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      Trump heads to Georgia in high-stakes bid to shape Republican primaries

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      Trump heads to Georgia in high-stakes bid to shape Republican primariesEx-president plans rally after endorsing candidates seeking to replace leaders who rejected his election lie Donald Trump’s continuing effort to bend national Republican candidates to his will and the party to do his bidding faces a test in the key state of Georgia on Saturday as the former president holds a score-settling rally there in support of candidates who could boost any future re-election agenda.Trump’s presence in the state comes 18 months after he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, a conversation that is now the subject of a grand jury investigation in Atlanta.The loss, which made Trump the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state in 28 years, continues to rankle the former president, and he has endorsed the state congressman Jody Hice in his challenge to Raffensperger. He also backed other candidates in the state against establishment Republicans, including David Perdue against the sitting governor, Brian Kemp.It follows a similar pattern in other states where Trump has held or plans to hold rallies as a way of showing support for Republican candidates who have offered him their fealty.Republicans’ midterms pitch: never mind the policy, here’s the culture warRead moreSaturday’s rally in Commerce, 70 miles north-east of Atlanta and one of the most conservative parts of the state, is expected to feature Herschel Walker, a former football player running for the US Senate; Perdue; and the congressional candidate Vernon Jones, a former Democratic state representative who began calling himself the “Black Donald Trump” after switching parties.But Trump is playing a high-stakes game and his candidates’ success in Georgia’s May primaries is far from guaranteed.Walker is slightly ahead of the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock in RealClearPolitics polling averages, but Jones, who dropped a bid for the governorship in February, faces a crowded Republican field for the conservative 10th congressional district, which covers part of east Georgia.Trump’s pick for governor, Perdue, faces an even more complex struggle. He has struggled to raise campaign money and trails incumbent Brian Kemp by 11 points, according to a Fox News poll.Perdue has toed Trump’s false line of a “stolen” 2020 election and begun claiming that his defeat to the Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, to whom he conceded in January, was also problematic. “Most people in Georgia know that something untoward happened in November 2020,” he told the talk radio host Bryan Pritchard. “I’ll just say it, Bryan. In my election and the president’s election, they were stolen. The evidence is compelling now.”‘Arsonists with keys to the firehouse’: once-obscure state races fuel fears for US democracyRead moreThe Perdue-Kemp contest represents a personal grudge for Trump, which flared after Kemp after refused to support his bid overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result.Trump has also sought to undermine the governor by backing Patrick Witt, who supported Trump’s election challenge, against John King, who is Georgia’s first Latino statewide constitutional officer and a Kemp loyalist. Witt is running against King in the Republican primary for state insurance commissioner. But the larger question is how far Trump’s influence extends in shaping Georgia’s Republican politics. To some, the former president’s endorsement power is diminishing in the state.“He will not be a help to Trump-endorsed candidates when he comes on Saturday,” the conservative commentator Martha Zoller told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “He will be negative and backward looking – and that’s not what voters want.”Some Republican pollsters said that while Trump’s endorsement was coveted, he had diluted his influence by reaching far down the ballot or supporting late-entry candidates with little public recognition or campaign apparatus.TopicsDonald TrumpUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams files lawsuit after being blocked from fundraising for Georgia governor campaign

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      Stacey Abrams files lawsuit after being blocked from fundraising for Georgia governor campaignA dispute over whether Abrams can be declared the nominee has prevented her from legally raising funds Stacey Abrams has filed a lawsuit seeking to immediately begin fundraising for her campaign for governor under a state law that prevents her gubernatorial leadership committee from doing so.Abrams is requesting to take advantage of a new kind of fundraising committee created by Georgia lawmakers last year, which her opponent, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has already been able to make use of. Called a leadership committee, it allows certain people and groups to accept unlimited contributions. Giving to direct candidate committees, on the other hand, is limited to $7,600 apiece for the primary and general elections and $4,500 for any runoff election.Under the law, the committees can be formed by the governor and lieutenant governor, opposing major party nominees, and both party caucuses in the state house and senate. The committees can coordinate with candidate campaigns, unlike most other political action committees.Although Georgia has not yet officially approved Abrams as the Democratic party nominee, Abrams argues that because no one filed to run against her in the 24 May Democratic primary and because write-in votes are not allowed, she became the nominee when qualifying closed.“Ms Abrams – the sole qualified and declared Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia – and her campaign committee will be unable to operate, control, chair, or otherwise use One Georgia, a leadership committee … to support her campaign without credible and justified threat and fear of legal proceedings being instituted against Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said.