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      J.D. Vance’s First Attempt to Renew Ohio Crumbled Quickly

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      In 2017, the Republican candidate for Senate started a nonprofit group to tackle the social ills he had written about in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir. It fell apart within two years.J.D. Vance was not running for office. He said it irked him when people assumed that. Instead, in 2017, he said he had come back to Ohio to start a nonprofit organization.Mr. Vance gave that organization a lofty name — Our Ohio Renewal — and an even loftier mission: to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” He said it would dispense with empty talk and get to work fighting Ohio’s toughest problems: opioids, joblessness and broken families.“I actually care about solving some of these things,” Mr. Vance said.Within two years, it had fizzled.Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. (Mr. Vance also started a sister charity, which paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in a small-town Ohio clinic. Then it shuttered, too.)Mr. Vance is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, running on a promise to tackle some of the same issues his defunct organization was supposed to have. On the campaign trail, he has said his group stalled because a key staff member was diagnosed with cancer.“I saw that Ohio lacked a focused effort on solving the opioid crisis, even while so many Ohioans’ lives were devastated by addiction, my own family and mother included,” Mr. Vance said in a written statement. “While the group only ended up lasting for a short period of time, I’m proud of the work we did.”But some of the nonprofit group’s own workers said they had drawn a different conclusion: They had been lured by the promise of helping Ohio, but instead had been used to help Mr. Vance start his career in politics.During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race. It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.The collapse of Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group was first reported last year in Insider. Now, Ohio Democrats use the group as an attack line. “J.D. Vance was in a position to really help people, but he only helped himself,” says an ad created by Mr. Vance’s opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan.The New York Times examined federal and state records and talked to most of the people connected to the tiny nonprofit organization. That included 10 people who served as employees, board members or outside advisers for Our Ohio Renewal.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.Mr. Vance started his group in November 2016, on the day after Donald J. Trump had won the presidency. At the time, Mr. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his troubled childhood in Ohio, was a surprise best seller. After Yale Law School and two years in Silicon Valley, Mr. Vance was returning to Ohio.A prayer in Norwalk, Ohio, in 2017 honoring those lost to opioid overdoses. Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesHe said his nonprofit group would seek to fix some of the social problems that he had described in his book.“I felt, you know, frankly a little bit of responsibility — now that I’ve been given this platform by the success of the book — to go and try to do at least a little something to help out,” Mr. Vance said in late 2016.His group was set up as a “social welfare organization” — called a 501(c)(4), after the relevant section of the federal tax code — that is allowed to do more political advocacy than a traditional charity. Politicians often treat these groups as a kind of incubator for their next campaigns, using them to attract donors, pay staff members and test out messages in between elections.Mr. Vance said his organization was not that. It was focused on something bigger. In its application for tax-exempt status, his group told the Internal Revenue Service it planned to increase its fund-raising to $500,000 a year by 2018 and to more than double its spending on personnel.In his statement to The Times, Mr. Vance said he had donated $80,000 of his own money to the nonprofit group, which was about a third of the $221,000 that it reported having raised over its lifetime. He declined to identify the group’s other donors.Mr. Vance said he did not take a salary. He did not have a formal leadership role but called himself “honorary chairman.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“I won’t promise anything for now, besides this: I will work hard to find solutions to the opioid and joblessness problems, and when we identify workable solutions, we’ll do something about them,” he wrote to members of his advisory board in 2017. He signed off, “Looking forward to doing some good, JD.”Mr. Vance wanted to help grandparents, like his, who stepped in to raise children when parents were absent or unable. The task of figuring out how to do so fell to Jamil Jivani, a friend of Vance’s from Yale Law School who had been hired as the group’s director of law and policy. Mr. Jivani and two researchers paid by Ohio State University — where Mr. Vance was a “scholar in residence” in the political science department — spent months researching family law, looking for policies that could be changed.At the time, Mr. Vance was traveling for speeches, working for an investment firm and splitting his time between Ohio and Washington, where his wife and young son lived. Mr. Vance was largely absent from the nonprofit group’s offices, according to an employee at the organization, who asked not to be identified while describing the group’s inner workings. The person often studied in Mr. Vance’s spacious and frequently empty office on campus. “It was very quiet,” the person said.Another person who worked for the nonprofit group said that, in hindsight, it had seemed aimed at serving Mr. Vance’s ambition by giving him a presence in a state where he had not lived full-time for several years. The person said it had felt as if much of the job involved giving outsiders the impression that Mr. Vance was in the state, said the person, who asked not to be identified for fear of antagonizing Mr. Vance and his supporters.In November 2017, the group’s research produced a result: an op-ed in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. In that piece, Mr. Vance urged the Ohio Legislature to adopt a bill that would help “kinship caregivers” like his grandparents.Mr. Vance’s group did not make much of an impact in the effort to pass the bill, said former State Representative Jeff Rezabek, a Republican who sponsored it. The legislation stalled that year, although similar legislation eventually passed later, after Mr. Vance’s group had become largely inactive.At the same time, in 2017 and early 2018, Mr. Vance was gradually starting to do the thing that he had said he wouldn’t: politics. He spoke at G.O.P. Lincoln Day dinners around Ohio. He publicly flirted with running for the Senate as a Republican in 2018 — even, reportedly, commissioning a poll to see if his attacks on Trump would hold him back.“J.D. is giving serious consideration toward this, because there are very serious people asking him to run,” Mr. Vance’s political adviser, Jai Chabria, told CNN in early 2018.Mr. Chabria’s firm Mercury L.L.C. was paid $63,425 by Our Ohio Renewal for “management services” in 2017. Although the group listed him in official documents as its executive director, Mr. Chabria says, he was only a consultant for the nonprofit. Mr. Jivani, the director of law and policy, actually ran the group.“Someone needed to get the paperwork started to launch it, but I was never tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the organization,” Mr. Chabria wrote in an email to The Times.He said the nonprofit group had never paid him to advise Mr. Vance personally during that time. He did that for free.Our Ohio Renewal also paid a salary to Mr. Vance’s personal assistant, who scheduled Mr. Vance’s appearances at events including Republican gatherings. Mr. Chabria defended that practice, saying that Mr. Vance had often mentioned Our Ohio Renewal at those talks.The assistant managed Mr. Vance’s calendar because he was a “central part” of the organization, Mr. Chabria wrote in an email, adding that Mr. Vance “was making regular public appearances in the media and at events to promote the activities of the group.”Tax-law experts said that was most likely permissible, given the looser rules around this type of nonprofit group.Also in 2017, Our Ohio Renewal said in annual filings that it had paid an unnamed pollster $45,000 for a survey “on social, cultural and general welfare needs of Ohio citizens.”That survey was one of the most expensive things Our Ohio Renewal ever paid for. But several employees said they had never seen it. “I don’t have any recollection of a survey and don’t have a copy of one,” Jennifer Best, who was both the group’s accountant and the treasurer of its board, said in an email message.Mr. Chabria saw the survey, but he said he no longer had a copy to share. He said it had tested messages about Our Ohio Renewal’s work and “did not ask questions on any potential candidacy” by Mr. Vance himself.In February 2018, Mr. Jivani — the director of law and policy who ran Our Ohio Renewal day to day — was diagnosed with cancer.Jamil Jivani at his family’s home in Toronto in 2018 after his cancer diagnosis.Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesAfter that, Our Ohio Renewal seemed to freeze.It stopped tweeting. Its website trumpeted the same “Latest News” — a story from January 2018 — for nearly two years and then shut off, according to archived versions of the page (Ohio Democrats have taken over the group’s old domain and are using it to mock Mr. Vance). The group’s financial activity slowed sharply, and its bank account ran down to zero, according to Ms. Best, the treasurer.Finally, she told the Internal Revenue Service that the group was finished at the end of 2020.Mr. Jivani, whose cancer is now in remission, blames the group’s demise on his own bad luck.“As much as I wanted to, I could not take care of the day-to-day needs of this organization to help it scale,” he said.Mr. Vance did not respond to questions about why he had let the organization collapse after Mr. Jivani’s diagnosis.Now, Mr. Vance is in a tight Senate race, with Mr. Chabria as his chief strategist. In his most recent financial disclosures, Mr. Vance listed himself as “honorary chairman” of Our Ohio Renewal, even though it no longer existed. Under the time frame, he wrote, “Jan 2017 to present.” More

