltz said. “We’re making her spend her money.”In the process, Mr. Flowers can build name recognition for future runs and might energize the Democrats who live in Northwest Georgia to come out and vote for him, Mr. Warnock and the Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams.The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a Democrat, is running against Representative Madison Cawthorn.Angeli Wright/Asheville Citizen-TimesMr. Cawthorn appeared at a rally with former President Donald J. Trump this month in Selma, N.C.Veasey Conway for The New York TimesMs. Beach-Ferrara is similarly buoyed by her opponent, Mr. Cawthorn, the young face of far-right conservatism in the Trump era. A married lesbian mother of three, Ms. Beach-Ferrara insists her unlikely life story will help her in a district where an influx of politically active outsiders in the Asheville area could change the region’s direction.North Carolina’s 11th House district, with new lines, is slightly less Republican than it was in 2020, when Mr. Cawthorn was first elected. She said Mr. Trump still would have won it by 10 percentage points but the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, would have lost by only 4 points.Her advantage two years later comes from disenchantment with Mr. Cawthorn, whose antics — he has called Ukraine’s president a thug and most recently said his colleagues had invited him to cocaine-filled orgies — have prompted seven Republicans to challenge him in the upcoming primary.“As people walk away from Cawthorn, our job is to meet them,” she said, adding, “For those who don’t know what to make of a gay Christian minister, what is very clear with them is I’m being honest with them from the start.”In Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, Mr. Chambers does not have the villain that Democrats have made nationally of Ms. Greene. His campaign is based on his irreverent appeal — an outspoken Black progressive voice willing to smoke weed in a commercial, burn a Confederate flag and call white school board members racist to their faces for defending a school named after Robert E. Lee.He raised $800,000 in the first three months of the year from 18,500 donors. The average contribution was $41, many of those small-dollar donors youthful and excited, the campaign said.Critics say such campaigns are more about building the brand of Democratic consultants than making a play for a Senate seat. The man who created Mr. Chambers’s marijuana and Confederate flag ads, Erick Sanchez, helped run Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and also hawks “Fouch on the Couch” throw pillows of Dr. Anthony Fauci for $40 a pop.But Randy Jones, one of Mr. Chambers’s campaign chiefs, said the candidate should not be discounted. Mr. Chambers, he said, is taking a page from Ms. Abrams, who energized Georgia voters of color, urban liberals and the scatterings of rural Democrats to nearly win the governorship four years ago, build a political organization and set herself up for a rematch this year with the Republican governor, Brian Kemp.Mr. Jones ran the campaign of another celebrity Democrat, Richard Ojeda of West Virginia, whose House campaign in 2018 was instructive in other ways. Mr. Ojeda, a trash-talking Bronze Star winner, sought to remake his party’s image in his emerging Republican stronghold as more muscular and more working class. He raised nearly $3 million, then lost by nearly 13 percentage points.Richard Ojeda campaigning in Logan, W.Va., in 2018.Andrew Spear for The New York TimesEmbittered by the experience, Mr. Ojeda moved to North Carolina to leave a home state he describes with the same epithet Mr. Trump used for developing countries. He uses his political notoriety to lift his group No Dem Left Behind, which promotes candidates in rural Republican areas, as he builds a new house.Even as he defended his campaign, Mr. Ojeda criticizes the party in ways that echo criticism of his own effort. Democrats across the country dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Senate campaigns of Jaime Harrison in South Carolina and Amy McGrath in Kentucky, when the money could have been spent on more winnable local races, he said. He insisted he could have won if Mr. Trump hadn’t come to his corner of West Virginia twice.But he also sees no point in ever trying again in a state so thoroughly Republican in the Trump era.“West Virginia is going to have to burn to the ground before it will ever rise from the ashes — that’s it,” Mr. Ojeda said. “In West Virginia, all you can do as a Democrat is stand up, fight the battle so it’s recorded and say, ‘You guys are full of’” it. More

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    Attempt to bar Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress can proceed, judge says

