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    Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act by limiting help to voters, a judge rules.

    A federal judge ruled that Arkansas violated the Voting Rights Act with its six-voter limit for those who help people cast ballots in person, which critics had argued disenfranchised immigrants and people with disabilities.In a 39-page ruling issued on Friday, Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., wrote that Congress had explicitly given voters the choice of whom they wanted to assist them at the polls, as long as it was not their employer or union representative.Arkansas United, a nonprofit group that helps immigrants, including many Latinos who are not proficient in English, filed a lawsuit in 2020 after having to deploy additional employees and volunteers to provide translation services to voters at the polls in order to avoid violating the state law, the group said. It described its work as nonpartisan.State and county election officials have said the law was intended to prevent anyone from gaining undue influence.Thomas A. Saenz is the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented Arkansas United in the case. He said in an interview on Monday that the restrictions, enacted in 2009, constituted voter suppression and that the state had failed to present evidence that anyone had gained undue influence over voters when helping them at the polls.Read More About U.S. ImmigrationA Billion-Dollar Business: Migrant smuggling on the U.S. southern border has evolved over the past 10 years into a remunerative operation controlled by organized crime.Migrant Apprehensions: Border officials already had apprehended more migrants by June than they had in the entire previous fiscal year, and are on track to exceed two million by the end of September.An Immigration Showdown: In a political move, the governors of Texas and Arizona are offering migrants free bus rides to Washington, D.C. People on the East Coast are starting to feel the effects.“You’re at the polls,” he said. “Obviously, there are poll workers are there. It would seem the most unlikely venue for undue voter influence to occur, frankly.”Mr. Saenz’s organization, known as MALDEF, filed a lawsuit this year challenging similar restrictions in Missouri. There, a person is allowed to help only one voter.In Arkansas, the secretary of state, the State Board of Election Commissioners and election officials in three counties (Washington, Benton and Sebastian) were named as defendants in the lawsuit challenging the voter-assistance restrictions. It was not immediately clear whether they planned to appeal the ruling.Daniel J. Shults, the director of the State Board of Election Commissioners, said in an email on Monday that the agency was reviewing the decision and that its normal practice was to defend Arkansas laws designed to protect election integrity. He said that voter privacy laws in Arkansas barred election officials from monitoring conversations between voters and their helpers and that this made the six-person limit an “important safeguard” against improper influence.“The purpose of the law in question is to prevent the systematic abuse of the voting assistance process,” Mr. Shults said. “Having a uniform limitation on the number of voters a third party may assist prevents a bad actor from having unlimited access to voters in the voting booth while ensuring voter’s privacy is protected.”Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said in an email on Monday that the office was also reviewing the decision and having discussions with the state attorney general’s office about possible next steps.Russell Anzalone, a Republican who is the election commission chairman in Benton County in northwestern Arkansas, said in an email on Monday that he was not familiar with the ruling or any changes regarding voter-assistance rules. He added, “I follow the approved State of Arkansas election laws.”The other defendants in the lawsuit did not immediately respond on Monday to requests for comment.In the ruling, Judge Brooks wrote that state and county election officials could legally keep track of the names and addresses of anyone helping voters at the polls. But they can no longer limit the number to six voters per helper, according to the ruling.Mr. Saenz described the six-voter limit as arbitrary.“I do think that there is a stigma and unfair one on those who are simply doing their part to assist those who have every right to be able to cast a ballot,” he said. More

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    One Eric Reaps in Missouri as Another Eric Sows

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

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    Peter Meijer, Republican who voted to impeach Trump, loses Michigan seat

