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      Ad Wars in 3 Governor’s Races Leave Out Trump and Biden

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      Offering a look at both parties’ political strategies this year, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, as well as local scandals and crime.Just over a year before the 2024 elections, three races for governor in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi are offering a window into the parties’ political strategies and how they might approach statewide and congressional contests next year.Strikingly, even as former President Donald J. Trump’s indictments and President Biden’s polling struggles have consumed the national political conversation, the two men rarely show up in advertising for the three governor’s races.Since July, nearly 150 ads have been broadcast across the contests. Just one ad mentioned Mr. Trump. Three brought up Mr. Biden.Instead, the ads focus largely on issues like education, the economy, jobs and taxes, according to an analysis of ad spending data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Attack ads about local scandals and controversies are frequent, and crime is the top advertising issue in the Kentucky governor’s race.Much as education was a dominant theme in Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor of Virginia in 2021, the issue remains one of the top advertising topics in both Kentucky and Louisiana, with nearly one in five ad dollars spent focusing on education over the past 60 days, according to AdImpact data.“Glenn Youngkin winning an off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia is the playbook,” said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who has researched political advertising. “You go with the last playbook.”Allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican looking to unseat Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, have seized on a message about education similar to the one that helped propel Mr. Youngkin to victory.“The radical left has declared war on parents, and Andy Beshear is with them,” proclaims one ad from Kentucky Values, a group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association.Mr. Beshear has countered by praising teachers, running an ad calling them “heroes” and pledging to increase their pay and expand universal preschool.“Our teachers are heroes, and public schools are the backbones of our communities,” Mr. Beshear says in the ad, standing in the middle of a classroom.Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, a Republican running for re-election, is running an ad boasting that he “got us back to school fast” during the coronavirus pandemic and criticizing other states for closing schools.In Louisiana, Jeff Landry, the Republican front-runner, is putting money behind an ad criticizing “woke politics” in schools and pledging to bring school agendas “back to basics.”No issue is getting more attention, in terms of total spending, than crime is in Kentucky. Twenty-five percent of ad spending in the state has focused on crime in the past month, according to AdImpact data.Ads from allies of Mr. Cameron warn of dangerous criminals flooding the streets as a result of a commutation program Mr. Beshear signed during the pandemic.Ads from allies of Daniel Cameron, the Republican nominee for governor of Kentucky, warn about the early release of prison inmates. School Freedom FundOf course, these three states are all deep-red bastions in the South and are not representative of the country’s broader politics.Abortion, perhaps the biggest issue in major battleground states, is barely registering in these three governor’s races; in the past 30 days, not a single campaign ad has been broadcast on the topic in Kentucky or Louisiana. In Mississippi, the only ad regarding abortion is from Brandon Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor, who has diverged from many in his party by supporting abortion restrictions.“Sometimes the family Bible is the only place you have to turn,” Mr. Presley says, sitting at a table next to a dog-eared Bible that he says is his family’s. “It’s shaped who I am and what I believe. It’s why I’m pro-life.”Given that Mr. Trump carried all three states by double digits in 2020, his absence from the airwaves shows he may not be helpful to Republican campaigns in a general election.“These campaigns are really smart and have done in-depth analytics on who their target voter is who’s actually going to move in this election, and he’s probably not helpful to that group of people,” said Michael Beach, the chief executive of Cross Screen Media, a media analytics firm.That one mention of Mr. Trump? It was in an ad from Mr. Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, boasting that he had followed the former president’s lead in releasing prison inmates early. More

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      Republicans give $101m to sports arena as myriad needs loom over Louisiana

