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      A Hidden New Threat to U.S. Elections

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      Some Republican-led counties are refusing to certify election results — a move that could throw American democracy into chaos if it becomes widespread.It’s been more than nine weeks since the Pennsylvania primary. The election is still not certified.The reason: Three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster — are refusing to process absentee ballots that were received in a timely manner and are otherwise valid, except the voter did not write a date on the declaration printed on the ballot’s return envelope.The Pennsylvania attorney general has argued in court amid a lawsuit against those three counties that the state will not certify results unless they “include every ballot lawfully cast in that election” (emphasis theirs).The standoff in Pennsylvania is the latest attempt by conservative-leaning counties to disrupt, delay or otherwise meddle with the process of statewide election certification, a normally ceremonial administrative procedure that became a target of Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 contest.It’s happened in other states, too. Earlier this year, Otero County, a rural conservative area in southern New Mexico, refused to certify its primary election, citing conspiracy theories about voting machines, though no county commissioner produced evidence to legitimize their concerns.Eventually, under threat of legal action from the state’s attorney general and an order from the State Supreme Court, the commissioners relented and certified the county’s roughly 7,300 votes.Pro-democracy groups saw Otero County’s refusal to certify the results as a warning of potentially grave future crises, and expressed worries about how a state might be able to certify a presidential election under similar circumstances.The showdown in Pennsylvania is most likely less severe. The number of undated ballots is quite small, and if they had to, state officials could certify the election without counting those ballots, disenfranchising a small number of voters but preserving the ability to certify and send presidential electors to Congress (or elect a governor, senator or local official from the area). For now, the attorney general’s argument is to simply force the counting of every legal ballot.“It is imperative that every legal vote cast by a qualified voter is counted,” said Molly Stieber, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, who is now the state’s Democratic nominee for governor. “The 64 other counties in Pennsylvania have complied and accurately certified their election results. Counties cannot abuse their responsibility for running elections as an excuse to unlawfully disenfranchise voters.”The battle over the undated envelopes in Pennsylvania also presages what is likely to be another litigious election season, in which partisans will look to contest as many ballots as possible to help their side win, seizing on technicalities and immaterial mistakes in an effort to cancel votes.Election experts say that such sprawling legal challenges, combined with false accusations of fraud, could create chaos akin to the 2020 election aftermath.More From Democracy ChallengedRight-Wing Radio Disinformation: Conservative commentators falsely claim that “Democrats cheat” to win elections, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Jan. 6 Timeline: We pieced together President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to subvert American democracy and cling to power.The Far-Right Christian Push: A new wave of U.S. politicians is mixing religious fervor with conspiracy theories, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state.A Cautionary Tale on Democracy: A New Hampshire man pushed through a drastic budget change in his “Live Free or Die” town, angering the community — and jolting it out of indifference.“Had this unfolded on this kind of timeline in 2020, it really could have created problems, because there would have been questions about whether the state could have actually named a slate of electors,” said Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “You could imagine there being disputed slates of electors that were sent to Congress, and it could have been a big mess.”The issue reached the courts last year, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in a dispute over a judicial election that ballots could not be discounted because voters had not dated the return envelope’s declaration. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in June.In Pennsylvania’s tight Republican primary race for Senate between Mehmet Oz, now the nominee, and David McCormick, a state court again ruled that the undated ballots must be counted, but also instructed counties to report two separate tallies to state election officials — one including the undated ballots, and one without them — should there be a later decision on appeal going the other way.So far, there has been no new opinion allowing counties to not count the ballots. Local officials in each county have declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit.What to read this weekend about democracyIf Donald Trump takes back the White House in 2024, his allies plan to purge potentially thousands of civil servants from the federal government and fill career posts with MAGA loyalists, Jonathan Swan reports for Axios.In The Washington Post, Greg Sargent spoke with Rachel Kleinfeld, a scholar who has studied the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in many countries. She warns that America is well along a trajectory toward more serious political violence.This election cycle, at least 120 Republicans who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential contest have won the party’s nomination, FiveThirtyEight calculates.briefing bookProtesters in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesA pocket history of ‘Stop the Steal’Blake Hounshell and On Politics chatted on Thursday with Charles Homans, a New York Times reporter who just published a landmark feature article in The Times Magazine on the history of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Your story is called “How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right.” Was there ever any moment when that prospect was in doubt, or was it always destined to turn out this way?It’s impossible to imagine it taking root as it has if Donald Trump had conceded the election. That is the categorical difference between him and previous presidents. And it is what has distinguished “Stop the Steal” from the skepticism, both reasonable and conspiratorial, that surrounded previous elections.But if you look at the prehistory of the 2020 election, as I did in this story, it’s equally hard to imagine Trump conceding that election, or really any election. He was disputing the validity of elections he lost (and even some that he didn’t) going back to literally the first Republican caucus in 2016.And starting in those 2016 primaries, he had an ally in Roger Stone, who was trying to build a movement