Presidential Election of 2020

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      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

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      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”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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      Death of QAnon Follower at Capitol Leaves a Wake of Pain

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      Rosanne Boyland had never voted before 2020, but she fell prey to dark conspiracy theories, family members said. She died on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and they are still not sure why.For months, Rosanne Boyland had been worrying her family with bizarre notions she had picked up on the internet: The actor Tom Hanks might be dead, she said. A national furniture chain was trafficking children. Many prominent Democrats were pedophiles.Then, early in January, she texted her older sister that she was heading to Washington with a friend to support President Donald J. Trump and protest what was happening in the country. “I’m going to dc,” she wrote. “I dont know all the deets yet.”Ms. Boyland, 34, was one of five people who never made it home from the Jan. 6 protest, which erupted in violence when hundreds of people stormed into the Capitol. Her death has left her family grappling to understand how Ms. Boyland, who they say had never voted before 2020, wound up waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag amid a crowd of fanatic supporters of the former president before walking up the steps of the Capitol to her death.Their frustration deepened further this week when Republicans in the Senate blocked an effort to establish an independent commission to look into the origins and the handling of the attack on the Capitol.Five people died, including Ms. Boyland, at the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol that followed the Jan. 6 rally.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“Why anyone would NOT want to find out what happened, even just to prevent it from happening again, is beyond me,” Ms. Boyland’s older sister, Lonna Cave, said in a text message after the vote.For months before the rally, Ms. Boyland had bombarded her friends and relatives with messages and links to long videos about the fantastical theories she had come to accept as fact. Many of the false claims spilled from QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory movement that rose in popularity over the course of his presidency and promoted the idea that many Democrats and celebrities are part of a global pedophile ring — a theory that 15 percent of Americans believe, according to one poll this week. Many of its supporters falsely believed that President Biden had stolen the election, and some attended Mr. Trump’s rally on Jan. 6.Ms. Boyland’s sudden fixation so alarmed her family members and friends that some of them asked her to stop talking to them about politics — or just to stop talking altogether.Some of her closest friends believe that Ms. Boyland was a vulnerable target for the conspiracy theorists. After a stint in drug rehabilitation, she had returned to her parents’ home and largely avoided drugs for several years, her family said. But the isolation brought about by the pandemic was making it harder. QAnon filled a void in her life, they said, helping distract her from thoughts of returning to drugs even as it acted as a different kind of hallucinogen.“I was worried that she was trading one addiction for another,” said Blaire Boyland, her younger sister. “It just seemed like, yes, she’s not doing drugs, but she’s very obsessively online, watching all these YouTube videos and going down the rabbit hole.”The family is also still struggling to understand how she died. From the video of the chaotic siege, it appeared that she had died after being caught in a crush of rioters. But the autopsy by the Washington medical examiner’s office did not find evidence of trampling and concluded that she had overdosed on amphetamines.Family members said it was likely that the only amphetamine in her body was the Adderall she took every day by prescription, though it appeared that she might have taken at least twice her prescribed dose.“We just want to find out what happened, to be able to rest,” Ms. Cave said. “This has been so messed up. We just want to grieve the normal way.”A descent into conspiracy theoriesFor years, Ms. Boyland had been barred from voting because she had been convicted of felony drug possession, but she had also shown little interest in politics until 2020. In the fall, though, free from probation, she made it clear early on that she planned to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump. She registered to vote on Oct. 3, a month before the election, records show.“She was so happy that she was able to vote,” recalled Stephen Marsh, 36, a friend of Ms. Boyland’s who said that she had been so thrilled that she had called his mother. “She was so excited about it because her past made it difficult for her to participate.”Rosanne Boyland texted her older sister that she was heading to Washington with a friend to support President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6.Justin Cave, via Associated PressBut her increasing absorption in the QAnon community was by that time pushing some of her closest friends away.