    Peter Meijer, Republican who voted to impeach Trump, loses Michigan seatTrump-backed challenger John Gibbs triumphs, while Democrats hopeful Kansas abortion vote will energize voters in November On one of the most consequential nights of the US primary season, amplifiers of Donald Trump’s stolen-election myth won in Arizona and Michigan – in the latter state defeating a Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment – while voters in Kansas decisively rejected an attempt to remove abortion protections from the state constitution.‘We could feel it’: Kansans celebrate upset abortion rights victoryRead moreWith fewer than 100 days left before the November midterm elections, the results confirmed Trump’s grip on Republican voters and advanced his efforts to purge critics and elevate loyalist standard-bearers.The verdicts rendered on Tuesday night are likely to have major implications for both parties.Democrats face a difficult election cycle, hampered by Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and widespread dissatisfaction with leadership in Washington in the face of economic problems. Historically, the opposition party makes gains in the first midterms of any presidency, often by framing the election as a referendum on the president.With narrow majorities in Congress, Democrats cannot afford to lose any seats in the Senate and only a handful in the House. But party leaders were hopeful on Tuesday that the abortion rights verdict in Kansas might energize voters and boost Democrats in close contests to come.Another midterm strategy employed by Democrats – boosting far-right candidates in Republican primaries in the hope of facing weaker opponents in November – met with success, despite bipartisan warnings that the approach could backfire, with dangerous consequences for US democracy.In a congressional primary in Michigan, John Gibbs defeated Peter Meijer, the Republican incumbent who was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump over the Capitol attack, after Democrats ran ads highlighting Gibbs’s pro-Trump credentials.In a statement, Meijer said: “I’m proud to have remained true to my principles, even when doing so came at a significant political cost.”But he published angrier words on Monday, assailing Democrats who spent heavily in support of Gibbs.In an online essay, Meijer wrote: “The Democrats are justifying this political jiu-jitsu by making the argument that politics is a tough business. I don’t disagree.“But that toughness is bound by certain moral limits: those who participated in the attack on the Capitol, for example, clearly fall outside those limits. But over the course of the midterms, Democrats seem to have forgotten just where those limits lie.”Meijer was the second Republican who voted to impeach to lose a primary contest. Four have opted to retire rather than to seek re-election. Two others were on the ballot on Tuesday in Washington state. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse were in close races against Trump-backed challengers which had yet to be called.So far, only one Republican who voted to impeach Trump, David Valadao of California, has survived, with a narrow victory in California.Michigan also saw a Trump-backed candidate win the Republican nomination for governor. Tudor Dixon, a conservative media personality, will face the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in November.In an incumbent-on-incumbent Democratic primary for a newly redrawn Michigan House district, Haley Stevens, a moderate backed by the political arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, defeated Andy Levin, a progressive from a prominent political family. Elsewhere, progressive members of “the Squad”, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Cori Bush in Missouri, beat back moderate challengers.In Arizona, a battleground state that became the epicenter of election denialism in the wake of Biden’s 2020 victory, the Trump-endorsed Blake Masters won a crowded Republican primary to face Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, in a contest that could determine control of the US Senate.In the race for Arizona secretary of state, a post that oversees elections, Republicans nominated Mark Finchem, a self-identified member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who has amplified false claims about the 2020 election and was backed by Trump.The Republican primary for governor was too close to call but by Wednesday Kari Lake, a former TV anchor backed by Trump, was narrowly leading Karrin Taylor Robson, backed by the former vice-president Mike Pence.Trump’s quest for retribution against Republicans who crossed him gained a win when Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican House speaker, who rose to prominence when he testified to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, lost his bid for a state Senate seat to David Farnsworth, who had Trump’s support.In Missouri, where Trump urged voters to choose “Eric” without specifying which in a Senate primary contest with three Erics, Republican leaders were relieved it was Eric Schmitt, the attorney general, who emerged victorious.Eric Greitens, the scandal-plagued former governor who resigned in 2018 and was attempting a political comeback, finished third. Schmitt will now face Trudy Busch Valentine, a deep-pocketed beer heiress who Democrats nominated over the more populist Lucas Kunce.Justice department urged to investigate deletion of January 6 texts by PentagonRead moreThough Trump’s endorsement record is mixed, his string of victories on Tuesday night underscored conservatives’ enduring allegiance to the former