around Trump’s false claims — and linking those claims to the then-current preoccupation on the right with settling refugees from Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries.That connected Stop the Steal, from the beginning, to a whole cosmology of far-right conspiracism that extended well beyond Trump himself, and which you can still see reflected in the movement today.Do the politicians promoting Stop the Steal really believe this stuff? Or are some just playing along for political gain?Some do and some don’t. There are also Republican strategists and even some Stop the Steal activists who will complain (though rarely on the record) that the pursuit of the most baroque and obviously conspiracist claims about the election have given a bad name to what they argue would have otherwise been more credible arguments — in particular challenges to the legality of the expansions of absentee voting provisions and infrastructure in response to the pandemic in 2020 in some key states, which are generally thought to have helped Joe Biden.Those challenges have found success in the courts in only one state, Wisconsin, and no one has demonstrated that the expansions in question led to meaningful fraud (a point that even the conservative law firm that brought the Wisconsin lawsuit has made).But they do exist on a spectrum with the legal battles over voting rights that have played out between Republicans and Democrats and civil rights groups for years — the battles that William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, is reportedly joining now — and don’t rely on proving a vast conspiracy of voting-machine manufacturers or finding bamboo fibers on ballots.The grass-roots activists who are most intensely engaged in the project of overturning the 2020 election, however, are often very invested in the voting machine conspiracies and a range of other unproven or debunked claims. So are the figures who have invested the most money in the cause, like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com chief executive.And of course, so is Trump, who personally directed his Justice Department officials to run down some of the most out-there claims, and who has continued to repeat them since.One takeaway from your story is that Trump has used this fantasy of a stolen election to solidify his hold over G.O.P. base voters. Yet it’s also driven many Republican elites and college-educated voters away. Help us assess the political costs and benefits.As Trump’s claims about the election have hardened into a tenet of Republican orthodoxy, they’ve paradoxically become less tied up with him personally. They have become part of a more generalized story the right tells about the groups it perceives as its enemies — Democrats, “RINOs,” the media, the intelligence community, state-level bureaucrats — and the supposed lengths they’re willing to go to keep the right’s champions out of power.Trump is a martyr in that story, and of course remains by far the largest-looming figure on the right. But I don’t think a restoration of the Trump presidency is a singular goal of even the movement crystallized around the false election claims.To your second point, there are obvious limits to this view of politics when it comes to winning over anyone who’s not already a partisan. What I wonder, though, is how much these views matter to voters who are not especially partisan or particularly engaged.The polling around this subject has consistently shown an asymmetry that clearly benefits Republicans: Republican voters are highly worried about threats to democracy (which they presumably define in Trump-aligned terms) and Democrats are much less so.This is where the Democrats’ tactic of openly helping some of the most Stop the Steal-minded candidates in this year’s Republican primaries, aside from its cynicism, also strikes me as strategically dubious insofar as it presumes that their views on the 2020 election are something that swing voters will actually hold against them.A certain religious fervor runs through the “Stop the Steal” movement. To what extent do conservative Christians see Trump as a kind of Messiah-like figure? And if they do, does that help explain the passion behind the belief that he was robbed of a second term?I don’t think that even many far-right Christians view Trump as a Messiah-like figure. They did broadly view him as someone who was willing and able to deliver a country that was governed in accordance with their view of Christianity and its relationship to the state.I’m talking here about the set of beliefs (discrete from, if often overlapping with, conservative evangelical Christianity) that are sometimes described as Christian nationalism: the belief that America is a fundamentally Christian nation whose founding documents were divinely inspired, and which is meant to be governed accordingly, whether or not its leader is particularly pious.That’s different from the kind of conservative evangelical politics that were ascendant in this country 20 or 30 years ago, and it is very prominent in Stop the Steal. I think it does inform the passion behind the belief in Trump’s false claims, but it also helps explain the fervent support for the efforts to overturn the election even among people who may not really buy this stuff.ViewfinderPresident Biden disembarking from Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday.Cheriss May for The New York TimesAn illuminating imageOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Cheriss May told us about capturing the image above:When presidents return to the White House late at night or early in the morning, it’s usually quiet and uneventful.But President Biden’s arrival home from his trip to the Middle East was a bit different.As he got back in the early hours of Sunday, I focused on him inside Marine One and noticed that he was illuminated by a bluish glow inside the aircraft as he spoke to the pilot and gave him a thumbs-up.It reminded me of the 1985 martial-arts movie “The Last Dragon,” when Taimak gets “the glow,” which gives him an extra burst of energy. At that moment, I knew it wouldn’t be the typical early-morning presidential arrival.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.— 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

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      The Hole in the Center of American Politics

