Presidential Election of 2020

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      My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing Donald Trump

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      When Donald Trump, the patron saint of sore losers, appeared at a Republican event on Saturday night and compared the 2020 election to a “third-world-country election like we’ve never seen before,” it wasn’t just another false rant from the former president. His words also described his attempted subversion of democracy in the run-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.Consider Mr. Trump’s remarks at his rally just before the attack: “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he said. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president.”Or consider Mr. Trump’s harassment of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with the request to “find” him votes, or his relentless harassment of other election officials and governors.Many Republicans want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But how is that possible when the former president won’t move on from the Nov. 3 election and continues to push the same incendiary lies that resulted in 61 failed lawsuits before Jan. 6, led to an insurrection and could lead to yet more violence?If you doubt that a threat of violence exists, look at the recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which shows that a dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory is believed by 15 percent of our fellow Americans — including almost one in four Republicans, 14 percent of independents and even 8 percent of Democrats.Republicans, instead of opposing a commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, need to be at the forefront of seeking answers on the insurrection and diminishing the power of QAnon and the other conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump has fueled. While he is still popular within the party, Mr. Trump is a diminished political figure: 66 percent of Americans now hope he won’t run again in 2024, including 30 percent of Republicans. He is not the future, and Republicans need to stop fearing him. He will continue to damage the party if we don’t face the Jan. 6 facts head-on.Nothing less than a full investigation is essential. As a House Republican chief counsel during the Clinton administration, I see a clear set of unanswered questions about Jan. 6, as well as evidence that needs to be gathered and that our country needs to understand. An investigation should cover the events related and leading up to Jan. 6, as well as all the parties involved. Who planned and funded the Trump rally that day, and who picked the speakers and got attendees there? How did supporters of QAnon, Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys get there? What happened as the White House planned for Jan. 6?Whether it is a congressionally formed commission or a congressional committee, the subpoenas and testimony would produce records that tell the story. Imagine all the thousands of texts, emails, phone calls and other records from the weeks leading to and on Jan. 6 that are not yet part of the public record. This material will come out eventually — in hearings, in books or in the media — but Republicans should be part of the process, to help provide accountability and prevent future attacks.While a commission would be best, a congressional select committee with a five-Democrat, five-Republican split and the same rules as a commission would have, could also work. In the meantime, any standing committee with subpoena power could begin the information-gathering process immediately.Many Republican leaders seem to think any all-encompassing investigation will be bad for the party. I disagree. Some prominent Republicans want to uncover the truth, as are police officers who heroically protected members of Congress and their staff on Jan. 6. Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after engaging with the Trump-inspired mob, supported Mr. Trump. Officer Michael Fanone, who was shocked multiple times with a stun gun and beaten and suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, told me he is a Republican. Officer Harry Dunn said: “We were victims of an assault, of an attack, and we deserve justice and we deserve to know everybody who was involved, and we want them held accountable.” Many of our officers feel they are being left on the field, and they wonder, what happened to “Back the Blue.”Mr. Trump’s lies are red meat to those in the conspiracy world who have already demonstrated what they are prepared to do. The danger also extends to states, as Mr. Trump tells people that election outcomes in Georgia and Arizona will be overturned, and he could be reinstated as president in August. How will QAnon followers or Oath Keepers respond when that does not happen?Many Republicans rationalize ignoring his rhetoric: His speech on Saturday wasn’t even aired live on Fox or CNN, and he may end up being indicted in New York and occupied with legal and financial problems. So, this thinking goes, what’s the harm in humoring the guy a little longer?The harm is that the lies have metastasized and could threaten public safety again. The U.S. Capitol Police report that threats against members of Congress have increased 107 percent this year. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, has noted, “There’s no reason to believe that anybody organically is going to come to the truth.” Representative Liz Cheney, another Republican, said, “It’s an ongoing threat, so silence is not an option.”Humoring the guy also emboldens Mr. Trump’s pardoned allies like Steve Bannon and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Republicans are now flocking to Mr. Bannon’s podcast to audition for Mr. Trump’s support, and Mr. Bannon says “a litmus test” will be whether they are willing to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election. Later this month, Mr. Flynn will appear at an Oklahoma campaign rally with Jackson Lahmeyer, a political novice who is challenging Senator James Lankford, the Republican incumbent. Mr. Lahmeyer claims the 2020 election was stolen and touts Mr. Flynn’s endorsement, saying we have to be willing to “Fight Like a Flynn.”Republicans would be better advised to fight like Senator Margaret Chase Smith. During the Joseph McCarthy era in 1950, she advised fellow Republicans that the Democrats had already provided Republicans with sufficient campaign issues, and they need not resort to McCarthy’s demagogy.The same is true today. Republicans need to have more faith in their policies and stop being afraid of a dangerous and diminished man who has divided the country and now divides our party. Reconsider the commission, let the investigation go ahead, and run and win in 2022 on the truth.Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican and a lawyer, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019.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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      In a Different Capitol Siege, Republicans in Oregon Call for Accountability