“As a direct consequence, Plaintiffs will suffer ongoing and irreparable injury to their ability to use political speech to advocate for Ms Abrams’s campaign, especially compared to her chief opponent, sitting Governor Brian P Kemp.”Georgia has not yet approved Abrams’s leadership due to disputes over whether she qualified as a nominee before the primary, even though the state’s Democratic party chair, representative Nikema Williams, has recognized her candidacy and recognized Abrams as the sole nominee.In an affidavit, Williams wrote, “The only candidate who qualified with DPG [Democratic Party of Georgia] to run for the office of Governor of the State of Georgia prior to the end of the 2022 candidate qualifying period on March 11, 2022 is Stacey Y Abrams.”Abrams said in court pleadings that when a lawyer for her contacted the state ethics commission to confirm that her leadership committee could begin raising and spending money before 24 May, a commission lawyer said Adams’s legal team first needed to seek legal advice from Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, as to whether state law considers Abrams the nominee. In the absence of any further clarification since, Abrams’s team filed the lawsuit seeking a temporary order to be allowed to raise money right away.Meanwhile, Kemp created the Georgians First leadership committee after signing the law and had raised $2.3m through January.Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’s campaign manager, said that Kemp’s early fundraising advantage causes “severe harm” to the fairness of the election.“Early fundraising supports later fundraising by demonstrating a candidate’s political viability and widespread appeal, particularly in a high-dollar statewide election in a swing state like Governor of Georgia,” she wrote.TopicsStacey AbramsGeorgiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Book Review: ‘Flipped,’ by Greg Bluestein

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      FLIPPEDHow Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican PowerBy Greg BluesteinHow do Democrats flip a state from red to purple to blue? This question keeps Democratic operatives lying awake at night.What better place to search for answers than Georgia? In 2020, Georgians voted for the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. The elections of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff also handed Democrats a slim majority in the U.S. Senate. The results, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein in his new book, “Flipped,” provided “Democrats an invaluable foothold in the Deep South and a bulwark against growing Republican strength in the Midwest.”Demography was not destiny, according to Bluestein. Despite the developments that were enlarging liberal, educated suburban communities while diversifying the Georgia population, partisan change depended on talented candidates, campaign strategists and local election officials.Bluestein revisits the story of Stacey Abrams, who, working with the guidance of Lauren Groh-Wargo, ran a trailblazing campaign for the governorship in 2018. Abrams was one of the first statewide figures who sought to harness the “emerging alliance that was racially, economically and geographically diverse” rather than trying to recreate the Democratic coalition that elected Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992. Bluestein recounts how Abrams, a Black woman, was almost denied the right to vote because a poll worker insisted that she had requested an absentee ballot. If Abrams, an attorney, struggled to cast a ballot, “what about the countless other Georgians, she wondered, who could never have so quickly fixed their problem?” After losing the contest to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, Abrams founded Fair Fight, which would register large numbers of Black voters by the 2020 election.A bright spot for Democrats in 2018 was Lucy McBath, the daughter of civil rights activists. She defeated Karen Handel to represent the Sixth Congressional District. Handel had won office a year earlier in a special election, beating Ossoff, a documentary producer who had hoped to show that with Donald Trump in the White House, Democrats could win suburban Republicans and independents in districts that had been dominated by conservatives like Newt Gingrich. Instead, the election proved that Republican voters in 2017 were still loyal. McBath, whose son, Jordan, was killed by a white man in 2012, won election by advocating gun control in the wake of a horrendous mass school shooting in Florida.Ossoff and Warnock found ways to run effective statewide campaigns for the Senate in 2020 despite the challenges posed by Covid shutdowns, masking and social distancing. During the runoff election campaign after Nov. 3, both candidates responded to the fierce outrage among Democrats who were tired of the chaos and extremism coming from the White House. As Trump kept talking about himself and about rigged votes every time he visited the state (to the frustration of Republicans), Warnock and Ossoff ran smart social media campaigns and connected to voters’ hope for a better future.Remarkably, Bluestein writes that the Biden campaign underestimated the potential for victory in Georgia. Since Democrats had not won the state’s electoral votes in a presidential election since 1992, Biden’s team concluded that the risk of losing was too high. Fortunately for Democrats, local candidates disagreed. They did so by embracing the party’s liberal traditions rather than trying to mimic Republicans.Still, the victories in 2020 ultimately depended on volunteers and voters whose voices are too often missing from Bluestein’s narrative. He doesn’t do enough to capture the thousands of volunteers who engaged in phone banking, text messaging, canvassing and turning out the vote. Nor are there many portraits of the voters who went blue.