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      Louisiana lawmakers have faced backlash for using some of their spring legislative session’s final moments not to address some of their state’s myriad needs – but instead to grant the multimillion-dollar wish of the state flagship university’s championship-winning women’s basketball coach.Poverty, poor education and insufficient healthcare have loomed over Louisiana for decades and have earned the state the country’s lowest rankings in each category, according to the US News and World Report. Louisiana ranks 50th – dead last – in crime and economy, 49th in infrastructure and 46th in education when compared to the rest of the nation, the report says.However, despite these jarring numbers, the budget approved by the Republican-dominated state legislature slated $101m to a foundation which financially supports Louisiana State University athletics – and it was earmarked to renovate the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, which is best known these days for hosting the women’s basketball team’s home games.The last-minute line funding renovations at the facility nicknamed the PMAC came at the request of Kim Mulkey, the women’s basketball team’s head coach who is known for her flamboyant fashion sense as well as her outspokenness about the venue’s need for repairs. But giving fees and self-generated revenue from the state to the private foundation in question would also be illegal, Louisiana’s Democratic governor John Bel Edwards has recently said.The commissioner of admission, Jay Dardenne, said in an interview that the PMAC could only receive such abundant funds – including self-generated revenue and non-cash state funding – if it was labeled as a university project in the budget.While that blocks the Tiger Athletic Foundation from receiving the full amount, the group is still in line to receive $50m, a substantial amount which could otherwise begin making a dent in Louisiana’s myriad other pressing needs, said former LSU faculty senate president Kevin Cope.“Such a sluicing of funds into a structure that serves primarily as a basketball court demonstrates that the leaders of our state grant a higher priority to chasing balls up and down a wooden court than to the improvement of its citizens,” Cope said.Edwards told the Louisiana Illuminator that he kept the illegal funding in the bill so that the foundation would still have money for project planning.Mulkey openly criticized the condition of the PMAC at a local meeting in April in the state’s capital of Baton Rouge, shortly after her players won the first national crown in their program’s history.“It’s time,” Mulkey declared. “That thing’s 48-years-old. It’s dangerous in there. Don’t grab a rail without holding onto somebody.”As the crowd broke out into laughter, Mulkey added, “I can say all of this now. I’ve won the national championship.”But Edwards was disinterested in Mulkey’s request. He said that his main priority for this year’s capital budget is to provide funding for a new LSU library due to the substandard status of the campus’s 68-year-old library.Robert Mann – an LSU professor, author, and political historian who frequently criticizes Louisiana’s government – said that school officials and advocates have spent years pleading for a new library. Despite those pleas, lawmakers allotted only a few million in project planning for a new library.However, lawmakers quickly delivered on Mulkey’s request for arena improvements, even though the university itself did not ask for PMAC funding.“If that disgraceful episode doesn’t convince people that our state’s priorities are out of whack, I don’t know what will,” Mann said.Stuart Bishop, the conservative state representative who authored the bill, assured that providing the PMAC tens of millions in renovation funds was not his main priority for the Louisiana budget. He said for years his top priorities for the state are improving water ports, airports, bridges and roads. But he included funding for the PMAC after multiple requests from colleagues.“It was a matter of, as it was explained to me, public safety for the PMAC, as well as having another venue on campus or in” the state’s capital, Baton Rouge, Bishop said.The Republican state representative Tanner Magee added that “women athletes deserve to know that we care just about them as we do” male athletes, including the school’s popular football team. A spokesperson for the athletic department – which generated nearly $200m in revenue last year – said helping the school’s sports teams carries a cultural and promotional benefit measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Edwards could veto the amount of money set aside for the PMAC. But Bishop and Magee were confident he’d avoid resorting to that measure, saying money for the PMAC doesn’t rule out eventual improvements to the library.“In a perfect world, in 10 years, we’re standing with a new library and a new event center for LSU,” Magee said. More

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      In Louisiana, Gov. Edwards Staves Off Certain Conservative Policies for Now