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      Republican politicians who don’t support Donald Trump have made starkly different choices over the last five years.Some, like Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have tempered their criticism of the 45th president — opposing him at times, while accommodating him at others in service of their partisan objectives.A smaller coterie of others, like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have opposed Trump vigorously — in her case, voting to impeach him and helping lead the House investigation into his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021. On Thursday evening, Cheney will again take center stage as the Jan. 6 panel holds what is expected to be its final prime-time hearing of July.As Peter Baker writes, Cheney and her allies are betting that history’s judgment will eventually vindicate their choices, while insisting that her motives are not political.“I believe this is the most important thing I’ve ever done professionally,” Cheney told Baker in an interview, “and maybe the most important thing I ever do.”Thus far, however, the accommodationists have carried the day. McConnell worked closely with the Trump White House to stock the federal judiciary with more than 200 conservative judges, realizing a decades-long project that culminated with the hard-right transformation of the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.Republicans are also poised to retake the House in November, and possibly the Senate, even though the official organs of the party have rallied behind Trump and, in the case of the Republican National Committee, helped pay his considerable legal bills.Is the center still vital?Still, Trump’s consolidation of the base of the Republican Party — the MAGA die-hards who wouldn’t blanch if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, proverbially speaking — has left a vacuum at the center of American politics that both parties have jostled to fill.Democrats seized the middle in the 2018 midterms, retaking the House by focusing on kitchen-table issues like health care, while setting themselves up to win full control of Congress two years later. Republicans have countered this year by seizing on inflation and various cultural issues in an attempt to portray Democrats as out of the mainstream.One reason behind all this political volatility: College-educated suburban voters have bounced around from election to election, making that bloc a kind of no-man’s land between two entrenched camps.Vacuums like this always attract political entrepreneurs, and there has been a flourishing of activity aimed at these voters. On Politics has covered a lot of that new energy over the past few months, from new parties popping up to megadonor-backed independent ballot initiatives to cash-flush super PACs mucking around in Republican primaries.In previous years, groups with names like “No Labels” and “Third Way” have claimed the mantle of political centrism. But partisan voters have generally scoffed at those efforts, suspecting them of being Trojan horses for corporate donors. Other centrist initiatives, like the anti-communist, pro-labor group Americans for Democratic Action, faded in influence as their historical moment passed.David Greenberg, a historian of American politics at Rutgers University, said there was a “huge number of people who are disaffected from where the Democratic Party seems to be going,” along with the exhaustively documented and better organized never-Trump Republicans.But he noted that structural impediments like the Electoral College had made it difficult for third parties and other groups to establish themselves, even when voters seem sympathetic to their arguments.An illustration for the cover of Harper’s Weekly in 1912 portrayed Theodore Roosevelt, who ran for president under the banner of the “Bull Moose Party.”Getty ImagesOn occasion, charismatic figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who ran for president in 1912 under the banner of the “Bull Moose Party,” have tried to galvanize the middle of the electorate and run against both poles. More often, though, attempts to break Democrats’ and Republicans’ chokehold on the system have foundered owing to a lack of strong leaders.Greenberg marveled at the irony, too, that so many Americans now feel that the two major parties have been driven to appeal only to their respective bases.“If you really go back historically, it was thought that our two-party system itself was a bulwark against extremism,” he said — as opposed to multiparty systems in places like Weimar Germany that allowed radical groups to assume power without ever commanding a majority of voters.A Missouri compromiseOne of the more interesting centrist-y experiments out there is happening in Missouri, where a former Republican senator, John Danforth, is backing an independent candidate for Senate, John Wood. A former Danforth aide, Wood was most recently a prosecutor on the Jan. 6 panel.In an interview, Danforth said his goal was to provide an alternative to two major political parties that, in his view, have each gone off course in their own way.“The problem is not just in Trump or the Republican Party,” Danforth said, though he said he was disturbed that Republicans were attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and of court cases ratifying the results.“But on the other hand,” he added, “we have identity politics, we have the cancel culture. We have the whole sort of presentation of America as oppressors and victims. And that’s not healthy, either.”“The whole point of this campaign is: We have to heal the country,” Danforth said.A consummate Republican insider, Danforth grew up in elite circles in St. Louis and attended Princeton University and Yale Law School, where he also picked up a master’s degree in divinity. After a stint in corporate law, he was elected state attorney general, then became a senator at the dawn of the slow Republican takeover of Missouri politics.At a time when politicians tend to find more success by railing against Washington elites, Danforth, 85, is an unapologetic defender of the old ways of doing business. He was especially offended by the storming of the Capitol, an event that led him to break with Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri politician he mentored and helped usher into office in 2018.Supporting Hawley, Danforth told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch after the freshman lawmaker greeted the Capitol mob with a raised fist on Jan. 6, was “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”And while Danforth professed optimism about Wood’s chances, which most Missouri political analysts rate as poor, he said he felt compelled to try.“We are not a corrupt system,” he said. “We are not a system that people should attack, either in the Capitol Building or by this take-up-arms view of politics. That’s why I’m doing this. I have to do it. You know, I just feel that I must.”What to readAfter evading the coronavirus for more than two years, President Biden tested positive, the White House announced on Thursday. My colleagues in Washington have more on his condition. Vice President Kamala Harris tested negative.In Opinion, eight columnists for The New York Times explain what they got wrong, and reflect on why they changed their minds.Mallory McMorrow, the state senator in Michigan whose April speech denouncing Republicans’ “groomer” attacks earned her a national following on the left, has become a powerful fund-raiser for her fellow Democrats.— 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

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      The Midterm Races That Give Democrats Nightmares