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      G.O.P. lawmakers in the state are calling for the resignation of a legislator who appears to have encouraged protesters to breach the State Capitol in December.A little more than two weeks before a mob of supporters of Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, falsely claiming that he had won the election, a strikingly similar event had unfolded on the other side of the country, at the State Capitol in Oregon.There, in December, a restive crowd had breached the exterior doors and battled law enforcement officers in a building that is capped by a gold-leaf pioneer wielding an ax. The agitators, waving Trump flags and clad in body armor, wielded pepper spray and smashed windows. “Arrest Kate Brown!” the crowd chanted, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.Republicans in Congress have resisted a full, formal investigation into the much larger attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, but in Oregon, lawmakers facing new evidence about the Dec. 21 siege in Salem are taking a different approach. On Monday, the state’s House Republican caucus signed a letter encouraging the resignation of a colleague, Representative Mike Nearman, who in a newly discovered video appeared to be coaching protesters on how they might gain access to the building.The House Republican leader, Christine Drazan, said on Tuesday that she believed there was enough support in her caucus to expel Mr. Nearman from the State Legislature if he did not resign. Legislators in the state have never before expelled one of their own.“I would hope that Representative Nearman would make the decision to not be the first,” Ms. Drazan said in an interview.The protest in Salem was part of a series of demonstrations that broke out across the country after the Nov. 3 election as supporters egged on by Mr. Trump mobilized to contest an election they falsely believed had been stolen. Some of the protests targeted state leaders who had imposed lockdowns and mask orders to counter the coronavirus pandemic.In Salem on Dec. 21, dozens of people mobilized outside the Capitol, expressing frustration that the building had been closed to the public amid the pandemic. Carrying signs condemning the “lying lockdown” and shouting, “Let us in,” some in the crowd surged through an open door on the building’s north side before law enforcement officers moved to confront them.A larger crowd later managed to push in through the doorway but, facing a line of officers in riot gear, they did not reach the rotunda area or areas of the building where legislators were working. Officers later made some arrests and cleared the building.In the months since the breach, videos have made it clear that the crowd had assistance from someone on the inside. Security footage made public days afterward showed Mr. Nearman, who has represented a district that lies south and west of Salem for the past six years, opening a door in a way that allowed protesters inside as he left the building. Mr. Nearman, who walked around the building and re-entered it, faces misdemeanor charges of official misconduct and criminal trespass.After the first video emerged, Mr. Nearman said he did not condone violence but also said he believed that legislative proceedings should be open to the public.Then last week, new footage surfaced, suggesting not only that he may have expected protesters to enter the building, but that he had offered to help them. The video, earlier reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, appeared to be streamed online a few days before the December intrusion. It showed Mr. Nearman making public remarks in which he coyly gives out his own cellphone number with a suggestion that anyone who might need to enter the Capitol building could text him if they needed a way inside. He referred to the idea as “Operation Hall Pass.”“That is just random numbers that I spewed out. That’s not anybody’s actual cellphone,” Mr. Nearman said after giving out his cell number. “And if you say, ‘I’m at the West entrance’ during the session and text to that number there, that somebody might exit that door while you’re standing there. But I don’t know anything about that.”Barbara Smith Warner, a Democratic lawmaker from Portland who is the House majority leader, said she found it hard to believe that a sitting legislator would put everyone in the building at risk, not only by intentionally opening the door but by doing it in a premeditated way.“That is mind-boggling,” Ms. Smith Warner said. “If that’s not traitorous, I don’t know what is.”Mr. Nearman did not respond to messages seeking comment. In an interview with the conservative radio host Lars Larson, Mr. Nearman said he had been “clowning around” in the video and “setting up” for what he had assumed would be a peaceful protest. He said he had been speaking in the video to a group that was not known to be violent.“I’m willing to have some consequences for what I did, or whatever, but this is super extreme,” Mr. Nearman said.Ms. Smith Warner said she came to see the Dec. 21 siege as a kind of dress rehearsal for what happened in the nation’s Capitol a few weeks later, with the same types of grievances on display. While Republican legislators in Oregon had been largely silent about the December siege until now, she said, she applauded those who were now willing to take on the issue.“I don’t want to minimize that at least some of the Republicans here are doing the right thing,” Ms. Smith Warner said. “That is no small thing. I do think their base will consider that a betrayal.”The U.S. House voted in May to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, which left several people dead, injured law enforcement officers and had lawmakers fleeing for safety as a mob ransacked the complex. But that plan for a broader accounting of the day was stalled by Republicans in the Senate who appeared to fear the political consequences of an open-ended inquiry.In Oregon, House Speaker Tina Kotek announced that a bipartisan special committee would convene this week to consider whether Mr. Nearman should be expelled. Ms. Drazan, the Republican leader, said she believed that the matter should have been handled by a different committee but supported the idea of considering expulsion.If a resolution to expel goes to the full House, it would need 40 of the chamber’s 60 lawmakers to approve it. The chamber has 37 Democrats.Ms. Drazan said she did not see much of a parallel between the siege in Washington and the one in Salem, and said she preferred to keep her focus on events in Oregon rather than weighing in on how Republicans in Congress should handle the Jan. 6 events. She said she hoped Republican lawmakers would be as focused on doing the right thing in their own party as they have been on criticizing the opposing party.“I am just exhausted by national politics,” Ms. Drazan said. “They just need to get their act together. They need to start to serve the greater good.”Ms. Drazan noted that when Republican Party leadership in Oregon passed a resolution that embraced the unfounded conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 attack was a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Mr. Trump’s supporters, her caucus in the Legislature disavowed the resolution, declaring that there was no evidence of a false flag effort and that the election was over.“We have, I hope, a clear-minded view of what is public service and what is not,” Ms. Drazan said.Mr. Nearman was among those who signed the letter. More

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      Are We Destined for a Trump Coup in 2024?

