Presidential Election of 2020

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      McCarthy Officially Backs Stefanik to Replace Cheney in House Leadership

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      “We need to be united,” said the Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who worked behind the scenes for days on behalf of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, on Sunday officially endorsed Representative Elise Stefanik in her bid to oust the No. 3 House Republican, Representative Liz Cheney, who has hemorrhaged support over her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about election fraud.“Yes, I do,” Mr. McCarthy told the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo when she asked whether he supported Ms. Stefanik’s push to become the Republican conference chairwoman.“We need to be united, and that starts with leadership,” Mr. McCarthy said. “That’s why we will have a vote next week.”The endorsement from Mr. McCarthy — who had been working behind the scenes on Ms. Stefanik’s behalf for days — came after Mr. Trump and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, endorsed Ms. Stefanik.The move made clear that fealty to Mr. Trump and willingness to embrace his false claims of election fraud have become the ultimate litmus tests among Republicans for holding a leadership position in the House. Ms. Cheney, who represents Wyoming and was once considered a future speaker, has a more conservative voting record than Ms. Stefanik. But Ms. Stefanik, a fourth-term congresswoman from New York, has joined in Mr. Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, made the case against Ms. Cheney on “Fox News Sunday.”“Right now it’s clear that she doesn’t represent the views of the majority of our conference,” Mr. Banks, who has co-sponsored legislation with Ms. Cheney opposing troop reductions in Afghanistan, told the show’s host, Chris Wallace.Mr. Banks — who like Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Scalise joined in objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory — added that his split from Ms. Cheney came after she criticized a memo he had written outlining a strategy for winning working-class voters.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, helped Representative Liz Cheney turn back a challenge to her leadership post in February.Joshua Roberts/Reuters“Liz Cheney is the only Republican leader who attacked the memo about making the Republican Party the party of the working class,” he said.Some House Republicans tried to oust Ms. Cheney from her leadership post in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Ms. Cheney easily turned back that challenge — winning a 145-to-61 caucus vote — after Mr. McCarthy delivered an impassioned speech in her defense.But now it is other Republicans who are rallying to her side.Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his second impeachment trial, argued that the party needed to adopt a bigger-tent philosophy in which both supporters and critics of Mr. Trump were welcome.“You look at polls, there’s a whole group of folks that agree with Liz Cheney, and so for us to win in 2022 and 2024, we need everybody,” Mr. Cassidy said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, pointed out that Mr. McCarthy had said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the Capitol riot — only to later insist that others stop talking about it.“It is incredible,” Mr. Kinzinger said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Liz Cheney is saying exactly what Kevin McCarthy said the day of the insurrection. She has just consistently been saying it.”“For me, I’m a conservative,” he added. “I’m going to fight for the soul of this party. But every member, not just leadership, every congressman, every state representative, every member of the party that pulls a ballot in the primary has to decide, are we going to exist on lies or exist on the truth?” More

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      Arizona Voting Review Faces More Questions

