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      G.O.P. Presses for Greater Edge on Florida and Ohio Congressional Maps

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      In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a map drawn by his fellow Republicans in the Legislature. In Ohio, Republicans closed in on a G.O.P.-friendly map for the midterm elections.With the midterm election cycle fast approaching, Republicans in the key states of Florida and Ohio have made critical progress in their push to add to their dominance on congressional maps by carving new districts that would be easier for G.O.P. candidates to win.In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vetoed congressional maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and called for a special session to draw new maps in mid-April, a rare fracture between the Republican governor and state lawmakers. Mr. DeSantis had previously pledged to veto the maps and had pushed his own maps that would have given his party a stronger advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.In Ohio, a new map of congressional districts that is gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans appeared highly likely to be used in the midterm elections after the State Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it would not rule on a challenge to the map until after the May 3 primary election.The Republican pressure comes as Democrats have fared better than expected in this year’s redistricting cycle. Democrats have drawn aggressive gerrymanders in states like New York, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, while Republicans have sought to make their current seats safer in states like Texas and Georgia.The result is an emerging new congressional landscape that will not tilt as heavily toward Republicans as it did after the last redistricting cycle, in 2011. In the first elections after that round of redistricting, in 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans maintained control of the chamber with 33 more seats than Democrats.The realignment in this year’s redistricting has rankled some Republicans across the country, who had called on G.O.P.-led state legislatures to be more aggressive in drawing maps.“Republicans are getting absolutely creamed with the phony redistricting going on all over the Country,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement last month.Mr. DeSantis seemed to share Mr. Trump’s view, taking the rare step of interjecting himself into the redistricting process and proposing his own maps, twice. His most recent proposal would have created 20 seats that would have favored Republicans, and just eight that would have favored Democrats, meaning the G.O.P. would have been likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Mr. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.Legislators in the Florida House of Representatives discussed redistricting at a session in January.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressBut Republicans in the State Legislature, who often acquiesce to Mr. DeSantis’s requests, largely ignored the governor’s proposed maps and passed their own maps that would have most likely given Republicans 18 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. Mr. DeSantis declared the maps “DOA” on Twitter when they passed.In a news conference on Tuesday announcing his veto, Mr. DeSantis said the map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature violated U.S. Supreme Court precedent.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“They forgot to make sure what they were doing complied with the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. DeSantis said at the State Capitol.The vetoed map did away with a seat held by a Black Democrat, Representative Al Lawson of Tallahassee, and created a smaller district in Jacksonville where a Black Democrat might get elected. Mr. DeSantis had proposed maps earlier this year that further eroded minority representation, including in Mr. Lawson’s district.Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that the map lawmakers end up drawing in the special session would still be likely to face a court challenge. The state’s current map was drawn by the courts after Florida voters wrote anti-gerrymandering provisions into the State Constitution in 2010.On Tuesday, the governor appeared to take aim at those provisions, calling them far-reaching and inconsistent. He hinted that in the future, the state might argue in federal court that the provisions were unconstitutional, but he said his intent was not necessarily to repeal them.“Our goal in this was just to have a constitutional map,” he said. “We were not trying to necessarily plot any type of litigation strategy.”He added, “We will obviously say it’s unconstitutional to draw a district like that, where race is the only factor,” referring to Mr. Lawson’s heavily Black district in North Florida.Legislative leaders in Florida told lawmakers to plan to be in Tallahassee for the special session April 19-22. Florida has a relatively late primary election, set for Aug. 23, and voting is unlikely to be threatened by the uncertainty over the maps. However, some House races have yet to attract a full field of candidates, in part because the district lines remain unclear.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Mo Brooks Says Trump Asked Him to Illegally ‘Rescind’ Election

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      Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who was involved in the former president’s efforts to challenge the election, made the charge after Mr. Trump took back his endorsement.Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican who was deeply involved in former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to use Congress to upend the 2020 election and stay in office, claimed on Wednesday that the former president had asked him repeatedly in the months since to illegally “rescind” the election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.Mr. Brooks made the extraordinary charge as the two onetime allies were engaged in a bitter political feud, and it was not immediately clear how their falling out related to the accusation. But the account from the Alabama congressman, who played a central role in challenging electoral votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6, 2021, suggested that Mr. Trump has continued his efforts to overturn his defeat and be reinstated.It marked the first time a lawmaker who was involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to invalidate his election defeat has said that Mr. Trump asked for actions that, were they possible, would violate federal law.His statement came after Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in the Republican primary for Alabama’s Senate seat, undercutting the congressman’s already slim chances in a crowded intraparty race.“President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” Mr. Brooks said in a statement on Wednesday. “As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that Jan. 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.”In a subsequent text message, Mr. Brooks said Mr. Trump had made the request of him on “multiple occasions” since Sept. 1, 2021. He said the former president did not specify how exactly Congress would reinstall him as president, and Mr. Brooks repeatedly told him it was impossible.“I told President Trump that ‘rescinding’ the 2020 election was not a legal option. Period,” Mr. Brooks wrote.Mr. Brooks said Mr. Trump brought up the matter to him repeatedly over the past six months. He said he had initially hoped the requests were not connected to his endorsement in the Senate race, but now believes that Mr. Trump was dangling public support of Mr. Brooks’s candidacy as leverage to try to get a new election.“I hoped not but you’ve seen what happened today,” Mr. Brooks said in a text. “For emphasis, the conversations about Jan. 6, 2021 being the only 2020 remedy have been going off and on for 6+ months.”