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      I wrote my weekend column about three ways that Donald Trump might be prevented from plunging the country into crisis in 2024, should he reproduce both his 2020 defeat and his quest to overturn the outcome: first, through the dramatic electoral overhauls favored by progressives; second, through a Bidenist politics of normalcy that prevents the G.O.P. from capturing the House or Senate; or third, through the actions of Republican officials who keep their heads down and don’t break with Trump but, as in 2020, refuse to go along if he turns another loss into an attempted putsch. More

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      Republicans Win Two Texas Mayoral Races, Including One in McAllen, Which is 85 Percent Hispanic

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      Republicans in Texas celebrated on Monday after winning two closely watched mayoral elections in the state on Saturday, taking control of cities in Democratic counties.The party was particularly buoyed by its performance in McAllen, a border city of 143,000 that is 85 percent Hispanic, where Javier Villalobos, a former chairman of the local Republican Party, defeated a candidate backed by local Democrats by 206 votes out of 9,282 cast.Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, hailed Mr. Villalobos’s victory as part of a larger political realignment of Hispanic voters that revealed itself in the 2020 election, when President Biden drastically underperformed against expectations, and previous Democratic margins, in several Texas border counties with large numbers of Hispanic voters.Mr. Biden won Hidalgo County, which includes McAllen, by 17 percentage points. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton carried the county by 40 points.Mr. Villalobos, a local lawyer who is a city commissioner, celebrated his victory by riding a bicycle built for two with Jim Darling, McAllen’s departing mayor. Mr. Darling did not seek re-election after eight years in office.In Fort Worth, Democrats had hoped Deborah Peoples, a former Tarrant County Democratic Party chairwoman, could win an open-seat mayoral race. Ms. Peoples had endorsements from Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro, high-profile Texas Democrats who ran for president in 2020.But Ms. Peoples lost to Mattie Parker, a former chief of staff to Fort Worth’s departing mayor, retaining Republican control of the largest city in Tarrant County, which flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020 after decades of backing Republican presidential candidates.Though both municipal contests were officially nonpartisan, Ms. Parker and Mr. Villalobos each identified as Republicans while their defeated opponents said they were Democrats. More

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      Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections

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      The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, a company hired by the Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate to review the state’s 2020 election results, moving supplies last month at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.Courtney Pedroza for The New York Times“I would not have voted to certify Jan. 6, not without more questions,” said Sam Peters, a Nevada Republican who is campaigning for a Las Vegas-area House seat. He said he was not sure that Mr. Biden had legitimately won Nevada, even though the president did so by more than 33,000 votes.It’s unclear how long the reluctance to accept unfavorable electoral outcomes will remain a central focus of the party, and to what degree Republicans might support widespread election challenges up and down the ballot in the future.But Republicans’ unwavering fealty to the voter fraud myth underscores an emerging dynamic of party politics: To build a campaign in the modern G.O.P., most candidates must embrace — or at least not openly deny — conspiracy theories and election lies, and they must commit to a mission of imposing greater voting restrictions and making it easier to challenge or even overturn an election’s results. The prevalence of such candidates in the nascent stages of the party primaries highlights how Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace far-flung falsehoods has elevated fringe ideas to the mainstream of his party.Over a year before the midterm elections, many of the fledgling primary races remain in flux, with scores of potential candidates still weighing bids. The Census Bureau’s delays in producing detailed population data have pushed the redistricting process back until at least September, which has impeded the recruitment of candidates for both parties.The result is that Republicans who have jumped into campaigns early tend to be those most loyal to Mr. Trump and the party base. Several among this new class of Republicans are likely to win their races, helped by historical trends favoring the party out of the White House, and a head start on fund-raising and meeting potential voters.Victories by these Republicans would expand the number of congressional lawmakers who have supported overturning the 2020 results, raising new doubts about whether Americans can still count on the routine, nonpartisan certification of free and fair elections.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman, is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump. Mr. Richardson said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMr. Peters already has a list of questions he would ask before voting to certify the 2024 election results, should he be in Congress then.“I’ll want to know that the elections have been transparent and that the states that have certified their elections did not have significant issues and questions that still haven’t been answered,” he said in a recent interview. “I want to know that the states have certified them properly.”Mr. Trump and his allies remain relentlessly focused on the false claims about the election. Steve Bannon, the on-and-off Trump adviser, said in an interview late last month with NBC News that challenging the results of the 2020 election was a “litmus test” for Republican candidates running in 2022 primary races. The former president has been pushing reviews of last year’s results, like a widely criticized Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona, and he continued his effort in a speech in North Carolina last weekend.Some party strategists fear that the denials of the election outcome could hurt candidates who progress to the general election in the crucial swing districts Republicans must win to take control of Congress.Polling shows a significant disconnect between Republicans and independent voters. A recent survey from Quinnipiac University found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate, an opinion shared by just 28 percent of independent voters.