“I care about you, but I think it would be best if we didn’t talk for a while,” one friend since childhood, Sydney Vinson, texted her on Oct. 3 after Ms. Boyland had sent her a long text message and screenshots about purported government manipulation of the news media. “Please don’t send me any more political stuff.”Ms. Boyland was the middle of three sisters, growing up in Kennesaw, Ga., a city of 34,000 people about 25 miles northwest of Atlanta. She and her sisters were close as children, and her younger sister said she had been inspired by Ms. Boyland’s assertiveness and confidence. Even then, she had a penchant for conspiracy theories, her sisters said, but harmless ones, like the existence of extraterrestrials or of Bigfoot.But when she was about 16, her life took a turn when she began dating an abusive boyfriend, her sisters said. She would blame black eyes on soccer practice and once came home with an unexplained shoulder injury. Around that time, she also got hooked on opioids.She eventually dropped out of high school, and her relationship with her family became strained. In 2009, when she was 23, she was charged with felony drug possession. Several other cases would follow, the most recent in April 2013, after which she was given five years of probation. It was only in July 2014, when she learned about the pregnancy of her older sister, Ms. Cave, that she pledged to be a better role model for her niece, her sisters said — and from that moment on, with a few brief relapses, she was largely sober.“She was always talking about how she couldn’t wait to be the aunt that was the cool aunt,” said Ms. Cave, who gave birth to her first daughter in March 2015. She now has two daughters, 5 and 6.Ms. Boyland grew close to both of them, often picking them up from school and documenting milestones in their lives. She spent much of her time going to group meetings and counseling other people who were struggling with drugs. At one point, she hoped to become a counselor herself.Ms. Boyland was the middle of three sisters, growing up in Kennesaw, Ga., about 25 miles northwest of Atlanta. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic arrived, though, she had to spend much of her time alone at her parents’ house, and her in-person group meetings were canceled. She told her sisters that she frequently felt an urge to begin using drugs again.“She was really struggling,” Blaire Boyland said. “She tried doing the Zoom meetings, but she wasn’t getting anything out of it. She felt out of control.”Her friends began noticing that she was posting about conspiracy theories and Mr. Trump. Before long, she was texting them about PizzaGate, the conspiracy theory that included false claims about Democrats’ trafficking of children in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington.“I’ve mostly been watching it all on youtube,” Ms. Boyland said in a text message to Ms. Vinson, her childhood friend. What most captured her attention, Ms. Vinson said, was the “Save the Children” slogan that QAnon members used to spread false claims about Democrats’ trafficking of children.“She cared about kids a lot,” Ms. Vinson said. “She thought she was fighting for children, in her own way, and just trying to spread the word about underground pedophile rings and just all of these things. I think QAnon had this way of making these things seem really believable.”At about 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, Ms. Boyland began the roughly 10-hour drive to Washington with a friend, Justin Winchell. They parked in Virginia and took a bus into the city to see Mr. Trump at the rally, where he riled up the crowd with unsubstantiated claims that his election loss had been rigged. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.Ms. Boyland headed with many of the other protesters down the street to the Capitol.The chaotic siegeMs. Boyland could barely be made out at first in the footage of the crowd’s surge up the Capitol steps — a short figure, outfitted in a black hoodie and American flag sunglasses.She disappeared into the mob inside the tunnel presidents use when they emerge for their inaugurations. It was the scene of some of the day’s most brutal hand-to-hand fighting, and videos showed rioters crushing police officers between doors and warning that the crowd could become dangerously packed.Just minutes later, after a push by the police that sent the crowd tumbling back out of the tunnel, she could be seen lying on her side, after which two men dragged her away from the door and began trying to resuscitate her.It appeared to be a case of trampling. But then the medical examiner concluded that she had died of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” a ruling that left her family, convinced that she had not relapsed into drug abuse, flummoxed. She had been taking Adderall regularly under a doctor’s prescription and had not been seen to have any adverse effects, they said.Several forensic pathologists and toxicologists who reviewed the autopsy report said in interviews that the level of amphetamine in her blood — most likely from the Adderall — had been enough to be potentially fatal.Iain M. McIntyre, the former chief toxicologist at the San Diego County medical examiner’s office, said the level could be consistent with her having taken both of her 30-milligram daily doses at the same time, something Ms. Cave said her sister sometimes did. Mr. McIntyre said the high dosage of amphetamine, along with the raucous scene, her heart disease and obesity, could have been enough to make her heart stop.Rosanne Boyland’s sister Lonna Cave and her husband, Justin Cave, were left wondering what they might have missed.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe day after her death, Ms. Cave’s husband, Justin Cave, told reporters that Mr. Trump had “incited a riot last night that killed four of his biggest fans.” Then came a spate of cruel messages to the family from all sides — people who said they were glad Ms. Boyland had died, and others who had been infuriated by Mr. Cave’s comments.Ms. Cave and her husband were left wondering what they had missed, how they could have helped Ms. Boyland before she fell too deeply into the conspiracy theories.“That’s part of the reason I feel guilty, because none of us thought too much about it when she started looking into it,” Ms. Cave said. “I understand that she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been. But she would not have been here if it weren’t for all the misinformation.” More