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      John Bel Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the Deep South, has successfully vetoed bills that have glided into law elsewhere in the region. Soon, he’ll leave office.The Republican supermajority in the Louisiana State Legislature pushed through a bill this year banning gender-transition care for minors, along with other legislation banning Covid vaccine requirements in schools and any classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.It was the kind of aggressive social policy agenda that has gained traction in conservative states across the country. But unlike in most such states, where Republican bills glide into law, lawmakers in Louisiana had to return to the Capitol last week, more than a month after the session ended, to try to claw the legislation back from the brink of failure.The reason: John Bel Edwards, the lone Democratic governor in the Deep South. He has used vetoes with some success as a bulwark against conservative legislation in a state where Republicans have had a lock on the legislature for more than a decade.In Louisiana, governors have a history of successfully wielding vetoes; most years, lawmakers have not even bothered trying to override them.But this year, legislators decided to test that power, reconvening to consider overriding more than two dozen vetoes at a moment when Republicans have tightened their control of the legislature and when Mr. Edwards, who is finishing his second term, is on his way out.“You voted for this before,” State Representative Raymond J. Crews, a Republican, told his colleagues on Tuesday as he asked them to support overriding the veto of his bill, which would require schools to refer to transgender students by the names and genders on their birth certificates. “I hope you’ll do that again.”Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has successfully used vetoes as a bulwark against certain conservative legislation in a state where Republicans have had a lock on the legislature for more than a decade.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesMr. Crews did not get enough votes. In fact, by the time lawmakers adjourned late Tuesday, all but one of Mr. Edwards’s vetoes still stood. The single exception was the ban on transition care for minors, a bill that the Republicans had channeled most of their energy and resources into resuscitating.The outcome of the session, which lawmakers raced through on Tuesday, was one last demonstration of how Mr. Edwards, a two-term governor leaving office next year, has succeeded at checking the influence of Republican lawmakers — to an extent.“It’s kind of hard to be too disappointed — we actually did override the veto on a very important bill,” said State Representative Alan Seabaugh, a Republican who led a faction of some of the most conservative lawmakers.Still, he acknowledged, Mr. Edwards posed a formidable obstacle. “It really shows what an influence a liberal Democrat governor has over Republican legislators,” Mr. Seabaugh said.Although many in the governor’s own party would dispute the portrayal of Mr. Edwards — an anti-abortion, pro-gun rights moderate — as a liberal, there was still widespread agreement that his departure in January could bring about a significant shift in the state’s political dynamic.Many recognize a strong possibility of a Republican succeeding Mr. Edwards, setting the stage for Louisiana to veer even more to the right, after several decades of the governorship flipping back and forth between the two parties.The Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge.Emily Kask for The New York TimesThe state has an all-party “jungle primary” in October. Polls show Jeff Landry, the state’s deeply conservative attorney general, as the front-runner, along with Shawn Wilson, a Democrat and former secretary of transportation and development.In a state where former President Donald J. Trump won by 20-point margins in 2016 and 2020, Mr. Edwards’s political survival has hinged on the appeal of his biography — he is a West Point graduate and a sheriff’s son — and on his blend of social conservatism and progressive achievements, including expanding Medicaid, that fits Louisiana’s unique political landscape.He has angered many in his own party with his vehement opposition to abortion rights and his restraint in criticizing Mr. Trump, who as president went to great lengths to campaign against Mr. Edwards’s re-election.Still, even Democrats who are critical of Mr. Edwards have seen him as a vital barrier against conservative policies that have easily advanced in neighboring states.“I do think that there’s always room for being a more vocal ally and a more staunch ally to our community,” Quest Riggs, who helped found the Real Name Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group in New Orleans, said of the governor. “But on the other hand, his vetoes have been a political tool that has been necessary to offset the mobilization by the evangelical right in Louisiana.”Last year, lawmakers succeeded in overriding a governor’s veto for the first time in three decades, reinstating a Congressional map that Mr. Edwards had objected to because it included only one district with a majority of Black voters despite the fact that one-third of the state’s population is Black. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for a legal challenge to the map to move forward.Many recognize a strong possibility of a Republican succeeding Mr. Edwards. Louisiana has an all-party “jungle primary” in October, and polls show Jeff Landry, the state’s deeply conservative attorney general, as the front-runner.