“It’s one of those things that is in the water with these very online, very loud and very active primary voters,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist and veteran of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns. “It’s a problem and it’s dangerous for the party to continue to flirt with this conspiracy theory, but I don’t think Republicans are really paying a price for it.”The election-skeptical Republicans span safe districts and battlegrounds. Derrick Van Orden, running for a second time in a Democratic-held district in western Wisconsin that Mr. Trump carried in 2020, published an op-ed article defending his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally near the Capitol, saying he had gone to “stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”A “Stop the Steal” demonstrator outside the Capitol on Jan. 3 as members of the new Congress were sworn in. Three days later, rioting Trump supporters broke into the building.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMany Republicans are simply trying to deflect the question of Mr. Biden’s legitimacy with pledges to crack down on voter fraud, rebuild “election integrity” and support more voting restrictions.In December, State Senator Jen Kiggans of Virginia, campaigning for a competitive U.S. House seat based around Norfolk, issued a nearly 900-word statement on Facebook detailing her commitment to restoring “voter confidence” but making no mention of Mr. Biden or whether she disputed the 2020 results. (Her primary opponent, Jarome Bell, said during an interview with Mr. Bannon that people involved in election fraud should be sentenced “to death.”)“I agree with you 100% that it is right to question the electoral process and to hold those accountable who are responsible for ensuring our elections are conducted fairly with the utmost integrity,” Ms. Kiggans wrote in her statement.Even Republican candidates who acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimate winner say potential fraud needs to be addressed. Mary Ann Hanusa, a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is running for Congress in Iowa, said she would have voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, but she added that because of the coronavirus, changes to voting practices in several states “were made outside of law and when you do that, it really opens up the door to fraud.”Senate primaries so far seem to be competitions to decide which candidates can cast themselves as the strongest allies of Mr. Trump and his quixotic quest to overturn the election results.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who spoke at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, is seeking a promotion to the Senate. Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, whom Mr. Trump endorsed during his speech on Saturday night, introduced his Senate campaign with a video promising to “make sure our elections are fair” — a barely coded reference to Mr. Trump’s claims.In Ohio, a super PAC called the USA Freedom Fund is attacking official and prospective candidates for being insufficiently loyal to the former president and “America First” principles, while backing Josh Mandel, the Republican former Ohio state treasurer.“I am the only candidate in Ohio who gets up wherever he speaks around the state and has the guts to say this election was stolen from Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Mandel said last month on a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.Perhaps no 2022 House candidate embodies the new Republican ethos more than Loren Culp, a former one-man police department from rural Republic, Wash., who made his name by refusing to enforce a new state gun law in 2018. He spent weeks refusing to concede the governor’s race last year, and he sued state officials before dropping his lawsuit in January under pressure from the state attorney general.In an interview last week, Mr. Culp said he believed fraud had cost him the election, despite his loss by more than half a million votes to Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.Now Mr. Culp is running to unseat Representative Dan Newhouse, a four-term Republican from a conservative and largely rural central Washington district who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January. Mr. Culp said that he had a better chance of winning a House election than a statewide one because, he argued, Washington’s all-mail election system makes fraud too easy to perpetuate in the Seattle area.Loren Culp, right, Republicans’ nominee for governor of Washington last year, at a rally in Mount Vernon in August. He spent weeks refusing to concede the race and sued state officials.Elaine Thompson/Associated Press“I don’t believe that a real conservative will win a statewide race in Washington until we go back to in-person voting,” Mr. Culp said, echoing the skepticism of mail voting that Mr. Trump pushed for months leading into November. “Congressional districts are smaller geographical areas with less people dealing with the ballots. So it’s a whole lot easier to keep tabs on things.”Republican candidates’ 2020 skepticism comes as the party’s base voters, moving in near-lockstep with Mr. Trump and influential voices in the conservative media, have told pollsters that they, too, believe Mr. Biden was not the legitimate winner. G.O.P. candidates say it does not take much for their constituents to raise questions about the election to them.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman who is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, said his events were regularly delayed because voters inundated him with questions about the election.“When I go to give a speech, it takes 10 to 15 minutes before I can start, because the election is the first thing anybody wants to talk about,” Mr. Richardson, who said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election, said in a recent interview. “I go ahead and let them get it out of their system and then I can get started.”“There’s definitely a reason to doubt,” he added. “There’s doubt out there.”And then there is Audra Johnson, who became briefly famous in 2019 after wearing a “Make America Great Again” wedding dress created by Andre Soriano, a conservative fashion designer.Ms. Johnson is now running against Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, a Republican who supported impeachment. She believes Mr. Trump was the rightful winner last year and said that, if elected, she would work to audit voting machines, enact a national voter identification law and create more “transparency” in election results.“It’s coming down to the point where anybody can vote in our elections,” she said. “That’s not how the system is supposed to be set up.” More