president despite a stream of damaging revelations about his efforts to overturn the election and his conduct during the deadly assault on the Capitol.Perhaps the most closely watched vote on Tuesday wasn’t an election, but a referendum. In the first test of the potency of abortion as electoral issue in the post-Roe era, voters in Kansas resoundingly rejected an amendment that would have erased the right to abortion from the state constitution.The decisive vote in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020 is the first major electoral victory for supporters of reproductive rights since the the supreme court invalidated the constitutional right to an abortion in June.It also serves as a warning to Republicans who have sought to downplay the significance of the issue in an election year otherwise dominated by inflation and economic woes.TopicsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsMichiganArizonaWashington statenewsReuse this content More

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    Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primaries

    Republican candidates who deny 2020 election results win key primariesVictories underscore the continued political potency of the stolen election myth, with most significant win in Arizona Candidates who question the 2020 election results won a handful of key primaries on Tuesday, underscoring the continued political potency of the myth of a stolen election in US politics.The most significant victory was in Arizona, where Mark Finchem, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, easily won the GOP nomination for secretary of state, placing him one step closer to overseeing elections in a key battleground state.Finchem, who has self-identified with the far-right Oath Keepers, vigorously fought to block certification of Joe Biden’s legitimate victory in Arizona and has sought to overturn it ever since.He told reporters on Tuesday he received a subpoena from the Department of Justice, which is investigating the January 6 attack, about a month ago. He has also been subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the attack.Finchem joins prominent election deniers in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania who have earned the Republican nomination for positions in which they would wield considerable power over elections.Kansas’ vote to protect abortion rights upends US midterm elections – liveRead moreIn the Arizona gubernatorial primary, Kari Lake, a Trump-backed former news anchor who has made election misinformation a centerpiece of her campaign, narrowly led rival Karrin Taylor Robson on Wednesday morning.Even before she took the lead in ballot counting, Lake, who has already alleged fraud in the vote, claimed victory.“There is no path to victory for my opponent and we won this race, period,” Lake said at her election night party. On Wednesday morning she led by just over 11,300 votes with 20% of the vote left to count.Blake Masters, a Trump-backed US Senate candidate in Arizona who has questioned election results also easily won the GOP primary to take on the Democratic senator Mark Kelly.Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona house who faced censure from his party and Trump’s fury after testifying in front of the January 6 committee, lost his primary for state senate to a Trump-backed challenger.There were other signs of how election conspiracies continue to dominate Arizona politics. In Maricopa county, a Republican candidate for the board of supervisors urged voters to steal pens the county provided to fill out ballots, a nod to a baseless fraud claim promoted on Gatewaypundit, a far-right website.In Michigan, Peter Meijer, one of 10 Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment, lost a primary battle against John Gibbs, who served in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration.In a debate last month, Gibbs said there were “mathematically impossible anomalies” in the 2020 race, which is not true. Meijer blasted Democrats for boosting Gibbs’s campaign as part of a strategy to elevate more extreme candidates who might be easier to beat in November.Michigan Republicans nominated Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, to take on Gretchen Whitmer for governor. Dixon has said the 2020 election was stolen in Michigan, where Trump lost by more than 150,000 votes, but has been vague about what exactly she says went wrong.In Missouri, Eric Schmitt, who lead a coalition of attorneys general urging the US supreme court to overturn the 2020 election, won the Republican nomination for US Senate. Trump endorsed “Eric” in the race, declining to say whether he was backing Schmitt or another challenger, Eric Greitens.In Washington state, two US House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump appeared to be doing fairly well as votes continued to be counted. With about half of the vote counted, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse were both leading Trump-backed opponents.TopicsRepublicansThe fight to voteUS midterm elections 2022US politicsArizonaMichiganMissourinewsReuse this content More

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    Abortion access, Trump’s sway and US democracy hang in balance in primaries