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      A makeshift review of the vote in the state’s largest county has pleased followers of former President Donald J. Trump but is being widely criticized as a partisan exercise.Directly outside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum near downtown Phoenix, the Crazy Times Carnival wraps up an 11-day run on Sunday, a spectacle of thrill rides, games and food stands that headlines the Arizona State Fair this year.Inside the coliseum, a Republican-ordered exhumation and review of 2.1 million votes in the state’s November election is heading into its third week, an exercise that has risen to become the lodestar of rigged-vote theorists — and shows no sign of ending soon.Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs noted the carnival’s presence outside the coliseum when she challenged the competence and objectivity of the review last week, expressing concern about the security of the ballots inside in an apparent dig at what has become a spectacle of a very different sort. There is no evidence that former President Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona’s presidential election in the fall was fraudulent. Nonetheless, 16 Republicans in the State Senate voted to subpoena ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s vote in November, for an audit to show Trump die-hards that their fraud concerns were taken seriously.As recently as a week ago, officials said the review would be completed by May 14. But with that deadline a week away, only about 250,000 of the county’s 2.1 million ballots have been processed in the hand recount that is a central part of the review, Ken Bennett, a liaison between those conducting the review and the senators, said on Saturday.At that rate, the hand recount would not be finished until August.The delay is but the latest snag in an exercise that many critics claim is wrecking voters’ confidence in elections, not restoring it. Since the State Senate first ordered it in December, the review has been dogged by controversy. Republicans dominate the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which supervised the election in the county. They said it was fair and accurate and opposed the review.After a week marked by mounting accusations of partisan skulduggery, mismanagement and even potential illegality, at least one Republican supporter of the new count said it could not end soon enough.“It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from suburban Phoenix who supported the audit, said on Friday. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”Civil-rights advocates say political fallout is the least of the concerns. They say the Arizona review is emblematic of a broader effort by pro-Trump Republicans to undermine faith in American democracy and shift control of elections to partisans who share their agenda. “This subpoena and this audit is not dissimilar to what’s happening with a number of bills being pushed nationally that basically take fair, objective processes and move them into partisan political bodies,” said Alex Gulotta, the state’s director of All Voting Is Local, a national voting-rights advocacy group. “This is not an aberration. This is a window into the future of where some people would like our elections to go.”Mr. Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and onetime candidate for governor, said companies hired to conduct the review plan to hire more temporary workers to step up the pace of the count. But its conclusion is still weeks away.Cyber Ninjas contractors examining ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Two previous election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.Courtney Pedroza/Getty ImagesLater this month, workers will have to suspend work and move their entire operation — work stations, imaging equipment, stacks of uncounted ballots that cover much of the coliseum floor — into storage elsewhere in the building to make way for a spate of high-school graduation ceremonies long scheduled to take place the week of May 17.In an interview, Mr. Bennett said that no storage site had been selected, but that he was optimistic that the hand count would be wrapped up quickly.“When we come back, we’ll have the last week of May and all of June, but I don’t think it’s going to take that long,” he said. “The hand count should be done by the middle of June.”Senators have cast the review as a way to reassure those who have supported Mr. Trump’s baseless claim that his 10,457-vote loss in November is the result of a rigged election. While it will not change the outcome of the election, they said, it may put to rest any doubts about its results.But doubts about the true purpose blossomed when Karen Fann, the Republican president of the State Senate, hired a Florida firm, Cyber Ninjas, to conduct the review. Its chief executive had promoted on Twitter a conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump’s loss in Arizona was the result of rigged voting machines.Journalists, election experts and representatives of the secretary of state, whose office is responsible for elections in Arizona, have struggled with getting permission to observe the review, while the far-right One America News cable outlet has raised money to finance it and has been given broad access to the proceedings.Claims of partisanship ballooned after it was revealed that one man who was hired to recount ballots, former State Representative Anthony Kern of Arizona, was a leader of the local “stop the steal” movement and had been photographed on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 in Washington. Mr. Kern had been on the Maricopa ballot, both as a Republican candidate for state representative and as a pro-Trump presidential elector.The review came under heavy fire last week from both the Arizona secretary of state and the federal Justice Department, which separately cited widespread reports that slipshod handling of ballots and other election items threatened to permanently spoil the official record of the vote. The Justice Department noted that federal law requires record to be kept intact under penalty of a fine or imprisonment. Some of the most serious questions involve the management of the review.On Wednesday, Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, charged that the review was being conducted with uncertified equipment and that ballot counting rules were “a significant departure from standard best practices.”She wrote: “Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit.’”After her claims drew a number of death threats from Trump supporters, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona ordered state police protection this past week for Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat.The Justice Department raised issues about the protection of the ballots, and it also questioned whether another aspect of the process — a plan to go to voters’ homes to verify that they had actually cast ballots, as election records showed — could violate federal laws against intimidating voters.In her reply to the department, Ms. Fann defended the review, saying it is being conducted under “comprehensive and rigorous security protocols that will fully preserve all physical and electronic ballots, tabulation systems and other election materials.”But she appeared to back away from the plan to personally interview voters, stating that the State Senate “determined several weeks ago that it would indefinitely defer that component of the audit.”Boxes of Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election were brought to Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix to be examined and recounted as part of an audit ordered by the Arizona Senate.Pool photo by Matt YorkMs. Fann said in a letter on Friday that the Justice Department’s concerns were “misplaced” and that strict rules safeguarding documents and equipment were in place. On Saturday, Mr. Bennett said the concerns about the integrity of the process were “completely unfounded, and I believe they come from people who have always decided that they don’t want the audit at all.”Ms. Fann, who had largely remained silent about criticism of the review, chose last week to mount a public defense of it. Appearing in an interview on the Phoenix PBS news outlet, she applauded the role of One America News in supporting the review and said the Senate had no role in choosing Mr. Kern or others who counted votes.“I don’t know why he’s there or how he got there, but that’s one of the people that was selected, and that is what it is,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s a great thing, to be honest.”And she said that the news media had blown concerns about the objectivity and management of the review out of proportion.“They talk about conspiracy theories,” she said, referring to reports that the review is examining ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers and watermarks baselessly said to be signs of fraud. “But I tell you what, there’s almost a reverse conspiracy theory to demean this audit.”She suggested that her support of the review would be proved right in the end.“I think we’ll find irregularities that is going to say, you know what, there’s this many dead people voted, or this many who may have voted that don’t live here any more — we’re going to find those,” she said. “We know they exist, but everybody keeps saying, ‘You have no proof.’ Well, maybe we’ll get the proof out of this so we can fix those holes that are there.”More common is the notion that the review has become an alarming exercise in undermining faith in America’s elections.One expert on election law, David J. Becker, founder of the Center for Election Administration and Research in Washington, said Ms. Fann’s assurances about the integrity of ballots and other records appeared unlikely to satisfy the Justice Department.“There’s no question that contamination of ballots and records is an ongoing issue that raises serious concerns about federal law,” said Mr. Becker, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s voting rights section. “We’ve never seen anything like this before, where some haphazard effort allows some unknown out-of-state contractor to start riffling through ballots. I think it’s pretty clear that the response does not resolve concerns about ballot integrity.” More