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      Herschel Walker’s Company Said It Donated Profits, but Evidence Is Scant

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      Back when he was a businessman running a food-distribution company, Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, said his company offered its customers more than just burgers and hot wings.“You are not just serving delicious, appealing food … you’re teaming up with Herschel, in an effort to level life’s playing field for those in need,” his company website once read.Mr. Walker, a former football star, pledged that 15 percent of profits would go to charities, a promise the company said was “part of its corporate charter.” For years, Mr. Walker’s company named four specific charities as beneficiaries of those donations, including the Boy Scouts of America and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.But there is scant evidence that Mr. Walker’s giving matched those promises. When The New York Times contacted those four charities, one declined to comment and the other three said they had no record or recollection of any gifts from the company in the last decade.“Herschel has been supportive verbally. I don’t think he’s given us any money,” said Jim Baugh, the founder of a now-defunct charity called the PE4Life Foundation. As late as 2017, one of Mr. Walker’s companies cited that foundation as a recipient of corporate donations, but Mr. Baugh said his foundation ceased operations in 2014.Mr. Walker’s Senate campaign declined to say when, how or even if Mr. Walker’s company had made the donations it promised. A campaign spokesman, Will Kiley, said in a short written statement, “Herschel Walker has given millions of dollars to charities,” but he declined to provide details.The Times’s reporting did not conclusively prove that Mr. Walker’s company failed to donate profits. It is possible that his company donated to other charities without naming them in public. It is difficult to know for certain that any company or group did not donate to a charity, because these are more than a million charities in the United States, and many do not disclose their donors.Mr. Walker, who is facing Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, in his first bid for public office, has been dogged by repeated instances in which he was found to have given misleading or outright false details about his life story.He falsely claimed to have graduated “in the top 1 percent” of his class at the University of Georgia, when in fact he had not graduated at all: He left the university after his junior year to play professional football. He also said he had “worked in law enforcement” when he had not.And Mr. Walker said in 2020 that his food-distribution company, Renaissance Man Food Services, employed about 800 people. Earlier that year, it had listed just eight employees when it applied for and received a $111,300 loan from a federal program to assist companies through the pandemic.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.Democrats have cast Mr. Walker as a fabulist. “At this point, it’s clear that pretty much everything Herschel Walker says bears no resemblance to the truth,” Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, said in a written statement.Mr. Walker, a Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Georgia in 1982, retired from football in 1997 and began a career in business. He now owns a holding company, H. Walker Enterprises, which owns Renaissance Man Food Services, according to court records and Mr. Walker’s Senate financial disclosures.According to its website, the company sells food through brands like “Herschel’s Famous 34,” whose website offers 10-pound cases of chicken wings to customers like hospitals and sports bars. The company also sells merchandise with corporate logos under the brand “34 Promotions,” named after Mr. Walker’s football jersey number.Beginning around 2007, Mr. Walker and his companies began to describe a corporate policy of donating profits.“Fifteen percent of all my company profits go to charity,” Mr. Walker said in a magazine interview in 2009. “As a person who was blessed, I think it’s my responsibility to share the blessing with others.”In some instances, Mr. Walker or his companies did not use the 15 percent figure and instead just said “a percentage” went to charity.Mr. Walker’s companies are private, so there is no public accounting of their profits. But, in financial disclosures required for his Senate run, Mr. Walker indicated that they produced a healthy income: He reported $3 million in “partnership distributions” from H. Walker Enterprises and $214,000 in salary from Renaissance Man Food Services.The Times was unable to reach Mr. Walker’s company directly. The phone number listed on its website has been disconnected, and the company did not respond to messages sent through the site.It was unclear what Mr. Walker’s company meant when it said a practice of making donations was written into its corporate charter. Public records from Delaware — where both H. Walker Enterprises and Renaissance Man Food Services were created in 2002 — show no sign of such a pledge. Instead, both companies were created with a one-page “certificate of formation” that listed their name and address but said nothing about charitable giving.From 2007 to 2017, Mr. Walker’s companies identified the same four charities — the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Special Olympics, PE4Life programs, the Boy Scouts of America — and others who were unnamed as among the recipients of charitable donations, according to archived versions of their websites.Mr. Walker signed an autograph at a PE4Life Foundation event in 2003. “Herschel has been supportive verbally. I don’t think he’s given us any money,” Jim Baugh, the founder, said.Tom Williams/Roll Call, via Getty ImagesIn response to queries from The Times, the Special Olympics declined to say if Mr. Walker or his companies had ever donated, citing internal rules about donor privacy.A spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America said there was no record of any donations from Mr. Walker or his companies to the Boy Scouts’ national chapters or the Boy Scouts of America Foundation.The spokesman said, however, that he could not rule out the possibility that Mr. Walker had given to one of the Boy Scouts’ 250 local councils. The Times also reached out to local Boy Scout chapters in two places with connections to Mr. Walker — a council in North Texas, where Mr. Walker lived for many years, and a council in Savannah, Ga., where H. Walker Enterprises is based.Both said they had not received any donations from Mr. Walker or his companies.At the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, officials said they had received gifts from Mr. Walker, but not in the last decade. The group’s records showed that Mr. Walker had donated $860 in 2005 and Renaissance Man Food Services gave another $1,000 in 2006. At the time, Mr. Walker was leading a bike team that raised money from a broader pool of donors — in all, the society said, Mr. Walker helped raise $39,525 in 2005 and 2006.But the group could find only one donation since then that might have come from Mr. Walker’s company: a gift of $25 from “RMFS” in 2009.Mr. Baugh, the founder of PE4Life, said that, while he could not recall any gifts from Mr. Walker or his companies, he credited him with playing a key role in the group’s lobbying efforts. Mr. Baugh said that Mr. Walker had visited Capitol Hill to support a grant program for physical education: “You can always count on Herschel being there, every year.”In addition to those promises, Mr. Walker made at least three other public promises to donate revenue.In 2014, he organized two talent shows in rural Georgia called “Herschel’s Raw Talent” — intended to bring “American Idol”-style glamour to rural Georgia communities like the one where he grew up. “A portion of the proceeds from each on-site competition will be donated to the local county,” Mr. Walker promised at the time. In some interviews, he said up to 80 percent would be donated.In the end, Mr. Walker staged “Herschel’s Raw Talent” events in just two counties. One of those, Stephens County, said it never received any donations from the talent show. The other, Laurens County, said its records did not go back that far.In 2010, during Mr. Walker’s time as a mixed martial-arts fighter, he said he would donate the purse of one fight to a charity providing mentors in schools, run by a Dallas-area church called Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship. The church declined to say if Mr. Walker had made good on that specific promise, citing donor privacy, but confirmed that he had donated to the mentoring program in the past.Mr. Walker’s campaign did not respond to questions about donations resulting from the “Herschel’s Raw Talent” events or the fight.But Mr. Walker has filed financial disclosures that detail a financial flow in the opposite direction — from charities to him. Just since March, the disclosures show, three charities paid him a combined $115,000 to give speeches. One of the biggest paychecks came from a Pennsylvania retirement-home system, which paid Mr. Walker $35,000 to speak and presented him with an award honoring those who exhibit “benevolence, patriotism and service to others.” More

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      Corporate Charter for H. Walker Enterprises

      by

      CERTIFICATE OF FORMATION

      OF

      H. WALKER ENTERPRISES, LLC

      WATL-SRV02346830v0154052.010000

      March 20, 2002

      STATE OF DELAWARE SECRETARY OF STATE DIVISION OF CORPORATIONS FILED 09:00 AM 03/20/2002 020187782 3505147

      This Certificate of Formation pertains to the formation of H. WALKER ENTERPRISES, LLC, a limited liability company organized under the Limited Liability Company Act of the State of Delaware, as follows:

      1. The name of the limited liability company is H. WALKER ENTERPRISES, LLC (the “Company”).

      2. The address of the Company’s registered office in the State of Delaware is 9 East Loockerman Street, in the City of Dover, county of Kent. The registered agent at this address is National Registered Agents. Inc.