“Flipped” will disillusion Democrats who hope that a realignment won’t meet fierce resistance. Lawrence Sloan, a Black American who operated a machine that opened mail-in ballots in Fulton County, was scared for his life after a video circulated online that appeared to show Sloan giving the middle finger to the machine and tossing out a ballot. In fact, we learn, his temper flared because the machine had nicked his finger, and Sloan was throwing out instructions for how to complete a mail-in ballot. Because of the misleading video, which Trump’s sons retweeted, Sloan was harassed and threatened. On one occasion, he asked friends to rescue him from a restaurant filled with Trump loyalists. “As a Black man in the South,” he said, “I know when pickup trucks start pulling up and honking their horns, it’s time to go.” Similarly, the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to go along with Trump’s schemes, decided that his two grandchildren could not safely visit his home.All of this brings us to the question of whether Georgia has really flipped or if 2020 was an aberration. Many parts of Bluestein’s story highlight how exceptional the conditions were in 2020. Democrats won with the help of Hollywood celebrities and political heavyweights who won’t always show up. A raging pandemic as well as a president whose politics terrified many voters raised the stakes of the state’s election in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.The next few elections will reveal if Democratic success has staying power. It is worth remembering that Jimmy Carter’s efforts to forge a new kind of Democratic South ended up being trumped by Gingrich’s version of Reagan Republicanism. Even after reading this informative book, it’s all too easy to imagine how a struggling President Biden, an inflationary economy, war in Ukraine and a persistent pandemic — combined with gerrymandering, high rural turnout, national party support and Election Day polling sabotage — could result in Republicans welcoming back the Grand Old Party in 2024 following a short detour off the beaten path of conservatism. More

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative anger

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerNational Review says candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan does not deserve fictional title The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.‘Champion for Alaska’: Don Young, longest-serving House Republican, dies at 88 Read moreThe honour, which a leading conservative website said Abrams did not deserve, was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.Abrams is a self-confessed Star Trek superfan. In 2019, she told the New York Times she binged on episodes during her last run for governor.“I love Voyager and I love Discovery and of course I respect the original,” she said, “but I revere The Next Generation.”Michelle Paradise, executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, told Variety the show decided it needed a figure of suitable gravitas.“When the time came to start talking about the president of Earth,” she said, “it seemed like, ‘Well, who better to represent that than her?”Abrams is a former Democratic member of the Georgia state house as well as a prolific romance novelist. She has said she will be US president by 2040.In 2018, she ran the Republican Brian Kemp close for governor of Georgia. She is seeking a rematch this year and in part thanks to her work on voting rights has risen to prominence in the national party, having been considered for vice-president to Joe Biden.Abrams’s work helped secure both Biden’s win in Georgia in 2020 and Democratic control of the US Senate, via two Georgia run-offs.Such work has made her a target of the right. On Friday, the National Review, a conservative site, published a column about her Star Trek cameo: Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth.Abrams, the Review said, “is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it”.Abrams refused to concede to Kemp, who as Georgia secretary of state oversaw the purging of voter rolls before the election he contested.Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state, has argued that Abrams’ refusal to concede was “morally indistinguishable from – and helped set the stage for – former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election”.Raffensperger famously stood up to Trump, whose request that Raffensperger “find” sufficient votes to flip the state is at the heart of a grand jury investigation.In 2019, Abrams told the New York Times that while she “legally acknowledge[d] that Brian Kemp secured a sufficient number of votes under our existing system to become the governor of Georgia. I do not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process.”She also said: “I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”The Review complained that Star Trek would never make Trump president of Earth, not even “in the way that the evil genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh once despotically ruled one-quarter of earth’s population”.It added: “In classic Trek fashion, Abrams [was] shown as the logical and inevitable result of the kind of technocratic progressivism that the show has long advanced, a fruition of our highest ideals. Her behavior in the political sphere does not seem to bear this out.”Elie Mystal, a writer for the Nation, responded: “Look at how conservative white people react to a FICTIONAL black woman president.”Mystal also tied the Review’s criticism to events in Washington, where Ketanji Brown Jackson will next week begin confirmation hearings to be the first Black woman on the supreme court.“Next week,” Mystal wrote, “this same publication that can’t handle a black women president ON A TELEVISION SHOW is going to claim to have reasonable and *totally not racist* thoughts about a real life black woman on the supreme court.” The makers of Star Trek: Discovery seemed happy just to have had Abrams on set. They also explained how they fulfilled her request not to be told of the plot of her episode, so she could enjoy it later.As the Washington Post reported, the episode, which was filmed in Toronto last August, ended with Abrams “telling the show’s protagonist … ‘There’s a lot of work to do. Are you ready for that?’“‘I am,’ [Captain Michael Burnham] responds. ‘Let’s get to it.’”Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Burnham, told Variety she was “taken aback … and really moved” by Abrams’ performance.“It really signaled the culmination of the season having her there,” she said, “because she’s such this symbol of hope and strength and connection and sacrifice and building something bigger than yourself that will last generations, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about doing in the story.”In a “cherished moment”, Martin-Green said, Abrams was presented with a trophy, a captain’s badge and a poem.TopicsStacey AbramsStar TrekUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS televisionnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans Push to Crackdown on Voter Fraud