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      Trump Still Has Iron Grip on Republicans

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      The vilification of Liz Cheney and a bizarre vote recount in Arizona showed the damage from his assault on a bedrock of democracy: election integrity.Locked out of Facebook, marooned in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website, Donald J. Trump remained largely out of public sight this week. Yet the Republican Party’s capitulation to the former president became clearer than ever, as did the damage to American politics he has caused with his lie that the election was stolen from him.In Washington, Republicans moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of her House leadership position, a punishment for denouncing Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud as a threat to democracy. Lawmakers in Florida and Texas advanced sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional narrative from Mr. Trump and his allies that the electoral system was rigged against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party started a bizarre re-examination of the November election results that involved searching for traces of bamboo in last year’s ballots.The churning dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation, six months after the election, is still struggling with the consequences of an assault by a losing presidential candidate on a bedrock principle of American democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.They also provided stark evidence that the former president has not only managed to squelch any dissent within his party but has also persuaded most of the G.O.P. to make a gigantic bet: that the surest way to regain power is to embrace his pugilistic style, racial divisiveness and beyond-the-pale conspiracy theories rather than to court the suburban swing voters who cost the party the White House and who might be looking for substantive policies on the pandemic, the economy and other issues. The loyalty to the former president persists despite his role in inciting his supporters ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, with his adherents either ignoring, redefining or in some cases tacitly accepting the deadly attack on Congress.“We’ve just gotten so far afield from any sane construction,” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime party official who was swept out of her suburban Virginia congressional seat in the 2018 midterm backlash to Mr. Trump. “It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level. We’re just going to say that black is white now.”Yet as Republicans wrap themselves in the fantasy of a stolen election, Democrats are anchored in the day-to-day business of governing a nation that is still struggling to emerge from a deadly pandemic.Strategists from both parties say that discordant dynamic — two parties operating in two different realities — is likely to define the country’s politics for years to come.At the same time, President Biden faces a broader challenge: what to do about the large segment of the public that doubts his legitimacy and a Republican Party courting the support of that segment by pushing bills that would restrict voting and perhaps further undermine faith in future elections. A CNN poll released last week found that nearly a third of Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, said Biden had not legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency.Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership post next week after speaking out against Mr. Trump.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesWhite House aides say Mr. Biden believes that the best way to restore some faith in the democratic process is demonstrating that government can deliver tangible benefits — whether vaccines or economic stimulus checks — to voters.Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who oversaw the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s strategy to win the House during the last midterm elections, said the Republican focus on cultural issues, like bans on transgender athletes, was a “win-win” for his party. Many Democrats will face only scattershot attacks on their agenda while continuing to run against the polarizing rhetoric of Mr. Trump, which helped the party flip suburban swing districts in 2018 and 2020.“I would much rather have a record of siding with Americans on recovery,” Mr. Sena said. “Which tale do the American public want to listen to — what Democrats have done to get the country moving again or Donald Trump and his culture war?”Mr. Biden predicted during the campaign that Republicans would have an “epiphany” once Mr. Trump was gone and would revert to being the party he knew during his decades in the Senate. When asked about Republicans this week, Mr. Biden lamented that he didn’t understand them anymore and appeared slightly flummoxed about the “mini-revolution” in their ranks.“I think the Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he said.But for much of the past week, Republicans put on vivid display exactly what they now stand for: Trumpism. Many have adopted his approach of courting white grievance with racist statements, and Republican-led legislatures across the country are pushing through restrictions that would curtail voting access in ways that disproportionally impact voters of color. There are also high-stakes electoral considerations. With his deeply polarizing style, Mr. Trump motivated his base and his detractors alike, pushing both parties to record voter turnout in the 2020 election. His total of 74 million votes was the second-highest ever, behind only Mr. Biden’s 81 million, and Mr. Trump has shown an ability to turn his political supporters against any Republican who opposes him.That has left Republicans convinced that they must display unwavering fealty to a departed president to retain the voters he won over. “I would just say to my Republican colleagues: Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in an interview on Fox News this week. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”In some ways, the former president is more diminished than ever. Defeated at the polls, he spends his time at his Florida resort playing golf and entertaining visitors. He lacks the bully pulpit of the presidency, has been banished from Twitter and failed this week to have his account restored by Facebook. He left office with his approval rating below 40 percent, the lowest final first-term rating for any president since Jimmy Carter in 1979.Still, his dominance over Republicans is reflected from Congress to statehouses. Local and federal lawmakers who have pushed their party to accept the results of the election, and thus Mr. Trump’s loss, have faced a steady drumbeat of censure and primary challenges. Those threats appear to be having an impact: The small number of Republican officials who have been critical of Mr. Trump in the past, including the 10 who voted for his impeachment in February, remained largely silent this week, refusing interview requests and offering little public support for Ms. Cheney.Her likely replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik, publicly promoted herself for the post and moved to establish her Trump bona fides by lending credence to his baseless voter fraud claims in interviews with hard-right supporters of the former president.The state Republican Party in Arizona undertook a quixotic re-examination of the November election results.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe focus on the election has crowded out nearly any discussion of policy or party orthodoxy. The Heritage Action scorecard, which rates lawmakers on their conservative voting records, awarded Ms. Cheney a lifetime score of 82 percent. Ms. Stefanik, who has a more moderate voting record but is a far more vocal supporter of the former president, scored 52 percent.Ms. Stefanik and many other Republican leaders are betting that the path to keeping the electoral gains of the Trump era lies in stoking their base with the populist politics that are central to the president’s brand, even if they repel swing voters.After months of being fed lies about the election by the conservative news media, much of the party has come to embrace them as true. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been conducting focus groups of Trump voters for years, said that since the election she had found an increased openness to what she calls “QAnon curious,” a willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about stolen elections and a deep state. “A lot of these base voters are living in a post-truth nihilism where you believe in nothing and think that everything might be untrue,” said Ms. Longwell, who opposed Mr. Trump. Some Republican strategists worry that the party is missing opportunities to attack Mr. Biden, who has proposed the most sweeping spending and tax plans in generations.“Republicans need to go back to kitchen-table issues that voters really care about, sprinkle in a little culture here and there but not get carried away,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who helped crush right-wing populists in past elections. “And some of them are making an industry out of getting carried away.”While clinging to Mr. Trump could help the party increase turnout among its base, Republicans like Ms. Comstock argue that such a strategy will damage the party with crucial demographics, including younger voters, voters of color, women and suburbanites. Already, intraparty fights are emerging in nascent primaries as candidates accuse each other of disloyalty to the former president. Many party leaders fear that could result in hard-right candidates’ emerging victorious and eventually losing general elections in conservative states where Republicans should prevail, like Missouri and Ohio.“To declare Trump the winner of a shrinking minority, that’s not a territory you want to head up,” Ms. Comstock said. “The future of the party is not going to be some 70-year-old man talking in the mirror at Mar-a-Lago and having all these sycophants come down and do the limbo to get his approval.”Yet those who have objected to Mr. Trump — and paid the price — say there’s little political incentive to pushing against the tide. Criticizing Mr. Trump, or even defending those who do, can leave elected officials in a kind of political no man’s land: seen as traitorous to Republican voters but still too conservative on other issues to be accepted by Democrats and independents.“It’s becoming increasingly difficult, it seems, for people to go out on the stump and defend somebody like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney,” former Senator Jeff Flake, who endorsed Mr. Biden and was censured by the Arizona Republican Party this year, said during a panel appearance at Harvard this week. “About 70 percent of Republicans probably genuinely believe that the election was stolen, and that’s debilitating. It really is.” More