“I know what the legal remedy for a contested presidential election is,” he continued. “There is one and only one per the Constitution and U. S. Code and it occurs on the first Jan. 6 after each presidential election. Period. Game over after January 6.”Mr. Brooks’s high-profile break with Mr. Trump raised the possibility that he might cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, providing information the panel has so far been unable to secure about what Mr. Trump told his allies in Congress before, during and after the riot. Other Republicans involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election — Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania — have refused requests from the panel for interviews.Mr. Brooks did not immediately respond to further questions. In his statement, he said he had fought on behalf of Mr. Trump “between Nov. 3 and Jan. 6” — “when it counted.”On Dec. 21, 2020, Mr. Brooks and other House Republicans met with Mr. Trump at the White House to discuss plans to object to the election. On Jan. 6, he wore body armor as he addressed the throng of Trump supporters who gathered at the Ellipse near the White House, telling them to “start taking down names and kicking ass.”“Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Mr. Brooks said, prodding the crowd to cheer more loudly. “Will you fight for America?”Later on Capitol Hill, after a pro-Trump mob rampaged through the building, Mr. Brooks tried to object to electoral votes from several states for Mr. Biden. He also spread false claims that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, might have been responsible for the violence, and gave a speech on the floor falsely claiming the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.“Noncitizens overwhelmingly voted for Joe Biden in exchange for the promised amnesty and citizenship and, in so doing, helped steal the election from Donald Trump, Republican candidates and American citizens all across America,” Mr. Brooks said at the time.In retracting his endorsement of Mr. Brooks on Wednesday, Mr. Trump abandoned one of his most loyal acolytes in the House after months of simmering frustration and as polls showed Mr. Brooks falling behind in his state’s Republican primary.In a sign of the former president’s continued focus on the 2020 election, he cited Mr. Brooks’s remarks at a rally last summer urging voters to move on from Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Requests to “rescind” the election. More

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      ‘You Don’t Know Squat!’ and Other Signs of Our High-Minded Politics

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      Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesHey, it’s spring, people — all kinds of fun things coming around the bend. Picnics! Postpandemic parties! Senatorial primaries!Hey, we’re still citizens, right? Come on. Get focused.Let’s take a look at a couple of the biggest upcoming political contests: races in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In Ohio there are approximately 10,000 people running for the Republican Senate nomination. Things can get pretty intense. One recent candidate forum featured Mike Gibbons, an investment banker, yelling “You don’t know squat!” at one of his adversaries, a former state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who retorted, “Two tours in Iraq!”Another major figure in the Ohio primary is Jane Timken, a former party official who is running as “the real Trump conservative.” A lot of Republicans are trying to hitch their wagon to that shifty star.What do you think “real Trump conservative” actually means? The conservative who’ll increase the national debt by more than a third? Or the conservative who got Vladimir Putin to toe the line by threatening to blow up churches in Moscow? That’s Rudy Giuliani’s latest Trump story, and I can’t summon the energy to wonder whether it actually happened.There’s a general Republican assumption that the key to winning a primary is getting Donald Trump’s endorsement, and yeah, that’s probably true. Unless he changes his mind and takes it back. Did you notice what happened at the end of that big, massively promoted fund-raising contest that promised the winner a trip to have dinner with him in New Orleans? The one where he claimed he’d already “booked you a ticket”?Nothing! According to The Washington Post, nobody actually got the prize. Now really, if you were one of the many donors who sent in a contribution hoping for that one-on-one, do you feel:A. Disappointed but understanding that Trump has a lot to do, what with the lawsuits and criminal conspiracy accusations and all.B. Hopeful there’ll be another contest that’ll start off with eight or 10 drinks with a Trump campaign adviser.C. Totally alienated and planning to vote only for a Republican Senate primary candidate who never mentions Trump by name.OK, I know you understand there are no such candidates. But let’s go back to those Senate primaries. The early voting states are mainly Republican, so there’s not a heck of a lot of drama on the Democratic side. Except, maybe, for Pennsylvania.The two best-known contenders there are Representative Conor Lamb and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Lamb won a big upset victory in a 2018 congressional election during which his opponent sneered that Lamb was “someone who’s young and idealistic, who still hopes he can change the world.” Which, at the time, I felt might go down as the most depressing political attack in modern history.Fetterman is 6-foot-8, shaves his head, sports a goatee and has a well-documented habit of showing up for public events wearing baggy shorts; he once wore them at a visit to a bridge collapse — a wardrobe choice that was notable both because he was there to meet President Biden and because it was freezing.On the Republican side, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who became famous as a health guru on Oprah Winfrey’s show, is running against about a trillion other hopefuls. The most prominent is David McCormick, who would probably like you to think of him as a former under secretary of the Treasury, rather than a former hedge fund C.E.O. who still needs to answer some questions about the Pennsylvania teachers’ retirement fund.Oz, who’s been photographed kissing his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, got a rather muted comment from Winfrey, who responded to news of his candidacy by saying, staunchly, “One of the greatest things about our democracy is that every citizen can decide to run for public office.” He may not have Oprah, but he has been endorsed by none other than Sean Hannity.Ohio is going to have to pick somebody to succeed Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who ranked fairly high on the bipartisanship meter, at least by our current pathetic standards. The major Republican candidates are all desperately courting a Trump endorsement, so it’s likely that in the future we’re going to see less hands-across-the-table from Ohio and more stop-the-steal.On the plus side, it’s been lively. During that recent debate, Gibbons rather grudgingly acknowledged that women were “probably” oppressed by being denied the right to vote but added that “there were not a lot of women that were in combat in World War I and World War II.”Mandel’s campaign issues page starts right off with “Fighting for President Trump’s America First agenda.” Gibbons calls himself “Trump tough.” And Timken, the candidate who was endorsed by Portman, is now billing herself as “the real Trump conservative.”If you’re a Democrat, there are two ways to view these Republican Senate primaries. One is to hope the nominee is somebody so nuts, he or she will have less of a chance of winning in the fall. The other is to figure that if there’s very likely going to be a Republican majority next year, we’d be better off with as many reasonable Republicans as possible.Reasonable Republicans who feel obliged to treat Donald Trump like the Second Coming. What can I tell you? We live in America, not Shangri-La.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Adam Laxalt, Senate Candidate, Says He’s Already Gearing Up to Fight Election Fraud

