internal-sub-only-nl

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      One Eric Reaps in Missouri as Another Eric Sows

      by

      CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — Voters here in this languid town along the Mississippi River, famous for being the boyhood home of Rush Limbaugh and for its history of devastating floods, sent an unmistakable message on Tuesday: They like Eric.Eric Schmitt, that is.The attorney general of Missouri stomped the man widely seen as his chief rival, Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor, despite some last-minute high jinks from Donald Trump. With a chaos-inducing puckishness that baffled national Republicans and local operatives alike, the former president had hedged his bets and endorsed “ERIC” — only Eric, no last name — for the Senate seat now held by Roy Blunt, who is retiring.It was a Solomonic, baby-splitting move without precedent, but it reflected Trump’s genuine dilemma and a fierce debate within his camp about which Eric was the true “MAGA” stalwart. Was it Greitens, the retired Navy SEAL, humanitarian Rhodes scholar who once openly admired Barack Obama? Or Schmitt, the mainstream Republican who reinvented himself as an anti-mask and anti-vaccine warrior in preparation for this week’s victory?As of Friday evening, Trump was still asking aides, “What should we do about Missouri?” His son Donald Trump Jr., and the younger Trump’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had lobbied fiercely on behalf of Greitens, and had even claimed after Monday’s ambiguous endorsement that the elder Trump really meant to choose the former governor, not the attorney general. The 45th president himself never clarified, a hedge that allowed him to claim victory either way.Guilfoyle, according to two people who heard accounts of her lobbying efforts, sought to persuade Trump that Greitens was truly ahead in the race. At one point, they said, she cited Big Penguin Polling, a little-known outfit that has a lively Twitter presence but does not disclose the full names of its proprietors. Trump trashed polling by the Remington Research Group, a survey firm linked to Jeff Roe of Axiom Strategies, which managed Schmitt’s campaign. But Remington’s numbers proved far more accurate than Big Penguin’s.In the end, as of early this evening, more than 45 percent of Missouri Republicans had chosen Eric No. 1, while about 19 percent had picked Eric No. 2 — a humiliating end for a man once seen by some Republican donors as America’s first Jewish president in the making.It was also a victory for establishment Republicans in Washington as they tussle (often in vain) for control of the party with Trump’s vast alumni network, which has fanned out across the country to back one candidate or another.A onetime national rising starBefore eventually running as a Republican, Greitens considered a career as a Democrat — pressing friends for meetings with Senator Claire McCaskill, for instance, and even traveling to the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008 to watch Barack Obama become the Democratic presidential nominee.In the run-up to his surprise victory in the 2016 governor’s race, Greitens was seeking — and getting — mainstream national attention, despite never having served a day in office. He sat for interviews with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to promote his books, which now read with an eerie irony in light of his subsequent fall from grace.In “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life,” a 2015 book that became a New York Times best seller, Greitens offers kernels of wisdom like “Resilience is cultivated not so that we can perform well in a single instance, but so that we can live a full and flourishing life.”Understand the Aug. 2 Primary ElectionsWhile the Trump wing of the Republican Party flexed its muscle, voters in deep-red Kansas delivered a loud warning to the G.O.P. on abortion rights.Takeaways: Tuesday’s results suggest this year’s midterms are a trickier environment for uncompromising conservatives than Republicans once believed. Here’s what we learned.Kansas Abortion Vote: In the first election test since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Kansas voters resoundingly decided against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, a major victory for the abortion rights movement in a reliably conservative state.Trump’s Grip on G.O.P.: Primary victories in Arizona and Michigan for allies of former President Donald J. Trump reaffirmed his continued influence over the Republican Party.Winners and Losers: See a rundown of the most notable results.One blurb for the book was by Admiral Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the day of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound — an operation conducted by an elite unit of Greitens’s former counterparts in the Navy SEALs. “Eric Greitens provides a brilliant and brave course of action to help navigate life’s roughest waters,” Mullen wrote.There was more. J.J. Abrams, the filmmaker, called Greitens “one of the great Americans of our time.” Tom Brokaw called him “my hero,” while Joe Klein, the former Time magazine writer, devoted half of an entire book, “Charlie Mike,” to Greitens and his military exploits. (“To say that ‘Charlie Mike’ glorifies Greitens is like saying God comes off well in the Bible,” one former colleague of Klein’s wrote in a scathing reassessment of Greitens after his resignation.)Greitens with supporters as he arrived to vote on Tuesday in Innsbrook, Mo. In the years leading up to his successful 2016 bid for governor, he was showered with national accolades. Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesAccolades came easily in a media climate that glorified warriors with Ph.D.s — and Greitens was an unusually charismatic figure whose charity work gained him national recognition and lucrative speaking contracts. Time magazine named him to its “100 most influential people” list (Mullen wrote the short bio, in which he called Greitens “one of the most remarkable young men I have ever encountered”); Fortune magazine rated him one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world, sandwiched at No. 37 behind Joko Widodo, then the governor of Jakarta, Indonesia, and Wynton Marsalis, the jazz musician.Greitens’s relentless self-promotion irked some of his fellow Navy SEAL alumni, who began circulating a video highlighting what they claimed were discrepancies between his account of his military service and his actual record.One of them, Paul Holzer, eventually came forward in a Missouri radio interview to take credit for making the video, which had become weaponized during the 2016 primary for governor. Playing on the title of another one of Greitens’s books, “The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL,” Holzer titled the video “Eric Greitens: The Heart and the Myth.”By the end of this campaign, however, Greitens had alienated all of his onetime admirers. Even Ken Harbaugh, a former close friend and early contributor to his troubled veterans charity, The Mission Continues, recorded a video urging him to drop out.Greitens also made a number of odd choices during the campaign, including his participation in a Christian baptism ceremony (he is Jewish) and a sudden trip to Finland over the July 4 weekend in which he competed in a 400-meter running event that he cast as a typical feat of athletic prowess. Breitbart’s glowing write-up of the race noted that he finished “just deciseconds behind the third and fourth place United States finishers,” without adding that he placed 22nd out of 25 competitors.A victory for McConnellThe defeat of Eric No. 2 was a rare victory for Senator Mitch McConnell, whose allies quietly funneled “around $6.7 million to the anti-Greitens TV blitz,” according to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt.McConnell cloaked his involvement throughout the race, mindful of Greitens’s penchant for political jujitsu. The minority leader’s political advisers, usually quick to run a phone call or text, went silent for weeks. A super PAC set up to run television ads highlighting the former governor’s history of scandals emphasized its Missouri roots, while declining to disclose donors from outside the state.Less than a week before Election Day, both of Eric No. 2’s main opponents said they would not vote to make McConnell majority leader if Republicans took the Senate this fall — a reflection of the anti-establishment fervor among the G.O.P. grass-roots.Eric No. 1’s victory was also a relief for the dozens of Missouri Republicans who labored for months to ensure Eric No. 2’s defeat.As Scott Faughn, the plugged-in publisher of The Missouri Times, a conservative political outlet focused on state politics, put it in a parting comment at Schmitt’s victory party on Tuesday night, “We’re crazy, but not Eric Greitens crazy.”What to readIn Pennsylvania, Nevada and now Arizona and Michigan, Republicans who dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election and who pose a threat to subvert the next one are on a path toward winning decisive control over how elections are run, Jennifer Medina, Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write.Republican candidates and conservative news outlets seized on reports of voting problems in Arizona on Tuesday to re-up their case that the state’s elections are broken and in need of reform, even as state and county officials said the complaints were exaggerated, Stuart Thompson reports.Will Senator Kyrsten Sinema support Democrats’ new climate deal? As usual, she’s not saying. Emily Cochrane takes a look.In The New York Times Magazine, Elisabeth Zerofsky has a deeply reported piece on the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in California that has become a nerve center of the American right.— BlakeIs 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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      His Campaign Pitch? ‘No One Wants to Have a Beer With Me.’