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      Florida's New Voting Rights Law Explained

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      Voting rights groups filed lawsuits shortly after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation reducing voting access in the battleground state. Critics said the law will disproportionately affect people of color.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, signed new voting restrictions into law on Thursday, reducing voting access in one of the nation’s critical battleground states.Florida, which former President Donald J. Trump won by about three percentage points in 2020, is the latest Republican-controlled state, following Georgia, Montana and Iowa, to impose new hurdles to casting a ballot after November’s elections.Voting rights experts and Democrats say that some provisions of the new law will disproportionately affect voters of color.Here’s a guide to how the law changes voting in Florida.What are the changes in the new law?The law, Senate Bill 90, limits the use of drop boxes where voters can deposit absentee ballots, and adds more identification requirements for anyone requesting an absentee ballot. It also requires voters to request an absentee ballot for each two-year election cycle, rather than every four years, under the previous law. Additionally, it limits who can collect and drop off ballots.The law also expands a current rule that prohibits outside groups from holding signs or wearing political paraphernalia within 150 feet of a polling place or drop box, “with the intent to influence voters,” an increase from the previous 100 feet.Why are people upset?The new law weakens key parts of an extensive voting infrastructure that was built up slowly after the state’s chaotic 2000 election. In 2020, that infrastructure allowed Florida to ramp up quickly to accommodate absentee balloting and increased drop boxes during the coronavirus pandemic.Voters of color are most reliant on after-hours drop boxes, critics of the law say, as it’s often more difficult for them to both take hours off during the day and to organize transportation to polling places.Republican legislators promoting the bill offered little evidence of election fraud, and argued for limiting access despite their continued claims that the state’s 2020 election was the “gold standard” for the country.Florida has a popular tradition of voting by mail: In the 2016 and 2018 elections, nearly a third of the state’s voters cast ballots through the mail.In both years, more Republicans than Democrats voted by mail. But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with 1.4 million Republicans, after Mr. Trump claimed repeatedly that expanding mail-in voting would lead to fraud.Has voter fraud been a problem in Florida?Voting ran smoothly in 2020, by all accounts.“There was no problem in Florida,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”And Mr. DeSantis has praised Florida’s handling of November’s elections, saying that his state has “the strongest election integrity measures in the country.”But on the need for the new law, he said: “Florida took action this legislative session to increase transparency and strengthen the security of our elections.”.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-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.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;}Are other states pursuing similar restrictions?Yes. The Texas House of Representatives passed a similar measure this week after a lengthy debate. The bill will soon be taken up by the state’s Republican-controlled Senate. Other states including Arizona, Michigan and Ohio are considering their own bills.What can we expect to happen next?Voting rights groups filed lawsuits shortly after Mr. DeSantis signed the bill into law during a live broadcast on a Fox News morning program.The League of Women Voters of Florida, the Black Voters Matter Fund and the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans joined in one suit, arguing that “Senate Bill 90 does not impede all of Florida’s voters equally.”“It is crafted to and will operate to make it more difficult for certain types of voters to participate in the state’s elections, including those voters who generally wish to vote with a vote-by-mail ballot and voters who have historically had to overcome substantial hurdles to reach the ballot box, such as Florida’s senior voters, youngest voters, and minority voters.”Another suit was brought by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Disability Rights Florida and Common Cause, who argued that the law violates constitutional protections and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.The law took effect immediately, and will be in force for the 2022 election, when Mr. DeSantis is up for re-election. 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      The Stock Market Loves Biden More Than Trump. So Far, at Least.