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesAlso last year, Mr. Edwards allowed a bill that excluded female transgender students from school sports to become law without his signature, predicting a veto would be overridden.Mr. Edwards said last week that he had issued 319 vetoes in his eight years as governor, and that 317 of them had been sustained. “Usually, we have been able to find common ground to move Louisiana forward,” he said.On Tuesday, lawmakers blitzed through the vetoed bills, including measures that denied parole for dangerous offenders and prevented “foreign adversaries” from owning agriculture land.Overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority vote in both houses, and the Republicans have a supermajority by just a thin margin. Two Republican state representatives were absent on Tuesday, and a few in the House and Senate crossed party lines to oppose some overrides, infuriating their more conservative colleagues.When the ban on gender-transition care came up, lawmakers described conflicting perceptions of what it means to protect children. Supporters of the bill said it would safeguard young people from treatments they claim are dangerous and untested, even though there is broad agreement among major medical associations in the United States that such care can be beneficial for many patients.Critics of the ban argue that it would imperil a small, vulnerable population of young people by denying them medically necessary care. Most of the 20 other states that have passed similar legislation are facing lawsuits, and judges have already temporarily blocked a few of the bans.In the House, the vote to override the veto passed 76 to 23, with seven Democrats joining the Republicans. In the Senate, it passed 28 to 11. Republicans seized the sole successful override as a victory.“We sent a clear signal,” Mr. Landry, the attorney general and candidate for governor, said in a video posted online, “that woke liberal agendas that are destructive to children will not be tolerated in Louisiana.”Lawmakers and observers contemplated how the political climate would be different during next year’s legislative session, particularly if Republicans were to maintain their supermajority and win the governor’s race.“What happens when they don’t have to hold back anymore?” said Robert E. Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University, referring to Republican lawmakers if Democrats lose the governor’s race. “You’ll have a governor that’s powerful and on your side.”That prospect has inspired trepidation among some, especially within the L.G.B.T.Q. community, but has amplified ambitions among conservatives.Mr. Seabaugh, who is leaving the House because of term limits but is running for a Senate seat, envisions passing some of the same bills next year without the threat of a veto and rolling back Mr. Edwards’s agenda. “I don’t think we can do it all in one year,” Mr. Seabaugh said, “but I’m sure going to try.” More

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      Republican John Kennedy: southern plain-talk or Foghorn Leghorn shtick?

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      Senator John Neely Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, offended Mexicans across the world in a hearing on the FBI and DEA’s budget this month, calling for American military members and law enforcement agents to invade their country in order to “stop the cartels” while adding that Mexico would be “eating cat food and living in tent behind an Outback [Steakhouse]” if not for “the people of America”.Mexico’s top diplomat condemned the comments as “profoundly ignorant”, and the country’s ambassador to the US called for a formal apology for the “vulgar and racist” language. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, urging the more than 37 million Americans of Mexican and other Latin American descent to “not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality” in the future.The entire episode illustrated how Kennedy has emerged as a loud conservative voice in recent years in the US and in a state which has repeatedly relied on laborers of Mexican origin to rebuild homes as well as businesses following hurricanes and other natural disasters.But as the fallout from his remarks about Mexico unfolded, critics also seized on the opportunity to point out that the Republican senator was once a moderate – and some would even say liberal – Democrat before switching parties in 2007, just as the far-right Tea Party movement was taking hold in Louisiana politics.And those critics say the politician who holds degrees from Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia and Oxford University in the UK is “playing the role of a clever hick” by doing things like making fun of Mexico in order to exploit the “bigotry and fear of his base”.Kennedy has made a name for himself by delivering “folksy”, sometimes racist statements in an exaggerated southern American accent that has been likened to being somewhere between that of Mr Haney, the con artist from the former CBS sitcom Green Acres, and Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon rooster who appears in Looney Tunes. The latter comparison is so striking that New Orleans’s Times-Picayune newspaper once posted a quiz featuring a series of eccentric statements that was headlined: “Who said it: Sen John Kennedy or Foghorn Leghorn?”In a Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy once told a Cornell law professor born in Soviet-era Russia: “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade” – insinuating that she was a communist or a foreign agent. The remark came about three years after Kennedy drew ridicule from some quarters for spending a Fourth of July holiday – which recognizes the US’s independence from the UK – in Russia with leaders of his country’s rival power.Separately, in a tough-on-crime, pro-police campaign ad, Kennedy ended the video by saying: “Look, if you hate cops just because they’re cops, the next time you’re in trouble, call a crackhead.”But back when he was a figure in Louisiana’s state politics, Kennedy’s elocution hewed more closely to a background that is typical of his estimated net worth of more than $12m in 2016. In interviews and videos of proceedings before his switch to the Republican party, Kennedy – one of the wealthiest members of Congress – appears to speak with only a slight southern accent.