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      Professional Democrats have many fears about the 2022 midterm elections that keep them up at night.Chief among them: losing Congress and handing over investigative powers and the ability to set the Washington agenda to Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Granting Republicans full control over states where abortion remains contested. Seeing President Biden turned prematurely into a lame duck.Somewhere near the top of that list is the concern that voters will elect Donald Trump’s preferred candidates to the office of secretary of state, a job that in many states plays a critical role in safeguarding the right to vote, while also ensuring the smooth operation and fairness of the electoral system.To put it plainly, the widespread worry on the left is that Trump’s loyalists will guarantee his re-election in 2024 if they take power in 2022. It’s not something either Trump or these candidates labor especially hard to rebut.Secretary of state is not a glamorous gig, generally speaking; it’s primarily an administrative job, and tends to attract little attention from the public and press. That changed significantly in battleground states after the Trump-fueled election chaos in 2020, and now money and attention are pouring into secretary of state races — not least because the former president has made it his mission to elect Republican candidates who back his conspiracy theories.It’s easy to tell what Trump wants: total fealty. It’s often far harder to figure out what voters want.Enter a new poll of five swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada — that was shared with The New York Times in advance of its publication. The survey, which polled 1,400 people who are likely to vote in November, was conducted by David Binder Research on behalf of iVote, a group that backs Democrats in secretary of state races.Interpreting the findings, which focus not on candidates but on voters’ views about what they think is important in a secretary of state, is a tricky business.The poll found that 82 percent of likely voters rated “accurately tabulating votes in elections and certifying results” as an extremely important responsibility. Additionally, 67 percent said they would be much more likely to support a candidate “who will prioritize options for all voters and making sure every vote is counted.”But as is often the case with voters, they are giving us conflicting signals. Fifty-nine percent said they would be much more likely to support a candidate “who says the top priority is to ensure fair elections and make sure that only eligible voters are casting ballots.” That sounds a lot more like what many Republican candidates are saying.In one indication of just how much traction Trump’s claims still hold over the G.O.P. base, 72 percent of voters who picked Trump in 2020 said the election had been stolen from him. That’s about a third of all voters.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

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      Jan. 6 and the Search for Direct Trump Links

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      The House panel investigating the Capitol riot has yet to find a proverbial smoking gun directly connecting the former president to the extremist groups that led the storming of the building. Is there one?The House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol held another blockbuster hearing on Tuesday, which featured previously unseen texts and draft social media posts suggesting that Donald Trump and his aides tried to make the march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even though they knew they were guiding a mob that was likely to turn violent.To better understand the state of the House inquiry and the related Justice Department investigations, I spoke with Alan Feuer, who has been leading The New York Times’s coverage of the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters and has reported extensively on extremist groups and movements. Few journalists know this world better, or have spent more time delving into obscure figures and rank-and-file members of organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.Alan wrote most recently about Ray Epps, a lifelong Arizonan who recently left the state, and whose participation in the protest outside the Capitol helped spark a conspiracy theory arguing that the entire day’s events were a black operation by the F.B.I.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Have we learned anything significant or new about extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot in these hearings?The short answer is: Not really.In the run-up to Tuesday’s hearing, the committee teased the fact that it was going to show links between extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and people in Donald Trump’s orbit.But what actually emerged at the hearings was something a little different.The committee didn’t break new ground but instead used public court filings and news articles to trace connections between far-right groups and Trump-adjacent figures like Roger Stone, the political adviser, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. The fact that Stone and Flynn have maintained those connections is fairly well known.Moreover, there is no direct evidence — at least not yet — that their ties to extremist groups were put to use in any planning for the violence on Jan. 6.And what are we learning about ties between extremists and Trump or his aides?Well, see above for the committee’s answer to that question — with a single caveat.At a previous committee hearing, there was a brief reference made by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. According to her, on the night before the Capitol attack, Trump asked Meadows to reach out to Stone and Flynn.We don’t know if that outreach ever occurred or, if it did, what was communicated. But it remains a tantalizing question: Why, apparently, did the president seek to open a channel to two people with ties to far-right groups on the eve of the Capitol attack?Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony drew the attention of the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesHutchinson’s testimony seems to have been a turning point in the investigation, and our colleagues have reported that it got the attention of Justice Department prosecutors. Can you help us understand why they might have been taken by surprise? I think most readers would assume that the Justice Department has more resources and a greater ability to compel cooperation than this committee does.While the House committee’s investigation into the events surrounding Jan. 6 and the Justice Department’s inquiry are covering much of the same ground, they operate by different rules.The committee has the power to issue subpoenas to pretty much anyone it wants. Federal prosecutors, however, are bound by rules of evidence that require pointing to some signs that a crime may have been committed before they use invasive techniques to gather evidence.Prosecutors may not have known that Hutchinson had valuable information before she testified in front of the committee because they did not necessarily have a way to compel those around her to give them a sense of what she knew. After