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      Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It

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      The bill, which includes some of the strictest voting measures in the country, would head to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott if it passes. He is expected to sign it into law.The Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill on Sunday that would impose a raft of new voting restrictions in the state, moving a step closer to the expected full passage of what would be among the most far-reaching laws in Republicans’ nationwide drive to overhaul elections systems and limit voting.The bill, which passed the State Senate early Sunday, would tighten what are already some of the country’s strictest voting laws, and it would specifically target balloting methods that were employed for the first time last year by Harris County, home to Houston. In addition to banning drive-through voting and 24-hour voting, which were used by nearly 140,000 voters in Harris County during the 2020 election, the bill would prohibit election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, regardless of whether they had requested them; ban using tents, garages, mobile units or any temporary structure as a polling location; further limit who could vote absentee; and add new identification requirements for voting by mail. Partisan poll watchers would also have more access and autonomy under the bill’s provisions, and election officials could be more harshly punished if they make mistakes or otherwise run afoul of election codes and laws. The bill, which was hashed out in a closed-door panel of lawmakers over the past week as the spring legislative session neared its conclusion on Monday, was rushed to the State Senate floor late Saturday in a legislative power play orchestrated by Republican lawmakers and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Suspending rules that require a bill to be public for 24 hours before a final vote, they set off hours of debate before the Senate passed the bill just after 6 a.m. on Sunday by an 18-to-13 vote. Democrats denounced the dark-of-night legislative maneuver on a measure that Senator Borris L. Miles, a Democrat from Houston, said people in his largely Black and Latino district called “Jim Crow 2.0.”“They do ask me, every time I’m in the neighborhood, is this 2021 or is this 1961?” Mr. Miles said on the Senate floor. “And why are we allowing people to roll back the hands of time?”The House, which did not move to suspend the 24-hour rule, is set to convene at 1 p.m. local time, and will debate the bill before voting on it. No further changes to the legislation can be made. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is widely expected to sign the bill. Texas is one of several Republican-led states — including Iowa, Georgia and Florida — that have moved since the 2020 presidential contest to pass new laws governing elections and restricting voting. The impetus is both Republicans’ desire to appease their base, much of which continues to believe former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, and the party’s worries about a changing electorate that could threaten the G.O.P.’s longtime grip on power in places like Texas, the second-biggest state in the country.In a statement on Saturday, President Biden called the proposed law, along with similar measures in Georgia and Florida, “an assault on democracy” that disproportionately targeted “Black and Brown Americans.” He called on lawmakers to address the issue by passing Democratic voting bills that are pending in Congress. “It’s wrong and un-American,” Mr. Biden said. “In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”Republican state lawmakers have often cited voters’ worries about election fraud — fears stoked by Mr. Trump, other Republicans and the conservative media — to justify new voting restrictions, despite the fact that there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in recent American elections.And in their election push, Republicans have powered past the objections of Democrats, voting rights groups and major corporations. Companies like American Airlines, Dell Technologies and Microsoft spoke out against the Texas legislation soon after the bill was introduced, but the pressure has been largely ineffective so far.The final 67-page bill, known as S.B. 7, proved to be an amalgamation of two omnibus voting bills that had worked their way through the state’s Legislature. It included many of the provisions originally introduced by Republicans, but lawmakers dropped some of the most stringent ones, like a regulation on the allocation of voting machines that would have led to the closure of polling places in communities of color and a measure that would have permitted partisan poll watchers to record the voting process on video. Still, the bill includes a provision that could make overturning an election easier. Texas election law had stated that reversing the results of an election because of fraud accusations required proving that illicit votes had actually resulted in a wrongful victory. If the bill passes, the number of fraudulent votes required to do so would simply need to be equal to the winning vote differential; it would not matter for whom the fraudulent votes had been cast. Democrats and voting rights groups were quick to condemn the bill.