      by

      By his own admission, Adam Hollier is not the kind of guy you want to have a beer with.“You remember when George W. Bush was running and they were like, ‘He’s the kind of guy you want to have a beer with?’” he told me, by way of explaining his personality. “No one wants to have a beer with me.”Why not, I asked?“I’m not fun,” he said. “I’m the friend who you call to move a heavy couch. I’m the friend you call when you’re stuck on the side of the road. Right? Like, I’m the friend you call when you need a designated driver.”He repeated it again, in case I didn’t get it the first time: “I am not fun.”Hollier, 36, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Michigan’s newly redrawn 13th Congressional District, which includes Detroit and Hamtramck, is a whirlwind of perpetual motion. A captain and paratrooper in the Army Reserves, he ran track and played safety at Cornell University despite being just 5-foot-9. After a fellowship with AmeriCorps, he earned a graduate degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan.Hollier’s brother, who is 11 years older, is 6-foot-5. His eldest sister is a federal investigator for the U.S. Postal Service who went to the University of Michigan on a basketball and water polo scholarship.“I grew up in a household of talent. And I don’t really have much of it,” Hollier said with self-effacing modesty. “My little sister is an incredible musician and singer and, you know, has done all of those things. I can barely clap on beat.”Hollier is running — when I spoke with him, he was quite literally doing so to drop his daughters off at day care — to replace Representative Brenda Lawrence, a four-term congresswoman who announced her retirement early this year.Her district, before a nonpartisan commission remapped boundaries that were widely seen as unfairly tilted toward Republicans, was one of the most heavily gerrymandered in the country, a salamander-like swath of land that snaked from Pontiac in the northwest across northern Detroit to the upscale suburb of Grosse Pointe on Lake St. Clair, then southward down the river toward River Rouge and Dearborn.Defying the odds, Hollier has racked up endorsement after endorsement by doing what he’s always done — outworking everybody else.Early on, Lawrence endorsed Portia Roberson, a lawyer and nonprofit leader from Detroit, but she has failed to gain traction. In March, the Legacy Committee for Unified Leadership, a local coalition of Black leaders run by Warren Evans, the Wayne County executive, endorsed Hollier instead.In late June, so did Mike Duggan, the city’s mayor. State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a fellow parent and a newfound political celebrity, backed him in May. A video announcing her endorsement shows Hollier wearing a neon vest and pushing a double jogging stroller.Hollier’s main opponent in the Democratic primary, Shri Thanedar, is a self-financing state lawmaker who previously ran for governor in 2018 and came in third place in the party’s primary behind Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul El-Sayed. His autobiography, “The Blue Suitcase: Tragedy and Triumph in an Immigrant’s Life,” originally written in Marathi, tells the story of his rise from lower-class origins in India to his success as an entrepreneur in the United States.A wealthy former engineer, Thanedar now owns Avomeen Analytical Services, a chemical testing laboratory in Ann Arbor. He has spent at least $8 million of his own money on the race so far, according to campaign finance reports.Pro-Israel groups, worried about his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have backed Hollier, as have veterans’ groups and two super PACs backed by cryptocurrency donors. The outside spending has allowed Hollier to compensate for Thanedar’s TV ad spending, which dwarfs his own.A firefighter’s son who couldn’t become a firefighterThe son of a social worker and a firefighter, Hollier recalls his father sitting him down when he was 8 years old and telling him he must never follow in his footsteps.Asked why, his father replied, “You don’t have that little bit of healthy fear that brings you home at night.”The comment stunned the young Hollier, who still considers his father, who ran the Detroit Fire Department’s hazardous material response team and retired as a captain after serving on the force for nearly 30 years, his own personal superhero.“And that’s a weird experience,” Hollier said. “Because, you know, at Career Day, nothing trumps firefighter except astronaut. Every kid’s dad is their hero, but my dad is, you know, objectively” — objectively, he said again, emphasizing the word — “in that space.”When he was 10 years old, in 1995, he persuaded his father to take him to the Million Man March in Washington, a gathering on the National Mall that was aimed at highlighting the challenges of growing up Black and male in America. They went to the top of the Washington Monument, where young Adam insisted on taking a photograph to get a more accurate sense of the crowd size.His parents were not political “at all,” he said — he notes that when Martin Luther King Jr. visited Detroit just ahead of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, his father went to a baseball game instead.Years later, Hollier admitted sheepishly, he did rebel against his father — by becoming a volunteer firefighter in college.Hollier says he’s most proud of scrambling to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office in the State Senate.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesEarly interest in politicsHollier was very much a political animal from a young age, he acknowledged.“I know it’s in vogue for people to say they never thought they would run for office, but I always knew I was, right?” he said. “Like, I was always involved in the thing.”That same day in Washington, for instance, he met Dennis Archer, the mayor of Detroit at the time, who told him he should “think about doing what I do” someday — a heady experience for a 10-year-old. He took the advice to heart, winning his first race for student council president in high school.Hollier’s first official job in politics was in 2004, working as an aide to Buzz Thomas, a now-retired state senator he considers his political mentor. Hollier lost a race for the State House in 2014 to the incumbent then, Rose Mary Robinson. In 2018, he was elected to the State Senate, where he worked on an auto insurance overhaul and lead pipe removal.But the achievement he’s most proud of, he said, is scrambling to save jobs in his district after General Motors closed a plant in Hamtramck just after he took office. In a panic, he called Archer, who gave him a list of 10 things to do immediately.One of the top items on Archer’s list was tracking down former Senator Carl Levin, a longtime friend of labor unions who had recently retired, and whom he’d never met.Don’t accept that G.M. would close the plant, Levin told him when they spoke.“They’re not going to produce the vehicles that they produce there right now,” Hollier recounted Levin saying. “But you’re fighting for the next product line.”Hollier took that advice to heart, and worked with a coalition of others to steer G.M. toward a different solution. The site is now known as Factory Zero, the company’s first plant dedicated entirely to electric vehicles.Motivations and milestonesIf Hollier loses, Michigan is likely to have no Black members of Congress for the first time in seven decades.When I ask him what that means to him, he jumps into an impassioned speech about how important it is for Black Americans, and for young Black men in particular, to have positive role models. It’s one I suspect he has been giving some version of for his entire life in politics.Growing up in north Detroit, Hollier often ran into his own representative, John Conyers, the longest serving African-American member of Congress. Conyers, who died in 2019 at age 90, was known for walking every nook and cranny of his district.But when Hollier knocked on his first door the first time he ran for office, the woman who opened it asked him, “Are you going to disappoint me like Kwame?” — a reference to Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced former mayor of Detroit.That experience sobered him about running for office as a Black man in Detroit, a highly segregated city where Black men are disproportionally likely to end up jobless or in prison. But it also motivated him to prove the woman wrong.On his 25th birthday, Hollier recalled going to pick up some food from a store near his parents’ house. Told about the milestone, the man behind the counter replied: “Congratulations. Not everybody makes it.”With just one day left before the primary, Hollier has spent 760 hours asking for donations over the phone, raising more than $1 million. His campaign says it has made 300,000 phone calls and knocked on 40,000 doors — double, he tells me with pride, what Representative Rashida Tlaib was able to do in the district next door.But when I asked him if he would be at peace if he lost, he confessed, “That’s a tough one.”He paused for a moment, then said, “I feel strongly that I’ve done everything I could have done.”What to readRepublican missteps, weak candidates and fund-raising woes are handing Democrats unexpected opportunities in races for governor this year, Jonathan Martin writes.Sheera Frenkel reports on a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues.Madison Underwood, a 22-year-old woman from Tennessee, was thrilled to learn she was pregnant. But when a rare defect in the developing fetus threatened her life, she was thrust into post-Roe chaos. Neelam Bohra has the story.— BlakeIs 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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats’ Plan to Win in 2022 Looks a Lot Like 2020 and 2018