    Abortion access, Trump’s sway and US democracy hang in balance in primariesKansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington state vote with Arizona’s ballot being the most closely watched On one of the most consequential nights of this year’s primary season, Donald Trump’s sway in a series of Republican races remained unclear but voters in red-state Kansas resoundingly rejected an amendment aimed at restricting abortion rights.Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan risks upsetting Beijing to no advantage Read moreTuesday night’s marquee races were in Arizona, where Republicans are on the verge of tapping prominent election deniers to be their nominees in contests for governor, secretary of state and US Senate.In the governor’s race, Trump-backed Kari Lake, a former news anchor who has built her campaign around misinformation about the 2020 election, was trailing Karrin Taylor Robson, a wealthy real-estate developer who is endorsed by Mike Pence and the current Arizona governor, Doug Ducey. The winner will take on Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s current secretary of state, who was projected to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.Down the ballot, Mark Finchem, a close ally of Trump who aggressively sought to overturn Arizona’s election results, was on the verge of clinching the GOP nomination to be secretary of state in a four-way primary. Trump has endorsed Finchem in the contest, which typically gets little attention, boosting him to the front of the field.If elected in November, Finchem would wield considerable power over elections in Arizona, including how ballots are counted and there is a loud alarm he could use that power to throw out an election result he doesn’t like, especially given his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 race.Underscoring how deeply embedded Trump’s election lies are among Republicans in Arizona, the New York Times reported on Tuesday that two politicians involved in the efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in the state worried the scheme could “appear treasonous”.On the Democratic side, Adrian Fontes, the former top election official in Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, is vying for his party’s nomination against Reginald Bolding, the minority leader in the Arizona house of representatives.And in the US Senate race, Blake Masters, who has embraced extreme anti-immigrant positions and is backed by Trump and the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, is the frontrunner to win the GOP nomination. He will face Senator Mark Kelly this fall, who ran unopposed.Meanwhile in Kansas, a state that Trump won by nearly 15 points, voters defeated an amendment that would have paved the way for abortion restrictions and delivered an energizing win for Democrats who face tough odds in the midterms.The resounding win came as a surprise in a deeply conservative state. Republican lawmakers scheduled the vote during the partisan primaries thinking that low Democratic turnout would bolster their anti-abortion cause, but secretary of state Scott Schwab suggested that the massive voter turnout on Tuesday may match the turnout of the 2008 presidential election.The vote is viewed as a litmus test for the future of abortion access across the US. There is also a tight race in western Michigan, where the freshman congressman Peter Meijer is trying to fend off a challenge from John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official. Meijer was one of 10 House Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment and Trump has backed Gibbs in an act of retribution. The Whoever wins the district will be in a competitive race in November. Democrats have faced criticism in recent weeks for trying to boost Gibbs, calculating that the more extreme candidate may be easier to beat in November.Michigan Republicans nominated conservative media commentator Tudor Dixon, who has falsely said Trump won the state in 2020 and earned a late endorsement from the former president. She will take on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in November. Dixon emerged as the party’s nominee after an extremely chaotic primary during which several candidates were disqualified and one was arrested for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection.On the Democratic side, redistricting set two Democratic House incumbents against each other in Michigan. Andy Levin, a former president of his synagogue, was ultimately defeated by Haley Stevens, after pro-Israel Super Pac funded ads attacking the former and amplifying the later. Levin has been critical of Israel’s human rights record.In Washington state, representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse, both of whom voted to impeach Trump, are hoping to survive Trump-backed challengers.In Missouri, Eric Schmitt, the state attorney general, prevailed in a competitive primary for an open US Senate seat. Schmitt trounced the state’s scandal-plagued former governor, Eric Greitens, who was attempting a political comeback. Both vied for Trump’s endorsement – and earned it – when the former president declined to choose between them. Instead Trump issued a statement on Monday announcing that he had endorsed “Eric” but did not specify which one.TopicsUS politicsArizonaKansasWashington stateMissouriMichigannewsReuse this content More