    Attempt to bar Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress can proceed, judge saysFederal judge cites ‘whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests’ in allowing 14th-amendment challenge to far-right Republican An attempt to bar the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress over her support for the January 6 attack can proceed, a federal judge said.‘Election integrity summits’ aim to fire up Trump activists over big lieRead moreCiting “a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import”, Amy Totenberg of the northern district of Georgia sent the case on to a state hearing on Friday.A coalition of liberal groups is behind the challenge, citing the 14th amendment to the US constitution, passed after the civil war.The amendment says: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, seeking to stop certification of his defeat by Joe Biden. A bipartisan Senate committee connected seven deaths to the riot. About 800 people have been charged, some with seditious conspiracy.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection. Acquitted, he is free to run again.Organisers of events in Washington on January 6 have tied Greene to their efforts. Greene has denied such links and said she does not encourage violence.In October, however, she told a radio show: “January 6 was just a riot at the Capitol and if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants.”In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack, Greene was one of 147 Republicans in Congress who objected to results in battleground states, an effort inspired by Trump’s lies about electoral fraud.An effort to use the 14th amendment against Madison Cawthorn, an extremist from North Carolina, was unsuccessful, after a judge ruled an 1872 civil war amnesty law was not merely retroactive.In her ruling on Greene’s attempt to dismiss her challenge, on Monday, Totenberg said: “This case involves a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import. Upon a thorough analysis of each of the claims asserted in this case, the court concludes that [Greene] has not carried her burden of persuasion.”Even if a state judge rules against Greene, she could challenge the ruling. The Georgia primary is on 25 May, cutting time short. Greene seems likely to win re-election.Writing for the Guardian this month, the Georgetown University professor Thomas Zimmer said: “Greene’s position within the Republican party seems secure … in fact, Greene is the poster child of a rising group of rightwing radicals … [not] shy about their intention to purge whatever vestiges of ‘moderate’ conservatism might still exist within the Republican party.”Extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene are the future of the Republican party | Thomas ZimmerRead moreOne of the groups behind the challenge to Greene is Free Speech for the People. In January, the group’s legal director, Ron Fein, told the Guardian the group aimed to set “a line that says that just as the framers of the 14th amendment wrote and intended, you can’t take an oath to support the constitution and then facilitate an insurrection against the United States while expecting to pursue public office”.On Monday, Fein said: “We look forward to asking Representative Greene about her involvement [in January 6] under oath.”Mike Rasbury, an activist with the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution group and a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Greene, said he was “elated” by Totenberg’s ruling.Greene, Rasbury said, “took an oath of office to protect democracy from all enemies foreign and domestic, just as I did when I became a helicopter pilot for the US army in Vietnam. However, she has flippantly ignored this oath and, based on her role in the January 6 insurrection, is disqualified … from holding any future public office”.TopicsRepublicansThe far rightUS Capitol attackUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsUS constitution and civil libertiesnewsReuse this content More

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    Effort to Remove Marjorie Taylor Greene From Ballot Can Proceed, Judge Says

    The case that Ms. Greene unsuccessfully sought to have dismissed mirrors efforts against other Republicans centered on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.A federal judge cleared the way on Monday for a group of Georgia voters to move forward with legal efforts seeking to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election to Congress, citing her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The disqualification effort is based on a constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War that barred members of the Confederacy from holding office. It mirrors several other cases involving Republican members of Congress, whose roles leading up to and during the deadly riot have drawn intense criticism.The judge, Amy Totenberg, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by President Barack Obama, denied Ms. Greene’s request for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order in the high-profile legal feud.Ms. Greene, 47, who is known for her unflinching loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump and for her clashes with Democrats, has steadfastly denied that she aided and engaged in the attack on the Capitol.In the 73-page ruling, Judge Totenberg wrote that Ms. Greene had failed to meet the “burden of persuasion” in her request for injunctive relief, which she called an extraordinary and drastic remedy.“This case involves a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import,” Judge Totenberg wrote. “The novelty of the factual and historical posture of this case — especially when assessed in the context of a preliminary injunction motion reviewed on a fast track — has made resolution of the complex legal issues at stake here particularly demanding.”James Bopp Jr., a lawyer for Ms. Greene, said on Monday night that the ruling was flawed and minimized the adverse effect that the disqualification effort was having on Ms. Greene’s right to run for office.“This is fundamentally antidemocratic,” Mr. Bopp said, maintaining that Ms. Greene had “publicly and vigorously condemned the attack on the Capitol.”He called the effort to remove her from the ballot part of a well-funded nationwide effort to strip voters of their right to vote for candidates of their choice, with elections determined by “bureaucrats, judges, lawyers and clever legal arguments.”In her request for an injunction, Ms. Greene argued that it would be impossible to fully resolve the case before Georgia holds its primary elections on May 24. Absentee ballots will start to be mailed on April 25, Ms. Greene’s motion said.In the ruling, Judge Totenberg determined that Ms. Greene had failed to prove that there was a strong likelihood that she would prevail on the merits of her legal claims. A state administrative judge is scheduled to hear the case on Friday.The decision by Judge Totenberg stood in stark contrast with a recent ruling in a similar case involving Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. In blocking that disqualification effort, U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of Mr. Trump, ruled that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution narrowly applied to members of the Confederacy after the Civil War.Ms. Greene’s critics have said that she frequently referred to efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results as “our 1776 moment” in public comments that led up to the riot at the Capitol. They contend that the phrase was a code used to incite violence, and point to the third section of the 14th Amendment in their argument to drop her from the ballot.That section says that “no person shall” be a member of Congress or hold civil office if they had engaged in insurrection or rebellion after “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More