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      In an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, Adam Laxalt, a Republican running for Senate in Nevada, said he’s already gearing up to fight election fraud.We have an item tonight from our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who reports on how a Republican running for Senate in Nevada has been anticipating an election-fraud fight in November.Nevadans still have 231 days until they head to the polls in November. But Adam Laxalt, the former attorney general of Nevada and a Republican candidate for Senate, is already laying detailed groundwork to fight election fraud in his race — long before a single vote has been cast or counted.In conversations with voters at an event at his campaign headquarters this month, Laxalt explained how he’s vetting outside groups to help him establish election observer teams and map out a litigation strategy.“I don’t talk about that, but we’re vetting which group we think is going to do better,” Laxalt told an attendee, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times from a person who attended the event and opposes Laxalt’s candidacy.At the event, Laxalt criticized the 2020 Trump campaign and outside groups for their handling of election-fraud claims, saying that they went on the offensive too late. “In 2020, it was nothing,” he said, according to the audio recording. “And then the campaign was late and the party was late. So, it’s just different now. There’s a lot of groups that are saying there’s election fraud.”And should he be unable to find help, Laxalt pledged that his campaign would shoulder the cost of bringing in lawyers and mapping out a strategy, even at the expense of other core programs necessary to run a campaign.“If I get into July and I’m like, ‘Dear God, no one’s going to do this right,’ we will pay from our campaign, which means less voter contact for the reason you said,” Laxalt told an attendee. “If someone’s not going to do it, we’ve got to do it. And I’m willing to lose on the other side because we’re going to take it off.”The ‘biggest issue’ of the campaignOf course, there was no widespread fraud in the Nevada presidential election in 2020, nor anywhere else in the country, as numerous audits, recounts, court challenges and investigations have confirmed. The secretary of state in Nevada spent more than 125 hours investigating allegations brought by the Nevada Republican Party and found no widespread fraud. And there has been no evidence in the run-up to this year’s election of any fraud in the state.But the pledge from Laxalt is yet another indication of how vital the specter of voter fraud remains to the Republican base, an issue deemed so critical that a statewide candidate would be willing to sacrifice one of the most essential campaign tasks to ensure a litigation path was in place, months before any actual voting occurred.When asked about the comments, Laxalt reiterated his criticisms of the 2020 election, particularly in Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas and the majority of Democratic voters in the state.“Every voter deserves more transparency and to be confident in the accuracy of their election results, and I will proudly fight for them,” Laxalt said in a statement.A court ruling against the Trump campaign in 2020 found no evidence “that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud,” both in Clark County and throughout the state.Laxalt, who was one of the leaders of the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the results in Nevada, has stated before that voter fraud is the “biggest issue” of the campaign and has publicly talked about establishing a large force of election observers and his plan to file election lawsuits early.“With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election,” Laxalt said in August in an interview with Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative radio host.Members of the media documenting a staff member counting ballots at the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas in November 2020.Bridget Bennett for The New York Times‘It’s about the court of public opinion’Laxalt’s legal strategy foreshadows a likely new permanent battleground for political campaigns: postelection court battles.While election-related lawsuits have long been common in American politics, the traditional fights have often been over polling hours and locations or last-minute policy changes to voting rules. But in 2020, the Trump campaign drastically altered the legal landscape, filing 60 cases after Election Day. The campaign lost 59 of them. The single case the campaign won had to do with challenging a state-ordered deadline extension in Pennsylvania for the submission of personal identification for mailed ballots.Despite that losing record, Republican candidates like Laxalt appear poised to repeat the Trump legal strategy of trying to overturn an election in court, even months before there has been any votes or any theoretical voter fraud. Experts note that while these legal strategies are likely doomed to fail in courtrooms, they risk further eroding public trust.“At the end of the day, this isn’t just about the court of law, it’s about the court of public opinion, and seeing how dangerous these lies about our elections can be,” said Joanna Lydgate, who is a former deputy attorney general of Massachusetts and who co-founded the States United Democracy Center. “We saw the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. We see those same lies showing up on the campaign trail all across the country.”In his conversations with voters, Laxalt reiterated that he wanted to amass a large coalition to tackle fraud as part of a “formal program,” and expected help from Republican Party leadership and “the senatorial committee,” a reference to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He also discussed a group featuring Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, though the group’s title was inaudible.The attendees at the event seemed to support Laxalt’s plans, and he was sure to mention his most prominent endorser.“I was just in Mar-a-Lago last week with the president,” Laxalt said, referring to Trump. “And the president was just like, all over election fraud still, obviously.”What to readJason Zengerle looks into Tucker Carlson’s influence on conservative Senate candidates’ political ads for The New York Times Magazine.The confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson offer a preview of Republicans’ midterm attack lines, Annie Karni reports. The New York Times provided live coverage of the hearings.President Biden will ask allies to apply more aggressive economic sanctions against Russia, Michael D. Shear reports.in the momentJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings today.Doug Mills/The New York TimesCrime and confirmation hearingsRepublicans made their strategy for the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson painfully clear: A tour of grievance politics that criticized Democrats for transgressions spanning decades.For Democrats, however, there was also a political strategy. It just wasn’t quite as loud.As Democrats attempt to defuse allegations that they’re anti-law enforcement, an attack that some party leaders blame for losses in the House in 2020, they’ve gone full out in supporting the police ahead of the midterms. It’s a key line of defense that Democrats prepared for ahead of the hearings and another way to discredit an attack line that could hurt the party in future elections.Representative Val Demings of Florida has been highlighting her role as chief of the Orlando Police Department in her Senate race. President Biden called for funding the police in his State of the Union address. And Biden’s nominee spoke at length today about her family members in law enforcement, often in response to questions by senators.Jackson has two uncles and a brother who have served in law enforcement, noted Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.“What do you say to people who say you’re soft on crime, or even anti-law enforcement, because you accepted your duties as a public defender?” Leahy asked.“Crime and the effects on the community and the need for law enforcement, those are not abstract concepts or political slogans to me,” Jackson responded.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      These Senators Grilling Judge Jackson Have Ambitions Beyond Senate