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    Schmitt Defeats Greitens to Win Missouri’s G.O.P. Senate Primary

    Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, easily captured the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. His decisive victory derailed the political comeback of former Gov. Eric Greitens, whose campaign had been clouded by allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity and corruption.Mr. Schmitt, a former state senator and treasurer, made a turn to the hard-right in order to fend off his top rivals, Mr. Greitens and Representative Vicky Hartzler, a longtime social conservative who was in second place as votes were counted Tuesday night, with Mr. Greitens trailing behind. Mr. Schmitt had the backing of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — which he parlayed into multiple appearances on Fox News — and a semi-endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump, who, unable to make up his mind, endorsed “Eric” on Monday without specifying which one.His victory was a relief for Republicans in Missouri and in Washington, who had worried that nominating Mr. Greitens, four years after he resigned his governorship in disgrace to avoid impeachment, would put at risk a seat they hoped to pass easily from retiring Senator Roy Blunt to a Republican successor. Once a swing state, Missouri has become reliably red over the past decade.If Mr. Greitens had won, Democrats planned to attack him on a record that included allegations from his former wife that he had physically abused her and one of their young sons, as well as accusations of sexual abuse from a hairdresser who said that he had lured her to his home, tied her up, torn off her clothes, photographed her partly naked, threatened to release the pictures if she talked and coerced her into performing oral sex.“I’m hoping and praying that it is God’s will that Eric Greitens does not get the nomination, but if Eric Greitens wins the nomination, we will lose a Senate seat to the Democrats,” Rene Artman, the chairwoman of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee, said days before the election. She had pleaded with Missouri Republican officials to more forcefully oppose Mr. Greitens.A super PAC in Missouri funded by affluent donors in and out of the state attacked Mr. Greitens in advertising that used his former wife’s allegations as well as footage from a trip he took as governor to China, in which he appeared to speak positively about the country.Mr. Greitens said the allegations against him were false and orchestrated by Washington Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Karl Rove, the political chief of the George W. Bush White House. Mounting a campaign saturated in violent imagery, Mr. Greitens ran advertising featuring military-style assaults against “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — and shots of himself, a former Navy SEAL, firing high-powered weaponry.In the end, Mr. Schmitt benefited from a highly fractured field of Republicans, 21 in all. It included Representative Billy Long, who claimed to be the true voice of Mr. Trump, and Mark McCloskey, a personal injury lawyer who made headlines when he and his wife brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in front of the couple’s St. Louis home.Ms. Hartzler was backed by Missouri’s junior senator, Josh Hawley, but snubbed by Mr. Trump, who told his supporters on his social media site, “I don’t think she has what it takes to take on the Radical Left Democrats.” Mr. Trump called Mr. Greitens “tough” and “smart” in an interview on the pro-Trump network One America News, and his son Donald Trump Jr. shot automatic rifles with Mr. Greitens at a shooting range and said on camera that they were “striking fear in the hearts of liberals everywhere.”With Ms. Hartzler dismissed by the former president and Mr. Greitens under concerted attack from wealthy Republicans, Mr. Schmitt was able to prevail. More

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    Eric Greitens May Just Get What He Deserves

    On Tuesday, Republican voters in Missouri will send a signal to G.O.P. leaders nationwide about what they will and won’t accept in a top candidate in the party’s current, Trumpian era: Namely, do they want a Senate nominee who exists in a perpetual swirl of scandal, including fresh accusations of domestic violence?For much of Missouri’s Senate primary race, it sure seemed Republicans were content to careen down this path. Consistently, if narrowly, the crowded G.O.P. field was led by Eric Greitens, the state’s disgraced former governor. Leaning into his bad boy rep, Mr. Greitens sold himself as an ultra-MAGA warrior being persecuted by his political enemies — just like a certain former president! — and a good chunk of the party’s base seemed ready, even eager, to buy his line.But it appears that MAGA may have its limits even in a deep-red state like Missouri. Certainly, electability has mattered more for many Republican officials and donors there, who have been less than enthusiastic about