Presidential Election of 2024

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      Small Donors Are a Big Problem

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      One of the most important developments driving political polarization over the past two decades is the growth in small-dollar contributions.Increasing the share of campaign pledges from modest donors has long been a goal of campaign-finance reformers, but it turns out that small donors hold far more ideologically extreme views than those of the average voter.In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years. (Very recently, in part because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House and in part because Joe Biden has not been able to raise voter enthusiasm, low-dollar contributions have declined, although they remain a crucial source of cash for candidates.)Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70.In an email, Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U. and an expert in campaign finance, wrote: “Individual donors and spenders are among the most ideological sources of money (and are far more ideological than the average citizen). That’s particularly true of small donors.”As a case in point, Pildes noted that in the 2022 elections, House Republicans who backed Trump and voted to reject the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 received an average of $140,000 in small contributions, while House Republicans who opposed Trump and voted to accept Biden’s victory received far less in small donations, an average of $40,000.In a 2019 article, “Small-Donor-Based Campaign-Finance Reform and Political Polarization,” Pildes wrote:It is important to recognize that individuals who donate to campaigns tend, in general, to be considerably more ideologically extreme than the average American. This is one of the most robust empirical findings in the campaign-finance literature, though it is not widely known. The ideological profile for individual donors is bimodal, with most donors clumped at the “very liberal” or “very conservative” poles and many fewer donors in the center, while the ideological profile of other Americans is not bimodal and features strong centrist representation.The rise of the small donor has been a key element driving the continuing decline of the major political parties.Political parties have been steadily losing the power to shape the election process to super PACs, independent expenditure organizations and individual donors. This shift has proved, in turn, to be a major factor in driving polarization, as the newly ascendant sources of campaign contributions push politicians to extremes on the left and on the right.The 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. F.E.C. was a crucial factor in shaping the ideological commitments of elected officials and their challengers.“The role of parties in funding (and thus influencing) campaigns at all levels of government in America has shifted in recent decades,” Thad Kousser, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote in an email.“Parties often played a beneficial role,” he added, “helping to bind together broad coalitions on one side or the other and boosting electoral competition by giving in the most competitive races, regardless of a candidate’s ideology. Then much of their power was taken away, and other forces, often more ideologically extreme and always less transparent, were elevated.”This happened, Kousser continued, “through an accretion of campaign finance laws, Supreme Court decisions and F.E.C. actions and inactions. This has led us toward the era of independent expenditures and of dark money, one in which traditional parties have lost so much power that Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination in 2016, even though he began with little support among the party’s establishment.”The polarizing effects of changing sources of campaign contributions pose a challenge to traditional reformers.Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Tufts, wrote in their 2015 book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail”:The public intensely dislikes how campaigns are financed in the United States. We can understand why. The system of private financing seems rigged to favor special interests and wealthy donors. Much of the reform community has responded by calling for tighter restrictions on private financing of elections to push the system toward “small donor democracy” and various forms of public financing. These strategies seem to make sense and, in principle, we are not opposed to them.But our research and professional experience as political scientists have led us to speculate that these populist approaches to curtailing money in politics might not be alleviating but contributing to contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan standoffs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans that appear to characterize the current state of U.S. politics.La Raja and Schaffner argued that “a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels. Yet this research seems to have been ignored in the design of post-Watergate reforms.”The counterintuitive result, they wrote,has been a system in which interest groups and intensely ideological — and wealthy — citizens play a disproportionately large role in financing candidates for public office. This dynamic has direct implications for many of the problems facing American government today, including ideological polarization and political gridlock. The campaign finance system is certainly not the only source of polarization and gridlock, but we think it is an important part of the story.Nathan Persily, a professor of law and political science at Stanford, observed in a telephone interview that the trend in campaign finance has been to “move money from accountable actors, the political parties, to unaccountable groups.”“The parties,” he pointed out, “are accountable not only because of more stringent contribution disclosure requirements but also by their role in actual governance with their ties to congressional and executive branch officials and their involvement with legislative decision making.”The appeal of extreme candidates well to the right or left of the average voter can be seen in the OpenSecrets listing of the top five members of the House and Senate ranked by the percentage of contributions they have received from small donors in the 2021-22 election cycle:Bernie Sanders raised $38,310,351, of which $26,913,409, or 70.25 percent, came from small donors; Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $12,546,634, of which $8,572,027, or 68.32 percent, came from small donors; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $12,304,636, of which $8,326,902, or 67.67 percent, came from small donors; Matt Gaetz raised $6,384,832, of which $3,973,659, or 62.24 percent, came from small donors; and Jim Jordan raised a total of $13,975,653, of which $8,113,157, or 58.05 percent, came from small donors.Trump provides an even better example of the appeal of extremist campaigns to small donors.In a February 2020 article, “Participation and Polarization,” Pildes wrote: “In 2016, Donald Trump became the most successful candidate ever in raising money from small donors, measured either in aggregate dollars or in the percentage of his total contributions. In total small-donor dollars for the 2015-16 cycle, Trump brought in $238.6 million.”Significantly, Pildes continued, “small donations ($200 or less) made up 69 percent of the individual contributions to Trump’s campaign and 58 percent of the Trump campaign’s total receipts.”Michael J. Barber, a political scientist at Brigham Young, argued in a 2016 paper, “Ideological Donors, Contribution Limits and the Polarization of American Legislatures,” that “higher individual contributions lead to the selection of more polarized legislators, while higher limits on contributions from political action committees (PACs) lead to the selection of more moderate legislators.”In addition to the impact of the small donor on weakening the parties, Pildes wrote in his email,a second major development is the rise of outside spending groups, such as super PACs, that are not aligned with the political parties and often work against the party’s leadership. Many of these 501(c) (tax exempt) groups back more