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      Election fraud is exceedingly rare and often accidental. Still, G.O.P. lawmakers and prosecutors are promoting tough new enforcement efforts.The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.It is a new phase of the Republican campaign to tighten voting laws that started after former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims of fraud following the 2020 election. The effort, which resulted in a wave of new state laws last year, has now shifted to courthouses, raising concern among voting rights activists that fear of prosecution could keep some voters from casting ballots.“As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we’re seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.It’s nearly impossible to assess whether the talk of getting tough on voter crime is resulting in an increase in prosecutions. There is no nationwide data on how many people were charged with voter fraud in 2020 or in previous elections, and state data is often incomplete. The state numbers that are available show there were very few examples of potential cases in 2020 and few prosecutions.Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud in the state from the 2020 election.In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”The political incentives to draw attention to the enforcement of voting laws are clear. A Monmouth University poll in January found that 62 percent of Republicans and just 19 percent of Democrats believed voter fraud was a major problem.That may mean the odds of being charged with voter fraud can be linked to the political affiliation of the local prosecutor.In Fond du Lac County, Wis., District Attorney Eric Toney was in office for nine years without prosecuting a voter fraud case. But after he started his campaign for attorney general in 2021, Mr. Toney, a Republican, received a letter from a Wisconsin man who had acquired copies of millions of ballots in an attempt to conduct his own review of the 2020 election. The letter cited five Fond du Lac County voters whose registrations listed their home addresses at a UPS Store, a violation of a state law that requires voters to register where they live.Mr. Toney charged all five with felony voter fraud.A report the Wisconsin Election Commission released last week said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to.Scott Olson/Getty Images“We get tips from community members of people breaking the law through the year, and we take them seriously, especially if it’s an election law violation,” Mr. Toney said in an interview. “Law enforcement takes it seriously. I take it seriously as a district attorney.”One of the voters charged, Jamie Wells, told investigators that the UPS Store was her “home base.” She said she lived in a mobile home and split time between a nearby campground and Louisiana. Ms. Wells did not respond to phone or email messages. If convicted, she stands to serve up to three and a half years in prison — though she would most likely receive a much shorter sentence.In La Crosse County, Wis., District Attorney Tim Gruenke, a Democrat, received a similar referral: 23 people registered to vote with addresses from a local UPS Store, and 16 of them voted in 2020. But Mr. Gruenke said he had concluded that there was no attempt at fraud. Instead of felony charges, the local clerk sent the voters a letter giving them 30 days to change their registrations to an address where they lived.“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.”Mr. Toney linked his decision to his views about the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which the Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., won by more than 20,682 votes out of 3.3 million cast.While he had never challenged Mr. Biden’s win, he said he believed that “there is no dispute that Wisconsin election laws weren’t followed and fraud occurred.”“I support identifying any fraud or election laws not followed to ensure it never happens again, because elections are the cornerstone of our democracy,” Mr. Toney said.(Ms. Wells, one of the voters Mr. Toney has charged, also said she believed something was amiss in the 2020 election. “They took it away from Trump,” she told investigators.)Mr. DeSantis in Florida is perhaps the best-known politician who is promoting efforts to bolster criminal enforcement of voting-related laws. The governor, who is up for re-election in November, made the new police agency a top legislative priority. .The unit, called the Office of Election Crimes and Security, takes on work already done by the secretary of state’s office, but reports directly to the governor.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Why Stacey Abrams Is Rejecting Her Democratic Stardom

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      On the campaign trail for Georgia governor, she is talking more about Medicaid expansion than voting rights, betting that a hyperlocal strategy and the state’s leftward tilt can lift her to victory.CUTHBERT, Ga. — As Stacey Abrams began her second campaign for Georgia governor with a speech this week about Medicaid expansion in front of a shuttered rural hospital, the crowd of about 50 peppered her with questions on issues like paving new roads.But Sandra Willis, the mayor pro tem of this town of roughly 3,500 people, had a broader point to make. “Once you get elected, you won’t forget us, will you?” she asked.The question reflected Ms. Abrams’s status as a national Democratic celebrity, who was widely credited with helping to deliver Georgia for her party in the 2020 elections and has made her name synonymous with the fight for voting rights.But she has shown little desire to put ballot access at the center of her bid. Her first days on the campaign trail have been spent largely in small, rural towns like Cuthbert, where she is more interested in discussing Medicaid expansion and aid to small businesses than the flagship issue that helped catapult her to national fame.Ms. Abrams’s strategy amounts to a major bet that her campaign can survive a bleak election year for Democrats by capitalizing on Georgia’s fast-changing demographics and winning over on-the-fence voters who want their governor to largely stay above the fray of national political battles.