her testimony, however, things look significantly different.Based on what we know now, how much can we say that the riot at the Capitol was planned, versus spontaneous?I’ll quibble slightly with the idea of planned vs. spontaneous and substitute a different pair of words: organized vs. spontaneous.What I mean is this: We know through the grueling work of open-source intelligence researchers and members of The New York Times’s stellar visual investigations team — who have pored over thousands and thousands of hours of video from Jan. 6 — that the Proud Boys, for example, were clearly moving in an organized and tactical manner on the ground that day.It’s clear that leaders and members of the group were instrumental in several advances on, and breaches of, the Capitol that were seemingly conducted in a way to make it appear as if other, more ordinary rioters took the lead.That said, we don’t know much about the planning surrounding the use of these tactics yet — or if anyone other than the Proud Boys helped contribute to any plans.We know that the group’s members arranged in advance to avoid wearing their typical uniforms in order to blend into the crowd, and we know that as late as Dec. 30, 2020, dozens of members took part in a virtual meeting where leaders ordered them to avoid antagonizing the police.But at least so far, there is no smoking gun laying out a detailed plot to storm the Capitol.The Justice Department has focused its prosecutions on those who committed violence or vandalism as they breached the Capitol. The narrative of critics of the investigations, including the Republican National Committee, is that the administration is pursuing a “witch hunt” of ordinary citizens who were just swept up in the moment. Is there anything to that critique?While it’s certainly true that the Justice Department’s most prominent cases concern those who had some role in violence or vandalism, many, many, many of the 850 or so people charged so far have been accused solely of petty offenses like trespassing and disorderly conduct.Those, of course, are federal crimes, and the evidence against even these low-level offenders is quite strong, given the incredible amount of video that was taken that day.So is it a “witch hunt” to charge people with clearly definable crimes for which there is abundant evidence?I’ll say this: The large majority of cases in which people merely walked into the Capitol, took a selfie and walked out — and did not brag about their conduct on social media or lie to investigators when they were being interviewed — have not resulted in any jail time whatsoever.What to readFifty-eight percent of American voters — cutting across nearly all demographics and ideologies — believe their system of government needs major reforms or a complete overhaul, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Reid Epstein explores the findings.David Sanger and Peter Baker preview President Biden’s trip to the Middle East, a journey freighted with both policy import and political peril for the White House. Follow our live coverage here.Prices rose 9.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Jeanna Smialek breaks down what it means.For Opinion, Jesse Wegman, a writer, and Damon Winter, a photographer, teamed up to produce “Gerrymander U.S.A.,” a stunning look at how partisan redistricting has shaped and, they would argue, distorted Texas politics. They visited the 13th Congressional District, which is represented by Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who has campaigned and governed as a hard-line Republican.In case you missed it: Read Jason Zengerle’s New York Times Magazine article on “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat.”— 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

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      Black Church Leaders in Georgia Intensify Their Voting Rights Push

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      Good evening. Tonight we have some news from Georgia courtesy of our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who reports on a voting rights project by Black religious leaders.In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Bishop Reginald Jackson undertook an expansive get-out-the-vote operation for the 534 African Methodist Episcopal churches he oversees in Georgia, holding registration drives, voter education programs and efforts for coordinated Sunday voting.That work appeared to pay off: Strong Black voter turnout helped power the victories of Joe Biden, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia.But now, after Georgia Republicans passed an extensive law last year with a variety of balloting restrictions, Jackson and other Black faith leaders across the state worry that they need to do more to help Black Georgians exercise their right to vote.So this week, more than a dozen of these faith leaders are starting Faith Works, a project with an initial budget of $2.6 million that will seek to organize voting operations across more than 1,000 churches in Georgia.The enterprise is a first for Black churches in Georgia, leaders say, with a formal fund-raising and operations center that will bridge different regions and denominations. Informally, the leaders call themselves “the Faith Avengers.”The initiative, which will be housed in a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization founded by the church leaders called Transforming Georgia, will offer small grants to churches to help customize get-out-the-vote operations, begin a social media advertising campaign, coordinate faith leaders’ messages on voting and build partnerships with other voting rights organizations, which are numerous across Georgia and have large national followings.“Faith leaders across the state worked ourselves to a frenzy to make sure we got out the vote in 2020,” Jackson said. “We have to work doubly hard to overcome the barriers put in place now for the 2022 election.”In Georgia’s primary elections in May, turnout surged past previous milestones, setting off a fresh debate over the impact of the voting law, which had largely been untested. Among other provisions, the law instituted strict new identification requirements for absentee ballots, limited drop boxes and expanded the Legislature’s power over elections.Bishop Reginald Jackson said, “We have to work doubly hard to overcome the barriers put in place now for the 2022 election.”Matthew Odom for The New York TimesBut Jackson and other civil rights leaders remain fearful that the primary election was not necessarily an accurate test of the law, and that the legislation’s provisions could still make voting harder in their communities.Their new voting push builds on a long history of civic activism in Black churches, especially in both fighting to protect the right to vote and ensuring that members exercise that right.Voting after Sunday church services, often known as “souls to the polls,” is a tradition going back decades in Black communities across the country, and church leaders in Florida and Virginia began to organize such efforts more formally in 1998.The Rev. Timothy McDonald, a Baptist minister in Atlanta who was one of the original national organizers of “souls to the polls,” said he viewed Georgia’s new voting law as a call to arms.