ideologically extreme candidates — particularly during primaries — than either the formal party organizations or traditional PACs. The threat of such funding also drives incumbents to the extreme, to avoid a primary challenger backed by such funding.Details of the process Pildes described can be found in a 2020 study, “Assessing Group Incentives, Independent Spending and Campaign Finance Law,” by Charles R. Hunt, Jaclyn J. Kettler, Michael J. Malbin, Brendan Glavin and Keith E. Hamm.The five authors tracked the role of independent expenditure organizations, many of which operate outside the reach of political parties, in the 15 states with accessible public data from 2006 (before Citizens United) to 2016 (after Citizens United).The authors found that spending by ideological or single-issue independent expenditure organizations, the two most extreme groups, grew from $21.8 million in 2006 to $66 million in 2016.More important, the total spending by these groups was 21.8 percent of independent expenditures in 2006 (including political parties, organized labor, business and other constituencies). Ten years later, in 2016, the amount of money spent by these two types of expenditure group had grown to 35.5 percent.Over the same period, spending by political parties fell from 24 percent of the total to 16.2 percent.Put another way, in 2006, spending by political parties and their allies was modestly more substantial than independent expenditures by more ideologically extreme groups; by 2016, the ideologically extreme groups spent more than double the amount spent by the parties and their partisan allies.On a national scale, Stan Oklobdzija, a political scientist at Tulane, has conducted a detailed study of so-called dark money groups using data from the Federal Election Commission and the I.R.S. to describe the level of influence wielded by these groups.In his April 2023 paper, “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns,” Oklobdzija wrote:Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, an increasingly large sum of money has decamped from the transparent realm of funds governed by the F.E.C. The rise of dark money — or political money routed through Internal Revenue Service (IRS)-governed nonprofit organizations who are subject to far less stringent disclosure rules — in American elections means that a substantial percentage of American campaign cash in the course of the last decade has effectively gone underground.Oklobdzija added that “pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and to create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties.” These dark money networks “channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups” in ways that diminish “the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.”What Oklobdzija showed is that major dark money groups are much more significant than would appear in F.E.C. fund-raising reports. He did so by using separate I.R.S. data revealing financial linkages to smaller dark money groups that together create a powerful network of donors.Using a database of about 2.35 million tax returns filed by these organizations, Oklobdzija found that “these dark money groups are linked via the flow of substantial amounts of grant money — forming distinct network communities within the larger campaign finance landscape.”Intense animosity toward Trump among Democrats and liberals helped drive a partisan upheaval in dark money contributions. “In 2014,” Oklobdzija wrote by email, “dark money was an almost entirely Republican phenomenon. The largest networks — those around Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity — supported almost exclusively conservative candidates.”In 2018, however, with Trump in the White House, Democratic dark money eclipsed its Republican counterpart for the first time, Oklobdzija wrote:In that year’s midterms, liberal groups that did not disclose their donors spent about twice what conservative groups did. Democrats also developed a network similar to those developed by Koches or Karl Rove with the 1630 Fund, which spent about $410 million total in 2020, either directly on elections or propping up liberal groups. In 2020, Democratic-aligned dark money outspent Republican-aligned dark money by almost 2.5 to 1. In 2022, total dark money spending was about 55 percent liberal and 45 percent conservative, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.A separate examination of the views of donors compared with the views of ordinary voters, “What Do Donors Want? Heterogeneity by Party and Policy Domain” by David Broockman and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Berkeley and Stanford, finds:Republican donors’ views are especially conservative on economic issues relative to Republican citizens, but are typically closer to Republican citizens’ views on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors’ views are especially liberal on social issues relative to Democratic citizens’, whereas their views on economic issues are typically closer to Democratic citizens’ views. Finally, both groups of donors are more pro-globalism than citizens are, but especially than Democratic donors.Brookman and Malhotra make the case that these differences between voters and donors help explaina variety of puzzles in contemporary American politics, including: the Republican Party passing fiscally conservative policies that we show donors favor but which are unpopular even with Republican citizens; the focus of many Democratic Party campaigns on progressive social policies popular with donors, but that are less publicly popular than classic New Deal economic policies; and the popularity of anti-globalism candidates opposed by party establishments, such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.Some of Brookman and Malhotra’s specific polling results:52 percent of Republican donors strongly disagree that the government should make sure all Americans have health insurance, versus only 23 percent of Republican citizens. Significant differences were found on taxing millionaires, spending on the poor, enacting programs for those with low incomes — with Republican donors consistently more conservative than Republican voters.On the Democratic side, donors were substantially more liberal than regular voters on abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control and especially on ending capital punishment, with 80 percent of donors in support, compared with 40 percent of regular voters.While most of the discussion of polarization focuses on ideological conflict and partisan animosity, campaign finance is just one example of how the mechanics, regulations and technology of politics can exacerbate the conflict between left and right.The development of microtargeting over the past decade has, for example, contributed to polarization by increasing the emphasis of campaigns on tactics designed to make specific constituencies angry or afraid, primarily by demonizing the opposition.The abrupt rise of social media has, in turn, facilitated the denigration of political adversaries and provided a public forum for false news. “Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter likely are not the root cause of polarization but they do exacerbate it,” according to a 2021 Brookings report.Some of those who study these issues, including La Raja and Schaffner, argue that one step in ameliorating the polarizing effects of campaign financing would be to restore the financial primacy of the political parties.In their book, La Raja and Schaffner propose four basic rules for creating a party-centered system of campaign finance:First, “limits on contributions to the political parties should be relatively high or nonexistent.” Second, “modest limits should be imposed on contributions to candidates.” Third, “no restrictions should be imposed on party support of candidates. Political parties should be permitted to help their candidates as much as desired with direct contributions or in-kind support.” Fourth, “public financing should support party organizations.”Persily, however, voiced strong doubts about the effectiveness of these proposals. “You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube,” he said, noting that polarization is becoming embedded in the personnel and decision-making processes of political parties, especially at the state and local levels, making a return to the parties’ past role as incubators of moderation unlikely.Broockman, Nicholas Carnes, Melody Crowder-Meyer and Christopher Skovron provided support for Persily’s view in their 2019 paper, “Why Local Party Leaders Don’t Support Nominating Centrists.” Broockman and his colleagues surveyed 1,118 county-level party leaders and found that “given the choice between a more centrist and more extreme candidate, they strongly prefer extremists, with Democrats doing so by about two to one and Republicans by 10 to one.”If what Broockman and his co-authors found about local party leaders is a signal that polarized thinking is gaining strength at all levels of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the prospects for those seeking to restore sanity to American politics — or at least reduce extremism — look increasingly dismal.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Trump Trial Date Is a Big Mistake