“I am a Georgian first,” she said in an interview. “And my job is to spend especially these first few months anchoring the conversation about Georgia.”In Cuthbert, where Ms. Abrams was pressed on Monday by Ms. Willis on her commitment to Georgia’s small communities, she reminded onlookers that this was not her first visit to town — and she promised it would not be her last. The town sits in Randolph County, one of a handful of rural, predominantly Black counties that were crucial to Democrats’ victories in Georgia in the last cycle. Upward of 96 percent of Black voters who cast ballots here in the 2020 presidential election voted in the 2021 Senate runoff elections.Randolph has also been held up as an example of the state’s neglect of its low-income, rural residents: The county’s only hospital shut down in October 2020.“I’m here to help,” Ms. Abrams said in her Monday speech in front of the closed hospital. Listing the names of seven counties surrounding Randolph, she promised to be a “governor for all of Georgia, especially southwest Georgia.”Georgia’s population continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, trends that have historically benefited Democrats.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s focus on state and hyperlocal issues reflects an understanding that to win Georgia, any Democrat must capture votes in all corners of the state. That also means knowing the issues closest to voters in every corner.“Everything either happens in Atlanta, or outside of Atlanta in the suburbs,” said Bobby Jenkins, the mayor of Cuthbert and a Democrat. “But as the election in November showed, you’ve got a lot of Democrats, a lot of people in these rural areas, and you cannot overlook them. There aren’t many in this county. But when you band all of these counties together in southwest Georgia, then you can create some impact.”Ms. Abrams has also used visits like the one to Cuthbert and a later meet-and-greet in the central Georgia town of Warner Robins to criticize Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who beat her in the same race in 2018, over what she called his weakening of the state’s public health infrastructure during the pandemic and his underinvestment in rural communities.“If we do not have a governor who sees and focuses on how Georgia can mitigate these harms, how Georgia can bolster opportunity, then the national environment is less relevant, because the deepest pain comes from closer to home,” Ms. Abrams said in the interview.Still, that national environment remains unfriendly to Democrats. Less than eight months before the November midterm elections, the party is staring down a record number of House retirements, a failure to pass the bulk of President Biden’s agenda and a pessimistic electorate that is driving his low approval ratings.Yet Democrats see reasons for hope in Georgia. The state continues to grow younger and more racially diverse, in a boon to the network of organizations that helped turn out the voters who flipped Georgia blue in 2020. Many of those groups remain well-staffed and well-funded. And while Ms. Abrams is running unopposed in the Democratic primary, Mr. Kemp faces four challengers, including a Trump-backed candidate, former Senator David Perdue.All of this is why, while Ms. Abrams’s public image has expanded, she has not deviated much from the campaign strategy she employed in 2018. During her first run for governor, she visited all 159 of Georgia’s counties and aimed for surges in turnout in deep-blue metro Atlanta counties even as she sought to turn out new voters in rural areas that Democrats had historically ceded to Republicans. Several of her 2022 campaign staff members formed her 2018 brain trust.Voting rights activists in the state — many of whom say their relationship with Ms. Abrams and her campaign remains warm — hesitate to question Ms. Abrams’s reduced focus on ballot access, especially since it is so early in the campaign and her strategy could yet shift.“She has a certain star, national spotlight quality that you rarely see with Southern candidates,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter in Georgia. She expressed confidence that Ms. Abrams’s candidacy would “continue to keep the voting rights issue from dying.”In 2021, after Georgia Republicans passed a major law of voting restrictions, Ms. Abrams spoke out against the measure to legislators in Congress.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesStudent supporters danced onstage after a rally for Ms. Abrams in Atlanta on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Abrams’s organizing for voting rights has its roots in her years as the minority leader in the Georgia Statehouse. She founded the voter enfranchisement group New Georgia Project in 2013 to turn out more young and infrequent voters — a strategy she pitched to national Democrats ahead of the 2020 election amid efforts to persuade white moderate voters.Then, a year ago, after Georgia’s Republican-led legislature passed a sweeping bill of voting restrictions, ballot access again became a central issue for national Democrats. Amid the party’s uproar about the bill and others like it, Ms. Abrams focused on the policy implications of the legislation over the political. During testimony to Republican senators in Washington shortly after the law’s passage, she laid out a laundry list of criticisms of the measure, denouncing its limits on drop boxes and a reduction in election precincts that could deter working people from voting.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 5Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      ‘Arsonists with keys to the firehouse’: once-obscure state races fuel fears for US democracy