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      Arizona 2020 Election Review: Risks for Republicans and Democracy

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      Experts call it a circus. Polls say it will hurt the G.O.P. in 2022. But Republicans are on board in Arizona and elsewhere, despite warnings of lasting damage to the political system.SURPRISE, Ariz. — Rob Goins is 57, a former Marine and a lifelong Republican in a right-leaning jigsaw of golf courses, strip malls and gated retirement communities pieced together in the Arizona desert. But ask about the Republican-backed review of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 election victory here in Maricopa County, and Mr. Goins rejects the party line.“There’s a lot of folks out there trying to make something out of nothing,” he said recently as he loaded purchases into his vehicle outside a Home Depot. “I don’t think there was any fraud. My opinion of this is that it’s a big lie.”Mr. Goins is flesh-and-blood evidence of what political analysts here are all but shouting: The Republican State Senate’s autopsy of the 2020 vote, broadly seen as a shambolic, partisan effort to nurse grievances about Donald J. Trump’s loss here in November, risks driving away some of the very people the party needs to win statewide elections in 2022.That Arizona Republicans are ignoring that message — and that Republicans in other states are now trying to mount their own Arizona-style audits — raises worrisome questions not just about their strategy, but about its impact on an American democracy facing fundamental threats.Now in its seventh week, the review of 2.1 million votes in Arizona’s most populous county has ballooned not just into a national political spectacle, but also a political wind sock for the Republican Party — an early test of how its renewed subservience to Mr. Trump would play with voters.The returns to date are not encouraging for the party. A late-May poll of 400 Arizonans by the respected consulting firm HighGround Inc. found that more than 55 percent of respondents opposed the vote review, most of them strongly. Fewer than 41 percent approved of it. By about 45 to 33 percent, respondents said they were less likely — much less, most said — to vote for a Republican candidate who supported the review.Workers recounting 2020 general election ballots in Phoenix last month.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe review itself, troubled by procedural blunders and defections, has largely sacrificed any claim to impartiality. The Pennsylvania computer forensics firm that was conducting the hand recount of ballots quit without a clear explanation this month, adding further chaos to a count that election authorities and other critics say has been making up its rules as it went along.“If they were voting on it again today, they would have withheld doing this, because it’s been nothing but a headache,” Jim Kolbe, a Republican congressman from southeast Arizona from 1985 to 2003, said of the Republican state senators who are backing the review. “It’s a black mark on Arizona’s reputation.”Instead, the Republicans in the Arizona Senate have doubled down. And as the review’s notoriety has grown, pro-Trump Republicans in other states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have begun to promote their own plans to investigate the November vote, even though — as in Arizona — elections in those states have been certified as accurate and free from any fraud that could have affected the outcome.The sudden interest in exhuming the November election is explained by another number from the poll in Arizona: While only about 41 percent of all 400 respondents said they supported the Maricopa audit, almost 77 percent of Republican respondents did.Among the Trump supporters who dominate the Republican Party, skepticism about the election results, fueled almost entirely by Mr. Trump’s lies, remains unshaken, and catering to it is politically profitable. Leslie S. Minkus, 77, is a business consultant in Chandler, another Republican stronghold just southeast of Phoenix. His wife, Phyllis, serves on the local Republican legislative district committee. “The majority of voters here in Arizona know that this election was stolen,” he said in an interview. “It’s pretty obvious that our alleged president is not more popular than previous presidents, and still wound up getting a majority of the vote.”Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in Goodyear, Ariz., last year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOpposition to the review by Democrats and some Republicans — including the Republican-run county board of supervisors and the Republican who is the chief county election officer — only shows that they have something to hide, Mr. Minkus added. And as for previous checks of ballots and voting equipment that showed no sign of fraud, he said, “I don’t think anybody would agree that the audits done in the past were independent.”In conversations with a range of Phoenix-area residents, many who supported the review were more equivocal than Mr. Minkus. “I think there was fraud going on. I mean, every election, there’s fraud,” said Eric M. Fauls, a 56-year-old California expatriate who moved to a golfing community in Surprise three years ago. “California — it was really bad — but I mean, California is never going to go Republican. With a swing state, it’s really important, so I think it’s worth doing an audit.”Still, he said, “I don’t know if there’s enough evidence either way to make it legitimate.”Most of the review’s critics, on the other hand, left little doubt of their feelings. “It’s a threat to our democracy. I think there’s no doubt about that,” said Dan Harlan, a defense-industry employee who changed his lifelong Republican registration to Democrat last year so he could help pick Mr. Trump’s opponent. “This audit is being conducted because the Republican Party refuses to look at long-term demographics and realize they can no longer be the party of the white male. And they’re doing everything they can to maintain power.“It’s not about democracy; it’s about winning,” he said. “And when any organization becomes more concerned with maintaining itself, losing its core values is no longer important.”Jane Davis, an 89-year-old retired nurse, was a Republican for 40 years before she re-registered as an independent and voted last year for Mr. Biden. The State Senate Republicans have backed an audit, she said, “to cause problems.”