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      I intended to write a normal horse-race column this week, about what we can glean from the polling that came out after the first Republican debate. The emphasis was going to be on the resilience of Ron DeSantis, the success of Nikki Haley, the modest perils for Donald Trump in not showing up for these affairs — and then the larger problem of how DeSantis or Haley or anyone else might unite the anti-Trump vote instead of just repeating the fragmentation of 2016.But is anything we could learn from one Republican debate more significant than the news that the most important legal case against Trump, his federal trial for alleged election-related crimes, will begin the day before Super Tuesday? Probably not. So let’s save DeSantis and Haley for another day and talk about the significance of a front-runner’s trial running through the heart of a primary campaign.From any theory of the law’s relationship to democratic deliberation, this seems like an extremely suboptimal convergence. If you take the judicial process seriously — as an exercise in fact finding and adversarial argument, with the presumption of innocence at the outset yielding to a legitimate verdict at the end — then clearly under ideal circumstances the trial of a major presidential contender would be completed before voters begin passing judgments of their own. Under less optimal circumstances, a verdict would be rendered before most of the votes are cast, instilling confidence that a majority of the electorate shared the same knowledge about the law’s decision.To its credit, that’s what the prosecution asked for: a January start date, with the trial potentially wrapping up around the end of the first phase of the campaign. But instead we’re headed for a world where the trial and the campaign are fully intertwined, with each primary associated with a different snapshot of the case’s progress — some votes cast pretrial, some after the opening statements, some with the prosecution’s arguments as a backdrop and some following the defense’s rebuttal.This means in turn that an underlying problem for these trials as an attempted vindication of the rule of the law — the fact that everyone watching can see that the law’s decisions are provisional and the final arbiter of Trump’s fate is the voting public — will be highlighted over and over again throughout the judicial process itself. The Republican primary electorate will be a kind of shadow jury, offering its reactions in real time, constantly raising or lowering the odds that the defendant can reverse a guilty verdict by the simple expedient of becoming the next president of the United States.The shrugging response from many liberals is that there’s simply no alternative here, that Trump committed so many potential crimes that the pileup of cases requires at least one, and possibly several, to go to trial during the primary campaign.But only one of the four prosecutions, the classified documents case, involves alleged crimes committed close to the 2024 election. In every other instance there’s been a winding, multiyear road to prosecution that could have been plausibly expedited so that Trump faced a jury by 2023.The pileup isn’t deliberate; New York and Georgia prosecutors didn’t get together with Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and plan things to end this way, and some of the federal delay arguably reflected a reluctance to pursue a case. But there is still a recurring pattern with these anti-Trump, anti-populist efforts, which so often seem to converge on stratagems and choices that further undermine confidence in officially neutral institutions.These choices are often defended with the suggestion that any criticism is just a bad-faith attempt to let Trump or his voters off the hook. So in that vein it should be stressed, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he might well be headed to renomination without the pileup of prosecutions and that prosecutors aren’t forcing G.O.P. voters to do anything they don’t seem inclined to do already.But the pileup still seems like a boon to his renomination effort. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Mr. Trump collapses under the weight of his legal challenges,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutions, and it strongly suggests that along with the core Trump bloc (30 percent to 40 percent of the Republican electorate, let’s say) that will vote for him no matter what, there’s another bloc that’s open to alternatives but rallies to him when he’s perceived to be liberalism’s major target, in much the same spirit that liberals and feminists once rallied to an accused sexual predator named Bill Clinton when he was the target of the religious right.To beat Trump in the primary, any challenger would need part of that bloc to resist the rallying impulse and swing their way instead. So timing Trump’s prosecution but not the final outcome of the trial to some of the most important primaries seems more likely to cement his nomination than to finally make his poll numbers collapse.A conviction might be a different matter. There may be Republican voters who regard these prosecutions as theater designed to keep Trump from the nomination and therefore expect the legal cases to fall apart when his lawyers make their defense. A Reuters/Ipsos poll a few weeks ago found that 45 percent of the G.O.P. electorate said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony, compared with 35 percent (that Trumpian core again) who said they would and that more than half said they wouldn’t support him in the fall campaign if he was imprisoned.I do not believe the latter number, but at the very least the poll suggests that there is still enough faith in the legal system for an actual conviction to have a different effect on the Republican primary than the prosecutions have thus far.But on the current timeline, a conviction before the primary is decided is exactly what we aren’t going to get.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians

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      At a vigil for the shooting victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from a largely Black crowd. His agenda in Florida has earned him few Black allies.Days after being sworn in as Florida’s governor in 2019, Ron DeSantis pardoned the Groveland Four, a group of Black men who had been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman decades earlier.At the time, Mr. DeSantis’s decision seemed like it could serve as a vital olive branch to Florida’s wary African American community. Accusations of racism had trailed him throughout a bruising general election, which he had begun by warning voters not to “monkey this up” by voting for his Democratic opponent, who was Black. The case of the Groveland Four, who all died before having their names cleared, had received national attention, and Mr. DeSantis said their treatment represented a “miscarriage of justice.”Four years later, Mr. DeSantis’s relationship with Black Floridians could hardly be worse. As he moved increasingly to the right ahead of his run for president, Mr. DeSantis pushed an agenda that cemented his status as a rising conservative star nationally but that has outraged many Black voters and leaders in his home state.Those policies include changing how slavery is taught in schools, cutting funding for diversity and inclusion initiatives and redistricting a Black-led congressional district in northern Florida out of existence. Some Black professional groups have stopped holding conferences in the state, while several Black leaders have condemned Florida — and Mr. DeSantis — as an example of racism in policymaking.Now, a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville that killed three Black people over the weekend has escalated those tensions to new heights.At a vigil on Sunday for the victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from the largely Black crowd. He condemned the murders and called the killer, a white man who the authorities said intentionally targeted Black people before killing himself, “a major-league scumbag.”Mr. DeSantis was confronted with loud boos at the vigil for the shooting victims.John Raoux/Associated PressJeffrey Rumlin, a pastor who spoke after Mr. DeSantis, offered a correction. “Respect for the governor,” Mr. Rumlin, who is Black, told the crowd, but “he was not a scumbag. He was a racist.”Shevrin Jones, a state senator from South Florida, said Mr. DeSantis’s reception at the vigil was telling.