“Before he got to the Senate, Kennedy never pretended to be a hick,” said Robert Mann, mass communication professor at Louisiana State University and author of Backrooms and Bayous: My Life in Louisiana Politics. “Instead, he usually acted like the well-educated, affluent person that he is.”Mann said that while Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party during a prior role as the Louisiana state government’s treasurer, he was one of the most outspoken critics of the governor at the time: Bobby Jindal, a Republican. But once he switched parties and entered the national political scene, Kennedy literally changed his tune.“After he got to the Senate and realized that Fox News and its viewers enjoyed his shtick, he went all in on this new persona,” Mann said. “The Kennedy of 2005 or 2008 is a completely different person in style and tone from the one you see today on the TV.”For Mann, Kennedy’s one-liners aren’t genuine, off-the-cuff folksy remarks. They’re calculated attempts to appease his conservative base. “The relationship is simple, I think: he periodically validates and reinforces their distorted views [on] Mexicans, Blacks and other marginalized people,” Mann said. “That tells them that he’s not an urbane, rich, well-educated person, but just one of them.“It’s how politicians have pandered to the lowest common denominator for centuries. Kennedy has mastered the technique.”Mann said that Kennedy was “playing a role on TV” by delivering sometimes “nonsensical” statements and using an exaggerated accent, which appears to fall in the long tradition of ambitious people using voice alteration to further themselves. Recent examples include Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who is bound for prison after fraudulently claiming her technology could diagnose diseases with a single drop of blood and admitted that the baritone voice she used before her criminal conviction wasn’t her real voice. Another is Paris Hilton, who recently dropped the iconic, high-pitched “shy” voice she once used while appearing on the reality television show The Simple Life.“That role is of a clever hick who, while unsophisticated, is always quick with a put-down for smug city slickers,” Mann said. “If you view him through the lens of someone who is affecting an attitude, the words don’t have to make complete sense. It’s the image and the attitude that count.”But while Kennedy may be playing a character, the senator’s statements have real-world impacts, including on foreign relations. The remarks have strained the relationship between the US and Mexico.The two countries are economic partners, with more than 33 million US tourists visiting Mexico every year and over $800bn in bilateral trade. That includes the more than $40bn Louisiana exports to Mexico and $15bn the state bought, creating a surplus balance in favor of Louisiana of $25bn.Additionally, more than 2 million US citizens permanently live in Mexico, and the jobs created by trade between the countries supports more than 70,000 families in Louisiana.A senior Mexican diplomat at the Mexican embassy in Washington said the rhetoric in Kennedy’s recent remarks about his country and his people runs “counter to the needs of the US-Mexico relationship,” which he said requires “stronger dialogue and mutual understanding”.“Uninformed and ill-intentioned statements have the potential to veer us on to a trajectory that can further foster misunderstanding and miscommunication between both countries,” the official said. “The true challenge lies in comprehending and addressing the numerous shared challenges but also opportunities faced by Mexico and the US, on the grounds of respect.” More

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      US senator denounced as ‘profoundly ignorant man’ over remarks on Mexico

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      Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback” Steakhouse restaurant if it were not for their nation’s proximity to the US, and their country should be invaded because of the presence of drug cartels there, the US senator John Neely Kennedy said.The Louisiana Republican’s racist remarks drew a strong condemnation from Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, who called Kennedy “a profoundly ignorant man”. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, urged the 37 million Americans of Mexican descent – along with other Latinos in the US – “not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality” in the future.Kennedy’s rant came on Wednesday during a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing that in part focused on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s budget. Kennedy told DEA administrator Anne Milgram that she and other members of the Biden White House should pressure López Obrador to let US military and law enforcement officials storm into his country “and stop the cartels”.