“We’ve been at this for over 40, almost 50 years, going back to when I served as the full-time assistant pastor of Dr. King’s church, Ebenezer,” he said, referring to the historic Atlanta church once led by Martin Luther King Jr., where Warnock is now pastor. “We were fighting the same battles.”Much of Faith Works’s initial focus will be on the program of grants for churches, which could pay for things like buses for “souls to the polls” efforts, call lists and phones for phone-banking operations or mailers to members.Church leaders will also hold voter education programs, coupled with a social media advertising campaign, to make sure voters know about their rights under state law, and how to work through potential confusion or challenges stemming from the new legislation.The leaders of Faith Works have also hosted town-hall meetings with key national voting rights figures, joined by hundreds of pastors from across Georgia. On Thursday, more than 350 joined a call to discuss voting rights with Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division. The leaders have also met with Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, and Cedric Richmond, a former senior Biden adviser.The goal, leaders say, is to leverage the trust and influence of the Black church in key communities, especially in rural areas where turning out first-time and infrequent voters can be a challenge for national groups.“Let’s be clear: People will trust their pastors,” said the Rev. Lee May, a pastor from outside Atlanta. “They trust their churches, and we want to really utilize that and helping to get people to turn out to vote.”What to readGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a favorite of Republicans who want to move on from Donald Trump, is usually an avid partisan warrior. But as the leader of a state where a majority of voters want to keep most abortions legal, he’s being far more cautious on that issue, Maggie Haberman, Patricia Mazzei and Michael Bender write.Another dramatic hearing of the Jan. 6 committee unfolded on Tuesday, with the panel sharing texts from within Trump’s inner circle expressing disgust with the president’s actions, along with unsent tweets that may alter the narrative of just how planned the events at the Capitol might have been. Catch up with our live coverage here.By most measures — with one glaring exception — people around the world are better off than ever. So why doesn’t it feel that way, especially to Americans? In his Interpreter column, Max Fisher explores.“This is how we all feel about politics right now”: Read the story of a teenage boy’s submission for a New York county’s “I voted” sticker design contest. His sticker:Ulster County Board of Elections— 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

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      When Republicans Backed Herschel Walker, They Embraced a Double Standard

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      As I wrote in this newsletter in March, the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by George W. Bush when he was a presidential candidate, pithily captures a wisdom that’s difficult to discount, regardless of one’s political stripe. But its emergence as a critique of the educational establishment has meant that it’s generally thought of as a charge from the right.There are times, though, when the right might consider attending to the proverbial log in its own eye, few more obvious and disturbing than the elevation of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, a Black man, as the Republican Party’s candidate in this year’s Georgia Senate race.To start, Walker is fact-challenged: His campaign removed a false claim from its website that he graduated from college. He has falsely claimed to have worked in law enforcement. The lucrative chicken processing business he has reportedly claimed to own is apparently neither especially lucrative nor owned by him. In a local TV interview this year, he said, implausibly, “I’ve never heard President Trump ever say” that the 2020 election was stolen.As Maya King reported this week for The Times, “After repeatedly criticizing absent fathers in Black households,” Walker “publicly acknowledged having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact.”It is hardly uncommon, however, for people running for office to have messy pasts. And in theory, someone could be an effective senator while, like Walker, questioning the theory of evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?” he asked in March. “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.” Or even while, as he did two years ago, offering the take that there existed a “dry mist” that “will kill any Covid on your body” that “they don’t want to talk about.”The problem with Walker is how glaringly unfit he is for public office apart from all that.Asked whether he would have voted for President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, Walker objected that it was “totally unfair” to expect him to answer the question because he hadn’t yet seen “all the facts,” apparently unaware that one would expect him to have formed an opinion via, well, following the news. Asked, on the day of the Uvalde massacre, about his position on new gun laws, Walker seemed unclear that candidates are expected to at least fake a basic familiarity with the issues, responding, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”Days later on Fox News, he went into a bit more detail in a verbal bouillabaisse that almost rose to the level of performance art, saying:You know, Cain killed Abel. You know, and that’s a problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?This isn’t a mere matter of verbal dexterity. He’s not just a political neophyte getting his sea legs as a public speaker — in recent months, we’ve watched Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, going through that. Walker isn’t just gaffe-prone, as Biden has been throughout his career. He isn’t someone underqualified and swivel-tongued, like the former governor and current congressional candidate Sarah Palin, who still gives the impression of someone who could have learned on the job. Walker doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue about, or interest in, matters of state, and gives precious little indication that this would change.Here’s where I’m supposed to write something like, “Walker makes Donald Trump look like Benjamin Disraeli by comparison.” But it’s more that Trump, who has endorsed Walker, is pretty much as clueless. Trump’s speeches are riveting — at least to his devotees — and certainly more practiced, but given how recently we’ve seen what happens when someone who would lose an argument with a cloud is placed in a position of grave responsibility, it’s rather grievous to see Republicans now do this with Walker.So why are they doing it?You could say that the issue here is less racism than strategy. The incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, is