“The response from Jacksonville’s Black community was the response from the Black community across the state of Florida,” said Mr. Jones, a Black Democrat. “We’ve never had a relationship with the governor.”Mr. DeSantis’s office, which is preparing for a major hurricane, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did his campaign.Kiyan Michael, a Republican state representative from the Jacksonville area, defended Mr. DeSantis. Far from being racist, she said, his support for policies like universal school choice and efforts to crack down on the employment of undocumented immigrants, had helped African Americans. The governor made modest gains with Black voters in his re-election last year, according to an Associated Press analysis.Ms. Michael, who is Black, also praised Mr. DeSantis for attending the Jacksonville vigil.“He could have sent somebody in his place. He didn’t,” she said. “He knew that he was going into a hornet’s nest, but he came himself to show his heart, his concern, his compassion.”The list of policies that Mr. DeSantis’s critics describe as harmful to African Americans is long, and many have been challenged in court.As governor, Mr. DeSantis sought to restrict enacting a popular referendum to restore the voting rights of many felons. After the George Floyd rallies, he signed legislation that many civil rights activists said criminalized political protests, as well as laws eliminating diversity and inclusion spending from state universities and restricting the teaching of the academic framework known as critical race theory. He also set up a new state police force to enforce election laws that arrested mainly Black people in a high-profile sweep and has seen many of its cases stumble in court. And he removed two elected state attorneys from office. Both were Democrats who supported criminal justice reform. One was Black.Perhaps the biggest backlash was early this year, when Florida education officials rejected an Advanced Placement course on African American studies and subsequently adopted new standards that said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The line was widely denounced, with a number of Black conservatives, including Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 rival Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, criticizing its inclusion.In the presidential race, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his “war on woke,” aiming to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated PressA backlash came when Florida education officials said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis defended the changes, saying on Fox News this month that the standards overwhelmingly showed the “injustices of slavery,” while also demonstrating that “people acquired skills in spite of slavery, not because of it, and then they used those when they achieved their freedom.”As a young man, Mr. DeSantis taught American history at a private boarding school in Georgia. There, The New York Times previously reported, some students said he offered lessons on the Civil War that seemed slanted, factually wrong and sometimes presented in ways that sounded like attempts to justify slavery.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his record leading Florida, particularly his “war on woke,” which seeks to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life. Republican primary voters have generally responded well, although Mr. DeSantis is still polling far behind the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.A general election, however, could be a different story. Mr. DeSantis’s status as a lightning rod for racial issues could galvanize Black turnout against him. Black voters are a key part of the Democratic electorate and their participation at the polls is vital. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump as Black turnout declined in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center. Four years later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won as Black voters came back to the polls in higher numbers.Angie Nixon, a Democratic state representative from Jacksonville, said in an interview that the harms of Mr. DeSantis’s policies were not just limited to Black voters.“He attacks marginalized communities in general because his base doesn’t like them,” Ms. Nixon said. “Because that’s low-hanging fruit for him to gain even more points politically among a base of voters. That’s all he’s ever done — is to try to appeal to a base of people.”Black leaders in Florida described their relationship with Mr. DeSantis as strained at best. In his five years as governor, Mr. DeSantis has held no formal meetings with the state’s legislative Black caucus, according to its members. In contrast, his predecessor, Rick Scott, did sit down with the Black legislators, although the meetings grew contentious and were eventually canceled after the caucus members said they were not being listened to.“I worked with Jeb Bush. I worked with Martinez. I worked with Rick Scott,” said the former congressman Al Lawson, referring to several past Republican Florida governors, including Bob Martinez. “None of them disenfranchised Blacks as much as this governor, DeSantis.”Mr. Lawson’s former district — once heavily Black and Democratic — is now held by a Republican, a product of a redistricting process in which Mr. DeSantis took the unusual step of putting forth his own maps, rather than leaving it entirely to the Legislature, where he enjoys significant support with G.O.P. supermajorities. (A legal challenge asserting that the changes harmed Black voters could restore Mr. Lawson’s district.)This summer, Black national organizations have shunned the state or encouraged their members to travel elsewhere. The National Association of Black Engineers said it would move its 2024 convention, originally set for Orlando, to Atlanta. Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity, said it would no longer hold its 2025 convention in Orlando. Both organizations cited recent policies in Florida that they felt posed a threat to Black Americans.In May, the N.A.A.C.P. released a travel advisory to Black Americans considering visiting Florida, calling the state “openly hostile” to members of racial minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people.Carol Greenlee, 73, pushed for decades for the pardon and eventual exoneration of her father, Charles Greenlee, one of the Groveland Four, over the 1949 crime in Central Florida. She saw the pardon as a moment of hope and reconciliation, especially after the previous governor, Mr. Scott, had declined to take up the case, despite the urging of the Legislature.“It felt like we were moving forward,” she said. “It felt like the pendulum was swinging toward justice.”Ms. Greenlee, who lives in Tennessee but has followed Mr. DeSantis’s path as governor, said his subsequent actions had left her baffled and angry.“I have to shake my head and wonder what happened with some of the stances he has taken,” she said. “It’s almost like a 180-degree turnaround.” More

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      The Object of Ukraine’s Desire: F-16s From the West. But It’s Tricky.