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      Stocks have soared under the new president, and the Dow has generally preferred Democrats since 1901. But don’t count on that for the future.From the moment he was elected president in 2016 through his failed campaign for re-election, Donald J. Trump invoked the stock market as a report card on the presidency.The market loved him, Mr. Trump said, and it hated Democrats, particularly his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr. During the presidential debate in October, Mr. Trump warned of Mr. Biden: “If he’s elected, the market will crash.” In a variety of settings, he said that Democrats would be a disaster and that a victory for them would set off “a depression,” which would make the stock market “disintegrate.”So far, it hasn’t turned out that way.To the extent that the Dow Jones industrial average measures the stock market’s affection for a president, its early report card says the market loves President Biden’s first days in office considerably more than it loved those of President Trump.Mr. Biden would get an A for this early period; Mr. Trump would receive a B for the market performance during his first days as president, though he would get a higher mark for much of the rest of his term.From Election Day through Thursday, the Dow rose about 26 percent, compared with 14 percent for the same period four years ago. Amid signs that the United States is recovering briskly from the pandemic, early returns for Mr. Biden’s actual time in office have also been exceptional. The stock market’s rise from its close on Inauguration Day to its close on Thursday marked the best start for any presidency since that of another Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson.For those too young to remember the awful day of Nov. 22, 1963, Johnson, the vice president, was sworn in as president that afternoon after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Measuring stock market performance from the end of the day they were all sworn into office allows us to include Johnson as well as Theodore Roosevelt, who became president on Sept. 14, 1901, after President William McKinley died of gunshot wounds.The Republican Party has long claimed that it is the party of business, and that Republican rule is better for stocks. But the historical record demonstrates that the market has generally performed better under Democratic presidents since the start of the 20th century.Over all, the market under President Biden ranks third for all presidents during a comparable time in office since 1901, according to a tally through Thursday (the Biden administration’s 109th day) by Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group.These are the top performers:Franklin D. Roosevelt, inaugurated March 4, 1933: 78.1 percent.Johnson, inaugurated Nov. 22, 1963: 13.8 percent.Mr. Biden, inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021: 10.8 percent.William H. Taft, inaugurated March 4, 1909: 9.6 percent.Note that three of the top four — Roosevelt, Johnson and Mr. Biden — were Democrats. That fits an apparent pattern. Since 1900, the median stock market gain for Democrats for the start of their presidencies is 7.9 percent; for Republicans, only 2.7 percent.By contrast, the Dow gained 5.8 percent in Mr. Trump’s first days as president. That was a strong return for a Republican, but not quite up to snuff for a Democrat.Now consider longer-term returns — how the Dow performed over the duration of all presidencies, starting in 1901. Again, the market did better under Democrats, with a 6.7 percent gain, annualized, compared with 3.5 percent under Republicans.Using this metric, the Trump administration looks much better, placing fourth among all presidencies.These are the annualized returns for the top-ranking presidents:25.5 percent under Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, in the Roaring Twenties.15.9 percent under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.12.1 percent under Barack Obama, a Democrat.12.0 percent under President Trump.That’s an extraordinarily good market performance under Mr. Trump, when you recall that it includes the stock market collapse of late February and March last year as the world reeled from the coronavirus.The market recovered rapidly once the Federal Reserve jumped in on March 23, 2020, and in response to emergency aid programs enacted by Congress. But neither the market, nor the economy, nor the pandemic improved sufficiently in 2020 to win President Trump another term.As for President Biden, he is undoubtedly benefiting from the upward trajectory in the economy and the markets that started under his predecessor — much as President Trump benefited from the growing economy bequeathed him by President Obama.It doesn’t always work that way. In the Great Depression, the market roared in Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days. He offered a hopeful contrast — and a stark break — with his immediate predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who presided over what was then the worst stock market crash in modern history. During Hoover’s four years in office, the Dow lost 35.6 percent annualized, by far the worst performance of any president.The market’s recent boom can be easily explained. Back in July, I cited an investment analysis that suggested the stock market might perform quite well in a Biden presidency, despite Mr. Trump’s claims to the contrary. Those factors included more vigorous and efficient management of the coronavirus crisis, which would promote economic recovery and corporate profits; generous fiscal stimulus programs, with the possibility of colossal infrastructure-building; a return to international engagement accompanied by a reduction in trade friction; and a renewal of America’s global climate-change commitments.So far, that analysis is holding up. But will it lead to strong returns through the Biden administration?I have no idea. Alas, none of this tells us where the stock market is heading. All we know is that it has risen more than it has fallen over the long run, but has moved fairly randomly, day to day, and has sometimes veered into long declines. Another decline could happen at any time, regardless of what any president does.The only approach to investing I’d actively embrace is passive: using low-cost stock and bond index funds to build a well-diversified portfolio and hang on for the long run. And I’d try to ignore the exhortations of politicians, especially those who would tie their own electoral fortunes to the performance of the stock market. More