Black, and Georgia Republicans presumably hope that a useful number of Black voters who might otherwise default to supporting him will be swayed by another Black candidate with a famous name, regardless of his lack of credentials. Banking on public naïveté isn’t necessarily a racist act, but the optics here are repulsive: It’s hard to imagine Republicans backing a white candidate so profoundly and shamelessly unsuited for the role. It presents a double standard that manifests as a brutal lack of respect for all voters, Black voters in particular.Serious figures have served in Congress’s upper house, from Henry Clay to Lyndon B. Johnson, Margaret Chase Smith to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to Tim Scott. And now, potentially, Herschel see-it-and-everything-and-stuff Walker? This amounts to the same kind of insult that comes from the left when elite schools lower admissions criteria in order to attract more Black students — a kind of pragmatism forged in condescension. Some call that bigotry. I would quibble about the definition, but only that, and not loudly. Walker as a candidate for the United States Senate is water from the same well.Have feedback? Send me a note at McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      An Anti-Trump Republican Group Is Back for the Midterms

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      Prominent conservatives who worked to oust Donald Trump in 2020 are back — with a plan to spend at least $10 million to defeat candidates who embraced the former president’s conspiracy theories about that election.The group of conservatives, the Republican Accountability PAC, has identified G.O.P. candidates whose extreme views its leaders deem dangerous to the future of American democracy.In 14 races across six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the group has decided to throw its weight behind those candidates’ Democratic opponents.The PAC has already claimed a hand in several victories in Republican primaries — notably, the incumbent Brad Raffensperger’s win against Jody Hice, the Trump-backed candidate in the Georgia secretary of state race.In the remaining major primaries, it plans to spend heavily to bolster Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose leading role in the House investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol has made her a villain and a turncoat to many on the right.Donald Trump, Post-PresidencyThe former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.Grip on G.O.P.: Donald J. Trump is still a powerful figure in his party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.2024 Campaign?: Republicans are bracing for Mr. Trump to announce an unusually early bid for the White House, a move intended in part to shield him from the damaging revelations emerging from Jan. 6 investigations.Endorsement Record: While Mr. Trump has helped propel some G.O.P. candidates to primary victories, he’s also had notable defeats. Here’s where his record stands so far in 2022.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Elsewhere, the group expects to focus on portraying Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, as well outside the mainstream of G.O.P. politics.And it will do so by finding what Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican strategist and a leading organizer of various anti-Trump initiatives including the Republican Accountability PAC, called “credible messengers” — voters who resemble the college-educated, suburban moderates who are without a home in either major party.Longwell, who runs a podcast for The Bulwark called “The Focus Group,” has drawn on her team’s research on what motivates this constituency in particular, which has little appetite for the often crude, aggressive form of campaigning that Trump has fostered across the Republican Party.Longwell’s barometer for who qualifies as an anti-democracy Republican isn’t just whether Trump has issued an endorsement, but whether they echo the former president’s conspiratorial views on elections. She has little interest in parsing whether Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, for instance, has a more nuanced position on the integrity of the 2020 election than, say, Blake Masters in Arizona.“There are not people in these races who are, you know, running as post-Trump candidates,” she said.Watching for Trump’s roleLongwell acknowledges the difficulty of the task at hand, given President Biden’s unpopularity and Americans’ widespread public anger over the price of gas and groceries. But she said the political environment could shift if Trump jumps into the 2024 fray before the midterms — a move that would instantly “put Trump on the ballot” and perhaps push a significant fraction of Republican voters to shun the most-Trump-leaning candidates.One important criterion for Longwell for jumping into a race is the quality of the Democratic nominee — Republicans will find it easier to support moderate candidates, in the mold of Biden’s 2020 run, than it is to back Bernie Sanders-style progressives.With a little over four months to go before Election Day, Longwell’s team has raised $6 million so far. It plans to run ads targeting potentially persuadable Republicans on digital platforms, as well as via direct mail, billboards, TV and radio.Longwell is prioritizing many of the same areas a previous version of the group, Republican Voters Against Trump, homed in on in 2020: places like Bucks and Dauphin counties in Pennsylvania and Pima County in Arizona, which are teeming with frustrated Republicans who may have voted in past elections for John McCain or Mitt Romney.Part of the challenge, Longwell acknowledged, is to create a “permission structure” for these voters to break with their party.“People are very tribal, they’re very partisan,” Longwell said. “And they’re frustrated, nationally, with Democrats, right?”What to read tonightCassidy Hutchinson’s electrifying testimony last month before the House committee investigating the Capitol riot has jolted top Justice Department officials into discussing the politically sensitive topic of Donald Trump more directly, at times in the presence of Attorney General Merrick Garland, Katie Benner and Glenn Thrush report.Democrats in Congress, under pressure to act after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, are planning to hold doomed votes this week on legislation seeking to preserve access to abortions.Can states that ban abortions also forbid residents to travel to get the procedure? Adam Liptak explores the newly urgent question of a constitutional right to travel.The chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, said she would step down next month, which will allow Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to appoint a replacement who could be friendlier to the party as lawmakers in Albany continue to codify and consider stronger laws on guns and abortion.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

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      Can Lisa Murkowski Fend Off Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska?