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      Ukraine’s sense of urgency in obtaining the fighter jet reflects concerns about the war against Russia, but also the political calendar in the West. But training pilots and support crew is a lengthy process.The F-16 fighter jets would not be delivered to Ukraine until next year, but that did not dissuade President Volodymyr Zelensky from hopping into one last week in the Netherlands — one stop on a European tour to collect commitments to donate the warplane as quickly as possible.There he was in Denmark, praising the government for “helping Ukraine to become invincible” with its pledge to send 19 jets. In Athens, he said Greece’s offer to train Ukrainian pilots would “help us fight for our freedom.” Within days of returning to Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky had secured promises from a half-dozen countries to either donate the jets — potentially more than 60 — or provide training for pilots and support crew.“It is important and necessary,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway told Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, announcing that his government would provide an undetermined number of the jets — probably 10 or fewer — in the future.It was a remarkable victory lap for a sophisticated attack aircraft that even Ukraine’s defense minister has acknowledged is unlikely to perform in combat until next spring — and then only for the few pilots who can understand English well enough to fly it. With Ukraine’s counteroffensive grinding ahead slowly this summer, Mr. Zelensky’s airy announcements of securing the F-16s signal a tacit acknowledgment that the 18-month war in Ukraine will likely endure for years to come.They were also a palpable signal of Mr. Zelensky’s fixation on a fighter jet that is faster, more powerful and more versatile than existing Ukrainian aircraft, but that has spurred debate over how substantially it can advance Kyiv’s immediate war effort. The F-16 has both offensive and defensive capabilities — it can be launched within minutes and is equipped to shoot down incoming missiles and enemy aircraft.People gathered outside the Danish Parliament during a visit by Mr. Zelensky. Mads Claus Rasmussen/EPA, via ShutterstockUkraine has adamantly insisted the planes would make a significant difference, though American officials have long maintained that tanks, ammunition and most of all, well trained ground troops are far more important in what is, right now, primarily a ground war. The Western warplanes are costly and it could take years to train and field enough pilots to provide sufficient air cover.As it presses for the fighter jets, Ukraine also senses a ticking political clock, current and former officials in Kyiv and Washington said. Mr. Zelensky appears driven to get as many of the F-16s as possible delivered before elections in Europe and the United States, which could bring a change of heart in the governments that have promised the planes.The Netherlands, for example, has pledged to give Ukraine as many as 42 F-16s it is phasing out of its air force; it will hold parliamentary elections this November. The larger concern, though, is the United States, where Republican support for sending tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine is dropping. Former President Donald J. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, said in July he would push Mr. Zelensky into peace agreements by telling him “no more — you got to make a deal.”“The American political uncertainties are very much on the minds of Ukrainians, and all of Europe,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who met with Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv just as the Ukrainian president was returning from his F-16 tour last week. “One of the objectives here, clearly, is to lock in commitments as clearly and unequivocally as possible.”Mr. Zelensky, left, met with Senators (from left) Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham in Kyiv earlier this month. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/via ReutersHe said Mr. Zelensky did not directly discuss next year’s U.S. elections during their meeting, which also included Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and was held in an underground room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kyiv immediately after an air raid alarm. But, he said in a telephone interview, the more that can be delivered before November 2024, “the more that air support is not threatened by the vagaries of American politics.”So far, the Biden administration has not committed to sending Ukraine any F-16s from its own fleet, although it announced last week that it would train pilots at air bases in Texas and Arizona starting in September.It is expected to take at least four months to train Ukraine’s pilots on aircraft more advanced than what they are used to flying, and on tactics and weapons they are not used to employing. It could take even longer to teach them enough English to understand training manuals and to communicate with air traffic controllers and instructors. The avionics on the planes, including the buttons, are in English.There is another wrinkle in plans to deliver the planes. The United States must give approval before other countries can send American-made jets to Ukraine. The Biden administration has signaled to Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands that it will allow the transfers, but a new president could reverse those case-by-case agreements if delivery has not yet been completed, according to a U.S. official.Several officials cited in this article spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.A former senior Biden administration official said that Mr. Zelensky’s spate of F-16 announcements was also likely intended to lock in Western commitments in the event that a sluggish counteroffensive erodes political support among allies.Ukrainians firing on Russian positions from an infantry fighting vehicle. Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesMr. Zelensky’s sense of urgency has been unmistakable. In addition to his diplomatic forays, he mentioned the F-16s at least eight times during his nightly addresses in August, predicting that their presence in Ukrainian skies will vanquish Russian forces. Officials in Kyiv have even used the death last week of one of their famed pilots in a training accident to underscore that Ukraine needs the jets to win. Part of the jets’ appeal is that they are in plentiful supply. Many European air forces have F-16s and are getting rid of them to transition to the even more advanced F-35. So they exist in ample numbers with a built-in Western repair and supply chain, and training programs that can support them years into the future.However, the immediate hurdle to fielding the F-16s that have been pledged is not the actual jets, but the shortage of trained English-speaking Ukrainian pilots and support crew to fly and maintain them.A former senior U.S. Air Force officer said it takes between 8 to 14 support personnel to maintain, fuel and support each F-16, depending on how many bases the jets operate from. It will take roughly as long to train the support crews as the pilots, the officer said.So far, American officials have said, only eight Ukrainian pilots are sufficiently fluent in English and experienced in flying combat aircraft to have started training on the F-16s in Denmark. At least 20 other pilots are starting English-language instruction in Britain. Even Ukrainian pilots skilled at flying the Soviet-era MiG-29 jets that make up much of Kyiv’s current fleet would have to learn to navigate the F-16s’ “hands-on throttle and stick” or “HOTAS” technology; that’s a system that would let them shift from bombing targets on the ground to engaging in air-to-air combat without taking their hands off the controls.The system makes it easier to navigate between the two targets than on a MiG-29, but it still takes time to learn.“That all is going to take time and that probably is not going to happen before the end of the year,” Gen. James B. Hecker, the top U.S. air commander in Europe, told reporters at George Washington University’s Defense Writers Group on Aug. 18.One U.S. adviser said Ukraine will probably deploy the initial F-16s as soon as the pilots are certified to fly, in a range of defensive and offensive combat missions. Given the advanced weapons the F-16s will carry, just having them deployed, even in a niche capacity, could force Russia to dedicate valuable resources to monitor and counter them, the adviser said.Pro-Ukraine demonstrators called on President Joe Biden to send F-16 jets to Ukraine in a protest outside the hotel where he stayed in Warsaw in February. Aleksandra Szmigiel/ReutersStill, their effectiveness would still be limited by Russian air defenses and advanced fighters developed to specifically combat NATO aircraft such as the F-16.“In the short term they’ll help a little bit, but it’s not the silver bullet,” General Hecker said.U.S. officials say the F-16s are important for other reasons. Their arrival will boost Ukrainian morale and signal the shift of Ukraine’s air force to a NATO-caliber fleet. That sends an important deterrent message to Russia, to stave off future attacks from Moscow once this war is over, U.S. officials say.U.S. officials have repeatedly stated that providing Ukraine with F-16s is more about the future than the present.“Putin’s strategy is clearly to outlast, or out-wait, America and count on it lacking the will or the arms to continue,” Mr. Blumenthal said.He added: “There is a kind of gap, so to speak, between the victory lap of accepting the planes and the actual delivery. But the goal is to close that gap as quickly as possible and get F-16s on the battlefield.” More

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      Trump Could Clinch the Nomination Before the G.O.P. Knows if He’s a Felon