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      ‘Arsonists with keys to the firehouse’: once-obscure state races fuel fears for US democracyCandidates for secretary of state are raising huge sums after Trump’s lies shook 2020 election Last year, Brad Raffensperger was attracting national headlines for taking a stand against Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election.In a phone call that was quickly made public, Trump demanded that Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, “find” enough votes to deprive Joe Biden of a victory in the battleground state. Raffensperger refused to do so and won widespread praise for his courage.Raffensperger is paying for his actions in a way that reveals how his once obscure elected position is now at the center of a battle for the future of American democracy – and attracting all the big money and political heat that entails.This year, Raffensperger is facing a brutal primary race against a Trump-backed candidate, the US congressman Jody Hice, and trying to cling on to his job. Hice, who has said the 2020 results in Georgia would have been different if the race had been “fair”, has already raised more than twice as much money as Raffensperger.Hice’s impressive haul is partly thanks to the unusually high number of out-of-state donations that his campaign has attracted, as more Americans across the country zero in on secretary of state races.‘This should terrify the nation’: the Trump ally seeking to run Arizona’s electionsRead moreAnd Georgia is not unique. As Trump and his allies continue to spread the “big lie” of widespread fraud in the 2020 race, many voters are focusing their attention – and wallets – on the officials who oversee states’ elections.Secretary of state candidates in both parties are now posting substantial fundraising figures, intensifying concerns over how election administration has become a heated political issue in the US.Secretary of state races have historically attracted little notice and even less money. The winners of these elections assume rather bureaucratic roles, and their duties may include managing state records, overseeing the department of motor vehicles and keeping the state seal. But in many states, the secretary of state also serves – crucially – as the chief election official.In the weeks after the 2020 election, as Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the results had been tainted by fraud, secretaries of state in key battleground states became the target of intimidation and threats. Now the former president is using the power of his endorsement to wield influence in the races for those posts.While Trump did not endorse any candidates for secretary of state in 2020, he has already endorsed three in the 2022 cycle: Hice in Georgia, Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan. All three candidates have embraced the lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election by allowing fraud to affect the results. Biden’s margin of victory in each of those states was less than three points, and their input could prove decisive in the next presidential election.“They are willing to overturn the will of the voters in order to choose the winner,” said Kim Rogers, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “It is disempowering, and it is akin to giving an arsonist keys to the firehouse.”Republicans and Democrats’ disparate concerns over election fairness have contributed to a significant increase in donations to secretary of state candidates.According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, donations for secretary of state races in six battleground states are three times higher than they were at this point in the last election cycle, in 2018, and eight times higher than the 2014 cycle. Fundraising has particularly increased in Arizona, Geor­gia and Michigan, which also happen to be the three states where Trump has issued an endorsement.“A lot more money is going to these once sleepy, bureaucratic races,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “The places that we’ve seen the biggest increase – which is basically Arizona, Georgia and Michigan – each of those places had some degree of nationally covered election controversy around 2020.”The Brennan Center analysis also indicated that out-of-state donations to secretary of state candidates are increasing at an even faster rate than overall donations. Finchem, who has called on the Arizona legislature to decertify the 2020 presidential results in three major counties, already has six times as many donors as every secretary of state candid­ate in the 2018 elec­tion combined. Two-thirds of those donors live outside Arizona.Democrats have taken note of Republican enthusiasm about secretary of state elections, and they are responding by ramping up their own fundraising.The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and its partner groups raised a record $4.5m in 2021, compared with $1.5m raised during the entire 2018 cycle. The organization has said it is on track to meet its fundraising goal of $15m for the 2022 cycle, in part because of the increase in first-time individual donors. Other progressive groups, including End Citizens United and iVote, have pledged to spend tens of millions more on secretary of state races this year.“The engagement is at every single level. We have seen a massive increase in our email list and grassroots support,” Rogers said. Rogers believes Democratic activists are increasingly turning their attention to secretary of state races partly because they have been frustrated by the lack of progress at the federal level. Congressional Democrats have repeatedly tried to pass national voting rights legislation, which would reverse some of the voting restrictions enacted by 19 states last year, but Senate Republicans have successfully used the filibuster to defeat those bills.‘The testing ground’: how Republican state parties grow Trumpism 2.0Read more“I think there are a lot of activists who got involved in 2020 who fought incredibly hard for the federal voting rights legislation in 2021,” Rogers said. “When 50 Republicans blocked it yet again, folks were looking for a way to stay engaged and to continue the fight, and they shifted their assets into the states.”Republicans complain that Democrats are trying to alter election regulations to their benefit at both the federal and state levels. Andrew Romeo, communications director for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said Democrats were “ramping up their interest in secretary of state races because they see control of these offices as a way to change the rules to compensate for their inability to win elections”.Romeo’s group is an umbrella organization that promotes Republican candidates for state legislatures, state supreme courts and secretary of state offices, among other roles. The RSLC and its policy partner group raised $33.3m in 2021, exceeding their previous odd-year record by more than $14m.But to Democrats like Rogers, the outcome of secretary of state races in key battleground states represents nothing less than the fate of American democracy.