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      When Love and Politics Mix

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      Emorie Broemel and Philip Swartzfager II met in Cleveland at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She was there working for ViacomCBS; he was a volunteer.Emorie Broemel, a senior director of government relations at ViacomCBS, never imagined she would meet her future husband at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. As a Democrat, it was one of the last places she expected to find love.“I joke that it’s my secret shame,” she said. She was also too consumed by her work at the time to even consider the possibility that she might make a romantic connection. “Conventions for me are not fun at all,” she said. “They’re very stressful. I’m like doing events and running around.”But for Philip Swartzfager II, an operations volunteer at the July convention, politics were the furthest thing from his mind when he was introduced to Ms. Broemel by Sarah Hudson, a mutual friend. Instead, he was surprised and a bit regretful. Ms. Hudson had actually been trying to set the two of them up for months and he wished they had connected sooner.It was not an ideal environment for a first date, Mr. Swartzfager said, because they each had social obligations throughout the evening. But after drinks, a concert performance by the country singer-songwriter Pat Green and a stop at the former House speaker John Boehner’s warehouse party — one of the convention’s marquee gatherings — they had gotten enough time together for Mr. Swartzfager, 39, to feel confident he’d met someone special. “I knew when we left the party,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’ve got to get her to commit to another date.’”It was about two weeks later when they were able to see each together again because Ms. Broemel, 36, had to travel, with only two days of rest at home in Washington in between, to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. To keep himself on her radar, Mr. Swartzfager, a manager of government relations at PayPal, sent Ms. Broemel an “encouraging text message so she didn’t forget me.”The message, Ms. Broemel said, was unnecessary: “I knew that I wanted to see Phil again.” Despite being exhausted from the back-to-back conventions, she agreed to meet up with Mr. Swartzfager for drinks at the Spanish restaurant Jaleo, just a few days after returning to the capital.Within months, they were dating seriously and in August 2017, on a trip to Rosemary Beach, Fla., unplugged from work and fully relaxed for the first time since they met, the couple realized that their relationship was on its way to becoming permanent. “That was kind of a crystallizing trip where I think we both knew that we wanted and that we would at some point marry,” Ms. Broemel said.Further confirmation came in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic when they quarantined together. “Although I knew we would get engaged, I knew we would be married, it was a very comforting experience to know that you can get along with somebody so well that you can weather working from home together,” Mr. Swartzfager said.He planned to propose in Baltimore, after a meal at Charleston, one of their favorite restaurants. But that fell through because of new public health rules, so Mr. Swartzfager asked Ms. Broemel to marry him at their Capitol Hill apartment in December.They were married April 17 before eight guests at Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville, where the bride grew up. The Rev. Anne Stevenson, Ms. Broemel’s childhood priest, came out of retirement to perform the Episcopal ceremony. More

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      Arizona Election Results Review Is Riddled With Flaws, Says Official