Mr. Greitens’s candidacy. It’s not necessarily that they found his behavior morally disqualifying — this is, after all, Donald Trump’s G.O.P. — so much as they were afraid his scandals would make him a weak general election candidate. (Democrats were certainly raring to run against him.) Losing this seat, currently held by the Republican Roy Blunt, who is retiring, would be a blow to the party’s midterm dream of winning control of the Senate. But efforts to nudge Mr. Greitens out of the race only ticked him off and provided fodder for his martyr self-mythologizing. He looked to be a classic example of how the G.O.P. had lost control of its MAGA monster.Until late last month. That’s when a group of Republicans rolled out a super PAC, named Show Me Values, aimed at bringing down Mr. Greitens. Just a few weeks — and an estimated $6 million in ad spending — later, the effort seems to be working. Multiple polls show the former governor’s support slipping, dropping him behind a couple of his opponents. The state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, appears to have taken the lead. He, too, is an election-denying Trump suck-up. But at this point the G.O.P. is operating on a curve; simply weeding out those alleged to be abusers and other possible criminals can feel like a major achievement.Polls are not votes, and the race remains too tight for anyone to exhale. But with only days to go, it looks as though Mr. Greitens’ political resurrection may flop. This would be a good thing for the people of Missouri. It could also serve as a model, or at least an encouraging data point, for more sensible Republicans looking to stave off the worst actors and excesses of Trumpism — and maybe eventually put their party back on the road to sanity.In an election cycle awash in MAGA bomb throwers vying for the title of biggest jerk, Mr. Greitens has been a top contender. Charismatic, combative and shameless, he is in many ways the essence of Trumpism. Heading into the race, he bore the stench of the multiple scandals — including allegations of sexual misconduct — that led him to step down as governor in 2018 to avoid impeachment by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature.Then, this March, his ex-wife filed an affidavit as part of a child custody dispute, swearing that he had physically abused her and their young son. (He has denied those allegations and, of course, blames dirty politics.) This was an offense too far for many Republicans, some of whom called on Mr. Greitens to leave the race. Among these was Senator Josh Hawley, who asserted, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”When you’ve lost the guy who gave the infamous fist salute to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, you know you’ve crossed a red line.In another era, or another party, a candidate dragging around such sordid baggage might have slouched quietly away. But Mr. Greitens has adopted the Trump guide to making vileness and suspected criminality work for you: Brace up, double down and bray that any and all allegations are just part of — all together now! — a political witch hunt.Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens is a political grievance peddler. Also like Mr. Trump, he saves his most concentrated bile for fellow Republicans. One of the most puerile ads of the midterms thus far has been Mr. Greitens’s “RINO hunting” spot, in which he leads a group of armed men in tactical gear as they storm a lovely little suburban home in search of G.O.P. heretics. “Get a RINO hunting permit,” Mr. Greitens urges. “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” Banned by Facebook, flagged by Twitter and trashed by pretty much everyone, the ad is pure political trolling.It was around the time of the RINO hunting ad that the Show Me Values PAC was announced. Team Greitens responded with characteristic invective. “These swamp creatures and grifters know their time at the trough is finished,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager. “That’s why they’re scared of America First champion Governor Greitens.”Whatever its roots, fear is a powerful motivator. Show Me Values began gobbling up ad time like Skittles, becoming the race’s biggest spender on TV. The spots detailing the abuse allegations by Mr. Greitens’s ex-wife appear particularly devastating. It seems that, with the proper message — and money to drive that message home — even the most flamboyant MAGA candidates can perhaps be deflated.Mr. Trump did not pioneer the brazen-it-out strategy being attempted by Mr. Greitens. But he perfected and popularized it, and under his reign, the G.O.P. has grown ever more willing to tolerate its politicians’ sketchy, creepy, violent and possibly illegal behavior, as long as they toed the line.Just look at Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, who won his primary in May, putting him on a glide path to a third term. Republican voters stuck by him despite his having been under indictment on charges of securities fraud and other naughtiness since 2015 and, in 2020, having had multiple staff members ask federal authorities to investigate him for a smorgasbord of “potential criminal offenses.”And for sheer MAGA shamelessness, it’s hard to top Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Panhandle’s trash-talking mini-Trump. It takes real moxie to fund-raise off the fact that one is being investigated by the feds on suspicion of child sex trafficking. But that is how Matt rolls, and his voters seem cool with it.This is not the mark of a healthy political party. Neither is it sustainable. Republican leaders need to get serious about reining in the Frankenstein’s monsters they have so long nurtured — before the party devolves even further into a circus of thugs, grifters and conspiracy nutters. This Tuesday, Missouri voters will, hopefully, take a baby step in that direction.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Lucas Kunce: ‘Populism is about everyday people coming together’