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      The federal election interference case — one of four — is set to start just before Super Tuesday and a cascade of consequential primaries.By the time Donald J. Trump is sitting at his federal trial on charges of criminally conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, he may have already secured enough delegates to effectively clinch the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.The former president’s trial is scheduled to start March 4, by which point five states are expected to have held nominating contests. The next day, March 5, is Super Tuesday, when 15 states, including delegate-rich California and Texas, plan to hold votes that will determine if any Trump challenger has enough political oxygen to remain a viable alternative.Primaries in Florida, Ohio and Illinois come two weeks later. Florida and Ohio will be the first winner-take-all contests, in which the top vote-getter statewide seizes all of the delegates rather than splitting them proportionally. Winner-take-all primaries have historically turbocharged the front-runner’s path to the presidential nomination. Mr. Trump’s federal trial, if it proceeds on its current timeline, won’t be close to finished by then.The collision course between the Republican Party’s calendar and Mr. Trump’s trial schedule is emblematic of one of the most unusual nominating contests in American history. It is a Trump-dominated clash that will define not only the course of the 2024 presidential primary but potentially the future direction of the party in an eventual post-Trump era.“It’s a front-runner set of rules now,” said Clayton Henson, who manages the ballot access and delegate selection process for the Trump campaign, which has been instrumental in rewriting the rules to benefit him.Mr. Trump has complained the March 4 start date of the trial amounts to “election interference” and cited Super Tuesday, but it is likely to have a greater effect on his ability to campaign for primaries in subsequent weeks. About 60 percent of the delegates will be awarded from contests after Super Tuesday.Generally, defendants are required to be present in the courtroom at their trials. After preliminary matters such as jury selection, prosecutors in Mr. Trump’s election case have estimated they will need about four to six weeks to present their case, after which defense lawyers will have an opportunity to call additional witnesses.That timeline also means it is likely that a majority of the delegates will have been awarded before a jury determines Mr. Trump’s fate.If Mr. Trump holds his dominant polling advantage throughout the primaries but then a jury transforms him into a convicted felon, any forces within the G.O.P. that would want to use that development to stop him would have one last opportunity to block his nomination — the same end-run around voters that officials tried at the party convention in 2016.That possibility would almost certainly lead to a schism between Trump loyalists and what used to be called the party’s establishment, an unpleasant reality in which defeating Mr. Trump could doom Republicans to a long cycle of electoral defeats.“Given what’s happening on the legal front, state parties need to think about what options they’re giving themselves” to allow delegates flexibility at the party’s national convention, said Bill Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member from New Jersey who advises the super PAC supporting Chris Christie and who opposes Mr. Trump.Republican state parties have until Oct. 1 to submit their formal delegate allocation rules to the national committee.“All this is happening so quickly, it’s unprecedented, and so as states formulate what their rules are going to be,” Mr. Palatucci added, “everybody’s got a whole new set of circumstances to consider.”There are no signs that the party’s leadership is contemplating using Mr. Trump’s legal troubles against him. The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump in numerous media appearances and the committee has been raising money by telling online donors that the former president is the victim of a political prosecution.The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn Monday night, just hours after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set the March trial date, one of the main organs of the Republican establishment, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, sounded the alarm.“Mr. Trump might have the G.O.P. nomination sewn up before a verdict arrives and voters learn whether he’s a convicted felon,” the Journal editors wrote. “This would certainly delight Democrats.”The renewed panic about the possibility of nominating a convicted felon recalls the 2016 effort to block Mr. Trump’s nomination after he had won a clear delegate majority in the primaries.Then, a group of Republican delegates loyal to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to muster support from one-fourth of the convention’s rules committee, a body that meets in the weeks before the national convention, to throw open the nominating contest to the full roster of more than 2,000 delegates. Had they succeeded, the renegade delegates still would have needed a majority vote of all the delegates in order to seize the nomination from Mr. Trump.Now, short of a full capitulation from Mr. Trump, removing him as the nominee at the convention after he has secured enough delegates remains an extreme long shot. A surrender by Mr. Trump seems highly unlikely given that advisers have said he views getting re-elected — and taking command of the pardon power plus control over the Justice Department — as his best insurance policy. Despite Mr. Trump’s claims, however, it is not clear that a president can pardon himself, so he might be on safer legal ground if some other Republican secured the nomination, became president and then pardoned him.The Trump campaign is taking no chances on a contested convention. His team is far more experienced and professional than it was in 2016, when Mr. Cruz’s forces organized state party conventions in Louisiana, Colorado and elsewhere to elect Cruz loyalists as convention rules committee delegates. Mr. Trump has a tighter grip on the party’s grass-roots supporters than he did in 2016, and his aides — including Mr. Henson, Brian Jack, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country, according to people with direct knowledge of their efforts.Mr. Trump’s team also has a stronger hold on state parties themselves, after three advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Nick Trainer — worked to consolidate support within them ahead of the 2020 election to stave off primary challenges to Mr. Trump. Many of those changes, which favor Mr. Trump, remain in place.Mr. Trump himself has gotten involved deep in the weeds of convention politics. He has awarded endorsements not just for state party bosses but for leaders of the two largest county Republican parties in Nevada — the sort of local officials who will have significant influence in choosing which grass-roots leaders will represent their states as convention delegates next July in Milwaukee.This loyalty has already delivered results for Mr. Trump’s campaign. This month, the Nevada Republican Party quietly announced it would not share political data or coordinate with super PACs — a blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has outsourced much of his campaign’s political operation to the super PAC Never Back Down. Never Back Down is led by Jeff Roe, the architect of Mr. Cruz’s 2016 campaign.Mr. LaCivita said in a statement that “no degree of trickery or gamesmanship” and “no amount of editorials in The Wall Street Journal” would stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the convention.“There’s been much more attention to detail and focus on those small things,” he added, “that if not attended to early on can lead to big headaches.”Mr. Trump’s aides, like, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, center, have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe mere possibility of a chaotic contested national political convention — a dream of political observers who have known nothing but scripted, made-for-television quadrennial gatherings since 1980 — may inspire well-funded Trump rivals to remain in the race just in case delegates decide it would be foolhardy to anoint a convicted felon as their party’s standard-bearer for the general election.Mr. Trump has vowed to appeal the March 4 trial date in the election case. That is not legally permitted: Generally, grievances over issues like whether a defense team had adequate time to prepare must wait to be taken up on appeal after any guilty verdict.Still, it is possible that his legal team will ask an appeals court or the Supreme Court to intervene before the trial using a long-shot method known as a petition for a writ of mandamus. Higher courts tend to be reluctant to grant such requests to disrupt the normal judicial process and have set a very high bar that must be met before they will consider doing so.Even if a jury acquits Mr. Trump in the federal election case — or one or more holdout jurors produce a mistrial — there are three other cases that could potentially lead to him being a convicted criminal by the time of the convention.He is facing bookkeeping fraud charges in New York, where a trial is set to begin March 25, although it is now might be pushed back. He is set to go on trial in Florida in May on federal charges related to his hoarding of sensitive national-security documents after leaving office. And he has been charged in another 2020 election case in Georgia, for which a trial date has not yet been set.Ben Ginsberg, who for decades was among the Republican Party’s top election lawyers before breaking with the party over Mr. Trump in 2020, said no amount of delegate machinations would be likely to stop a Trump nomination should he win enough early nominating contests.“If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire,” Mr. Ginsberg said, “I think it’s all over anyway.” More

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      Can Trump Appeal His Federal Election Trial Date? What to Know.