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      Four of the senators on the panel grilling Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are known to have dreams beyond the walls of the U.S. Senate.Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president, the old saw goes.So as the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes this week to consider the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a Supreme Court seat, we’ll be watching the panel not just for probing questions about her judicial philosophy but also for clues to 2024.Four Republican senators on the committee have flashed signs of larger aspirations, and they share a lot else in common. All are men who are roughly within a decade of one another in age. All have one or two Ivy League degrees. Each has sought to mold the Republican Party in his own image. And all approach these hearings knowing they are just as much onstage as Jackson is.For the supremely ambitious, a Supreme Court nomination battle is an irresistible opportunity. It’s a chance to build email lists, rustle up campaign cash and impress base voters. Remember how Kamala Harris used the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to preview her 2020 presidential run?It’s still early to be thinking about the 2024 presidential race, but candidates are already engaged in “shadow jockeying,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa conservative. “Everybody’s waiting to see what Trump does.”Even so, Republican activists are looking for a champion, said Rachel Bovard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “They want to see that you have a pulse,” she said.But big hearings can be perilous, too. Senators can’t be seen as “playing for the cameras,” Quin Hillyer, a conservative columnist, told us. More and more Republican voters, he said, want “toughness without histrionics.”With that in mind, here are the four Republican senators to watch:Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe hard-linerTom Cotton, 44, of Arkansas has two degrees from Harvard and served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Ranger. He’s been an increasingly frequent visitor to Iowa and New Hampshire of late — telltale signs that he has caught the presidential bug.Cotton is a foreign policy hawk, particularly on China. But he has also staked out hard-right positions on domestic policy, with calls to restrict legal immigration and roll back criminal justice reforms.In a speech this month, Cotton embraced the Republican Party’s “proud, patriotic and populist” direction under Trump. “We’re the party of the common man, the worker, the farmer, the cop on the beat,” he said. But he broke with Trump over the First Step Act, which he blamed for the early release of “child predators, carjackers and gang members.”Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at CPAC in Orlando, Fla., last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe former Tea PartierTed Cruz, 51, of Texas ran for president once before and might again, his allies say. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cruz has been a major force in Republican politics since entering the Senate in 2013.He has gone through three main phases during his time in Washington. First he was a Tea Partier known for defying Republican leaders over government spending. Then he was a presidential candidate who came in second to Trump in 2016 by running as a conservative true believer. And now he’s a beard-sporting Trump ally who preaches “America First” dogma with the zeal of a convert.Cruz once took to the national spotlight like a moth to flame. But in recent years, that spotlight has been harsh: His vacation to Cancún during a storm that left millions of Texans without electricity or running water drew withering scorn, and his recent apology to Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, for calling the Jan. 6 rioters “terrorists” was seen as groveling.He has been subdued about Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, calling for her to be treated with “dignity and decorum.” After meeting her in his office last week, he joked on a podcast that he was “highly suspect” of her — for rejecting his offer of Cuban coffee.Close observers of Cruz say he appears less calculating, more relaxed and more authentically himself than in the past — potentially meaning he has set aside his presidential ambitions or simply that he’s trying out a different approach.“I think Cruz looks at it as, nobody’s going to beat him to the conservative lane,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist. “He may not need to pick every single fight.”Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri also speaking at CPAC last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe young upstartJosh Hawley, 42, of Missouri, is an evangelical Christian who promotes traditional values. That puts him on a potential collision course with Cruz and with former Vice President Mike Pence, said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.Hawley has carved out a significant following on the right by going after tech companies for what he calls their alliance with the “radical left.” And though he has said he’s not running for president in 2024, he hasn’t exactly spurned the speculation, either.Hawley is an unapologetic supporter of the Jan. 6 protesters. And though he condemned the violence at the Capitol as “horrific,” his campaign has put a photo of himself hailing the Jan. 6 crowd on mugs (“the perfect way to enjoy Coffee, Tea, or Liberal Tears!”). He has raised millions by complaining that Democrats are attempting to “cancel” him. On March 1, he led his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference by noting his objection to the certification of the Electoral College votes. “I wasn’t backing down then; I haven’t changed my mind now,” he said to raucous applause.Allies say that Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, sees the Supreme Court as his domain. Of the four senators, he’s the only one who has bucked the wishes of Senate Republican leaders by forcefully attacking Jackson’s record. Fact-checkers have found his claims wanting, and the White House called them “toxic.” He likely won’t be able to stop her confirmation. But the fact that Hawley is fighting Jackson’s nomination at all could endear him to Republicans who want a brawler in their corner.“His goal appears to be to make Ted Cruz look like the statesman of the group,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant.Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe prairie philosopherBen Sasse, 50, of Nebraska is a former university president who has mapped out his own path as a sporadic Trump critic. Sasse has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Yale. But unlike the other senators, he embraces and even flaunts his intellectual roots.Sasse wrote his dissertation about “culture-warring entrepreneurs” who seized on the debate over prayer in schools to power Ronald Reagan’s political ascent — an early expression of Sasse’s pox-on-both-houses approach to politics. A lone wolf in the Senate, Sasse often positions himself above what he derides as the “tribal” politics of Washington. In noting Jackson’s nomination, for instance, he said the Judiciary Committee has been “a place of grandstanding and rabid partisanship.”“Grandstanding” is a word Sasse employs frequently — as when he tangled last week on the Senate floor with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, over aid to Ukraine. The skirmish caught the eye of conservative pundits, who saw it as a sign that Sasse is seeking attention.But for what? If there’s a lane for Sasse in a coming presidential election, it’s likely as a Never Trumper or an independent. He voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment, a no-no for Republican base voters.What to read The ex-wife of Eric Greitens, a leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, accused him in court documents of knocking her down and confiscating her keys, phone and wallet during an argument in 2018.Republicans are relitigating the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle, Glenn Thrush writes, even as they prepare to question Jackson in confirmation hearings that began with opening statements on Monday.Erica L. Green looked back at Jackson’s years at Harvard University, where the future judge learned to navigate “one of the most elite and white institutions in the country.”FrameworkIn North Carolina, Pat McCrory, the Republican Senate candidate, released an ad accusing his opponent Ted Budd of being soft on Russia. via YouTubeRussia becomes a campaign liabilityTo understand just how rapidly the politics of foreign policy are shifting on the right, look no farther than North Carolina — where being associated with Donald Trump’s views on Russia is now a political problem.The state is electing a replacement this year for Senator Richard Burr, who is retiring. On the Republican side, the May 17 primary is largely a two-way contest between Pat McCrory, a former governor, and Representative Ted Budd, a far-right lawmaker who was endorsed by Trump.As the war in Ukraine broke out, McCrory released an ad accusing Budd of being soft on Russia. The ad shows a clip of Budd calling Vladimir Putin “intelligent” — much as Trump praised the Kremlin leader’s aggression as “genius.”