      by

      Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Georgia, where my colleague Maya King covers politics across the South.ATLANTA — Long before Georgia became the center of the American political universe, Stacey Abrams and leagues of Democratic organizers across the Peach State were testing out a new strategy to help their party win more top-ticket elections.National Democrats largely dismissed their calculations, which called for exhausting voter turnout in the reliably blue Metro Atlanta region while investing more time and money in turning out rural, young and infrequent voters of color outside the capital city instead of the moderate and independent white voters in its suburbs.There were strong civil rights interests at stake, given the history of discrimination against Black voters in Georgia and across the South.But there were hardball politics at play, too, in Abrams’s push to register millions of new voters. She and her allies hoped they would become the backbone of a coalition that could turn Georgia blue for the first time since Bill Clinton won the state in 1992.In 2018, Abrams, Georgia’s current Democratic nominee for governor, came extraordinarily close to winning her first campaign for the office. In 2020, her organizing helped Joe Biden narrowly win the state before boosting the fortunes of two Democrats who won both of the state’s Senate seats two months later.The strategy is now widely accepted on the left — although it is expensive. But Abrams, her fellow Democratic candidates and several voter-focused organizations in Georgia are counting on it again this year to prove that their wins in 2020 were not a fluke made possible by former President Donald Trump’s unpopularity, but rather the continuation of a trend.It’s why Way to Win, a collective of progressive Democratic donors and political strategists, is pouring $8.5 million into Georgia’s voter mobilization efforts ahead of November, according to plans first shared with The New York Times.The group has already shelled out nearly $4 million to more than a dozen organizations in Georgia, including the Working Families Party and the New Georgia Project, which Ms. Abrams founded in 2014 and whose board Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who is running for election to a full term, chaired from 2017 to 2020. The group’s goal is to provide the financial backing for Democrats to continue turning out the same broad swath of voters that they did in previous cycles, and blunt the effect of national trends working against them.They also feel like they have something to prove to skeptics in Washington yet again.“If you talk to these voters — every voter that has been ignored by traditional pundits and traditional institutional leaders — if you build a big tent, they will come,” said Tory Gavito, co-founder, president and chief executive of Way to Win. “I can’t tell you how many rooms I still go to where traditional operatives will say, ‘Is Georgia really a battleground?’ And it’s like, are you kidding? How many cycles do we have to go through where Georgia leaders really show the power of a multiracial coalition?”Alexis Hill, left, a canvasser for the New Georgia Project, spoke to resident Dashanta Gaines on her doorstep in Fairburn on May 12.Alyssa Pointer/ReutersLocal organizing, national headwindsTo win the big statewide races, Georgia Democrats are counting on high turnout from the same coalition that brought them success in 2018 and 2020: a mix of loyal, rain-or-shine voters in addition to a critical mass of moderate, independent and infrequent voters.But the outside forces getting them to the polls, or not, look very different than they did in the two previous election cycles. Where anti-Trump sentiment, a nationwide movement against systemic racism and coronavirus-related provisions that expanded access to the ballot fueled record turnout in 2020, voters this year are keeping rising prices and concerns about an economic recession front of mind, dampening their enthusiasm. They are also contending with a new, more restrictive voting law passed by the Republicans who control the state legislature and governor’s mansion.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Mike Pence Keeps Trying to Make Mike Pence Happen