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      The ex-president vowed to appeal a judge’s decision to schedule the start on his trial the day before Super Tuesday. He can’t disrupt the trial that way, legal experts say — but there is a longer-shot possibility.Former President Donald J. Trump immediately vowed to challenge the March 4 start date for his criminal trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, raising questions of whether or how he could try to push back the timing of the case.“I will APPEAL!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media shortly after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued her order on Monday.But despite complaining about the date, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, John Lauro, said in court that the defense team would abide by her decision “as we must.” Mr. Lauro had proposed the trial begin in April 2026, citing the volume of evidence defense lawyers needed to study, while prosecutors had suggested starting in January.Here is a closer look.Why is March 4 awkward?The date comes in the middle of an already crammed calendar for Mr. Trump, who faces an array of criminal cases and civil lawsuits as he seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.In particular, as Mr. Trump noted, the day after the trial would begin is Super Tuesday, when voters in over a dozen states will cast their primary votes. That voting will take place amid the likelihood of negative headlines pegged to the start of the trial, and his ability to travel and hold rallies campaigning for primaries in subsequent weeks is likely to be limited.Defendants are generally required to be present at their trials. After preliminary matters like jury selection, prosecutors have estimated they will need about four to six weeks to present their case, after which defense lawyers will also have an opportunity to call additional witnesses.Are trial calendars even subject to appeal?Typically, no, but there are complexities.First, Mr. Lauro could file a motion asking Judge Chutkan to reconsider the timing and fleshing out his argument that March 4 does not give the defense enough time to adequately prepare.But if she declines to change it, decisions by a Federal District Court judge over a prospective trial calendar are not usually considered subject to an immediate appeal. Instead, if a claimed problem can be remedied by later overturning any guilty verdict, an appeal raising that issue must wait until after the trial.Indeed, if the former president is convicted, Mr. Lauro appears to be laying the groundwork for Mr. Trump to argue in an appeal after the trial that the start date violated his constitutional right to have meaningful legal representation. Mr. Lauro told the judge on Monday that the defense team would not be able to provide adequate representation to Mr. Trump if it had to be prepared by March 4. Such a trial date would deny his client the opportunity to have effective assistance of counsel, he added.But Mr. Trump has another way to ask a higher court to review the calendar before the trial starts. It is called a petition for a writ of mandamus, and while it is not technically considered to be an appeal, legal experts say, it looks very similar.What is a writ of mandamus?It is a judicial order to a lower-court judge mandating some action. It functions as a safety release valve, allowing what are essentially early appeals. It is reserved for extraordinary situations where a judge has made a mistake that will cause a defendant irreparable harm, so the normal process of waiting until after any guilty verdict to raise the issue on appeal could not provide a remedy.Thus, while Mr. Trump would normally have to wait until after the trial to ask a higher court to review Judge Chutkan’s calendar decision, his defense team could, in theory, try to short-circuit that process by filing a mandamus petition to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — or even directly to the Supreme Court.Is it easy to win such an order?No. In general, a mandamus petition is very likely to be denied, legal experts say. Higher courts, reluctant to disrupt the ordinary judicial process, have set a steep bar before they agree to intervene this way.In a 1999 ruling, for example, the D.C. Circuit said it would not even consider a mandamus petition based on an argument that the trial judge had made a clearly wrong decision since the problem could be addressed later through an ordinary appeal.“As we have seen, any error — even a clear one — could be corrected on appeal without irreparable harm,” the judges wrote.In a 2004 ruling, the Supreme Court said the right to relief must be “clear and indisputable” and there must be no other adequate means to obtain it. And even then, it said, a higher court still has discretion to decline issuing such an order if it nevertheless believes that intervening would not be “appropriate under the circumstances.”Does Trump have grounds for a mandamus petition?By itself, the objection raised by Mr. Lauro — that March 4 will not give Mr. Trump’s lawyers adequate time to prepare — would almost certainly fall short as a reason for a higher court to intervene early, according to Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and specialist in criminal procedure.But Professor Rothstein said it was harder to predict what would happen if Mr. Trump’s team also raised an objection the former president has made in his public comments: that the trial date interferes with the election. There is a stronger argument for a claim of irreparable harm since various primaries will be over by the time of a verdict.Still, there is scant precedent to guide a higher court’s decision about whether a trial date’s effect on an election is sufficient to consider intervening early. And even if so, he said, it is also uncertain where the higher court might land on whether the public interest is better served by delaying a trial or by letting it go forward so voters can know about a major candidate’s criminality as soon as possible.“Like so many things with these unprecedented questions that the Trump cases present, the law does not have a definite answer,” Prof. Rothstein said. More

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      Wisconsin Elections Official Targeted in Partisan Clash Over Voting

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      Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator since 2018, has been demonized by former President Donald J. Trump’s allies in the battleground state.Republicans in Wisconsin pushing to oust the state’s nonpartisan head of elections clashed on Tuesday with voting rights advocates and some local clerks during a rancorous public hearing in Madison, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.With their new supermajority in the State Senate, Republicans fought over the reappointment of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator.The agency’s head since 2018, Ms. Wolfe has become a steady target of right-wing attacks, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s grievances about his defeat in the battleground state in 2020. Many of them hinge on his falsehoods about election fraud and the use of electronic voting machines and ballot drop boxes.Ms. Wolfe did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be ousted. Among them was Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whom Republicans tasked with leading a 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results in the state. The review, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million, found no evidence of significant fraud.