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      Supporters of the senator hope that the state’s unique nonpartisan primary system will help her, but allies of Tshibaka, a Trump-backed challenger, see a path to victory.Paulette Schuerch, a Native Alaskan who helped Lisa Murkowski’s fabled write-in campaign for Senate in 2010, is now working for the senator’s Trump-backed opponent, Kelly Tshibaka.The breaking point for Schuerch, as she detailed in a telephone interview from her home in Kotzebue, a village 35 miles above the Arctic Circle, came in 2014. That year, Murkowski initially evaded insensitive comments about suicide made by Don Young, the state’s congressman, whom she had endorsed, before later asking him to apologize. Suicide is a delicate topic for many rural Alaskans, especially Alaska Natives, who have some of the highest rates of any ethnic group in the country.At a meeting on the margins of an annual gathering of Alaska Natives, Murkowski looked several of the delegates in the eye, Schuerch said, and told them: “Don’t you give me the stink eye and shake your heads at me. I see you.”“That really turned me off,” Schuerch recalled. “Suicide affects us all the time. I can’t support somebody who doesn’t understand that.”It’s a story Schuerch has told increasingly often, and she is now helping Tshibaka make inroads among Alaska’s Native population, which has long been a key element of Murkowski’s winning coalition.Tshibaka has been visiting villages in rural Alaska, participating in traditional events like the Utqiagvik blanket toss and crashing on the floors of schools in her sleeping bag.And while public polling in Alaska is scarce, Tshibaka’s campaign points to Schuerch’s break with Murkowski as a clear sign that the independent-minded senator may be in trouble in her re-election bid.On Saturday, former President Donald Trump is holding a rally for Tshibaka in Anchorage, Alaska’s most populous city. Tshibaka’s team is confident that Republican partisans have soured on Murkowski over her support for President Biden’s cabinet nominees — especially Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior.In an oil-rich state where jobs are often scarce and energy is a top political issue, the Biden administration’s environmental conservation moves have rankled many rural Alaskans, who depend heavily on resource extraction for their livelihoods. Tshibaka has sought to exploit the Native community’s disquiet with Haaland, a Native American herself who has become a lightning rod in Alaska.Tshibaka often accuses the Biden administration of wanting to “turn the entire state of Alaska into a national park,” a line that appears to resonate with people like Schuerch.“I think after 21 years in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski is taking Alaska Natives for granted,” Schuerch said.A tricky path for a Trump-backed challengerComplicating the picture, however, is Alaska’s unique nonpartisan primary system, which voters approved as part of a 2020 ballot initiative and is being used this year for the first time.Under the system, the four candidates from any party who receive the most votes in the Aug. 16 primary are expected to proceed to the general election in November, when voters will rank them in order of preference. This is called ranked-choice voting.The ballot initiative, which passed narrowly by a popular vote, was pitched to Alaskans as a cure for gridlock and partisan polarization in a state that has one of the largest shares of independent voters in the country and prides itself on bucking national voting trends.It also happens to have been pushed in part by allies of Murkowski — including Scott Kendall, who is now running a super PAC, Alaskans for L.I.S.A., that supports her candidacy. (Officially, the name includes an acronym for “Leadership in a Strong Alaska.” Under federal election law, it’s illegal to use a candidate’s name in the name of a super PAC.)Murkowski has never received more than 50 percent of the vote in any of her winning campaigns for Senate.Ash Adams for The New York TimesAnd while Kendall insists that the top-four system was not put in place to benefit Murkowski, his former boss, there’s no question it has complicated Tshibaka’s path to victory.“It doesn’t allow the farthest-right Republican to knock out the moderate and be the only candidate in the general election,” said Jim Lottsfeldt, a political strategist who is supporting Murkowski. “The old primary system punished people who dared to be independent thinkers. You can’t do that anymore in Alaska.”By Lottsfeldt’s reckoning, Murkowski ought to emerge with about 55 percent of the vote after voters’ preferences are taken into account, while Tshibaka, whose positions on issues like abortion might turn off moderates, is likely to finish at around 45 percent.Tshibaka’s team is urging her supporters to use what’s known as “bullet voting,” in which voters do not rank any candidates besides their first choice — thus, they hope, denying thousands of second-choice votes to Murkowski.They note, too, that Murkowski has never received more than 50 percent of the vote in any of her winning campaigns for Senate, and they point to polls showing the senator to be deeply unpopular with the Republican base.It’s debatable whether Trump’s Alaska sojourn will help or hurt his preferred candidate. Tshibaka will probably cut television ads promoting his endorsement, using footage from Saturday’s rally, as candidates in other states have done.But there’s a popular bumper sticker in Alaska that reads, “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside” — a slogan that speaks to the frontier state’s suspicion of the Lower 48, as Alaskans often refer to the rest of the continental United States.So Trump’s intervention, unless it is done with the sort of delicacy and tact that the former president is not known for, could easily backfire.“Trump is not from Alaska, period,” noted Lottsfeldt, who added that the former president’s visit comes after weeks of tough congressional hearings about his role in inciting the Capitol riot.“All I think it does is probably motivates people in the center to feel negative about Tshibaka,” Lottsfeldt said.What to read tonightUnder pressure to do more to respond to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, President Biden issued an executive order that aims to ensure access to abortion medication and emergency contraception while preparing for legal fights to come, Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg report.The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters to return absentee ballots, a move that came as Republicans in the state have taken a range of steps since the 2020 election to try to limit the influence of voters over the state’s government. Reid Epstein has the story.The ascent of Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, is perhaps the most prominent example of right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to promote Christian power in America, Elizabeth Dias writes.Cities around the South have challenged the supremacy of coastal supercities, drawing a steady flow of creative young people. In her Big City column, Ginia Bellafante asks:Will new abortion bans put an end to that?viewfinderPresident Biden, Jill Biden and other members of their family watched fireworks in celebration of Independence Day.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesSeeking symbolism for the FourthOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Sarah Silbiger told us about capturing the image above:You can always count on photographing certain details on July 4. Kids with drippy Popsicles, rhinestone American flag T-shirts and oversize mascots of the Founding Fathers.But what I find most interesting are the different photo-ops the White House creates. In 2019, I spent hours in the rain outside the Lincoln Memorial covering President Donald Trump’s display of tanks and a Blue Angels flyover.In 2020, we photographed the White House from about half a mile away, in a field. Talk about social distancing.In 2021, President Biden’s White House adopted a somber tone, to recognize American resilience during Covid, but cautiously celebrated the beginning of the country’s emergence from the pandemic thanks to vaccines.This year, the absence of distance or masks made for a picture-perfect image of Biden’s extended family on a balcony of the White House. The bright white spotlight on the family, set up by White House officials, signaled to the news media that they, too, recognized the moment as an important photo-op.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.— 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