“S.B. 7 is a ruthless piece of legislation,” said Sarah Labowitz, the policy and advocacy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “It targets voters of color and voters with disabilities, in a state that’s already the most difficult place to vote in the country.”But Republicans celebrated the proposed law and bristled at the criticism from Mr. Biden and others. “As the White House and national Democrats work together to minimize election integrity, the Texas Legislature continues to fight for accessible and secure elections,” State Senator Bryan Hughes, one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement. “In Texas, we do not bend to headlines, corporate virtue signaling, or suppression of election integrity, even if it comes from the president of the United States.”The bill took its final form after a contentious, monthslong debate; back-room negotiations; procedural errors by legislators; and extended, passionate debate by Democrats, who have tried to stall the bill’s passage through political and legislative maneuvers.Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has said that an election overhaul is a priority, is widely expected to sign the bill.Eric Gay/Associated PressVoting rights groups have long pointed to Texas as one of the hardest states in the country for voters to cast ballots. One recent study by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas last in an index measuring the difficulty of voting. The report cited a host of factors, including Texas’ in-person voter registration deadline 30 days before Election Day, a drastic reduction of polling stations in some parts of the state, strict voter identification laws, a limited and onerous absentee voting process, and a lack of early voting options.In the preamble to the new bill, the authors appear to pre-emptively defend the legislation from criticism, stating that “reforms to the election laws of this state made by this Act are not intended to impair the right of free suffrage guaranteed to the people of Texas by the United States and Texas Constitutions, but are enacted solely to prevent fraud in the electoral process and ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.”In March, Keith Ingram, the director of elections in the Texas secretary of state’s office, testified that last year’s election in the state had been “smooth and secure.” He added, “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county elections officials.”A day before the Texas bill emerged, a new report pointed to the vast sweep of Republicans’ nationwide effort to restrict voting.As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In last year’s election, while Republicans won Texas easily — Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 630,000 votes and the party maintained control of both chambers of the Legislature — turnout soared in cities and densely populated suburbs, which are growing increasingly Democratic. In Harris County, one of the biggest counties in the country, turnout jumped by nearly 10 percent.Republicans’ initial version of the bill put those densely populated counties squarely in the cross hairs, seeking to ban measures put in place during the 2020 election that helped turnout hit record numbers. The initial bill banned drive-through voting, a new method used by 127,000 voters in Harris County, as well as 24-hour voting, which was held for a single day in the county and was used by roughly 10,000 voters.While those provisions were left out of an earlier version of the bill as it made its way through the Legislature, they were reinstated in the final version of the bill, though the bill does allow for early voting to begin as early as 6 a.m. and continue until as late as 9 p.m. on weekdays. It also maintains at least two weekend days of early voting. More than any other state, Texas has also gone to great lengths to grant more autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers. The observers have been a cornerstone of American voting for years, viewed as a watchdog for election officials, but their role has grown increasingly contentious, especially in Texas. Republican poll watchers have been egged on in particular by Mr. Trump, who implored them to go to major cities across the country and hunt for nonexistent voter fraud.Across Texas during the 2020 election, there was an increase in anecdotal complaints of aggressive poll watchers, often on the Republican side, harassing both voters of color and election officials.The new bill would make it a crime to refuse to admit the observers to voting sites or to block their ability to fully watch the process. It says poll watchers must be able to “sit or stand [conveniently] near enough to see and hear the election officers.”It would also make it easier for partisan poll watchers to successfully pursue legal action if they argue that they were wrongfully refused or obstructed.In addition, the bill would limit who can vote absentee by mail in Texas, which does not have universal, no-excuse absentee voting. The bill states that those with a disability may vote absentee, but a voter with “an illness, injury or disability that does not prevent the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day” may not do so.Amid the new restrictions are multiple provisions that provide greater transparency into election administration. Counties must now provide video surveillance of ballot-counting facilities, and they must eventually make those videos available to the public. Discussions with voting equipment vendors must also be available to the public.During the debate before Sunday’s vote in the State Senate, Senator Royce West, a Democrat from Dallas, raised concerns that a provision barring voting before 1 p.m. on Sundays would limit “souls to the polls” organizing efforts that are popular with Black churches. Mr. Hughes said that clause was intended to allow poll workers to go to church.Mr. West noted that a separate bill passed by the Legislature will allow the sale of beer and wine starting at 10 a.m., two hours earlier than current law permits.“We’re going to be able to buy beer at 10 o’clock in the morning, but we can’t vote until one o’clock,” Mr. West said.Austin Ramzy and Anna Schaverien contributed reporting. More