    InterviewLucas Kunce: ‘Populism is about everyday people coming together’Martin Pengelly Former US Marine with a progressive take on identity and masculinity hopes Missouri Democrats will pick him as their nominee for US Senate Lucas Kunce thinks populism has been given a bad name. “It’s outrageous,” he says, “that people call the Josh Hawleys, the Eric Greitens, the Donald Trumps of the world populist. Populism is about everyday people coming together to have power in a system that’s not working for them. So do that, Josh Hawley. I mean, good Lord, what a charlatan.”Josh Hawley, senator who ran from Capitol mob, mocked by home paperRead moreKunce is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Missouri, in the fight to take the state’s second seat in Washington, alongside Hawley. The primary is on Tuesday.Kunce’s main challenger is Trudy Busch Valentine, a prominent donor from the Anheuser-Busch brewing dynasty. Kunce’s fundraising has been hugely successful but polling is tight.Kunce has attacked Busch Valentine for representing the donor class, but in conversation he focuses more on attacking Republicans. Hawley, he says, is “always talking about masculinity – this, that, the other – meanwhile, he skitters out of the Capitol from a riot he essentially started. The guy votes for every corporate judge that comes up in front of him. He doesn’t do anything that would actually empower everyday people.“And Donald Trump, I mean, he put the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, in charge of our economy. That’s not populism. What they do is divide people based on race, religion, where you come from, in a way that doesn’t give everyday people power. They make sure folks are divided so that they don’t have power as a whole against the system that’s not working.“And so I just think it’s a tragedy that we give sort of any sort of populist label to these guys because they don’t want to change the system.”Now 39, Kunce is a Yale law grad who joined the US marines, went to Iraq and Afghanistan and worked in international arms control. He’s a persuasive speaker, even over Google Meet, laptop camera on the fritz.He is for gun control but he is running in gun country. That in part explains an ad in which Kunce holds an AR-15-style assault rifle, makes as if to fire it and then says that unlike potential Republican opponents including Mark McCloskey, the lawyer who infamously pointed such a gun at protesters for racial justice, he doesn’t need to indulge in such macho posturing.Kunce is also for abortion rights, in a state with a post-Roe v Wade trigger law.He grew up in Jefferson City, “in what would be considered a pro-life house and pro-life neighbourhood. That’s what I knew. And then I joined the Marine Corps. I went out and saw what it was like for these countries where they have oppressive Big Brother governments, where women have no rights. I saw what it was like to live in countries where there’s this two-tiered system of rights, where if you have wealth, access and power, the world’s literally your oyster.“And then I see what they did in Missouri here, how these country club Republicans passed the country’s first trigger law, saying abortion is not even available in cases of rape or incest. It’s like they’re willing to do that because they know it’s not going to affect them. Because they’re gonna go out of state, they have the wealth and the means. And so I think that’s messed up. People in my old neighborhood, that’s who’s not gonna have access. We’re gonna have a two-tier system here.The dystopian American reality one month after the Roe v Wade reversalRead more“And I’ve seen people from from my life go through very hard pregnancies I don’t think they should ever have to be forced to go through. People should be able to have that right and opportunity … And so my position is that I will vote to end the [Senate] filibuster and codify Roe v Wade. I think we need to make that happen.”The Republican primary in Missouri is certainly messy, an all-in scrap in which Greitens, a pro-Trump ex-governor who quit in disgrace and is accused of sexual and physical abuse, could yet come out on top.Polling suggests a Missouri US Senate seat remains a stretch for any Democrat. All the same, Kunce has attracted national attention. He says that was a surprise.“I had no expectations going into this. I was a guy nobody knew. I wanted to run a campaign where I rejected corporate Pac money, federal lobbyists’ money, big farm executive money, big fossil fuel executive money. People basically said that wasn’t possible and that was stupid.