“I think it’s ridiculous, and I object to their spending any taxpayer money” on the review, she said.Protesters last month outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where ballots from the 2020 general election were being recounted. Courtney Pedroza/Getty ImagesChuck Coughlin, the Phoenix pollster who conducted the Arizona survey, said people like the Minkuses were in firm control of the state Republican Party in no small part because they are the ones who vote. Four in five Republican primary-election voters, he said, are 50 or older.By itself, that white-hot core is not large enough to wield power in statewide elections, Mr. Coughlin said. But it is plenty large enough to advance Mr. Trump’s narrative of a corrupt elite that is stealing power from the nation’s true patriots, particularly when it is stoked by politicians.“Historically on these big issues, you have a lively public discussion and then it goes away; the issue moves on to something else,” he said. “But this is an issue that we’re dwelling on because it’s to Trump’s advantage that the party continues to dwell on it — on his loss, and his victimhood and his identity.“I feel legitimately bad for these people that they’re so wounded that they are willing to take their party and a heretofore vibrant democracy down with it.”Indeed, some elections experts say that’s why the politics of the “audit,” as extravagantly flawed as it is, may be more complex than meets the eye. If it is about winning elections and building a majority, it looks like a political loser. If it’s about permanent grievance and undermining faith in the democratic system for political gain, maybe not.Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate president, and other Republicans have insisted that their election review is not intended to contest Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, but to address voters’ concerns that the election had been stolen. In practice, those experts say, the review keeps the stolen-election narrative front and center in the state’s politics, slowly eroding faith in representative government.Karen Fann, president of the Arizona Senate last year. She said the purpose of the review was to address concerns of Trump voters that the election had been stolen. Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press“The problem is that Americans have a real lack of trust in institutions these days,” said William Mishler, a longtime expert on democratic institutions at the University of Arizona. And even many who regard the Arizona election review as a discredited, amateur exercise “fear the mischief that’s likely to come out of this in the form of some further undermining of confidence in the election outcome.”Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime student of the American political system, said the Arizona election review highlighted a seismic shift in the rules of American democracy. In years past, political parties were forces for moderation, trying to appeal to as many voters as possible. Now, he said, one of the two major parties was taking precisely the opposite tack.“We’ve had crazies in public life before,” he said. “We’ve had demagogues speaking out and sometimes winning high office. The difference this time is that they’re being encouraged rather than constrained by party and election officials.” Without some check on radicalism, he said, “our whole system breaks down.”Mr. Mishler concurred. “What worries me is not that there’s a minority of crazies in the party,” he said of the Republicans. “It’s that there’s a majority of the crazies.”That said, election inquiries only count votes. Mr. Mishler, Mr. Mann and Mr. Kolbe, the former representative, all said that a more imminent threat to democracy was what they called an effort by some Republicans to disregard votes entirely. They cited changes in state laws that could make challenging or nullifying election results easier, and a burst of candidacies by stolen-election advocates for crucial election posts such as secretary of state offices.Arizona is among the latter. The race to replace Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who s week that she was running for governor, already has attracted one Republican legislator who is an election conspiracy theorist and another who is perhaps the legislature’s leading supporter of restrictions on the right to vote.“These are perilous times,” Mr. Mann said. “Arizona is just demonstrating it.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      Democratic Report Raises 2022 Alarms on Messaging and Voter Outreach

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      A new report, in perhaps the most thorough soul-searching done by either party this year, points to an urgent need for the party to present a positive economic agenda and rebut Republican misinformation.Democrats defeated President Donald J. Trump and captured the Senate last year with a racially diverse coalition that delivered victories by tiny margins in key states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.In the next election, they cannot count on repeating that feat, a new report warns.A review of the 2020 election, conducted by several prominent Democratic advocacy groups, has concluded that the party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.The 70-page report, obtained by The New York Times, was assembled at the behest of three major Democratic interest groups: Third Way, a centrist think tank, and the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, which promote Black and Hispanic candidates. It appears to be the most thorough act of self-criticism carried out by Democrats or Republicans after the last campaign.The document is all the more striking because it is addressed to a victorious party: Despite their successes, Democrats had hoped to achieve more robust control of both chambers of Congress, rather than the ultra-precarious margins they enjoy.Read the reportThree prominent Democratic groups, Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund, conducted a review of the 2020 election.Read Document 73 pagesIn part, the study found, Democrats fell short of their aspirations because many House and Senate candidates failed to match Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support with voters of color who loathed Mr. Trump but distrusted the Democratic Party as a whole. Those constituencies included Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas, Vietnamese American and Filipino American voters in California, and Black voters in North Carolina.Overall, the report warns, Democrats in 2020 lacked a core argument about the economy and recovering from the coronavirus pandemic — one that might have helped candidates repel Republican claims that they wanted to “keep the economy shut down,” or worse. The party “leaned too heavily on ‘anti-Trump’ rhetoric,” the report concludes.