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      The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why.

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      A devastating email breach of the D.N.C. roiled Democrats in the final months of 2016. An unassuming security official made it his mission to prevent a recurrence.As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020.It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign.That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races.By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week.That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.Mr. Lord left the team Yahoo affectionately calls “The Paranoids,” took a six-figure pay cut and headed to Washington in January 2017 to become the D.N.C.’s first chief information security officer.The way he saw it, the D.N.C.’s 2016 breach wasn’t so much a cybersecurity issue as it was a problem of workflow and corporate culture.Mr. Podesta’s aide, for instance, had asked a staff member to vet whether the infamous Russian spearphishing email was safe, and the aide responded that the email was “legitimate.” It was a typo; he later said he had meant to write “illegitimate.” By the time anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipes, and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, were being dissected online by the news media and conspiracy theorists.“After that, few would even pick up a flier, let alone a hose to help in 2017,” Mr. Cornale said. “Bob showed up with five fire trucks while putting on his suspenders, and ran in to the house.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Lord told his staff on Friday that he was leaving, clearing the way for the D.N.C. to get a replacement to get ahead of whatever adversaries may have planned for the midterms.Over the past four years, Mr. Lord has been a persistent and pervasive presence, speaking at every all-hands meeting, reminding employees that staving off the next cyber threat would come down to individual accountability: not reusing passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, running software updates. He urged them to use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to lock down their Venmo accounts; he also advised them to avoid clicking on suspicious links.A “Bobmoji”— a digital caricature of Mr. Lord — hangs above the men’s urinal and adorns the walls of the women’s restroom, reminding staff members of the checklist.Mr. Lord has had significantly smaller security budgets than he did at Yahoo, or that of any government agency and technology companies that Russia breached over the past year. And so he became something of a digital Marie Kondo — the Japanese tidying expert — decluttering the D.N.C.’s networks, excising old software and canceling extraneous vendor contracts, then took those extra discretionary funds and put them towards cybersecurity. But he knew cybersecurity technologies can go only so far. “If adding security technologies could fix our cybersecurity problems, we would have fixed things 25 years ago,” he said in an interview.His real legacy, D.N.C. staff members said, is that he single-handedly changed a culture.“To survive in Bob’s role, you have to drive people a little crazy,” Nellwyn Thomas, chief technology officer at the D.N.C., said.When the committee sent out an innocuous email asking staff members to enter their T-shirt size and address for some free swag, not a single employee complied, employees said.Mr. Lord had proudly turned them paranoid. More