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    Will Democrats Soon Be Locked Out of Power?

    Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president — including the Libertarian vote — than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either party’s power.The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalism’s Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote — and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.That’s a scenario for liberal horror, but it’s not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the system’s overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)The Electoral College’s legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senate’s legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.From the Republican Party’s perspective, the best way to avoid this future — where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance — is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.You can’t expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late — to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia — as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian “makers versus takers” politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scott’s recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class — basically the right-wing equivalent of “defund the police” in terms of its political toxicity.And it means — and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.’s capacities — nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. It’s very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages — well, that’s a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. That’s been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didn’t pass and also weren’t likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldn’t have happened in this period either, but it’s much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if you’re a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.Second, to the extent that there’s a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters — culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites — who were part of Barack Obama’s coalition but have drifted rightward since.That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism — the foundations, the activists, the academics — on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivism’s side even once they reach Washington.Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they don’t have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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    Trial Alleging Voter Suppression in 2018 Abrams-Kemp Georgia Race Begins

    A trial is underway to determine whether Georgia’s handling of the 2018 election for governor was discriminatory, in a case brought by Stacey Abrams’s voting rights group.The 2018 race for governor in Georgia ended in a bitter dispute between Brian Kemp, a Republican who was serving as secretary of state at the time, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic challenger who accused the state of voter suppression.The election, won by Kemp, was plagued by long lines, especially in communities of color where wait times occasionally exceeded two hours. And Kemp’s office put 53,000 voter registrations on hold under the state’s “exact match” rule, which requires that voters’ registration information exactly match what is on file with the state’s Department of Driver Services or Social Security Administration. Many of those 53,000 were Black voters, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in 2018.After the election, Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by Abrams, sued the state, claiming its election practices were illegal and discriminatory.Now, more than three years after the suit was filed, the trial began on Monday in Atlanta — the first federal voting rights trial in Georgia in over a decade. Abrams is now in the middle of a second campaign for governor, a rematch with Kemp.After Judge Steve C. Jones tossed parts of the original lawsuit last year, Fair Fight opened its case challenging three specific tenets of the Georgia election system. These tenets, the group says, make it harder for people to vote, especially Black voters.“Through the three practices at issue in this case — exact match, affirmative mismanagement of the voter rolls and failure to train on absentee ballot cancellations — these defendants have erected a series of roadblocks — roadblocks that propose unjustifiable burdens on eligible voters in violation of both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act,” Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a lawyer for Fair Fight and the other plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.The office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state and the defendant in the case, has said repeatedly that the state has already beaten back most of the claims in court, and accused Fair Fight of playing politics.“They ran this litigation like a campaign,” Joshua B. Belinfante, a lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. He continued: “What the evidence will show is what the plaintiffs allege is part of a campaign is not what is happening on the ground in Georgia elections.”Echoes from the pastFair Fight and other groups have challenged Georgia’s election laws on both constitutional grounds and under a provision of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2. The trial represents one of the first marquee challenges using this provision after the Supreme Court weakened its protections for voting rights last year.In her opening remarks, Lawrence-Hardy spoke of John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon who died in 2020. And she drew comparisons between the current legal battle and the state’s history of suppressing voters. Georgia was one of the states that were put under special federal oversight by the Voting Rights Act when it was signed in 1965 because of the history of discrimination at the polls in those states.“The methods may be different than in the past, but the state’s creation of barriers to voting in Georgia have the same impact, particularly for people of color and immigrants who meet all eligibility requirements to vote in Georgia’s elections,” Lawrence-Hardy said. She added that when the state first proposed the exact-match identification policy in 2009, Georgia was still under federal oversight and the Justice Department rejected the initial proposal.The trial, which is expected to last roughly a month, will feature dozens of voters who claim that their right to vote was foiled by the state’s rules and regulations, with anecdotes from both the 2018 and the 2020 elections. Election workers will also testify.“You’ll hear how these election workers, who come from all political persuasions and demographic roots, operate under extraordinarily trying circumstances,” Belinfante, the lawyer for the secretary of state, said in his opening remarks. “And you’ll hear how at the end of the day they just want to get it right.”But the trial will not focus on the state’s controversial new voting law that was passed last year and that added numerous new restrictions on voting. The lawsuit was filed before that law was introduced and passed.A window of opportunityThough Raffensperger is on the defense, the trial also presents a political opportunity for the sitting secretary of state, who is seeking re-election. After he rebuffed Donald Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough votes to subvert the election in Georgia, Raffensperger became a key target of Trump, who has endorsed a well-funded challenger in Representative Jody Hice, a Republican who has publicly claimed that Trump won the election in Georgia.Raffensperger has not backed down from saying Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election in Georgia, a stance that has put him at odds with a segment of the Republican base who will be deciding his fate in the May 24 primary.But the trial has allowed Raffensperger the opportunity to attack Abrams and embrace issues that help endear him to the Republican base, such as noncitizen voting. Republicans have focused on noncitizens voting in their hunt for widespread voter fraud (there is no evidence of swaths of noncitizens voting, nor of widespread fraud) and also to justify new policies. Lawyers for Fair Fight contend that part of the “exact match” process could result in citizens being prevented from voting, including newly naturalized citizens.“I want to make sure it is citizen-only voting here in the state of Georgia,” Raffensperger said in a brief news conference before the trial began on Monday. “We are defending this basic protection of the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, has accused Fair Fight of playing politics with the lawsuit. Dustin Chambers/ReutersWhat to read President Biden announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would lift summertime regulations on E15, an ethanol-gasoline blend, the latest sign that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed the White House to embrace fossil fuels.U.S.-backed news outlets and Ukrainian activists’ efforts to deliver news to Russians are starting to show signs of working, sowing doubt in the Kremlin’s accounts of the invasion.North Carolina dropped Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, from its voter rolls, as officials investigate whether he fraudulently cast a ballot in the state in 2020.in the moment Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas used the migrant drop-off as a fund-raising opportunity. Joel Martinez/The Monitor, via Associated PressTexas sends a bus to … Fox News The arrival of a busload of migrants sent to Washington by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas made for quite the event.Not so much on the ground, but on cable news, on Twitter and in fund-raising emails.In response to the Biden administration’s plans to end a Trump-era pandemic policy that turned away most unauthorized migrants at the border, Abbott pledged to put immigrants on charter buses and send them to Washington. This morning, the first bus arrived near Union Station, with Fox News camera crews ready to record the moment.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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    Stacey Abrams win in Georgia will lead to ‘cold war’ with Florida, DeSantis says