“While Ukrainians bled and died,” a narrator scolds, “Congressman Budd excused their killer.”In a sign that McCrory’s attack might be landing, Budd’s allies responded with a response ad calling it “a low down, dirty hit job.” The ad quotes Budd as saying, “Putin is evil. He’s an international thug,” and emphasizes his support for Ukraine.Each side has spent only a few thousand dollars on the ads so far, indicating the goal was to generate free media coverage and not to reach voters directly.But the exchange underscores how being perceived as an apologist for Putin is suddenly a bad look in a Republican primary thanks to Volodymyr Zelensky, the charismatic president of Ukraine. By presenting an alternate model of strength and machismo, said Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, “Zelensky has changed the whole dynamic of the Republican Party.” Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Dr. Oz’s Heritage Is Targeted as Rivals Vie for Trump Backing

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      The Senate candidate’s Turkish background has emerged as a focus of David McCormick’s attacks in Pennsylvania’s G.O.P. primary.Late last year, before he had formally entered the Pennsylvania Senate race, David McCormick flew to Florida for a private meeting with Donald J. Trump, angling to get in the former president’s good graces ahead of a Republican primary that would soon pit him against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity surgeon and television personality.Mr. McCormick, then the chief executive of the world’s largest hedge fund, had an edge in pitching Mr. Trump: His wife, Dina Powell McCormick, had been a senior national security official in the Trump White House, and she accompanied him to the meeting at Mar-a-Lago.As Mr. McCormick and his wife, now a top Goldman Sachs executive, made their case, the topic soon turned to electability and Dr. Oz’s Turkish American heritage, which has since become a central point of contention in the campaign. At one point, Ms. Powell McCormick, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who is fluent in Arabic, pulled out a picture that showed Dr. Oz alongside others wearing Muslim head coverings, according to four people briefed in detail on the exchange, which has not previously been reported.The people briefed on the conversation said Ms. Powell McCormick told Mr. Trump that the fact that Dr. Oz was Muslim would be a political liability in parts of Pennsylvania.The McCormick campaign denied that account and insisted that the McCormicks have focused only on Dr. Oz’s ties to Turkey as a liability.The early meeting with Mr. Trump was just one sign of the intensity of the race to succeed the retiring Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican. The Pennsylvania seat is a linchpin in both parties’ pursuit of the Senate majority in 2022. And with polls showing a competitive Republican contest, the race is already awash in negative ads and on pace to be one of the most expensive primaries in the nation.Mr. Trump’s blessing is widely seen as potentially decisive.A spokesman for Mr. Trump confirmed the private meeting with the McCormicks took place but declined to comment on anything said.The McCormick campaign has publicly made Dr. Oz’s heritage an issue from Mr. McCormick’s first day as a candidate in January, when he called on Dr. Oz to renounce his Turkish citizenship. His campaign has since accused Dr. Oz of harboring “dual loyalties.” Dr. Oz’s Muslim faith has not been part of the public debate.Mr. McCormick’s spokeswoman, Jess Szymanski, echoed the concerns he has been raising publicly.“This is an anonymous, false smear on a candidate’s wife who is an Arab American immigrant woman who fled the Middle East to escape religious persecution,” Ms. Szymanski said of the account of the McCormicks’ meeting with Mr. Trump. She said that it was “designed to distract from the legitimate national security concerns” about Dr. Oz that “could pose significant security risks,” including his dual citizenship, his Turkish military service, connections to the Turkish government and financial links abroad.“The assertion that any points beyond those have ever been raised is categorically false,” Ms. Szymanski said.Dina Powell McCormick, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who served as a senior national security official in the Trump administration, maintains strong ties to the Middle East.Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Tory Burch FoundationBorn in Ohio to Turkish immigrants, Dr. Oz did serve in the Turkish army and has said that he maintained dual citizenship in recent years to make it easier to visit his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in Turkey.But Dr. Oz’s ties to Turkey have lingered as an issue, as there is no known precedent of a sitting senator holding dual citizenship with a nation that can be at odds with American foreign policy. (After Senator Ted Cruz of Texas learned he had Canadian citizenship, he renounced it in 2014.)How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.On Wednesday, Dr. Oz said that he would renounce his Turkish citizenship if elected. Calling the issue a “distraction,” he accused Mr. McCormick of making “bigoted attacks” that were “reminiscent of slurs made in the past about Catholics and Jews.”Dr. Oz would be the first Muslim senator in the United States, but he has not emphasized that history-making aspect of his candidacy. In an opinion essay in the Washington Examiner in January, he wrote that he had been “raised as a secular Muslim” and that his four children are all Christian.The four people who described the exchange between the McCormicks and Mr. Trump did not know the setting or the source of the photograph they said Ms. Powell McCormick showed the former president. Among the few images readily accessible online in which Dr. Oz can be seen with people wearing Muslim head coverings are scenes from his father’s 2019 funeral in Istanbul. A video shows Dr. Oz behind two imams wearing turbans and clerical robes; later, he helps carry the coffin, draped in a green pall decorated with Quranic verses.Ms. Powell McCormick was a key member of the White House’s Middle East team in the early days of the Trump administration and maintains extensive ties to the region. At Goldman Sachs, she oversees the firm’s global business with foreign governments and their investments, and this month, she was appointed by the top Republican in the House to serve on the advisory board of the Middle East Partnership for Peace, which is guiding investments of $250 million to promote Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.In a sign of the perceived power of the former president’s endorsement, Ms. Powell McCormick has called Mr. Trump so often in recent months that he has complained to people about the frequency of her calls, according to two people who have heard from him about it.On his first day as a candidate, Mr. McCormick called on Dr. Oz to renounce his Turkish citizenship.Libby March for The New York TimesFor now, Mr. Trump remains uncommitted even as both camps have aggressively sought his stamp of approval. The former president’s initial choice in the race, Sean Parnell, withdrew in November after losing custody of his children following allegations of abuse in a divorce proceeding.Dr. Oz spoke with Mr. Trump by phone before entering the Senate race in late November, and in person at Mar-a-Lago just before Christmas. On Wednesday, he and his wife, Lisa Oz, had dinner with Mr. Trump and Melania Trump.Sean Hannity of Fox News, who endorsed Dr. Oz this week, has been whispering in Mr. Trump’s ear on Dr. Oz’s behalf, according to people familiar with those conversations, and Dr. Oz has made a dozen appearances on Mr. Hannity’s prime-time show since he entered the race, according to Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group.The Pennsylvania Republican primary has already seen millions of dollars in television ads, as both rivals sell themselves as the most conservative and most pro-Trump candidate.An anti-Oz super PAC has