      3.

      Management of the limited liability company is vested in one or more managers.

      IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned has executed this Certificate of Formation as of the date first above written.

      /s/ Ronald W. Eisenman

      Ronald W. Eisenman, Organizer More

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      Corporate Charter for Renaissance Man Food Services

      by

      CERTIFICATE OF FORMATION

      OF

      RENAISSANCE MAN FOOD SERVICES, LLC

      STATE OF DELAWARE SECRETARY OF STATE DIVISION OF CORPORATIONS FILED 09:00 AM 04/25/2002 020266223 – 3518604

      April 25, 2002

      This Certificate of Formation pertains to the formation of RENAISSANCE MAN FOOD SERVICES, LLC, a limited liability company organized under the Limited Liability Company Act of the State of Delaware, as follows:

      \ATL-SRV02358882v0154052.010000

      1. The name of the limited liability company is RENAISSANCE MAN FOOD SERVICES, LLC (the “Company”).

      2. The address of the Company’s registered office in the State of Delaware is 9 East Loockerman Street, in the City of Dover, county of Kent. The registered agent at this address is National Registered Agents, Inc.

      3. Management of the limited liability company is vested in one or more managers.

      IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned has executed this Certificate of Formation as of the date first above written.

      /s/Ronald W. Eisenman

      Ronald W. Eisenman, Organizer More

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      Donors Worry About a Cash Crunch for Voter Registration Groups