    Stacey Abrams win in Georgia will lead to ‘cold war’ with Florida, DeSantis saysFlorida governor and potential Republican presidential contender says, ‘I can’t have Castro to my south and Abrams to my north’

    DeSantis takes on Disney in latest culture war battle
    The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, predicted a “cold war” with Georgia if it elects the Democrat and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams as governor this year.Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerRead more“If Stacey Abrams is elected governor of Georgia, I just want to be honest, that will be a cold war between Florida and Georgia,” DeSantis said at a press event in the north-west of his own state.“I can’t have [former Cuban leader Raúl] Castro to my south and Abrams to my north, that would be a disaster. So I hope you guys take care of that and we’ll end up in good shape.”DeSantis polls strongly among potential Republican nominees for president in 2024, with or without Donald Trump in the race. Accordingly, he has positioned himself as a major player on culture-war issues, recently signing a bill regarding the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues which critics labeled “don’t say gay”.In California, Los Angeles county has banned business travel to Florida and Texas over anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Such moves have also led DeSantis into direct confrontation with Disney, a major employer and economic engine in his state.On Friday, he said: “I don’t really care what the media says about that. I don’t care what, you know, very leftwing activists say about that. I do not care what big companies say about that. We are standing strong. We will not back down on that.”Abrams has become a major player in her own state and a hate figure among conservatives. A former state representative and a successful author, she ran for governor in 2018 and lost narrowly to Brian Kemp, refusing to concede while protesting his role as secretary of state in controlling his own election.Abrams’ work to turn out Democratic votes, particularly among minorities, helped flip Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and then elect two Democratic senators in runoffs in January the following year.She is running unopposed in the Democratic gubernatorial primary this year but trails both the incumbent governor, Kemp, and his Trump-backed primary challenger, former senator David Perdue, in early polling.Abrams did not immediately comment on DeSantis’s comment.A spokeswoman for DeSantis’s office said: “If Stacey Abrams wins the governorship of Georgia, we know that her approach to leadership will involve more heavy-handed government, taxes and bureaucratic influence.”Amid controversy, Craig Pittman, a Florida reporter and author, said the governor was “trying desperately to get attention from Fox News for saying something outrageous to own the libs and diss Black people”.TopicsStacey AbramsRon DeSantisUS politicsFloridaGeorgiaRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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    Herschel Walker, the Worst Candidate, Trump-Approved