      by

      It’s difficult to find a Republican strategist who will say the former vice president has a real chance in a 2024 matchup against his former boss. But he’s clearly laying the groundwork.My colleague Michael Bender wrote this week about the deepening rivalry between Donald Trump and Mike Pence, onetime partners and political allies.The two men became estranged after Pence declined to support Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021. That same day, the mild-mannered Indianan hid from a mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as it stormed the Capitol after being egged on by the president.This week, they made dueling appearances in Washington and things did not go well for Pence. He drew a small, polite crowd at a gathering of the Young America’s Foundation while Trump basked in a raucous reception at the America First Policy Summit. (For those unfamiliar with these institutions, both represent emerging power centers of the new, Trumpified G.O.P. establishment.)The split-screen speeches showed that Trump, as Bender notes, is still the big dog in the Republican Party.“The two appearances also underscored the wide gap in enthusiasm among Republicans between Mr. Trump and any other potential primary rival in 2024,” Bender wrote.In a New York Times/Siena College poll of Republican voters this month, just 6 percent said they would vote for Pence if he were to run for president two years from now, compared with 49 percent who said they would stick with Trump. Unscientific straw polls of young Republican activists have found Pence faring even worse in hypothetical primaries.To put the matter plainly: It is difficult to find a Republican strategist who will tell you that Pence has a real chance in a 2024 matchup against his former boss.Rick Tyler, a former presidential campaign adviser to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said that Pence had the best chance of nudging Republican voters away from Trump.The former vice president was being careful and “savvy,” Tyler said, in balancing the need to distance himself from Trump’s worst conduct while paying respect to his administration’s conservative policy achievements.But it was unclear, he acknowledged, whether Republican primary voters might see things the same way.Donald Trump, Post-PresidencyThe former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.Losing Support: Nearly half of G.O.P. voters prefer someone other than Donald J. Trump for president in 2024, a Times/Siena College poll showed.Trump-Pence Split: An emerging rivalry between Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, his former vice president, reveals Republicans’ enduring divisions.Looking for Cover: Mr. Trump could announce an unusually early 2024 bid, a move designed to blunt a series of damaging Jan. 6 revelations.Potential Legal Peril: From the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 inquiry to an investigation in Georgia, Mr. Trump is in legal jeopardy on several fronts.Trump supporters, Tyler said, were more like fans of pop groups or football teams than traditional voters carefully weighing the pros and cons of other candidates — making it unlikely, he said, that most would ever break with the 45th president for anyone, let alone his loyal former deputy.The anger factorIf we’ve learned anything from the past seven years of American politics, it is that the base of the Republican Party is deeply angry with the state of affairs in this country. Pence’s nostalgic paeans to broad-shouldered, Ronald Reagan-style conservatism do not seem to be what G.O.P. voters are looking for in their elected leaders. They want fire and brimstone, not low-energy sermons.And while Trump’s successful 2016 campaign did offer a dose of the usual aspirational optimism that voters like to hear, it focused much more on a list of enemies: the “deep state,” the Republican establishment, Mexican asylum seekers, Muslims, Washington politicians, a metaphorical “swamp” that included Democrats and the mainstream media.One mistake political pundits often make about voters — and I’m sure I’m guilty of this myself on occasion — is that they tend to overemphasize the extent to which most Americans are attracted to policy ideas and coherent ideologies, rather than to charismatic personalities.And nobody has ever accused Mike Pence of having a charismatic personality.‘He wasn’t channeling anyone’s rage’It’s sometimes forgotten that before Pence rose to national prominence, he hosted a conservative radio talk show in Indiana.When I was an editor at Politico, during the 2016 campaign we sent a reporter, Darren Samuelsohn, to Indianapolis to dig up old episodes of the show in search of the “real Mike Pence.”Over some late nights and with the help of plenty of caffeine, Samuelsohn plowed through hours of cassette recordings, listening for insights about what was clearly a formative experience for the future vice president. (For Gen Z readers: Cassettes are an ancient form of audio technology that preceded compact discs, MP3 files and Spotify.)What we found was revealing in its own way: Pence was pretty much the opposite of a radio shock jock. As a Tea Party stalwart during an earlier era of anti-insider fervor, he criticized many of the same enemies that Trump would later target. But he did it with Midwestern politeness, in a dulcet baritone that was nothing like the Rush Limbaughs or the Howard Sterns of that era.“Pence’s show had a casually indignant air to it,” Samuelsohn wrote in his analysis. “He wasn’t channeling anyone’s rage. His banter was easygoing as he implored his listeners to dial 800-603-MIKE, ending the week with ‘Open Phone Friday.’ He came out of commercial breaks to a ‘Mike Pence!’ jingle and musical interludes from the likes of Hootie & the Blowfish and a bouncing keyboard version of ‘Great Balls of Fire.’”Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke this month in Tampa, Fla., at a gathering hosted by Turning Point USA.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressA battle of personalitiesIt’s easy to see this Mike Pence in today’s quixotic pre-2024 maneuvering.When he criticizes his onetime ally and superior, he does so only obliquely — never by name, and only with carefully manicured phrases like “Some people may choose to focus on the past, but elections are about the future,” as he put it in this week’s speech.Hmm! What person could he have possibly been referring to here?Pence has also authorized his closest aides, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, to cooperate with the House committee investigating Jan. 6 as it amasses evidence of Trump’s actions surrounding the riot. But Pence himself has not spoken in any detail about his ordeal that day, reinforcing the impression among many Republican insiders that he is afraid of openly crossing swords with Trump.Contrast that with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is younger, angrier and savvier about glomming onto hot-button issues on the right. DeSantis seems to be the flavor of the month, and 25 percent of 2024 Republican primary voters picked him in that same Times/Siena poll, well north of Pence.As a governor, DeSantis benefits from a platform that allows him to take actions that appeal to Republican activists and plugged-in voters, who have responded enthusiastically to his battles with Disney, teachers and his state’s wilting Democratic Party over L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And he has picked his moments to criticize Trump’s record in office — maneuvering to the right of the former president on the coronavirus pandemic and on cultural issues that have revved up the G.O.P. base, such as critical race theory.DeSantis might not ultimately be what Republicans are looking for in their next banner carrier, either. Florida strategists and former aides often describe him as thin-skinned and plodding on his feet, with a humorless stump style. And it’s difficult to envision anyone out-brawling Trump in an open 2024 Republican primary.But DeSantis was, by all accounts, a serious student at Yale even while juggling the punishing demands of being a varsity college athlete. He has a sterling military record, as far as we know. He is whip-smart and skilled at both political combat and tapping into Republican voters’ deep skepticism about the news media. There’s a chance that he will improve just enough, and Trump’s standing in the Republican Party will degrade just enough, to put him in the pole position heading into 2024.And who knows: Maybe some other person will come along and fire up conservative Iowans and New Hampshirites in the frigid January air.But Mike Pence? It’s hard to imagine how he will translate his cautious, inch-by-inch break with Trump into a seat in front of the Resolute Desk on Jan. 20, 2025.What to read tonightYour On Politics correspondent, Blake, has a dispatch on Eric Greitens’s Senate campaign in Missouri, where a barrage of attack ads has eroded his lead in the polls ahead of the Tuesday primary.My colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg has the story of Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an outspoken doctor in Indiana who gained national attention after providing an abortion to a 10-year-old — and who is now paying the price.From Opinion: What happened when seven Trump voters and six Biden voters tried to find common ground?Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs 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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Finally, a Dr. Oz Show That I Really Want to Watch