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      People close to the groups, which had a big infusion of money in 2020, fear they might have to begin scaling back their programs.Several nonprofit groups that work to register voters are privately sounding the alarm about their finances, warning donors that they will have to begin scaling back their programs just as the country enters the homestretch of the midterm elections.It is a critical time. Today is National Voter Registration Day, and deadlines to register are fast approaching. In four states — Minnesota, South Dakota, Virginia and Wyoming — early voting begins at the end of this week.More established groups that have worked on voter registration for years have anticipated the cutbacks, knowing the traditional rhythms of lower-stakes midterm elections, and have planned accordingly. But other, newer organizations that sprung up amid a flood of donor interest during the 2020 election cycle have struggled to adapt to the changing circumstances.“To the extent that any organizations working on voter registration anywhere in the country are having issues getting fully funded for this cycle, I find that extremely concerning,” said Bruce Cohen, a Democratic donor and activist. “I would ask other potential donors — if not now, when?”The main targets of complaints among voter registration groups are the Democracy Fund, a foundation bankrolled by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay; and the Open Society Foundations, the global philanthropy organization founded by the billionaire investor George Soros.Donor advisers said in interviews that the Democracy Fund and O.S.F. created the expectation that millions of dollars would be forthcoming for democracy-related programs in 2022, only to disappoint many of the would-be recipients months later.According to an email shared with The New York Times, branches of the two groups invited potential donors to the introduction of “the Roadmap for American Democracy” in June.“We will need to mobilize more than a billion dollars to uphold the integrity of our election process and ensure diverse, equitable participation,” the email read. The Open Society Foundations is going through a tumultuous transition period. As Soros has entered his 90s, he has handed over authority to his son Alex. Last year, my colleague Nicholas Kulish reported that the group had abruptly scaled back its giving worldwide as part of a “restructuring plan.”Press officers for O.S.F. denied that the organization had made promises it had not kept.“Our thought was that we were talking to donors over a longer period of time,” said Laleh Ispahani, a co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ U.S.-focused programs who has worked to enlist other donors. “We were always clear that you’re not saving democracy in a single election. That is a longer-term project.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Times/Siena Poll: Our second survey of the 2022 election cycle found Democrats remain unexpectedly competitive in the battle for Congress, while G.O.P. dreams of a major realignment among Latino voters have failed to materialize.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.Ohio Senate Race: The contest between Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, appears tighter than many once expected.She said O.S.F. had already invested $40 million to $75 million in 2022 for programs related to democracy and voting rights. “We will never retreat from this space,” she said. “This is our bread and butter.”A representative for the Democracy Fund did not respond to a request for comment.“O.S.F. came through for us in a big way,” said Nse Ufot, the chief executive of the New Georgia Project, which was instrumental in registering tens of thousands of voters of color before Democrats’ victories in 2020 and early 2021.But, she added: “What we are seeing is an overall dip in fund-raising” to the broader coalition of groups that helped her group turn Georgia into a blue state through grass-roots community organizing and voter registration. “Folks who think Georgia is competitive do not understand what made Georgia competitive.”One reason for the funding difficulties is the hangover from 2020, when foundations and private donors poured millions into democracy-related projects, including voter registration. The Senate elections in Georgia in early 2021, along with Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential results, poured jet fuel on those efforts.“Donors got energized by the threat to democracy,” said a person who advises wealthy people on their political contributions and who insisted on anonymity. The person described a feeling of exhaustion among the donor class: “People left it all on the field.”At times, those efforts have blurred the line between neutral, nonprofit work and partisan advantage. An analysis by Ken Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times, for instance, found that “15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020.”At the time, they reported, Democrats were “warning major donors not to give in to the financial complacency that often afflicts the party in power.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.It’s not fully clear whether the complacency they feared has now arrived, or whether only certain groups have been disproportionally affected. Several people closely involved with the Democratic Party’s voter-registration plans said they were not aware of a systemic crisis.Among the groups affected, people familiar with their internal finances said, were the Voter Formation Project, which describes its mission as “increasing participation in local, state and national elections through digital communication, experimentation and knowledge sharing.” Tatenda Musapatike, the head of the Voter Formation Project, did not respond to an email seeking comment.But another reason for the budget shortfalls, people familiar with the situation said, was the sour state of the economy, which has led to belt-tightening across corporate America and in the world of institutional investors — including ones that regularly fund efforts like voter registration that are considered nonpartisan and politically safe.The wider contextAs On Politics reported in January, Republicans have begun to close the gap with Democrats in voter registration in major battleground states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.In Pennsylvania, for instance, the Democrats’ advantage in registrations shrank to 540,000 as of today, from 685,000 as of November 2020, according to an analysis by Politico.In 2020, the pandemic disrupted the party’s two main pathways for bringing in new voters: sign-ups at the Department of Motor Vehicles and face-to-face field work. Democratic candidates and party committees cut sharply back on door-knocking campaigns, while Republicans largely maintained their in-person canvassing programs.An analysis shared with The New York Times by Catalist, a Democratic data firm, showed that in 2020, the Democrats’ traditional edge in voter registration shrank to nine percentage points across 29 states — down from a 19-point advantage over Republicans in 2008.This year, as the pandemic has waned, groups aligned with Democrats, including unions and the League of Conservation Voters, have revived their field programs. And a surge of anger on the left and among young people over the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion has led to an accompanying rise in new registrations for Democrats.But top Democrats have quietly discussed for months how to address what some officials see as a broader problem with the way the party handles voter registration.Traditionally, Democrats have relied on a mix of official, partisan voter registration drives conducted by state parties and candidates as well as outreach by nonprofit groups that are legally prohibited from targeting communities by their expected party affiliation.As Republicans have made gains, however — most notably in Florida, where the G.O.P. now has a registration edge of around 200,000 voters — senior Democrats have begun to question whether the party ought to bring more of those officially nonpartisan voter-registration campaigns in-house.For the 2022 cycle, the Democratic National Committee is spending nearly $25 million on its “I Will Vote” initiative, which includes voter protection, legal challenges and voter registration in battleground states, focused on communities of color and college campuses. The voter registration component of the program began with an initial investment of nearly $5 million, but has since expanded.The D.N.C. also began a blitz of publicity this week around National Voter Registration Day, featuring digital ads aimed at college students on Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. The committee also plans to fly banners during college football games nudging students to register.“This is the D.N.C.’s largest voter registration investment in a midterm cycle and marks a return to an aspect of party building that the D.N.C. has not engaged in for several cycles,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the committee.What to readA federal judge expressed skepticism about an attempt by Donald Trump’s lawyers to again skirt the issue of whether Trump had declassified some of the highly sensitive records seized from his Florida home by the F.B.I., Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage report.Newly released videos show allies of Trump and contractors who were working on his behalf handling sensitive voting equipment in a rural Georgia county weeks after the 2020 election, Danny Hakim, Richard Fausset and Nick Corasaniti report.A sleeper race in this year’s contests for Senate is also one of the sleepiest, Jonathan Weisman writes, as Ted Budd and Cheri Beasley face off in North Carolina, a state known for breaking Democrats’ hearts.Where in America is it easiest and hardest to vote? The state at the bottom of the rankings in a new academic study called the Cost of Voting Index might surprise you. Nick Corasaniti and Allison McCann lay out the details.Nate Cohn, The Times’s top polling expert, asks a perfectly reasonable question: Can we trust the polls?Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Return to Center Stage. Their Own.