slammed the surgeon as a “RINO,” or Republican in name only, with vivid images of him kissing his Hollywood star. Dr. Oz has narrated some of his campaign’s ads counterattacking at Mr. McCormick, saying in one, “He’s part of the swamp that labeled President Trump as Hollywood — just like they say about me.”In one commercial referring to his rival by name, Mr. McCormick did so not with the familiar “Dr. Oz” but as “Mehmet Oz.” Standing in front of an oversize American flag, Mr. McCormick opens the ad by saying, “When Mehmet Oz questions my patriotism, he’s crossed the line.”The McCormick campaign has hired influential Trump alumni to guide its effort, including the former White House aides Stephen Miller and Hope Hicks, and the McCormicks’ private lobbying has included a separate dinner with Donald Trump Jr., according to people told of the meal.Mr. McCormick himself was considered for various posts in the Trump administration, and met with the president-elect in 2016, though he never joined the government.But a Trump endorsement of Dr. Oz would have its own logic. Like Mr. Trump himself, Dr. Oz built a national following as a television star. The former president has told people who have spoken to him about the race that he deeply appreciates the political power of such a celebrity given his own experience. And in 2016, Dr. Oz interviewed Mr. Trump on his show at the height of the presidential campaign.A third Senate candidate, Carla Sands, whom Mr. Trump named ambassador to Denmark, is also running in Pennsylvania and had her own private audience with the former president last year. A fourth candidate, Jeff Bartos, has contributed more than $1 million to his own campaign. He was the 2018 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor and entered the Senate race in March 2021 — more than six months ahead of either Mr. McCormick or Dr. Oz. Mr. Bartos has not had a formal sit-down with Mr. Trump, though the two spoke at an impromptu meeting at Mar-a-Lago a few months ago, according to a person told of the interaction.Also running is Kathy Barnette, a political commentator who has written a book about being Black and conservative and has raised more than $1 million.Limited public polling shows a wide-open contest. A Fox News survey in early March showed Mr. McCormick leading, with 24 percent, and Dr. Oz at 15 percent, but many voters were undecided. The Democratic field includes Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Representative Conor Lamb and Malcolm Kenyatta, a state representative.The pro-Trump label can be an awkward fit for both Mr. McCormick and Dr. Oz.Mr. McCormick is the former chief executive of the Bridgewater hedge fund and served in the Treasury Department of the second Bush administration. His career arc from West Point graduate to the financial world more neatly fits the traditional Republican establishment mold, and he said last year that the riot on Jan. 6 at the Capitol was “a dark chapter in American history.”For his part, Dr. Oz first found fame as a regular guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and clips showing him dancing with Michelle Obama have made their way into ads attacking him. He previously supported key elements of the Affordable Care Act and, while he calls himself “pro-life,” he struggled in a Fox News interview to articulate when he believes life begins.Mr. Trump, according to advisers, has tracked the race closely but appears content — for now — to sit on the sidelines. He jealously guards his endorsement record and was already burned by his early backing of Mr. Parnell. Facing the possible defeat of candidates he is backing in other states, Mr. Trump has turned at least temporarily more cautious in some key Senate races.Just as he is doing in two other crowded Republican primaries, in Ohio and Missouri, Mr. Trump is not picking sides while the field remains muddled. In both those states, he has also met with multiple candidates vying for his backing.Rob Gleason, a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said a Trump endorsement in the state’s race “could be the tipping point in a close election.“He’s just very important in Republican circles,” he said. “He still is.” More

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      David McCormick Faces Scrutiny Over Teacher Pension Investments

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      David McCormick, a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, came under attack from his chief rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz, over the underperformance of investments for the state’s teachers.Before he entered Pennsylvania’s Senate race, David McCormick oversaw a giant hedge fund that invested billions of dollars for the retirement plans of the state’s teachers.But Mr. McCormick’s company, Bridgewater Associates, delivered such middling profits and charged such high fees that the Pennsylvania teachers’ retirement fund moved to sell off its Bridgewater holdings beginning two years ago.Overall, Bridgewater’s performance was a contributing factor in nearly a decade of poor returns for the retirement fund, trustees of the fund said in interviews.The impact is now being felt indirectly by thousands of teachers who have to pay more from their paychecks to fund their retirements, an extra $300 annually in some cases.Since jumping into the Republican primary in January, Mr. McCormick has offered his business career as a qualification for the open Senate seat in November, but he has made little mention of his connection to the state’s teacher pension fund, which has long been mired in controversy, nor to the more than $500 million in fees that Bridgewater was paid by the fund.But on Tuesday, Mr. McCormick’s chief Republican rival, the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, sought to use those high fees and Mr. McCormick’s decade on top of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, against him.“We’re stuck with a half-a-billion-dollar bill while he and his colleagues got half a billion in fees,” Dr. Oz said outside the Harrisburg headquarters of the pension fund, the Public School Employees Retirement System, known as PSERS. He addressed a small group of supporters with a large prop check made out for $500 million.“The fact that no one knows this story,” he added, is “shameful.”Until 2019, the retirement fund had nearly $5 billion invested with Bridgewater, among the most of any firm, and it was one of the hedge fund’s top clients.In response to Dr. Oz, the McCormick campaign said that Bridgewater had made plenty of money for the retirement fund and that Mr. McCormick, who served as president and later as chief executive of the hedge fund, was not directly involved in overseeing its relationship or investments with PSERS.The dispute is the latest round in a slugfest between Mr. McCormick and Dr. Oz, whose primary contest will help shape one of the most crucial races this year for control of the Senate. The two candidates and their outside supporters have already spent a state record $30 million in attack ads ahead of the May 17 primary. A Fox News poll this month of potential Republican voters showed Mr. McCormick on top of a five-person field, although many voters are undecided.