      by

      I must have watched a few whole episodes of “The Dr. Oz Show” when I wrote a long profile of Mehmet Oz for The Times Magazine back in 2010, but afterward? Please. I’m a glutton, but not for punishment, and the snippets of the show that I’d happen upon convinced me that snippets sufficed. Oz was more huckster than healer, more showman than shaman, grinning dopily as he sacrificed his integrity on the altar of ratings. I encountered enough Faustian parables of that ilk as a journalist covering politics. I didn’t need them in my daytime television.But I’m enthralled by Oz’s newest production, by which I mean his campaign for the Senate. It may be my favorite Senate race ever.By “favorite” I don’t mean that it inspires me, at least not to anything but disputably clever prose. I mean that it has such a surfeit of unlikely details, such a concentration of modern political themes.Such enormous stakes, too. While Republicans are very likely to win back the House in November 2022, thanks to the normal midterm pendulum swing and voters’ profound economic anxiety, Democrats have a real chance to hold on to the Senate, and their fate probably rests on a few key contests, including the one in Pennsylvania between Oz, the Republican nominee, and John Fetterman, his Democratic rival. They’re vying for the seat being vacated by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who’s retiring.You couldn’t script a matchup like this. Oz, an accomplished surgeon, has spent decades enshrining himself as a trim, taut, manically energetic paradigm of peak health; I sometimes look at him and just see a big bowl of leafy greens and ancient grains dressed with low-fat yogurt. I look at Fetterman and see a sausage pizza. (I think I mean that as a compliment.)Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke just days before the Democratic primary in May and spent the next two months off the campaign trail, in recovery. He said recently that his hearing still isn’t what it used to be. He also disclosed that he’d been diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in 2017 but hadn’t faithfully taken his prescribed medication or even returned to the doctor over the next five years.So it’s the health truant versus the health tyrant.But it’s also the television wizard versus the Twitter wiseacre. Oz knows how to woo and wow a small-screen audience, but, as the subhead of an excellent recent article by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian noted, Fetterman “is wielding social media might against star power.”The Fetterman campaign operates in extreme meme mode, trolling Oz in particular for being a New Jerseyan in unpersuasive Pennsylvania drag. It deconstructed the décor in an Oz campaign video to show that he was speaking from a room in his New Jersey manse. It hired the “Jersey Shore” star Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi to beckon Oz home in a video clip that got more than three million views on Twitter.It followed that inspired mischief with a video in which another recognizable ambassador for New Jersey — the guitarist Steven Van Zandt, who plays in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and had a role in “The Sopranos” — cautions Oz about his Pennsylvania misadventure.But the most devastating recent Oz taunt came from outside the Fetterman campaign, in the form of an ad that documented the doctor’s recurring promotion of bogus miracle cures and used footage from “The Wizard of Oz” to shame him for it. Dorothy, Toto and the gang never performed a nobler service.Oz is off. He responded to the sneak Snooki attack with a cringe-inducing game of famous-acquaintance one-upmanship. “She’s been on my show,” he told Dom Giordano, a Philadelphia talk-radio host. “I know all these celebrities. I could actually have celebrities do my campaign for me.”Take that, John Fetterman! You may have a consistent political ideology. Oz has been to the Emmys.Therein lies a Republican predicament. With Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and, to a lesser extent, J.D. Vance in Ohio, the party has nominated Senate candidates whose star statuses aren’t paired with comparable political acumen and whose flaws or fumbles have given their Democratic counterparts a better chance than they might have had against more experienced, more traditional candidates.Fame is funny that way. It can be redeemed for many things but not for everything. And the blessing of Donald Trump — which Oz, Vance and Walker all received — is funny, too. It giveth in the primary only to taketh away in the general, or at least (fingers crossed) that’s a distinct possibility.Despite Fetterman’s stroke and convalescence, he has been raising much more money than Oz has. He was more than five points ahead of Oz in two June polls. The National Review columnist Jim Geraghty called Oz “the wildly underperforming Ford Pinto of Republican Senate candidates.”Not even a Tesla in vain search of a charging station? Whatever the beleaguered vehicle’s make and model, I can’t take my eyes off this car wreck.For the Love of SentencesAl Drago/Associated PressPerhaps the most nominated sentence of the week was by a Times critic who appears frequently in this feature, James Poniewozik, about how quickly social media accounts screen-grabbed and mocked new images of Senator Josh Hawley fleeing the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot: “To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, it was the continuation of politics by other memes.” (Thanks to David Carlyon of Manhattan and Keith Herrmann of Raleigh, N.C., among others, for drawing attention to this.)Monica Hesse, in The Washington Post, weighed in on what Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, had been through: “Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) reportedly said that Cheney’s failure to support Trump after the insurrection was like looking up in the stands to ‘see your girlfriend on the opposition’s side.’ The sexism was breathtaking: The idea that the third-highest ranking Republican in the House would be thought of not as a senior member of the party but as a groupie whose loyalty could be thrown on and off like a letterman jacket.” (Phil Carlsen, South Portland, Maine)Also in The Post, Matt Bai questioned the praise for the former Trump aides Sarah Matthews and Matthew Pottinger: “If we have Matthews and Pottinger to thank for airing the truth about Trump’s final days, then we have them to thank for that legacy, too.” (Mark Van Loon, Hamilton, Mont.)And Paul Schwartzman had fun analyzing the uncertain fortunes of Representative Jerry Nadler of New York: “Nadler’s Jewishness has taken on new importance since redistricting has left him in a pickle.” (Michael Schooler, Washington, D.C.)Stepping back to marvel at what has become of Republicans in the Trump era, Tom Nichols wrote in his newsletter in The Atlantic: “In the Before Times, we still argued over politics instead of whether communist Muslims had taken over our Venezuelan voting machines with help from the Italian space program.” (Jim Price, Oak Park, Ill.)Taking stock from a different vantage point, Gail Collins wrote in The Times: “Donald Trump got elected president and those of us who make fun of politicians for a living moved into a land of perpetual opportunity.” (Steve Cohen, Reston, Va.)Moving away from politics — because who doesn’t want to? — Joshua Sokol pondered the amazing recent photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope in the context of the revelatory, epochal pictures from space telescopes past: “Will anything land as hard as the Apollo shots? Or the Hubble pics, plastered on science classroom walls and aped by everyone from Terrence Malick to the ‘Thor’ movies? We’ll see. But for now, at least, the tap is open, and the universe is pouring in.” (Harry Schaefer, Silver Spring, Md.)In The Times, J. Kenji López-Alt rhapsodized about the various deployments of onions in a burger suffused with them, including “gnarled, nearly burned shreds that frizzle out of the burger’s edges the way my daughter draws hair with crayons.” (Jeannie Ianelli, Seattle)Alexis Soloski profiled Neil Patrick Harris: “His personality is fizz and bounce, with just a touch of guile. He tends to look like he is up to something. Something fun.” (Katie Baer, Pittsboro, N.C.)And in The Los Angeles Times, the theater critic Charles McNulty wrote: “If the Cheesecake Factory were a musical, it would no doubt look and sound much like ‘Moulin Rouge.’ The temptations are obvious, the portions huge and the goal is satiety to point of button-popping exhaustion.” (Robert Potter, Los Angeles)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.Bonus Regan Picture!Frank BruniI’ve marveled in past newsletters at the crazy variety of positions in which my beloved Regan sleeps. Almost as confounding is the variety of places where she sleeps. I can find no rhyme, reason or pattern to her choices, many of which seem to fly in the face of comfort.Here she is below the dining room table. Does she imagine herself in some wolf’s den — some cave? There’s a couch upstairs that she likes to put half, but only half, of her body under. And one night out of every 100, she departs from her usual habit of jumping onto my bed and instead flattens herself and crawls all the way beneath it. The space there is so tight that I once had to pull her out of it in the morning.She seemed strangely unfazed. And characteristically well rested.On a Personal NoteGetty ImagesIs the real Glenn Thompson the congressman who voted against marriage equality last week or the father who, three days later, attended his gay son’s wedding to another man and gave a loving speech about how happy he was for the couple?Friends keep asking me that, as if being gay and writing about politics affords me some special insight. Nope. I have only the same curiosity and pique that so many others do. I have questions. I have observations.Thompson is a Republican who represents a conservative Pennsylvania district. He joined 156 other House Republicans — the overwhelming majority of them — in voting no on a bill that Democrats had put forward to codify same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into law before the Supreme Court could potentially revisit the 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The bill passed anyway.I guarantee you that there were opposing votes in addition to Thompson’s by Republicans with gay relatives and friends whom they otherwise support. But in a testament to the human talents for compartmentalization and rationalization, those Republicans performed a mental split of public and private, of professional and personal, that permitted them to vote in violation of cherished relationships.I suppose some of them believe that you can fully embrace a gay person without endorsing that person’s right to marry, but that’s a feat of moral needle-threading well beyond my ken. Others probably reasoned that they had to vote as they did to save their jobs or to safeguard other priorities. Life is indeed all about trade-offs.But how do you trade away your own son’s dignity? And what do you say to him after you’ve done so, or when he’s cutting his wedding cake?Thompson’s son hasn’t really spoken out. Neither has Thompson’s son-in-law. Maybe that reflects an impressive capacity for forgiveness and grace. Maybe the young men are just focused, for now, on honeymooning.Or maybe they try to look at the bright side. There’s indeed a bright side here: In an era of profound partisanship, 47 House Republicans joined 220 House Democrats to support the marriage equality bill, and there’s a definite chance that it can garner just enough Republican support in the Senate to prevent a filibuster. That speaks to how much progress has been made on the gay-rights front over recent decades and how much the country has changed.It doesn’t erase my concerns about many Republicans’ resurgent vilification of gay people, slandered as “groomers” by a hateful contingent within the party. But it suggests a strain of understanding, a ray of enlightenment. That consoles me somewhat. I hope it consoles Thompson’s son, too. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Can Democrats Persuade Voters They’re Not a Party of Rich Elites?