“These folks want to rig the game, and they are out to do that,” Rogers said. Vandewalker fears that the increasingly dire messaging about secretary of state races will contribute to a political climate in which both parties distrust the outcome of elections.“Money and attention being paid to these races is not inherently a bad thing. The voters should be informed about these candidates,” Vandewalker said. But he adds, “that kind of rhetoric is extremely dangerous to voter confidence because of course one side or the other is going to win and is going to count the votes. And democracy counts on people accepting the result, even if their side doesn’t win.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsGeorgiafeaturesReuse this content More

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      In Georgia's Secretary of State Race, 2020 Is Still on the Ballot

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      A normally sleepy secretary of state race has become a critical barometer of Republicans’ views of the last election — and of Trump.We have a dispatch tonight from our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who traveled to Georgia last week to report on the Republican primary between Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and Representative Jody Hice, a challenger backed by Donald Trump.MACON, Ga. — At a regional airport in central Georgia, Representative Jody Hice offered a quick summation at the top of his remarks to a crowd of voters. Hice’s political situation requires repeated explanation — why he’s leaving a safe seat in Congress to run for a bureaucratic state government post.“I feel with all my heart that our last election was massively compromised right here in Georgia,” he told the crowd of roughly two dozen voters last week.The audience responded in unison: “Amen.”The last election, indeed, was not massively compromised in Georgia, as multiple audits and hand recounts affirmed. But as the normally sleepy races for secretary of state have suddenly become critical battlegrounds, Georgia remains on the front lines. It’s the site of the most high-profile Republican primary for secretary of state, between Hice and the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to acquiesce to his attempts to overturn the election.Hice’s campaign shows just how political these secretary of state races have become across the country, contests to determine who will oversee the supposedly apolitical task of administering elections. Hice spent last week barnstorming Georgia as if the primary election was a week away. (It’s actually scheduled for May 24.) He held four stops a day by chartering a private jet to crisscross the state, a flex of financial and organizational muscle that is more often found in a race for governor, Senate or even president.In a roughly 10-minute stump speech at the airport in Macon, Hice touted his conservative credentials as a member of the House Freedom Caucus, noted Trump’s endorsement and attacked Democratic attempts in Congress to write new federal voting legislation. But he avoided many of the specific and disproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He instead focused on broader, though still disproven, allegations about voting in Georgia.‘A lot of shenanigans’Core to Hice’s pitch on the campaign trail is that Raffensperger, his primary opponent, sent mail ballot applications to every voter on Georgia’s voting rolls and that all voter rolls were about 10 percent inaccurate. Sending out ballot applications, Hice said, “opened the door initially for all kinds of problems.”What he did not mention was that voters still needed to send in their applications and be verified by the state, so that each application was checked and verified before a voter could receive a ballot. And on the accuracy of the voter rolls, studies have varied, but more often than not inaccuracies occur because voters have moved locally.His supporters are more specific in their attacks on the 2020 election. They spoke in detail about a video that made the rounds in conservative media purporting to show election workers pulling ballots out from under a table. The workers, multiple state officials have confirmed, were simply continuing their counting after mistakenly taking a break.“The video of the ballots in a van coming in at three in the morning in the Fulton County counting room, that kind of tells you everything you need to know,” said Brad Ebel, 52, a Georgia delegate from Macon. “I think there was a lot of shenanigans that went on that were not lawful.”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.Governors’ 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.Ebel is not alone. In Georgia, 74 percent of Republican voters said there was widespread fraud in 2020, according to a recent poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results. His primary challenger is backed by the former president.Audra Melton for The New York Times‘Pastor Q’ vs. the candidate of ‘truth’Raffensperger, for his part, has been busy making appearances on both conservative news sites and the mainstream press, seeking to match Hice’s statewide campaigning by utilizing his stature as the sitting secretary of state.In a recent interview, Raffensperger said that Hice “does not know what he’s talking about” regarding the absentee ballot process.“It’s just a myth that was made and propagated by people that had losing campaigns or didn’t do their job,” Raffensperger said. “The Republican Party and the Trump campaign did not have an absentee ballot chase program, whereas the other party did,” he added, referring to how political campaigns track absentee ballots and make sure voters return theirs.Raffensperger continually said he was the candidate of “the truth” and referred to his opponent as Pastor Q, a reference to the congressman’s former role as a pastor and his support for other candidates for secretary of state who have praised QAnon-style conspiracy theories.