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      Arizona’s top election official said the effort ordered by Republican state senators leaves ballots unattended and lacks basic safeguards to protect the process from manipulation.Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting.All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out this week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter. Ms. Hobbs, called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices.”“Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit,’” she wrote to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting it.The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds. But it has become so troubled that the Department of Justice also expressed concerns this week in a letter saying that it might violate federal laws.“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.The scene playing out in Arizona is perhaps the most off-the-rails episode in the Republican Party’s escalating effort to support former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that he won the election. Four months after Congress certified the results of the presidential election, local officials around the country are continuing to provide oxygen for Mr. Trump’s obsession that he beat Joseph R. Biden Jr. last fall.In Arizona, the review is proving to be every bit as problematic as skeptics had imagined.Last month, the Arizona Republic editorial board called for the state’s G.O.P. Senate majority to stop “abusing its authority.”“Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have set aside dollars, hired consultants, procured the hardware and software to conduct what they call ‘an audit’ of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County,” the editorial said. “What they don’t have is the moral authority to make it credible.”Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said the process had ignored long-established safeguards against mistakes or deliberate manipulation of the election results.Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinRepublican state senators ordered a review of the election in Maricopa County, whose 2.1 million ballots accounted for two-thirds of the entire vote statewide, in December, after some supporters of Mr. Trump refused to accept his 10,457-vote loss in Arizona. Democrats had flipped the county, giving Mr. Biden more than enough votes to ensure his victory statewide.The senators later assigned oversight of the effort to a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had publicly embraced conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines had been rigged to deliver the state to Mr. Biden. Since then, supporters of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election story line have been given broad access to the site of the review, while election experts, the press and independent observers have struggled to gain access, sometimes resorting to going to court.In one much-noted instance, Anthony Kern, a former state representative photographed on the Capitol steps on the day of the insurrection — and who was on the Maricopa ballot both as a legislative candidate and as a presidential elector — was hired to help recount ballots.Among other concerns, Ms. Hobbs’s letter contended that stacks of ballots were not properly protected and that there was no apparent procedure for preventing the commingling of tallied and untallied ballots.The security violations spotted by observers, the letter stated, included ballots left unattended on tables and ballots counted using scrap paper instead of official tally sheets. Counters receive “on the fly” training. Ballots from separate stacks are mixed together. Software problems cause ballot images to get lost. The letter also noted that some aspects of the process “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories than as a part of a professional audit.”For instance, some ballots are receiving microscope and ultraviolet-light examinations, apparently to address unfounded claims that fraudulent ballots contained watermarks that were visible under UV light — or that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Southeast Asia using paper with bamboo fibers.John Brakey, an official helping supervise the effort, said high-powered microscopes were being used to search for evidence of fake ballots, according to a video interview with the CBS News affiliate in Phoenix.“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in, to Arizona, and it was stuffed into the box,” he said in a taped interview. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”“I don’t believe any of that,” he added. “I’m just saying it’s part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”Republicans in the Senate signed a contract agreeing to pay $150,000 for the vote review, a figure that many said then would not cover its cost. A variety of outside groups later started fund-raisers to offset extra expenses, including the right-wing One America News cable channel and an Arizona state representative, Mark Finchem, who argues the election was stolen. How much in outside donations has been collected — and who the donors are — is unclear.The letter from the secretary of state also said that equipment and software being used to display images of ballots had not been tested by a federal laboratory or certified by the federal Election Assistance Commission, as state law requires. That left open the possibility, the letter said, that the systems could have been preloaded with false images of ballots or that the software had been designed to manipulate ballot images — concerns similar to those that believers in a stolen election had themselves raised.Ms. Hobbs also said the procedures for checking the accuracy of the effort included no “reliable process for ensuring consistency and resolving discrepancies” among the three separate counts of ballots. It also appeared that the task of entering recount results into an electronic spreadsheet was performed by a single person rather than a team of people from both political parties, the letter stated.Mr. Bennett, the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting the vote review, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But Ms. Hobbs concluded her letter to him by saying, “you know that our elections are governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency. You also must therefore know that the procedures governing this audit ensure none of those things.“I’m not sure what compelled you to oversee this audit, but I’d like to assume you took this role with the best of intentions. It is those intentions I appeal to now: either do it right, or don’t do it at all.” More

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      Stefanik Moves to Oust Cheney, Resurfacing False Election Claims