“A majority of people in Wisconsin have doubts about the honesty of elections in this state,” he said at the hearing. “That’s disgraceful.”On Tuesday, Ms. Wolfe declined to comment through a spokesman for the elections commission, who shared a copy of a letter that she sent to legislators in June that had sought to dispel election misinformation.“I believe it is fair to say that no election in Wisconsin history has been as scrutinized, reviewed, investigated and reinvestigated as much as the November 2020 general election,” her letter said. “The outcome of all those 2020 probes produced essentially the same results: the identification of a relatively small number of suggestions for procedural improvements, with no findings of wrongdoing or significant fraud.”Meagan Wolfe, the administrator, did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be removed.Ruthie Hauge/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the hearing, Ms. Wolfe’s supporters described her as a model of competency who guided a network of state, county and local election officials through the pandemic and has done so in an impartial manner. They warned that her removal would result in chaos.“Considering what happened after the 2020 elections and since, we are in a world of crazy for next year,” said Lisa Tollefson, the clerk of Rock County, in the southern part of the state. “With the actions and accusations that have been made toward election officials, we are certainly seeing the highest turnover in county clerks and municipal clerks in our history.”Dan Knodl, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate committee, challenged her “world of crazy” remark.“Are you predicting something, or you have information that something is on the horizon?” he said.Ms. Tollefson answered that the political climate was only likely to intensify in Wisconsin and pointed to the hard-fought election in April that flipped Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal.Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, Democrats argued that the Legislature did not have the authority to vote on Ms. Wolfe’s reappointment, noting that state law requires her renomination to come from the commission.A June vote by the commission on whether to appoint her to another four-year term ended in an impasse, with three Democrats abstaining over concerns that Republicans would use their supermajority in the Senate to remove her. By doing nothing — declining to renominate or take any other action — the commission can effectively keep Ms. Wolfe in her current role under state law.Republicans have challenged the statute, and the issue is expected to end up being decided by the courts.Ann S. Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, referred to the move by G.O.P. lawmakers to oust Ms. Wolfe as a “circus.”Mr. Knodl bristled at her language and said he was not about to abdicate oversight.“Whether it’s circuslike or not, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Thank you for attending the circus.”Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race.“The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said. More

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      When I Tell You Nikki Haley Is Pathetic, That’s an Understatement

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      I wish it were as simple as that one Republican debate.I wish the Nikki Haley onstage in Milwaukee last week — who called out Donald Trump for his profligate government spending, who implored her fellow Republicans to approach the issue of abortion more sensibly and less sadistically, who made a meal of Vivek Ramaswamy — were guaranteed to be the Nikki Haley on the campaign trail next week, next month or next year.But I have this thing called a memory, and as one of my favorite classic rock bands pledged, I won’t get fooled again. Past Haley, present Haley, future Haley: They’re all constructs, all creations, malleable, negotiable, tethered not to dependable principle but to reliable opportunism. That’s the truth of her. That’s the hell of her.I say “hell” because what she displayed on that debate stage was the precise mix of authority and humanity that fueled her political rise, made her a political star and stirred speculation that she might be the country’s first woman president. I understand why so many observers got so excited. Haley was exciting.She has undeniable smarts and formidable talent, as Vivek Ramaswamy learned. She treated his so-called foreign policy as so many nonsense words scrawled with crayon in a toddler’s coloring book. Then she tore the pages of that book to shreds, doing to it in mere seconds what she has done to her own reputation over the past seven years.I could trace all her zigs and zags since early 2016: her initially ardent opposition to Trump’s candidacy, her speedy capitulation, her stint in his administration as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and so on. But they were covered in an excellent essay in The Times by Stuart Stevens early this year, and a span of mere months, from December 2020 to April 2021, tells the saga of her signature spinelessness just as well.That December, she sat down with the journalist Tim Alberta, then with Politico, for one of several interviews for an epic profile of her that he was writing. For a month Trump had been denying the results of the presidential election, spreading his conspiracy theories, undermining the peaceful transfer of power and doing profound damage to the country. And while Haley let Alberta know that she had the president’s ear and had called him in the middle of it all, she made equally clear that she hadn’t felt a smidgen of responsibility to talk some sense and decency into him.“Here was Haley, someone with a reputation for speaking candidly to Trump, someone who had the courage as governor to remove the Confederate flag from her state capitol, admitting that she hadn’t bothered to challenge him — even in private — on a deception that threatened the stability of American life,” Alberta marveled. “Why not?”Haley answered Alberta: “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged.” For Haley, that absolved her of any patriotic duty and Trump of any blame for the havoc that he was wreaking. The guilty parties, she told Alberta, were the lawyers abetting his delusions. Astonishingly, she seemed not to grasp that she was abetting right alongside them.Her rationalizations “were so strained that they called into question her own judgment,” Alberta wrote. “This was a test for Haley, an early opportunity to define herself on a question of great national urgency. And she was failing.”But wait. Along came the insurrection of Jan. 6, and Haley suddenly snapped to. She talked to Alberta on Jan. 12. She told him she was “disgusted” by Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence. “When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” she said.Trump, she seethed, “went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.” A belated epiphany. An inspiring vow. Cue the orchestra.Stop the music. By April, her ire was embers and her vow a puff of smoke. At a public appearance in Orangeburg, S.C., she told The Associated Press that if Trump decided to run for president again, she would support him and would not seek the Republican Party’s nomination herself. (Ha!)He was still publicly excoriating Pence, but she was singing a new song about that. “I think former President Trump’s always been opinionated,” she said, as if that were just a cute little character quirk.What had changed since January? The Senate had acquitted Trump of the charges that led to his second impeachment. Many other Republican leaders had moved on from any denunciations of his actions on Jan. 6. And his hold on the party’s base had proved enduring.So Haley’s “shouldn’t have followed him” yielded to her falling in line — for the time being.When I tell you that’s pathetic, it’s an understatement. More