      by

      Today, at an unassuming event space in Washington overlooking the Capitol, a coterie of progressive thinkers and doers gathered for an intimate conference that could not have been more different from the boisterous gathering hosted just down the road by the conservative America First Policy Institute.The purpose of Tuesday’s liberal gathering was to discuss ways to counter a narrative that appears to be gaining traction with voters: that Democrats are now the party of economic elites, while Republicans represent working-class Americans.The G.O.P., of course, has been trying to pull off exactly this feat for decades — with mixed success.Richard Nixon spoke of a “silent majority” of Americans who were turned off by what they saw as the cultural excess of the 1960s. One famous attack line from Nixon’s re-election campaign painted George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, as the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion.”Ronald Reagan, a sunnier type, appealed to the patriotism and conservative social values of blue-collar workers in places like Ohio’s Mahoning Valley by aggressively confronting the Soviet Union abroad and speaking openly about his Christian faith.A shift for the partiesBut it was Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate baron from Manhattan, who arguably pulled off the major realignment of the two parties along educational and class lines. Now, Republican politicians boast that theirs is the party of working people. They speak much less often, in public at least, about “tort reform,” “double taxation” and other phrases that the business community once regularly injected into the political conversation.This shift has alarmed many Democratic Party strategists. Americans without a college degree still represent the majority of voters, fueling critiques like Ruy Teixeira’s jeremiad against what he characterizes as overly educated cultural snobs who, in his view, are leading Democrats to ruin.Many of those critiques urge Democrats to alter their cultural message to reach voters who might not share their views on, say, structural racism or immigration.But the wonks and operatives huddling at Tuesday’s series of panels and hallway discussions would argue that party leaders are failing on two more fundamental levels: They don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and they aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress turned liberal activist, organized the event with Adam Jentleson, a former top aide to Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader and senator from Nevada who died last year.Jentleson, who now runs a progressive communications strategy firm called Battle Born Collective along with Rebecca Katz, said in an interview, “Democrats must find a more effective way to meet working-class voters where they are, and channel their very real anger — or else Republicans will.”Adam Jentleson with Senator Harry Reid in 2015. Jentleson, who now helps run a progressive communications strategy firm, supports an economic approach he calls “inclusive populism.”Tom Williams/Roll Call, via Getty ImagesJentleson championed an economic philosophy called “inclusive populism” — essentially, left-leaning economics without the nastiness of past populist movements, which have often channeled working-class voters’ resentment toward immigrants or racial minorities.Not everyone could agree on what to call their nascent movement, with one attendee noting that the term “populist” comes freighted with historical baggage.Brandishing a fresh survey commissioned by the progressive group Fight Corporate Monopolies and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm led by Margie Omero, Jentleson argued that “a populist economic message is highly effective, and it’s crazy that Dems aren’t already moving in this direction as fast as possible.”Omero, who presented her findings at the conference, said that while Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters might be the most acute, workers without college degrees of all backgrounds are drawn to the general tenets of “inclusive populism” — whatever one calls it — and are highly receptive to messages that blame, say, oil companies for the high price of gasoline.Among the other speakers at Tuesday’s gathering — which was called Sound Check — were Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat from New York’s Westchester County; Heather McGhee, the board chairwoman of Color of Change, a civil rights group; and Zachary Carter, a journalist and the author of a biography of John Maynard Keynes.In his talk, Carter bashed unnamed economists of the “old guard” of the Democratic Party, who he said were misdiagnosing the causes of inflation and prescribing, essentially, higher unemployment and lower wages as the answer.“The story we are hearing from the old guard is not fundamentally compelling in a democracy,” Carter said. “Their critique is premised on the idea that most working people actually have it too good, and attempts to improve their well-being can only make things worse.”An informal coalition of progressive groups helped put on the event: Way to Win, a donor community led by Ms. Hunt-Hendrix; Fight Corporate Monopolies, a relatively new advocacy group led by Sarah Miller, founder of the American Economic Liberties Project; the Economic Security Project, led by Taylor Jo Isenberg; and Popular Comms, a progressive strategy group co-founded by Jonathan Smucker.Lessons from PennsylvaniaSmucker, whose background is in political organizing in eastern and central Pennsylvania, gave a presentation on lessons learned from the 2018 campaign for Congress of Jess King, who ran as an inclusive populist in Lancaster, Pa.King, who styled herself a working mom who refused to take “corporate” donations, wound up losing her race after a court decision left the district solidly Republican.She would have been able to overcome the district’s original lean of six percentage points toward the G.O.P., though not the 14-point structural advantage she ultimately faced in the general election, Smucker said.What helped open the door with working-class voters in that district, Smucker said, was an aggressive door-knocking campaign that began with a conversation about “special interests,” Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and the eventual need for a universal health care system — and included large doses of criticism of the leaders of the Democratic Party as disappointing and out of touch.The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months — and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.Hunt-Hendrix said she found the conference “fortifying” at a time when many on the left are discouraged by how the midterm elections are shaping up.Jentleson emphasized that Tuesday’s confab was “a conversation about the future of the party, not a prescription for 2022.”What to readIn competing speeches in Washington, Donald Trump portrayed the country as overwhelmed by crime, Michael Bender reports, while Mike Pence tried to draw subtle distinctions with his former ally and current rival.Previously undisclosed communications among Trump campaign aides and outside advisers provide new insight into their efforts to overturn the election in the weeks leading to Jan. 6, Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater report.As the world faces disasters including climate change and the pandemic, an old question seems newly urgent: Does democracy or autocracy perform better in times of crisis? Max Fisher explores.Several disabled voters are suing Wisconsin’s Elections Commission in federal court, seeking to restore a decades-old precedent that allowed people with disabilities to receive assistance with the return of absentee ballots.— BlakeIs 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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      A Trump-Backed Veteran Ran Hard to the Right, Only to Be Outflanked