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      Republicans say Liz Cheney, their No. 3, is being targeted because she won’t stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies. Her would-be replacement is campaigning on them.WASHINGTON — As House Republicans have made the case for ousting Representative Liz Cheney, their No. 3, from their leadership ranks, they have insisted that it is not her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies that they find untenable, but her determination to be vocal about it.But on Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have anointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, loudly resurrected his false narrative, citing “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to cast doubt on the results.“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, in the first of a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of the former president.The comments, Ms. Stefanik’s first in public since she announced she was taking on Ms. Cheney, reflected how central the former president’s election lies have become to the Republican Party message, even as its leaders insist they are determined to move beyond them and focus on attacking Democrats as radical, big-spending socialists before the 2022 midterm elections.Far from staying quiet about the false election claims on Thursday, Ms. Stefanik effectively campaigned on them, describing Mr. Trump on Mr. Bannon’s show as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” and asserting that Republicans would work with him as “one team.”“The job of the conference chair is to represent the majority of the House Republicans, and the vast majority of the House Republicans support President Trump, and they support his focus on election integrity and election security,” Ms. Stefanik later told Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump. The job, she said in an unmistakable jab at Ms. Cheney, “is not to attack members of the conference and attack President Trump.”While Ms. Stefanik avoided claiming outright that the election was stolen, she praised the Arizona audit, a Republican-led endeavor that critics in both parties have described as a blow to democratic norms and a political embarrassment, as “incredibly important.” She said recounting votes there and scrutinizing how Pennsylvania and other states administered the 2020 election were “valid, important questions and issues that the American people deserve policy proposals and answers on.”It was a stark contrast from Ms. Cheney, who has relentlessly upbraided the former president for falsely claiming the election was stolen and on Wednesday beseeched Republican lawmakers in a scathing opinion piece to excise him from the party. Ms. Cheney voted against her party’s efforts to invalidate the election results on Jan. 6, while Ms. Stefanik — like most House Republicans — voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Biden.Some Republicans, including the hard-right lawmakers who led a charge to try to remove Ms. Cheney in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, readily conceded that they were unwilling to tolerate dissent from their party leaders.“All the polling indicates that President Trump is still the titleholder,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Fox News. Ms. Cheney “can tell what her version of the truth is, but she can’t do it as the leader of the Republican Party in Congress.”For many Republicans, however, the calculation to boot Ms. Cheney, a strict conservative, in favor of Ms. Stefanik, who has a far more moderate voting record but has wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Trump, is more complicated.In interviews with lawmakers and party operatives, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the internal turmoil, several expressed concern about the optics of purging the only female member of leadership and a daughter of a conservative dynasty for her resolve to call out Mr. Trump’s lies. They worried that the move to oust Ms. Cheney could spook donors who might chafe at sending money to Republicans so closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, and ultimately voters who might be alienated by the party’s refusal to brook dissent.But they were also wrestling with the political downsides of keeping Ms. Cheney in her post, worried that they would continue to be forced to answer for her unyielding broadsides against the myth of a stolen election that many of their voters believe. Several lawmakers privately lamented her stubbornness and said they wished Ms. Cheney would focus solely on attacking Democrats.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have annointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, has loudly resurrected Mr. Trump’s false election narrative.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThat has been the approach taken by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who was initially vocal in his criticism of Mr. Trump and support of Ms. Cheney, but more recently has refused to broach either subject.On Thursday, for the second day in a row, he sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney, saying he was solely focused on challenging Mr. Biden and Democrats, and “looking forward — not backward.”“Members do not want to have to defend themselves against attacks from members of their own leadership team,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former House leadership aide. “The primary job of the House Republican Conference chair is to set up and facilitate the weekly press conferences conducted by the House Republican leadership. If you go out of your way to embarrass your leaders at those press conferences, you are not doing your job and you won’t last in that position very long.”Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a rising freshman star who voted against her party’s attempt to invalidate the election results, came out on Thursday in support of Ms. Stefanik, saying she respected Ms. Cheney’s “strong conservative record and service to our country” but wanted relief from the infighting that had plagued the conference.“If Republicans are divided, and not focusing all of our efforts against radical Democrat policies, Speaker Pelosi will remain in power,” Ms. Hinson said in a statement that called Ms. Stefanik “the right person to unify and lead our conference at this time.”Others appeared torn. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who had vocally condemned Mr. Trump for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and warned that the Republican Party could not define itself solely around the former president, said she was tired of “having these fights publicly.”“I want to move forward,” Ms. Mace told Fox Business’s Neil Cavuto. “I want to win back the House in a year and a half. We can get the majority back, and we’ve got to stop fighting with each other in public.”Ms. Mace warned that if the party continued “to make our party and our country about one person, and not about hard-working Americans in the this country, we’re going to continue to lose elections.” Asked whether she was referring to Mr. Trump or Ms. Cheney, Ms. Mace replied, “All of the above.”Some arch-conservative Republicans who are eager to oust Ms. Cheney — many of whom have despised her hawkish foreign policy views for years — have been quietly skeptical of Ms. Stefanik despite her endorsement from Mr. Trump, noting the low rankings conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Conservative Union have given her. On Wednesday night, the anti-tax Club for Growth opposed her campaign, branding her “a liberal.”“House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group wrote in a statement on Twitter.But despite the hand-wringing among the rank-and-file, by Thursday, Ms. Stefanik’s allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, publicly predicted that she would be conference chairwoman as soon as Wednesday, when Republicans plan to meet.“For sure the votes are there,” Mr. Jordan said on Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican Party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”Carl Hulse More