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.A West Point graduate and former Treasury Department official, Mr. McCormick was recruited by Bridgewater as president in 2009, rose to co-chief executive in 2017 and became sole chief executive in 2020 before leaving in January to run for Senate.The Pennsylvania teachers’ pension fund has been troubled for years. Besides hedge funds, it put its money into highly risky “alternative” investments including trailer park chains, pistachio farms and pay phone systems for prison inmates.In mid-2020, the fund’s annual profits over nine years, a decade when the stock market boomed, amounted to just 6.34 percent, missing a target set by Pennsylvania law.The shortfall prompted $80 million in higher paycheck deductions for about 100,000 teachers and other school employees, as well as higher property taxes for homeowners statewide, to pay for school districts’ makeup contributions to the pension fund, said Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer.Mr. McCormick’s campaign said that he had not directly been involved in overseeing Bridgewater Associates’ relationship with the Pennsylvania teachers’ retirement fund or overseeing the fund’s investments.Libby March for The New York TimesMr. McCormick, who declined to be interviewed, said through a campaign spokeswoman that PSERS’s poor performance was not the fault of its Bridgewater holdings — as Dr. Oz argued — and that those holdings had earned money for the pension fund. “Pennsylvania retirees made $3.9 billion in net profits and did not lose a penny over the life of the relationship under Bridgewater management,” the spokeswoman, Jess Szymanski, said.Still, some Bridgewater investments did miss internal benchmarks that the retirement fund had set, which contributed to the decision by the board of trustees to sell off its Bridgewater investments, along with those in other hedge funds.In the most recent quarterly reporting period, PSERS’s largest Bridgewater investment, the Pure Alpha II fund, underperformed a benchmark for comparable funds over the preceding three-, five- and 10-year periods. It exceeded the benchmark over a one-year period.More important than the individual Bridgewater investments, according to board members, was that Bridgewater’s investment philosophy came to dominate the retirement fund’s broad portfolio, currently valued at more than $72 billion.At a July 2020 meeting with senior retirement fund staff members, Joseph Torsella, the state treasurer at the time, criticized Bridgewater’s poor performance and its wide influence over the pension fund.Mr. Torsella, a Democrat, said in an interview, “I got the sense we were important at the highest level of Bridgewater, and I got the sense at PSERS that Bridgewater was the one true church.”Bridgewater, which manages about $140 billion, largely for institutional clients, is known as much for a culture in which employees bluntly air their differences as it is known for its investing record. It boasts of earning customers tens of billions of dollars over four decades.Its founder, Ray Dalio, is a multibillionaire who popularized an investing strategy known as “risk parity.” It promises to make money in both good and bad economic times by placing bets across different types of assets such as gold, Treasury bonds and sovereign wealth funds.During the 2008 financial crisis, when stocks went into a free-fall, Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha fund gained 9.5 percent. That was the start of an infatuation with Bridgewater by the professional staff at the Pennsylvania teachers’ fund, according to board members and their aides.Walloped by its declining stock holdings, the retirement fund embraced the risk parity model. It not only loaded up on Bridgewater’s own funds, it molded itself into a Bridgewater-like hedge fund.A report for the Pennsylvania legislature in 2018 found that PSERS’s portfolio allocation “reflects a risk parity model.”Mr. McCormick on the campaign trail in Edinboro, Pa. He topped a recent Fox News poll of Republican primary candidates, though many voters were undecided.Libby March for The New York TimesIt was a highly unusual, and risky, approach for a public fund that sends monthly checks to 250,000 former teachers, custodians and other school employees.“The real impact of Bridgewater on PSERS was not just that Bridgewater was one among a couple of hundred managers — they were the guru,” said Mr. Torsella, who was part of a bipartisan group of board members who began challenging the way the pension fund was run. “Too many of the investment team at PSERS became acolytes of Bridgewater. There was too much deference to their way of thinking.”Certainly, no one at Bridgewater was twisting the arms of PSERS’s staff to imitate the hedge fund’s strategy.Still, teams of retirement fund staff members trooped to Bridgewater’s wooded campus in Westport, Conn., or hosted Bridgewater consultants in Harrisburg for daylong seminars. In 2019, top pension fund executives flew to China for two Bridgewater events, including a weeklong “investor summit,” at a cost of $4,467 in travel.Over the decade following the financial crisis, as the stock market recovered and boomed, PSERS’s embrace of a risk parity model of investing had a disastrous impact on the pension fund’s bottom line. As of 2018, the retirement fund’s returns over a decade ranked 50th out of 52 public pension plans nationwide, according to the report for state lawmakers.Although Bridgewater’s funds were promoted as a way to weather a bear market in stocks, the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 proved that the complex financial straddles didn’t live up to the hype. Bridgewater’s Pure Alpha fund was underwater for the year, even as the S&P 500, the broad stock market index, gained more than 16 percent.The dissidents on the PSERS board, who favored a plain-vanilla portfolio of largely public stocks and bonds, succeeded in pushing the pension fund to sell off two of its Bridgewater funds, All Weather and Optimal, and to eventually liquidate all of its hedge fund investments.In July 2021, the pension fund was forced to increase paycheck deductions for 94,400 school employees hired since 2011.Samantha Kreda, who teaches special education to third to fifth graders at the Richard R. Wright School in Philadelphia, was one.Samantha Kreda in her classroom in Philadelphia.Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“The PSERS increase amounted to $30 every paycheck, but that’s a huge amount of money considering all the things teachers are expected to pay for,” she said. She buys books, snacks, birthday gifts and school supplies out of her pocket for students in her high-poverty school. Rather than cut back on those extras, she said, she has reconsidered “splurges” like dinner out with her boyfriend.Ms. Kreda, 27, who has a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, knows Ivy League peers who went into law or finance and now make “unfathomable” salaries. “I love my job; I don’t teach for the paycheck,” she said. Still, a $30 deduction from her biweekly pay gives her pause. “It definitely makes a difference,” she said.Maureen Farrell More

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      How a Murdoch Hopes to Save American Democracy

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      Kathryn Murdoch is trying to change how elections are run. It’s a work in progress.Over the last decade, as America’s two dominant political parties pulled farther apart, a group of centrist-minded donors was growing increasingly frustrated.A gridlocked Congress made bipartisan policy wins close to impossible. Campaign-finance reform? The Supreme Court effectively put a stake in it in 2010. Climate legislation? Time and again, it hit a phalanx of Republican opposition.“Basically, everything that we were looking at would run up against a nonfunctioning government,” said Kathryn Murdoch, who has become a leader of a network of donors seeking to change the way Americans choose their elected officials.Fix the election system, the thinking goes, and the government will begin to run more smoothly. But when Murdoch’s family foundation, Quadrivium, examined the democracy reform movement, they found it too anemic and fractured to be effective.“Everything was very subscale, it seemed very clear to me — smart people, good ideas, a lot of data backing all of it up, but subscale for the problem, and not a lot of collaboration or, frankly, enough funds,” Murdoch said in an interview.The daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul, Kathryn Murdoch has often found herself at odds with the conservative politics of her family’s TV, print and radio empire. Murdoch, a registered independent who is American, spent years funding efforts to slow climate change, only to encounter political obstacles at nearly every turn. Her new focus is building a movement to reshape American democracy itself, and she has set a goal of mobilizing $100 million to do so over the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.This focus has meant pitching her fellow philanthropists on why they should donate to democracy groups rather than to their own causes.“There’s not necessarily a special-interest group that is helping to ensure the integrity of the system,” said Marc Merrill, a software entrepreneur and donor who works with Murdoch on political overhaul projects. “Well, that’s an opportunity.”Murdoch’s problem with primariesMurdoch quickly determined that the chief villain was the partisan primary.It was aiding extremist candidates like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia. It was forcing moderate Republican senators like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to cater to the right wing rather than to the center of the electorate. And it was souring voters on politics. Murdoch has the statistics at her fingertips: In 2020, just 10 percent of Americans effectively elected 83 percent of the House. Only 17 percent of general elections for House seats were competitive.