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      After going dark during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative is back.After a six-year hiatus, the Clinton Global Initiative returned to New York City this week, bringing together leaders from the worlds of nonprofit, government and business, with a few celebrities sprinkled in for good measure. It has been an eventful few years since they last gathered in 2016.“The challenges we face are steep, but they pretty much have been steep for a long time now,” former President Bill Clinton said in his opening remarks at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan on Monday. “And CGI is always and has always been about what we can do and not what we can’t do.”The Clinton Global Initiative began in 2005 and quickly became something akin to a Davos-on-the-Hudson event, but one with a greater focus on philanthropy, nonprofits and corporate do-gooding. The way it differed from most conferences is that it required participants to make commitments, sometimes in dollars, other times in targets — such as for creating jobs or delivering clean water.Up to the hiatus in 2016, attendees announced more than 3,700 commitments, which by the organization’s own tally had helped more than 435 million people in over 180 countries.In many ways the early days were the high-water mark of the philanthrocapitalism era, when trust in the wealthy and celebrities to save the world ran high. In turn, many significant organizations modeled themselves after the Clintons’ endeavor.Then in 2016, in the heat of the general election campaign fight between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, with reporters asking a lot of questions about the foundation and its donors, Mr. Clinton announced that the 2016 meeting would be the final version of the initiative.Now, as world leaders gathered in New York for the first fully in-person United Nations General Assembly in three years, the goal is to recapture that old Clinton magic, and to see if there is still room in a field of thought-leading, pledge-making symposia crowding the city this week.Advisers to Mr. Clinton said that in the years since, he had longed to restart the event. “He would tell me regularly when we were just talking before a board meeting, ‘I was just out last night and someone was saying when are you going to start CGI again?’” said Robert Harrison, former chief executive of the Clinton Global Initiative, from 2007 to 2016, and a board member of the Clinton Foundation.“A year ago, 10 months ago, we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s try,’” Mr. Harrison recalled.The Clintons’ return to the world stage was heralded in March with a letter from Mr. Clinton that doubled as a call to arms. With the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the challenges to democracy at home and abroad, the world needed CGI back, according to Mr. Clinton.Judging from the names at the event, many old friends and allies answered the call, including the philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs and Melinda French Gates, Secretary Xavier Becerra of the Department of Health and Human Services, state governors, corporate chief executives, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the director-general of the World Health Organization.This year the initiative tallied 144 commitments, which will result in more than 1.6 million jobs and the reduction of 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.Commitments ranged from a program to build soccer fields in underserved communities to one making bricks out of volcanic ash. Nine members committed to providing humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Mr. Clinton interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine via videoconference on Tuesday, with Mr. Zelensky in his trademark form-fitting T-shirt.From left, the CNN host Fareed Zakaria with Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados; the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; and the chef José Andrés at the Clinton Global Initiative event on Monday.Julia Nikhinson/Associated PressMilling in the halls at the event, Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and longtime denizen of Clinton world, brushed past, smartphone pressed to his face. Petra Nemcova, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model who survived the deadly 2004 tsunami in Thailand and now works in philanthropy, chatted with a Ukrainian official by the coffee urns, where the milk was all plant-based — soy, oat, almond — in a nod to Mr. Clinton’s veganism as well as the climate impact of cows. The meals were all plant-based, too.The mood between sessions was like that at a college reunion, with people embracing after years apart and speaking warmly and with nostalgia — convivial but not, perhaps, the most forward looking.“Why did they leave in the first place?” said Paloma Raggo, a philanthropy expert and professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa. “It wasn’t the right political climate for them to be at the forefront of things.”The Clintons shut down the initiative because of scrutiny during the campaign. And they kept it on ice for six years for a variety of reasons. First there was the recovery from Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in the presidential election. Then the #MeToo movement brought a harsh spotlight on past Clinton ties to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Later, people close to Bill and Hillary say, Covid protocols kept them away from large crowds.Still, to critical observers, the timing does not seem clear. “Is it because now there are issues that make it necessary, them coming here, or is it because at this point the political consequences or bad juju has dissolved a bit and they reappeared?” Ms. Raggo asked.Some former advisers say the Clinton Global Initiative’s moment has passed and the event should not be revived. Memberships, which cost $15,000 and $20,000 in past years, were just $5,000 for this year’s event, according to Mr. Harrison, the former chief executive. In addition to Mr. Clinton’s desire to return to the spotlight, some see the former first daughter as a motivating force.Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Clinton this month debuted a documentary series on AppleTV+ called “Gutsy,” in which mother and daughter talk to famous women and activists. Mrs. Clinton, who has also written or co-written four books, two with Chelsea, since the 2016 election, took the stage Monday afternoon to a standing ovation.“I don’t know about you, but when people ask me how I am these days, I often say: ‘Well, personally I’m great. I’m just worried about everything,’” Mrs. Clinton told the crowd.Shortly thereafter, on the same stage, Ms. French Gates announced a $50 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fund scholarships at a health sciences university in Rwanda in the name of Dr. Paul Farmer, who died unexpectedly in February.“Someone else has stepped up who also appreciates, respects and understands the value of this work,” Mrs. Clinton then said. “One of Paul’s friend’s here in our CGI community has just told us about making a gift of $10 million more dollars.”The foundation started in 1997 as the charitable vehicle to pay for the design and construction of Mr. Clinton’s presidential library. It had its share of controversy pretty quickly, with the Marc Rich pardon and donations an issue as he left the White House. In 2002, the Clintons started the Clinton H.I.V./AIDS Initiative, with the goal of saving the lives of millions of people around the world living with the disease. Today it continues as the Clinton Health Access Initiative, though it spun off from the foundation in 2010.When the Clinton Global Initiative debuted in 2005, George W. Bush was president. Hillary Clinton was a New York senator and a likely presidential contender herself. Bill Clinton was a recent two-term president. Chelsea seemed poised to follow in her parents’ footsteps.Chelsea Clinton with her parents at the conference.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe first version of the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2005, was timed to the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. The currency of the initiative was the “commitment.” Attendees were encouraged to make commitments that were then tallied at $2.5 billion in pledges from 300 people, to a variety of causes including global poverty, conflict resolution and climate change.The September traffic jam of motorcades zipping between events during the United Nations General Assembly were the moment to extract these pledges.“I think CGI was the rocket fuel on all of this,” said John Prendergast, co-founder of the Sentry, who has appeared on several panels with heads of state there over the years. “He has this real nose for pulling these various communities together,” he said of Mr. Clinton.Now there are numerous other events competing for attention and attendance, including the Concordia Summit and the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers event.Donna Shalala, the former health and human services secretary and former president of the Clinton Foundation, said in an interview that they had ended the Clinton Global Initiative to avoid any potential conflict of interest with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.“It was painful,” she said. “Let me assure you the president loves CGI and the rest of us did. And the foundation was defined by CGI, it’s what everyone knew us for.”When the election ended and Mrs. Clinton lost, it was not a simple matter of cranking up the annual meeting again.“This is not just hitting pause on a song; it’s like shutting down a nuclear reactor, you don’t just keep flipping the switch on and off,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “Once you turn it off, there’s an energy and a ramp-up that’s involved and time consuming.”Even after a dormant period for the initiative, the foundation’s signature event, tax filings show that the foundation had net assets of over $300 million as of the 2020 tax year, the most recent available.For nonprofits, CGI can be a powerful place to raise funds and make connections.Gary White, the chief executive and a co-founder of Water.org, said he had met some of his most important donors at CGI, including the PepsiCo Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation and the Ikea Foundation.“Where the rubber meets the road is at CGI, where they are there to make commitments not just as a side show,” Mr. White said.He also met the actor Matt Damon at CGI, in 2008, when his organization was called Water Partners. Mr. Damon had his own group, known as H2O Africa. The next year they announced that they had merged their groups. This year, they made a commitment to deliver clean water and sanitation to 100 million people in need, a goal the group says it is nearly halfway to meeting.Mr. Clinton’s opening remarks at the conference came out a little quiet, a hint raspier than usual, a tiny bit slow.He made a reference to “someone who had no dog in the hunt,” and then quipped, “You must forgive me if I sometimes slip off into my colloquial past.” The audience laughed, relief palpable, as the old charm emerged.Toward the end of his first panel, Mr. Clinton told the participants, “I wish I could keep you here the rest of the day.”After that panel, Mr. Clinton leaned down from the stage to grasp hands, smile, pose for photographs and talk to the crowd. He beamed, campaign-trail muscle memory seeming to kick in. As the Secret Service tried to move him along, one had the distinct impression that the former president never wanted to leave the stage. More