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      Fox News Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

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      Donna Brazile, a Democratic analyst, has left the Murdoch-owned network as some hosts and journalists who questioned Donald Trump have exited or been sidelined.Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump. More

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      'Special Master' to Decide if FBI Can Use Giuliani's Data

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      A federal judge in Manhattan on Friday ordered the appointment of a so-called special master to review whether materials seized from Rudolph W. Giuliani’s apartment and office during an F.B.I. search in April are protected by attorney-client privilege.The searches were part of a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine before the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani was President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.Mr. Giuliani was seeking to uncover damaging information on President Biden, then a leading presidential candidate. The authorities are examining whether Mr. Giuliani was also lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in his dirt-digging mission, The New York Times has reported.Mr. Giuliani has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He has said he never lobbied on behalf of the Ukrainians.The judge, J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said the appointment of the special master — usually a retired judge or magistrate — was “warranted here to ensure the perception of fairness.”The special master would conduct a review to determine whether any of the material seized from Mr. Giuliani’s cellphones and computers was potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and should be made off-limits to prosecutors.In response to the ruling, one of Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert J. Costello, said, “We knew that a special master was inevitable, which is why we did not oppose it, so this ruling comes as no surprise to us.”The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had sought the appointment of the special master, declined to comment.Judge Oetken also denied Mr. Giuliani’s request for copies of the confidential government documents detailing the basis for the warrants issued in support of the searches in April, and an earlier search of Mr. Giuliani’s iCloud account. Typically, such records are only made available to defendants after they are indicted and before a trial.Mr. Giuliani was “not entitled to a preview of the government’s evidence in an ongoing investigation before he has been charged with a crime,” the judge said.Judge Oetken asked that the parties submit to the court proposed candidates for special master by next Friday.Ben Protess More

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      Prosecutors Investigating Whether Ukrainians Meddled in 2020 Election

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      The Brooklyn federal inquiry has examined whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the election, including funneling misleading information through Rudolph W. Giuliani.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter. More

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      The State of California’s ‘State of Jefferson’