“Win or lose, self-described progressive or moderate, Democrats consistently raised a lack of strong Democratic Party brand as a significant concern in 2020,” the report states. “In the absence of strong party branding, the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who lost re-election in South Florida in November, said in an interview that she had spoken with the authors of the report and raised concerns about Democratic outreach to Hispanic voters and the party’s failure to rebut misinformation in Spanish-language media.“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has in some ways lost touch with our electorate,” Ms. Mucarsel-Powell said. “There is this assumption that of course people of color, or the working class, are going to vote for Democrats. We can never assume anything.”The report, chiefly written by a pair of veteran Democratic operatives, Marlon Marshall and Lynda Tran, is among the most significant salvos yet in the Democratic Party’s internal debate about how it should approach the 2022 elections. It may stir skepticism from some quarters because of the involvement of Third Way, which much of the left regards with hostility.A fourth group that initially backed the study, the campaign finance reform group End Citizens United, backed away this spring. Tiffany Muller, the head of the group, said it had to abandon its involvement to focus instead on passing the For the People Act, a sweeping good-government bill that is stuck in the Senate.Former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat, lost re-election in South Florida last year. She remains worried about her party’s outreach to Hispanic voters.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMr. Marshall and Ms. Tran, as well as the groups sponsoring the review, have begun to share its conclusions with Democratic lawmakers and party officials in recent days, including Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.The study spanned nearly six months of research and data analysis that scrutinized about three dozen races for the House and the Senate, and involved interviews with 143 people, including lawmakers, candidates and pollsters, people involved in assembling the report said. Among the campaigns reviewed were the Senate elections in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as House races in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas, and in rural New Mexico and Maine.The study follows an internal review conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that was unveiled last month. Both projects found that Democratic candidates had been hobbled by flawed polling and pandemic-imposed limitations on campaigning.In the D.C.C.C. report, the committee attributed setbacks at the congressional level to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to attacks calling them police-hating socialists.Some lawmakers on the left have complained that criticism of left-wing messaging amounts to scapegoating activists for the party’s failures.Yet the review by Third Way, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund goes further in diagnosing the party’s messaging as deficient in ways that may have cost Democrats more than a dozen seats in the House. Its report offers a blunt assessment that in 2020, Republicans succeeded in misleading voters about the Democratic Party’s agenda and that Democrats had erred by speaking to voters of color as though they are a monolithic, left-leaning group.Representative Tony Cárdenas of California, who helms the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political action committee, embraced that critique of Democratic messaging and said the party should discard the assumption “that voters of color are inherently more progressive.”“That’s been a ridiculous idea and that’s never been true,” Mr. Cárdenas said, lamenting that Republicans had succeeded in “trying to confuse Latino voters with the socialism message, things of that nature, ‘defund the police.’”Quentin James, the president of the Collective PAC, said it was clear that “some of the rhetoric we see from coastal Democrats” had been problematic. Mr. James pointed to the activist demand to “defund” the police as especially harmful, even with supporters of policing overhauls.“We did a poll that showed Black voters, by and large, vastly support reforming the police and reallocating their budgets,” Mr. James said. “That terminology — ‘defund’ — was not popular in the Black community.”A report by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attributed the party’s setbacks to a surge in turnout by Trump supporters and an inadequate Democratic response to Republican attacks.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesKara Eastman, a progressive Democrat who lost her bid for a House seat based in Omaha, said Republicans had succeeded in delivering a “barrage of messages” that tarred her and her party as being outside the mainstream. Ms. Eastman said she had told the authors of the 2020 review that she believed those labels were particularly damaging to women.Matt Bennett, a Third Way strategist, said the party needed to be far better prepared to mount a defense in the midterm campaign.“We have got to take very seriously these attacks on Democrats as radicals and stipulate that they land,” Mr. Bennett said. “A lot of this just didn’t land on Joe Biden.”Democrats maintained a large advantage with voters of color in the 2020 elections, but the report identified telling areas of weakness. Mr. Biden and other Democrats lost ground with Latino voters relative to the party’s performance in 2016, “especially among working-class and non-college voters in these communities,” the report found.The report found that a surge in Asian American turnout appeared to have secured Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia but that Democratic House candidates ran behind Mr. Biden with Asian American voters in contested California and Texas races. In some important states, Democrats did not mobilize Black voters at the same rate that Republicans did conservative white voters.