      by

      Joe Kent, a square-jawed Trump devotee running for a House seat in Washington State, is in a bit of a pickle.Kent has campaigned as a “Stop the Steal”-style candidate on Donald Trump’s “America First” platform, positions that apparently caught the eye of the former president, who has endorsed him.Kent insists the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents provocateurs. In September, he spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., in support of people accused of storming the Capitol, urging the release of what he called “political prisoners.”But in recent weeks, far-right figures led by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, have started an online drumbeat claiming that Kent, a retired Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer who has a fistful of Bronze Stars, is actually a deep-state denizen himself.Kent’s wife, Shannon, was a targeting specialist for the National Security Agency who was killed by a suicide bomber in northeast Syria in 2019 while fighting the Islamic State.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      There Are 100 People in America With Way Too Much Power

      by

      Toward the end of my Tuesday column on the Senate, I gestured toward the idea of making it into something like the British House of Lords, which has limited power to veto legislation or make policy. Most democracies with bicameral national legislatures have done something similar, empowering their lower, popular chambers and weakening their upper chambers.The Canadian Senate, for example, acts mainly as a council of revision, amending legislation that comes out of the House of Commons. It can reject legislation, but it rarely exercises that power. The Australian Senate has much more power to block legislation from the House, but the chamber is more democratic than its American counterpoint in that it is apportioned by proportional representation.The United States stands alone with a Senate that is powerful enough to grind the entire legislature to a halt. You could end the filibuster, of course, and that would improve things, but it would take a constitutional amendment to do any root and branch reform of the Senate.Let’s say that amendment was on the table. What would it say?What I would write is simple. I would repeal the 17th Amendment, returning the election of senators to each state legislature, and restoring the federal nature of the chamber. But to compensate for the end of popular election of senators, I would also strip the Senate of its power to introduce or veto legislation.In my vision, the Senate would be a council of revision that continues to represent the states as states. I think this is necessary because the United States will likely be a federal democracy for as long as it exists, and the system should probably accommodate the interests of state governments (insofar as they exist) in one way or another.My Senate could not block House legislation, but it could offer amendments if it chose to take action. Those amendments would then be voted on by a conference committee of House and Senate members, for final approval. If the Senate decides to hold a bill for revision, it has a set amount of time — let’s say 60 days — with which to act. If it does not act in that time, the bill is deemed passed and goes to the president for signing.The Senate would retain its oversight powers as well as its power to approve treaties and offer “advise and consent” to the president for judicial and executive branch nominees. But “advise and consent” would mean an actual hearing and an actual vote.The idea is to move the locus of policymaking back to the House of Representatives (which I would like to enlarge to at least 600 members), and to make it the most important chamber in the operation of government. In this scheme, it might be worth extending House terms to three years to reduce the pressures of campaigning and allow members more time to develop expertise, should they seek it.My basic principle here is that the popular chamber of Congress should also be the most influential one. You see some of this in the Constitution as written — Article I, Section I establishes the Congress and Section II establishes the House — but I’d like to make it the defining part of our constitutional system. I also think that we’d have a more agile and effective government if we removed the veto point that is the Senate.My scheme for transforming the structure of American government is a little broader and more nuanced than this (I’d like to extend federal representation to territories and Americans abroad, for example), but these are the basics of a major part of it. The Senate is too powerful. Let’s cut it down to size.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the problem of the Senate:It may seem odd to blame the institution for this outcome. It’s not as if there is any alternative to passing legislation through both chambers of Congress. But it’s also no accident that climate legislation has repeatedly been passed in the House only to collapse in the Senate. It is no accident that, as a general rule, the upper chamber is where popular legislation goes to die or, if it isn’t killed, where it is passed in truncated and diminished form, like the recent (and lackluster) bipartisan gun bill. The Senate was built with this purpose in mind. It was designed to keep the people in check — to put limits on the reach of democracy and the scope of representation.And my Friday column was on the problem of the Electoral College (a recurring theme, I know):The Electoral College makes it difficult to see that each state contains a multitude of political perspectives, and that our democracy might be a little healthier if the vote of a Seattle Republican mattered as much for the outcome of a presidential election as that of a Green Bay Democrat.Now ReadingErwin Chemerinsky in defense of judicial review for The American Prospect.Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas for The New Yorker.Sarah Jones on the anti-abortion movement for New York magazine.Vanessa Williamson on taxation for Dissent.B.D. McClay on sore winners for The Outline.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at jamelle-newsletter@nytimes.com. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie), Instagram and TikTok.Photo of the WeekI took this years ago at a Civil War re-enactment marking the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox. The Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant re-enactors were having a coffee and relaxing a bit before the day’s festivities.Now Eating: Curried Broccoli and Cauliflower SaladThis recipe is from the wonderful book “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking,” by Toni Tipton-Martin. It is very easy to put together, and very, very good. This recipe makes enough for about four people, and you can easily double it if you’re cooking for a group. I didn’t make any adjustments to the salad the last time I made it, but what I will recommend is to make your own mayonnaise. It’s pretty easy, and the results are far superior to anything you can get from the store.Ingredients4 slices bacon½ cup mayonnaise¼ cup sugar1 tablespoon cider vinegar¼ teaspoon curry powder or more, to tasteSalt2 cups broccoli florets, trimmed and cut into bite-size pieces¼ cup sliced celery.2 cups cauliflower florets, trimmed and cut into bite-size pieces⅓ cup plus one tablespoon raisins⅓ cup plus one tablespoon toasted slivered almondsDirectionsIn a medium skillet, cook the bacon over medium-high heat until crisp, about 7 minutes. Drain on paper towels and crumble when cool enough to handle. Reserve the fat for another use.In a small bowl, mix together the mayonnaise, sugar, vinegar, curry powder, and salt to taste.In a serving bowl, layer the broccoli florets, celery, and cauliflower. Pour on all the dressing. Add a layer of raisins, then almonds, then top with the bacon. Cover with a tightfitting lid or plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours or overnight. Toss before serving. More