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      Rob Stein, Who Changed How Politics Is Funded, Dies at 78

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      In the wake of Republican electoral victories in 2004, he convened major liberal donors to finance a network of political groups aligned with Democrats.Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who helped reshape American politics by pioneering new ways for wealthy liberals to influence policy debates and elections, died on Monday at a hospice facility in Washington. He was 78.His son Gideon said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer.After a varied career in which he worked as a public interest lawyer and a top adviser to the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration and created nonprofit groups and a venture capital fund, Mr. Stein found his calling in the wake of the 2002 elections.The president’s party usually fares poorly in midterm elections, but Republicans captured the Senate, giving them control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, as well as the majority of governorships and state legislative seats. This left Mr. Stein concerned that Republicans could be headed for long-term dominance if Democrats failed to understand and counter their rivals’ superior tactics and political machinery.He spent months obsessing over the advocacy groups and think tanks that collectively constituted the conservative movement. He routinely stayed awake past midnight studying tax filings to map the flow of cash to these groups.Mr. Stein crystallized his research into a PowerPoint presentation called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” which was intended as a sort of Rosetta stone for understanding the conservative movement and its funding. He began showing it to Democratic political operatives and major donors around the country, developing a following among some of the most influential figures on the left.After President George W. Bush was re-elected and Republicans increased their majorities in Congress in 2004, Mr. Stein launched a coalition of major liberal donors, the Democracy Alliance, to offset the Republican advantages detailed in his presentation. Each member had to commit to donating at least $200,000 a year to groups recommended by the alliance — including outfits supporting progressive causes, like fighting climate change and protecting abortion rights, that generally aligned with the Democratic Party.Its founding members included some of the biggest donors on the left, among them the financier George Soros.The alliance’s donors have combined to give more than $2 billion to recommended groups, the organization said. Their donations have helped seed some of the most important institutions on the left, including America Votes, Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.It wasn’t long before Republicans were trying to organize donor coalitions of their own to mimic some of the strategy behind the Democracy Alliance.“It just changed the way people thought about their philanthropy,” said David Brock, the former conservative journalist who became a leading Democratic operative and who founded Media Matters.In the 2022 election cycle, Media Matters and a network of affiliated groups subsequently created by Mr. Brock are on pace to spend $100 million, Mr. Brock said. He added that none of that would have been possible without Mr. Stein and the Democracy Alliance.“It was revolutionary for our side, and over the last 20 years it was the sole reason why sustainable Democratic infrastructure got built,” he said.Mr. Stein, center, with Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, and Kerry Healey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in 2018. Mr. Stein worked on building coalitions of donors and operatives across party lines.Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia SummitRobert Jay Stein was born on Oct. 26, 1943, in Wheeling, W.Va. His father, Charles, owned a chain of lumberyards, and his mother, Janis (Harrison) Stein, was involved in local arts, social service and religious organizations.He graduated from the Linsly Military Institute (now the Linsly School) in Wheeling before attending Antioch College in Ohio, a hotbed of progressive politics and activism.The abrupt transition shaped Mr. Stein’s politics.“It opened my brain to both conservative values and liberal values, and I became respectful of both, even though over time I became more in the liberal camp,” Mr. Stein said in an interview last month.He went on to the George Washington University Law School in Washington, where he would make his home for the rest of his life.He worked as a public interest lawyer for 10 years, then helped create or run a series of nonprofit organizations focused on issues including nutrition, refugees, organizational management and voter participation.Ahead of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Stein was recruited to develop a presentation about mobilizing voters. That led to positions as an adviser to the Democratic National Committee under Chairman Ronald H. Brown, and then as chief of staff to Mr. Brown when President Bill Clinton named him commerce secretary in 1993.Mr. Stein left the Commerce Department shortly before Mr. Brown’s death in a plane crash in 1996 to help start a venture capital fund focused on women-owned businesses. When he formed the Democracy Alliance, he infused it with principles typically associated with venture investing.In addition to his son Gideon, from his marriage to Mary Ann (Efroymson) Stein, which ended in divorce, Mr. Stein is survived by his wife, Ellen Miley Perry; their daughter, Kat Stein; two other children from his first marriage, Dorothy and Noah Stein; and five grandchildren.After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision prompted a surge in political spending, much of it funded by undisclosed sources, Mr. Stein grew increasingly concerned that big money was deepening polarization and distrust in government.While he urged Democrats not to “unilaterally disarm,” he also began talking about ways to bridge partisan divides and reform politics. That became a larger part of Mr. Stein’s focus after Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016.He advised several groups on building coalitions of donors and operatives across the political spectrum to fight what he saw as a slide into authoritarianism exacerbated by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stein applied thinking and strategy from the Democracy Alliance to encourage “a new cross-partisan pro-democracy infrastructure,” said Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican operative who has worked to loosen Mr. Trump’s grip on the party.“He was especially attentive to those of us on the right who had never had common cause with Democrats,” said Ms. Longwell, who helped create and run two organizations that oppose Mr. Trump and his allies: the Bulwark website and the political group Defending Democracy Together.She said Mr. Stein, whom she considers a mentor, was “a relentless cheerleader for the project of democracy.” More