“Make him a deal he can’t refuse,” Kennedy said, an apparent allusion to the famous line from the classic mobster film The Godfather. Kennedy also said: “Without the people of America, Mexico, figuratively speaking, would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.”Kennedy’s comments about the US’s neighbor to the south built on prior Republican statements exalting the idea of using the American military to crack down on Mexican cartels. Mexican cartels press most illegal fentanyl into counterfeit pills which are designed to look like Xanax, oxycodone, Percocet and other prescription medications, or they mix it into other drugs, including cocaine and heroin.Many of the 70,000 overdose deaths registered in the US annually involve people who took fentanyl without knowing it.In a response on Thursday to Kennedy, Ebrard said numerous Mexican government officials and citizens have died in the name of stopping fentanyl from crossing into the US. “He doesn’t know that or pretends like he doesn’t,” Ebrard said.Ebrard added that Kennedy should contemplate why people in the US can obtain fentanyl simply by going out to certain streets or logging on to certain websites online. “It’s a fallacy to argue in favor of sending an armed force to Mexico when in the United States you have fentanyl circulating everywhere,” said Ebrard, who has previously noted that it is mostly Americans who are arrested for trafficking fentanyl in the US.Kennedy delivered his tirade against Mexico in a southern American accent that many of his detractors have likened to the voice of Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn. As the Louisiana politics and culture news outlet Gambit reported, it is widely believed that Kennedy maintains the drawl to come off as folksy, despite his holding degrees from the University of Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia and Oxford University in the UK.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe is also one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, where Democrats and independents who caucus with them hold a two-seat majority after last year’s midterm elections. Open Secrets estimated that Kennedy’s net worth was more than $12m in 2016, when the former longtime treasurer of Louisiana’s state government first won his Senate seat.Kennedy began his political career as a Democrat before switching his party affiliation to Republican in 2007. More

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      G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud

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      Five red states have severed ties since last year with the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps maintain accurate voter rolls.First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama.Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans.For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012.Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.In an interview on Tuesday, Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who is Missouri’s secretary of state, said that the group had balked at his state’s calls for reforms, some of which were expected to be weighed by the group’s board of directors at a meeting on March 17. He denied that the decision to pull out was fueled by what the organization and its defenders have described as a right-wing smear campaign.“It’s not like I was antagonistic toward cleaning our voter rolls,” Mr. Ashcroft said.Shane Hamlin, the group’s executive director, did not comment about particular complaints of the states in an email on Tuesday, but referred to an open letter that he wrote on March 2 saying that the organization had been the subject of substantial misinformation regarding the nature of its work and who has access to voter lists.Wes Allen, Alabama’s secretary of state, withdrew the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center in January, a day after he was sworn in.Butch Dill/Associated PressDefenders of the group lamented the departures, saying they would weaken the group’s information-sharing efforts and undermine it financially because of lost dues. And, they said, the defections conflict with the election integrity mantra that has motivated Republicans since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Republicans haven’t always been so sour about the work of the coalition, which Louisiana left in 2022.It was just last year that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mentioned the group’s benefit to his state, which he described as useful for checking voter rolls during a news conference announcing the highly contentious arrests of about 20 people on voter fraud charges. He was joined then by Cord Byrd, Florida’s secretary of state, a fellow Republican who, on Monday, was expressing a much different opinion. In an announcement that Florida was leaving the group, Mr. Byrd said that the state’s concerns about data security and “partisan tendencies” had not been addressed.“Therefore, we have lost confidence in ERIC,” Mr. Byrd said.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis, who is considering a Republican run for president, did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. LaRose, in Ohio, also had a stark shift in tone: After recently describing the group to reporters as imperfect but still “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” by Monday he was also calling for reforms and put the group on notice.“Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to and including our withdrawal from membership,” Mr. LaRose wrote. “I implore you to do the right thing.”The complaints about partisanship seem centered on David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped develop the group and is a nonvoting board member. Mr. Ashcroft said he didn’t think that Mr. Becker, a former director of the elections program at the Pew Charitable Trusts who has vocally debunked election fraud claims, including disputing Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, should be on the board.Mr. Becker is the founder and director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, another nonpartisan group that has been attacked by election deniers.“There’s truth and there’s lies,” Mr. Becker said on a video call with reporters on Tuesday. “I will continue to stand for the truth.”Mr. Hamlin vowed that the organization would “continue our work on behalf of our remaining member states in improving the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increasing access to voter registration for all eligible citizens.”While some Republican states are ending their relationship with the group, California, the nation’s most populous state, could potentially join its ranks under a bill proposed by a Democratic state lawmaker. But in Texas, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill with the opposite intention.Still, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas’s Republican secretary of state, said in an email on Tuesday that “We are not currently aware of any system comparable to ERIC, but are open to learning about other potentially viable, cost-effective alternatives.”New York, another heavily populated state, is also not a member of the group.Seven states started the organization more than a decade ago. It charges new members a one-time fee of $25,000 and annual dues that are partly based on the citizen voting age population in each state. The Pew Charitable Trusts provided seed funding to the group, but that money was separate from donations that it had received from Mr. Soros, according to the website PolitiFact.Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is Maine’s secretary of state, said in an interview on Tuesday that the group had been particularly helpful in identifying voters who have died or may no longer live in the state, which became a member in 2021.“We have a lot of Mainers who retire to Florida for example,” Ms. Bellows said.Ms. Bellows called the recent defections “tragic” and said that her office had received several inquiries from residents who had read criticism of the group online.“Unfortunately, this move by our colleagues in Florida and elsewhere to leave ERIC in part because of misinformation being spread by election deniers deprives all of us of the ability to effectively clean our voter rolls and fight voter fraud,” she said. More

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      Louisiana anti-abortion group calls on doctors to stop denying care exempted by ban

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      Louisiana anti-abortion group calls on doctors to stop denying care exempted by banGroup speaks out after hospitals refused to offer treatment for a woman who had a near deadly miscarriage citing ambiguous lawAn influential group in Louisiana that has long opposed abortion access is calling out medical providers and their legal advisers who – for an apparent fear of liability – have cited the state’s ban on most abortions to deny treatments that remain legal.The group spoke out after hospitals in the state’s capital, Baton Rouge, refused to provide treatments for a woman who had a near deadly miscarriage.The treatments which Kaitlyn Joshua needed were similar to an abortion, and her doctors feared being prosecuted, citing purported ambiguities in the ban on terminating most pregnancies which took effect in Louisiana after the US supreme court last year overturned the nationwide abortion rights granted by Roe v Wade.Even though Louisiana has some of the tightest restrictions against abortion in the US, Joshua was legally entitled to the care she sought under an exception to the ban which involves miscarriages, Sarah Zagorski of Louisiana Right for Life said.Zagorski, whose organization has been involved in anti-abortion legislation since 1970, said it is clear under Louisiana’s abortion ban that it is legal to provide and receive miscarriage treatments, even if they closely resemble some abortions.“It was just a gross misunderstanding of the law from the practitioners handling the case, unfortunately,” Zagorski said.In a recent interview with the Guardian, Zagorski said the public in general urgently needs more education on the exceptions to the abortion ban in a state which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the US. While she stopped short of saying what her organization might be able to contribute that effort, she did say it was imperative for medical providers and their legal teams to take it upon themselves to study and comprehend the exceptions to the abortion ban in Louisiana, especially in light of a case like the one centering on Joshua.Joshua for her part has retained an attorney, though neither she nor the lawyer would comment to the Guardian on what actions they are possibly contemplating against any providers who turned Joshua away.