“A substantial boost in turnout netted Democrats more raw votes from Black voters than in 2016, but the explosive growth among white voters in most races outpaced these gains,” the report warns.There has been no comparable self-review on the Republican side after the party’s severe setbacks last year, mainly because G.O.P. leaders have no appetite for a debate about Mr. Trump’s impact.Republicans will continue to have structural advantages in Washington because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College. Erin Scott for The New York TimesThe Republican Party faces serious political obstacles, arising from Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, the growing liberalism of young voters and the country’s growing diversity. Many of the party’s policies are unpopular, including cutting social-welfare and retirement-security programs and keeping taxes low for the wealthy and big corporations.Yet the structure of the American electoral system has tilted national campaigns toward the G.O.P., because of congressional gerrymandering and the disproportionate representation of rural white voters in the Senate and the Electoral College.Democratic hopes for the midterm elections have so far hinged on the prospect of a strong recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and on voters’ regarding Republicans as a party unsuited to governing.Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a moderate Democrat who was briefed on the findings of the report, called it proof that the party needed a strong central message about the economy in 2022.“We need to continue to show the American people what we’ve done, and then talk incessantly across the country, in every town, about how Democrats are governing,” Ms. Sherrill said.Largely unaddressed in the report is the immense deficit Democrats face among lower-income white voters. In its conclusion, however, Mr. Marshall and Ms. Tran write that Democrats need to deliver a message that includes working-class whites and matches the G.O.P.’s clear “collective gospel” about low taxes and military strength.“Our gospel should be about championing all working people — including but not limited to white working people — and lifting up our values of opportunity, equity, inclusion,” they write. More

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      Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims

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      Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation.Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time.In the days before Christmas, as Mr. Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.Mr. Meadows also joined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote.Yet the newly unearthed messages show how Mr. Meadows’s private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish, and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Mr. Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Mr. Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss.“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”A spokesman for Mr. Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Mr. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.The requests by Mr. Meadows reflect Mr. Trump’s belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Mr. Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Mr. Trump also urged Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Trump continued to push Mr. Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.None of the emails show Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, agreeing to open investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.Ting Shen for The New York TimesThroughout those weeks, Mr. Rosen privately told Mr. Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William P. Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Meadows’s outreach to Mr. Rosen was audacious in part because it violated longstanding guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.“The Justice Department’s enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president. That’s the key idea that gave rise to these policies,” said W. Neil Eggleston, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. “If the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Nevertheless, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.On Jan. 1, Mr. Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Mr. Trump’s favor.Mr. Meadows had previously forwarded Mr. Rosen an email about possible fraud in Georgia that had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign. Two days after that email was sent to Mr. Rosen, Ms. Mitchell participated in the Jan. 2 phone call, during which she and Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to reconsider his findings that there had not been widespread voter fraud and that Mr. Biden had won. During the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him the votes necessary to declare victory in Georgia.Mr. Meadows also sent Mr. Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesman for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.And in his request that the Justice Department investigate the Italy conspiracy theory, Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link to a video of Brad Johnson, a former C.I.A. employee who had been pushing the theory in videos and statements that he posted online. After receiving the video, Mr. Rosen said in an email to another Justice Department official that he had been asked to set up a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the F.B.I., had refused, and had then been asked to reconsider.The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.Mr. Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.He is also negotiating with the Justice Department about what he can disclose to Congress and to the inspector general given his obligation to protect the department’s interests and not interfere with current investigations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Rosen said last month during a hearing before the oversight committee that he could not answer several questions because the department did not permit him to discuss issues covered by executive privilege.Mr. Durbin opened his inquiry in response to a Times article documenting how Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who had found favor with Mr. Trump, had pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded election fraud claims. The effort almost ended in Mr. Rosen’s ouster.Last month, Mr. Durbin asked the National Archives for any communications involving White House officials, and between the White House and any person at the Justice Department, concerning efforts to subvert the election, according to a letter obtained by The Times. He also asked for records related to meetings between White House and department employees.The National Archives stores correspondence and documents generated by past administrations. More