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      Mark Zuckerberg Ends Election Grants

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      Mark Zuckerberg, who donated nearly half a billion dollars to election offices across the nation in 2020 and drew criticism from conservatives suspicious of his influence on the presidential election, won’t be making additional grants this year, a spokesman for the Facebook founder confirmed on Tuesday.The spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the donations by Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were never intended to be a stream of funding for the administration of elections.The couple gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments, which were grappling with a shortfall of government funding as they adopted new procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.The infusion of private donations helped to pay for new ballot-counting equipment, efforts to expand mail-in voting, personal protective equipment and the training of poll workers.It also sowed seeds of mistrust among supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Critics referred to the grants as “Zuckerbucks” and some frequently claimed, without evidence, that the money was used to help secure Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Several states controlled by Republicans banned private donations to election offices in response.“As Mark and Priscilla made clear previously, their election infrastructure donation to help ensure that Americans could vote during the height of the pandemic was a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis,” Mr. LaBolt said in an email on Tuesday. “They have no plans to repeat that donation.”The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group with liberal ties that became a vessel for $350 million of the contributions from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan in 2020, announced on Monday that it was shifting to a different model for supporting the work of local election administrators.During an appearance on Monday at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Tiana Epps-Johnson, the center’s executive director, said that the organization would begin a five-year, $80 million program to help meet the needs of election departments across the country.Called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, the program will draw funding through the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collective housed at the TED organization, the center said. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are not involved in the new initiative, Mr. LaBolt said.At the event on Monday, Ms. Epps-Johnson said the grants distributed by the center in 2020 helped fill a substantial void of resources for those overseeing elections in the United States. One town in New England, she said without specifying, was able to replace voting equipment from the early 1900s that was held together with duct tape.“The United States election infrastructure is crumbling,” Ms. Epps-Johnson said.In addition to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $69.6 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research in 2020. At the time, that nonprofit group said that the top election officials in 23 states had applied for grants.Republicans have been unrelenting in their criticism of the social media mogul and his donations.While campaigning for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday in Perrysburg, Ohio, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has undergone a conversion to Trumpism, continued to accuse Mr. Zuckerberg of tipping the election in 2020 to Mr. Biden.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist, hasn’t exactly sworn off help from big tech. He counts Peter Thiel, a departing board member of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, and a major donor to Mr. Trump, as a top fund-raiser. Mr. Thiel has also supported Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.In an opinion piece for The New York Post last October, Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters called for Facebook’s influence to be curbed, writing that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent half a billion dollars to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”In Colorado, Tina Peters, the top vote-getter for secretary of state at the state Republican Party’s assembly last weekend, has been a fierce critic of Mr. Zuckerberg, even after her arrest this year on charges stemming from an election security breach. Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, is facing several felonies amid accusations that she allowed an unauthorized person to copy voting machine hard drive information. More