“The law itself is very specific about this,” Zagorski added. “This should not have been how this happened.”Louisiana’s abortion ban states, in part: “Abortion shall not mean any one or more of the following acts, if performed by a physician: …The removal of a dead unborn child or the inducement or delivery of the uterine contents in case of a positive diagnosis, certified in writing in the woman’s medical record along with the results of an obstetric ultrasound test, that the pregnancy has ended or is in the unavoidable and untreatable process of ending due to spontaneous miscarriage, also known in medical terminology as spontaneous abortion, missed abortion, inevitable abortion, incomplete abortion, or septic abortion.”To the author of the ban, the Louisiana state senator Katrina Jackson, the language makes it clear that miscarriage treatment is distinct from an abortion. Though she did not speak with the Guardian, she has previously released a statement to National Public Radio and its local New Orleans affiliate, WWNO, saying that nothing in the law bans women from receiving miscarriage treatments.But Jackson has not indicated whether she may try to at all clarify the legislation she authored. She first faced calls to do at least that after Louisiana woman Nancy Davis, who was carrying a skull-less fetus that would die within a short time of birth, was denied an abortion in the state and had to travel to New York to terminate the pregnancy.Abortion access advocates have similarly rallied around Joshua.At six weeks pregnant with her second child, Joshua called a physician group in Baton Rouge – her state’s capital – to schedule her first prenatal appointment, but the clinic denied her an appointment. The group said it was no longer providing prenatal care for women under 12 weeks of pregnancy because it thought it was too risky in light of the abortion ban that took effect in Louisiana after last year’s overturning of Roe v Wade to be ambiguous.Miscarriages most frequently occur during the first trimester of pregnancy, and they require the same medical procedures as abortions, Joshua – who declined to speak to the Guardian – was told. Joshua told WWNO that the clinic did not want to face possibly being investigated if their miscarriage care was interpreted as an abortion.As a Black woman, Joshua told WWNO that she was aware of maternal-related deaths in her state. A 2018 report by the Louisiana Department of Health found that Black women are four times more likely than their white counterparts to die during childbirth, so she decided to schedule her next appointment with a Black obstetrician.Yet before her appointment, Joshua bled heavily and felt severe pain between her 10th and 11th week of pregnancy. She went to Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge for immediate care and received an ultrasound that showed her fetus had a faint heartbeat and had stopped growing three or four weeks earlier.Joshua’s pregnancy hormones, meanwhile, were abnormally low. Nonetheless, the hospital would not confirm that she was having a miscarriage.By the next evening, Joshua ended up at Baton Rouge general hospital after losing a large amount of blood and tissue. A female doctor told Joshua that there appeared to be a cyst in her ultrasound and questioned if she was pregnant.Joshua told WWNO that the doctor recommended waiting at home for the miscarriage to pass, if this was in fact a spontaneous abortion. However, the doctor refused to give her treatments that would lessen the pain and quicken the miscarriage.“She stated that they’re not going to put … ‘spontaneous abortion’ [anywhere] because that would then flag an investigation on them,” Joshua told WWNO.Zagorski says it’s natural for things to be confusing for providers and patients after last year’s landmark supreme court decision. Nonetheless, Joshua’s ordeal was separate and apart and clearly fit the built-in exceptions, she said.For the record, Zagorski said neither her group nor the ban support aborting a child with life-threatening medical conditions, as seen in the Nancy Davis case. “We believe that even in dire severe cases like that, where the baby is likely to not live long, that it is still a human life and there are ways that a woman can deliver naturally and have hospice care for that baby,” Zagorski said.Despite that stance, Louisiana’s state health department issued an emergency rule late last month that allows women to terminate pregnancies if their unborn child suffers from one or more of 25 listed medical conditions, including acrania. The medical diagnoses remain an exception to the abortion law for at most 180 days.Abortion access advocates would prefer Louisiana and other similarly situated states to do away with their bans altogether. But the legislatures of Louisiana and those other states are controlled by conservatives who oppose abortion.TopicsAbortionLouisianaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      3 Races for Governor to Watch This Year

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      Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIn Mississippi, the Republican governor, Tate Reeves, appears to have avoided a rugged Republican primary field, despite his lackluster approval ratings and a water crisis in Jackson. Two potential G.O.P. challengers skipped the race: Philip Gunn, Mississippi’s House speaker, and Michael Watson, the secretary of state. More