“What I hear all the time is that there are people who want to work on legislation, but they can’t before their primary, because they are terrified — and particularly if there’s an extreme Trumpy candidate or something like that,” Murdoch said. “They’re terrified of being seen as bipartisan. And that’s absolutely the wrong thing for the American people.”Murdoch says she now sees a “clear path” to fixing what ails American democracy, even if it takes years. A big part of the solution, in her view, is getting rid of partisan primaries altogether.On that much, advocates agree — though they may differ on the remedy required.In addition to Murdoch, several other donors have bankrolled the idea of eliminating partisan primaries. John and Laura Arnold, a billionaire couple from Texas, are big financial backers. So is Mike Novogratz, a Wall Street financier. Katherine Gehl, the former chief executive of a food company and co-author of “The Politics Industry,” a political reform manifesto, is an influential proponent.“How can we take that weapon away from people using it for those self-interested, narrow purposes?” Laura Arnold asked in a podcast discussion on partisan primaries with Gehl, who is pushing her own alternative called “final-five voting.”The biggest factor energizing those in the movement to reform American democracy is former President Donald Trump, whose attacks on the integrity of the election system alarmed many donors.Travis Dove for The New York TimesThe Trump factorThe biggest factor energizing advocates is Donald Trump, whose attacks on the integrity of the American election system and endorsements of fringe candidates have alarmed many donors.“After Trump got elected, things started to shift toward structural issues of democracy,” said Lee Drutman, who studies election reform as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “And the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was a galvanizing moment.”A separate group, launched by Novogratz, has been enlisting philanthropists to each pledge 1 percent of their net worth toward “protecting democracy” and said it had already raised $87 million toward a goal of $250 million in pledges by 2024.Most proposed changes include some variation on ranked-choice voting, a system that allows voters to select their preferred candidates in order. New York City used the system in its Democratic primary for mayor last year, to great media fanfare — a breakout moment for what previously had been an obscure cause promoted by a small and scattered group of activists.Before then, ranked-choice proponents had notched a few quieter wins. In Maine, voters pushed through a ballot initiative in 2016 to become the first state to allow the system in elections for federal office. Alaska followed in 2020 with a similar ballot initiative, and 51 cities across the country have adopted ranked choice in some form or another.Proponents of ranked-choice voting argue it will make campaigns more civil, save money, lessen the polarization that is poisoning American politics and give voters more choices. And while the data is still out on many of those claims, surveys do show that voters tend to like it.One detractor has been Sherrie Swensen, the clerk of Salt Lake County, Utah, a state that has embraced ranked-choice voting in municipal elections. Swensen, whose position includes overseeing elections, said the system was “very complex to implement,” as it took weeks to figure out how to design new ballots.The democracy lobbyMurdoch is plowing resources and much of her energy into Unite America, a collection of groups that backs organizations, campaigns and candidates that support her reform goals. Unite America is meant to be a “cross-partisan” meeting ground for donors and activists, she said. “It’s a group of people,” Murdoch added with a chuckle, “with a wide variety of reasonable opinions.”Its executive director is Nick Troiano, a 32-year-old activist who ran for office as an independent in Pennsylvania at 24. Troiano has recruited a staff of hard-nosed political operatives from both parties, hoping to develop a cadre of seasoned campaigners who can steer investments and advise ballot initiatives in new states.“One thing that we’ve learned is we have to professionalize running these campaigns, and some of the best political talent that’s out there is sometimes locked up in the parties,” Troiano said.Murdoch and Merrill have also invested in Citizen Data, a nonpartisan outfit that provides voter information and analytical tools to groups that don’t have access to the two parties’ vast data resources.In the short term, Troiano expects what he calls “the primary problem” to get worse before it gets better. He noted that only a few dozen House seats are expected to be competitive this year, according to the Cook Political Report, even though redistricting has shaped up to be more balanced than many expected.“The important thing is to take on the winner-take-all mind-set in American politics,” said Rob Ritchie, the head of FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform group. Ritchie predicts that between five and 10 states will be using some version of ranked-choice voting for presidential primaries by 2024, along with dozens more cities.Unite America’s official goals are somewhat more modest: help at least four new states start nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice in federal elections by 2024, using the Alaska model. Along with Alaska, several other states have already been largely “liberated” from partisan primaries, in Troiano’s estimation: California, Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington.Over the long term, Murdoch says, she is starting to feel more optimistic about American politics.“When you’re outside of it, it’s very easy to be completely depressed and cynical and say, ‘It can never get fixed. There’s too much money involved. It’s all going to hell in a handbasket,’” Murdoch said. “But from the inside, if you join in and actually start doing it, you realize that we can get it done.”What to read The war in Ukraine has ushered in a new era of foreign policy, aligning the United States more closely with Europe and re-energizing its leadership role, Michael Crowley and Edward Wong report. Here is our live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden are suggesting different midterm slogans, with some vulnerable House Democrats revolting against the name “build back better,” Jonathan Martin reports.American Bridge, the Democratic super PAC, accused Trump of violating campaign-finance law by spending political funds on a 2024 presidential bid without formally declaring himself a candidate, Shane Goldmacher reports.how they runGlenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia race for governor last year has been attributed to parents who were upset about the state’s coronavirus response. New data has suggested otherwise. Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesVirginia’s ‘silver surge’Did angry school parents really sway the Virginia governor’s race?A new analysis by the Democratic-aligned firm TargetSmart suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong.Drawing on newly available voting records, the firm found that turnout among voters aged 75 or older went up by 59 percent in 2021 compared with the 2017 election for governor.As for those angry parents, when TargetSmart looked at counties where schools closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, it found no comparable surge for Republicans.“In fact,” TargetSmart’s Tom Bonier writes, “the biggest swings towards Republicans occurred in southwestern Virginia, where schools were open for in-person instruction for most of the year.”None of this means Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s focus on “parents’ rights” and critical race theory in schools did not affect his defeat of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate. But it does suggest that we should be skeptical of first impressions.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More