    Let’s just be blunt. No one, and I mean not one person, would seriously believe that Herschel Walker, the former football star and current leading contender for the Republican Senate nomination in Georgia, was at the top of his class at the University of Georgia.Yet Walker has claimed just that for years, saying multiple times that he graduated in the top 1 percent of his class.As CNN reported Friday, Walker never graduated from college. He left to play professional football. Furthermore, according to CNN: “A profile of Walker from 1982 in The Christian-Science Monitor and an article in The New York Times said he maintained a B average at the school. Walker himself told The Chicago Tribune in 1985 he maintained a 3.0 before his grades dropped.”But wait, that wasn’t the only problematic boast Walker made about his grades.In his 2008 book about suffering from dissociative identity disorder, Walker says that he grew up as a “fat kid” who stuttered (twin “sins” in his judgment), that his teachers looked through him as if he hadn’t been there and that the older children ridiculed him as “stupid.”But, Walker wrote: “If I’m proud of anything I did in my high school career, it’s what I did in the classroom that I reflect on and relish the most. I did more than just shed the ‘stupid’ label placed on me as a result of my speech impediment. I shed it, erased it and rewrote it with the titles: Beta Club president and class valedictorian.”CNN’s KFile reviewed Walker’s high school yearbooks and coverage of him in local newspapers at the time and could find no evidence to support the claim that he was a high school valedictorian.No one wants to be insensitive about a speech impediment or any other disorder, but exaggerating is exaggerating, and lying is lying. It goes to the character of the man much more than any physical or psychological condition.His consistent record of inflating his academic credentials isn’t the only thing to suggest that he’s highly problematic.He has also been accused by his ex-wife of making multiple threats against her life. In 2005 she secured an order of protection against him.As The Associated Press reported: “When his book was released, she told ABC News that at one point during their marriage, her husband pointed a pistol at her head and said, ‘I’m going to blow your f’ing brains out.’ She filed for divorce in 2001, citing ‘physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.’”Now, after months of not seriously challenging Walker, some Georgia Republicans are waking up to the reality that they may have made a grave mistake and that he is likely to lose if he advances to the general election.And they have only Donald Trump to blame. Walker’s campaign was all Trump’s doing and at Trump’s urging.Raphael Warnock became the first Black senator in Georgia’s history, as well as the first popularly elected Black Democratic senator from the South, because of Black voters, who voted him into office just one day before rioters stormed the Capitol. In fact, Black voters were the majority of the coalition that elected him, according to exit polls — the first time that was the case for any Black senator.The results of Warnock’s race, along with Jon Ossoff’s simultaneous runoff election, tipped the balance of the Senate and sent shock waves through Georgia’s political establishment.Within months, state Republicans were speculating about Walker challenging Warnock in 2022.As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote last summer about what then was still a potential run by Walker: “Herschel Walker hasn’t lived in Georgia for decades. He’s never held public office, doesn’t attend the sort of Republican events that are mainstays on the political calendar and has bypassed the backslapping fund-raising circuit that helps decide winners and losers in the state’s premier races.”But none of those obstacles got in the way. Trump weighed in last March, writing in a statement: “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” The statement continued, “He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the N.F.L. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”Trump kept up the pressure. He told the “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” in June that Walker had told him he was going to run, and Trump thought he would. The former president said, “I had dinner with him a week ago. He’s a great guy. He’s a patriot. He’s a very loyal person.”But why? Why Walker? Sure, he was an old Trump friend and ally, but he wasn’t a politician and hadn’t publicly expressed a desire to become one.Well, there were a few reasons, all of them part of a callous racial calculus, one in which Trump is well trained. First and foremost, Walker is Black. To many in the G.O.P., his race blunts the idea that Republicans are appealing to racists, relieves the pressure on Trump supporters for supporting a racist and gives them a shot at winning more of Georgia’s Black voters.Walker could be a tool and a weapon. But no weapon — at least not this weapon — formed by Trump shall prosper.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More