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      Wednesday: In California’s rural far northern counties, furor for the recall has taken hold alongside the region’s fascination with secession.Mark Baird displayed a “State of Jefferson” flag at his ranch in Siskiyou County. Flags promoting secession can be seen around far Northern California.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesGood morning.Roughly 1.7 million of California’s 22.1 million registered voters signed the petition to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Many of those who signed it technically live in California but symbolically live in another state entirely.California’s rural far north, sometimes styling itself as the “State of Jefferson,” has long viewed itself as a land apart. Its dozen or so counties, mostly north and east of Sacramento, voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.In Shasta, Lassen, Modoc, Siskiyou and other State of Jefferson-friendly counties, more than one in six voters signed the petition to recall Newsom, according to the Secretary of State’s data. And, as The Sacramento Bee and The Los Angeles Times have reported, members of a Shasta County militia have for months been threatening violence over the governor’s pandemic health restrictions. (Those rules, Newsom has said, will end on June 15.)Last week, in a nonbinding but revealing election, five counties in eastern Oregon endorsed a plan to secede from the liberal-leaning parts of their state and take a chunk of the State of Jefferson with them. The master plan: to become part of Idaho and then add all or parts of Siskiyou, Shasta, Tehama, Del Norte, Modoc and Lassen Counties on the California side of Oregon’s southern border.“Those of us in rural Oregon are written off,” Mike McCarter, the 74-year-old retiree leading the secession drive, told our colleague Kirk Johnson.McCarter, who bought a gun club in retirement and now helps people get their concealed-carry permits, said eastern Oregon and California’s northern border counties had more in common with conservative Idaho than with the more liberal majorities of their states. “We just want to come alongside them and bolster the conservative support,” he said.Last week’s vote brought to seven the number of Oregon’s 36 counties that would, if they could, join the grass-roots movement to “Move Oregon’s Border For a Greater Idaho.” The group’s website describes the California annexation as a kind of Phase Two.Mount Shasta, a 14,162-foot dormant volcano, towers over Weed, Calif.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesCould it happen?Unlikely, although Northern California has periodically threatened to secede since the state was founded in 1850. Mountainous and woodsy (as opposed to beachy, aggie, foggy, desert-y or glitzy), the region makes up more than a fifth of the state’s land mass but only 3 percent of its population. It is also generally whiter, older and poorer than the rest of the state.This is the California that the rest of the country doesn’t talk about — a California where hunting and fishing, not surfing, are the signature pastimes and the jobs are more likely to be in timber than in tech. The region has felt chronically neglected and dismissed by California’s lawmakers and coastal population centers.In fact, the modern State of Jefferson concept arose in 1941 from an effort to get more state funding. One of Oregon’s rural mayors talked the California border counties into declaring that they would all form a separate state unless Salem and Sacramento stopped taking their tax money and leaving their roads in disrepair.A tongue-in-cheek naming contest was held by a newspaper in Siskiyou County, and “Jefferson” got the most votes (after the founding father), beating out “Discontent” and “Bonanza.” A group of young men, toting rifles, proclaimed a “patriotic rebellion” in which they would “secede every Thursday until further notice.”The movement was cut short when the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the rebels to rethink their allegiance. But the State of Jefferson still has its own flag — a gold pan with two X’s that stand apart, conveying the region’s sense of having been “double-crossed” by far-flung state capitals.The Jefferson state of mind has lived on, particularly lately.Oregon’s Legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, would have to go along with the proposed defection to Idaho, as would Idaho’s Republican-dominated Legislature — not to mention California’s Legislature and the U.S. Congress. But as polarization persists in and beyond California, it’s not completely unthinkable.Here’s what else to know todayThe Block Island wind farm, the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States, off the coast of Rhode Island in 2016.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesCompiled by Jonathan WolfeThe federal government said it cleared a key hurdle to open the central California coast to offshore wind farms, part of President Biden’s aggressive plan to expand renewable energy and shift the nation away from fossil fuels.The state has already had 900 more wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year for fires, The Associated Press reports.State lawmakers are considering cutting the share of out-of-state students at University of California campuses to make room for more local residents, The Los Angeles Times reports.President Biden is coming under increasing pressure to abandon a Trump-era immigration rule known as Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away migrants without giving them a chance to apply for protections.OptumServe, a company that was paid $221 million to operate dozens of vaccination sites around the state, has helped administer only about 1 percent of shots given in California, CalMatters reports.The president of California’s largest state employee union was ousted after 13 years in the role, The Associated Press reports.The Los Angeles Times reports that Joe Hedges, the chief operating officer of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, has left his job after an investigation by the agency.An audit found that Caltrans overpaid thousands of workers $1.5 million, and failed to recoup the money, The Sacramento Bee reports.A subway train at Union Station in Los Angeles in January.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLos Angeles transit officials have pushed subway and rail projects forward during the pandemic, but The Los Angeles Times asks, “Will the riders return?”The central California town of Corcoran is sinking, a situation caused primarily not by nature, but agriculture.A proposed affordable housing project next to a luxury housing complex in Livermore, in the Bay Area, is dividing residents who are accusing one another of racism and elitism, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.A student-led resolution calling on the University of California, Santa Barbara, to divest from companies that supply Israel with military equipment has heightened tensions on the campus, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a source of discord, Reuters reports.Paleontologists are excavating a recently discovered trove of fossils from the Miocene era — including mastodons, camels and fossilized trees — in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Gizmodo reports.In response to a wave of pandemic pet adoptions, veterinary offices are offering upscale care to meet demand.A photographer for Yale Climate Connections captured life in California’s underwater kelp forests, which are under siege from a population of voracious purple sea urchins.Subscriber event: Join the comedian Sarah Silverman and The Times’s Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba as they discuss how disinformation spreads, and how we can fight back. [Today at 4 p.m. Pacific.]California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here and read every edition online here. More