“And we just decided we’d do it the right way anyway. To actually stand for something and to win and to make sure you only represent people like the ones who took care of me growing up, rather than these folks who are buying off politicians and using them to strip our communities for parts.“I’m thrilled we’ve gotten the attention that we’ve gotten for what we’re doing and how Democrats can win in the midwest again – if they take a real straightforward populist message.”Kunce talks of “big, bold investment” in the midwest, of spending the sort of billions previously spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on building “the next generation of energy technology right here, to build out manufacturing, research and development, we’re talking wind and solar but we’re also talking hydrogen, distributed nuclear or modular nuclear, battery technology [and] good union jobs”.Independence, Missouri: tribalism, the flag and 4 July in the age of TrumpRead moreSuch aims are part of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better, progressive and Democratic plans fiercely opposed by big business and the right. Kunce’s description of a “Marshall plan for the midwest”, a reference to US aid for postwar Europe under a Missourian Democratic president, Harry Truman, seems in part a repackaging. He isn’t big on progressive labels. Asked about identity politics, he prefers to talk about class.“My focus is on top-bottom, as far as identity politics go. There are a lot of people who are being used as targets, usually the most vulnerable people in our society, by the shareholder class, these massive corporations who are funding campaigns against trans youth, against gay people, against minority communities. They do whatever they can to fund divisive campaigns in order to make it so we don’t have a top-bottom race.“This is what I was talking about earlier with these charlatans who pretend to be populist but they’re actually dividing people as much as they can. I’m absolutely for protecting communities that are vulnerable. I just don’t want to lose sight of this top-bottom dynamic that’s really killing us and making it so everybody is fighting for crumbs underneath the table rather than actually having to sit at it.”Kunce has been presented as a representative of progressive masculinity, a type of Democrat who might appeal away from the coasts. He connects the issue back to Republican posturing.“It’s crazy. I mean, Mark McCloskey on his AR-15, frightening people who are walking by his house. You don’t even hold it right. He would have burned himself up with hot brass if he’d shot a round. The fakeness here is just incredible. Josh Hawley’s right there too.“Real men aren’t a bunch of posers. They are people like my dad who sacrifice for their family, sacrifice for their community, stay in the first job they ever took out of school for their entire life, even when they’re miserable, because they needed their little girl to have health insurance so that she would survive. People that invest in their community, in their families.“It’s like the guy who inspired me to join the marines. This guy named Al. When I was a kid, we always volunteered at the church soup kitchen. Twice a month we’d go down there … and this guy who ran the kitchen, he was always like, ‘OK, what chores do all the kids want to do?’ And my little sister and I were always like, ‘Oh, we want to do the dishes.’ And Al was always confused about why two kids wanted to do the dishes.‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from ObamaRead more“But at my house with a big family, doing the dishes, man, it was like 40 minutes of standing at the sink, hurting your back, scrubbing hard and drying. Well, the church kitchen had a dishwasher. So doing the dishes was a scam there. You just threw a bunch of stuff in and walked away. I was like, ‘This guy’s an idiot, he thinks we’re doing a chore.’ And so Al figured that out.“And two years later, when he renovated the kitchen in his house, he took his old dishwasher, put it in his pickup truck, drove it to our house and installed it for us, because he remembered that and he wanted to do something for somebody.“That’s what a real man does. That’s masculinity. Al was a marines officer in Vietnam. Never talked about it. Just, you know, quiet fortitude. That’s what I think being a man is and it’s why I joined the Marine Corps and it’s why I think these [Republican] guys are just a bunch of posturing peacocks.”My last question is in part prompted by Kunce’s mention of “quiet fortitude”. Kunce is a fan of Clint Eastwood movies. Which is his favorite?“Unforgiven. Because Unforgiven was such a comeback for the western brand. It brought it back in the early 90s. And I thought that was really cool. I mean, I watch all the old ones. Pale Rider, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … but I think Unforgiven was just, it was a real comeback story for the genre which I love.”I’m for In the Line of Fire. If Kunce wins on Tuesday, the Republicans will be too.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022DemocratsMissouriUS politicsUS SenateUS CongressinterviewsReuse this content More