“At some point, Pastor Q endorsed them and they’ve endorsed him,” Raffensperger said. “And so that’s his position, and I think it’s untenable, and I believe that’s why he won’t be elected statewide.”When asked about his involvement with candidates who have appeared at pro-QAnon events, Hice said, “They reached out to us early about a meeting that I did not attend, but I’m in favor of any conservatives who will stand up and run for office.”‘I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia’Raffensperger is perhaps best known for rebuffing Trump’s request to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, one more than the amount he lost by, in a brazen attempt to overturn the election.When asked how he would respond had he received that call from Trump, Hice avoided a direct answer. But he appeared to side with Trump’s argument.“The context of the call was we need to make sure that legal ballots were counted and illegal ballots were not counted,” Hice said. “I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia had we had a true election that was fair, and that in essence is what the president was aware of. How do you continue finding ballots, ballots, ballots, ballots, days, days, days after the election, just enough for President Trump to lose?”Supporters of Hice backed the congressman’s view that Trump won Georgia.Representative Jody Hice campaigning for secretary of state in Macon, Georgia, last month. He said he is “totally convinced” that Trump would have won Georgia, echoing conspiracy theories.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“If you’re asking me do I think that there were things that occurred that were outside of what was correct and legal? Yes,” said Bert Adams, a Savannah resident who attended Hice’s meet-and-greet with her husband, Sam, in that Georgia city last Thursday. “And could that have led to a different outcome than the one that was correct and legal? Probably.”Though he remains focused on false allegations about the 2020 election, Hice also talked about state election law, and changes to it that he wants the Legislature to work on: banning drop boxes, banning outside funding and adding more limits to the absentee ballot process, though he did not specify those limits.Though he is the challenger, Hice has been by far the most prolific fund-raiser among candidates running for secretary of state, both in Georgia and around the country. He has raised more than $1.6 million since announcing his candidacy, and has roughly $650,000 in cash on hand.Yet as his single-engine turboprop jet sat idling outside in Macon, Hice made a closing plea.“We need your financial support,” he said. “It’s a huge endeavor, obviously, to reach out to the entire state.”What to readRussia laid siege to urban areas across Ukraine on Thursday, and the United Nations predicted that roughly a quarter of the population could be displaced. Our colleagues continue their live coverage.The confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, will begin on March 21, Carl Hulse reports.Democrats won an early victory in a New York State redistricting case, when a judge indicated on Thursday that he would allow this year’s midterm elections to proceed using newly drawn district lines that heavily favor Democrats. Nicholas Fandos reports.In a court filing, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said that there was enough evidence to conclude that Trump and some of his allies may have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction in misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report.Closing segmentJessica Cisneros addressing supporters in Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday. She is facing an incumbent in a runoff election for a congressional district in South Texas.Jason Garza for The New York TimesSpoiler alertAnyone on the ballot can win an election. It’s also true that anyone on the ballot can sway an election — without actually winning.On Tuesday, a little-known candidate who won a couple thousand votes in the Texas primaries has stretched out an already bitter Democratic race by more than two months.In Texas, candidates have to win at least 50 percent of the vote to win their party nomination. If no one gets at least 50 percent, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff. On Tuesday, Representative Henry Cuellar, a longtime South Texas Democrat, received the most votes in his primary but fell short of the 50-percent threshold, pushing him into a runoff against Jessica Cisneros, a progressive immigration lawyer.As of Thursday afternoon, Cuellar had won 48.4 percent of the vote and Cisneros had 46.9 percent. A third liberal candidate, Tannya Benavides, had 4.7 percent. Attempts to reach Benavides were unsuccessful. She wasn’t anywhere near qualifying for the runoff in May, but she received just enough votes to prevent either candidate from winning the primary outright.They’re called spoiler candidates, but it’s not necessarily a fair descriptor.Major-party candidates who fail to win enough support are in many ways just as responsible for their losses as little-known candidates who earn a mere fraction of the vote. But spoiler candidates have helped shape American politics for better or for worse. One third-party candidate in Georgia told us that he has been a target of Republican ire — even death threats — for running in the 2020 Senate race.The candidate, Shane Hazel, a Libertarian, received 2.3 percent of the vote in the November general election in Georgia in 2020.David Perdue, who was the incumbent Republican senator, came less than half a percentage point shy of the 50 percent mark. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, advanced to the runoff as well — and won the Senate seat. Ossoff’s victory, alongside Raphael Warnock’s, a fellow Georgia Democrat, gave their party control of the Senate.While Hazel and his supporters were thrilled that a scrappy campaign had influenced a marquee Senate race, he doesn’t call himself a spoiler. He might have angered Republicans for helping to thwart a Perdue victory, but he said his intention was to give voice to voters, not to simply send a race to a runoff.And he’ll be back on the ballot in 2022, but for a different office.“There are a lot of Republicans who are extremely upset,” Hazel said, “that I’m running for governor.”Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More