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      Texas House Speaker Survives Challenge From Hard Right

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      The speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, won renomination in a runoff on Tuesday, surviving a bruising Republican primary challenge from a party activist and first-time candidate who was backed by former President Donald J. Trump and his Texas supporters.The race, in a southeast Texas district that includes part of the city of Beaumont, was a bitter political showdown among some of the most powerful players in Texas politics, and was likely to have been one of the most expensive ever for a Texas House seat.Millions poured in to the campaigns during the primary, including large donations from West Texas oil and gas billionaires and out-of-state school-choice advocates who backed the challenger, David Covey. For his part, Mr. Phelan had help from deep-pocketed donors like Miriam Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and widow of the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.Mr. Covey, a technical adviser to the oil and gas industry who has described himself as a “very committed Christian and a conservative,” led Mr. Phelan in the first round of voting in March, when neither candidate won a majority.But during the runoff, Mr. Phelan rallied his supporters and campaign contributors, significantly out-raising his opponent through the middle of May.“We came this close,” Mr. Covey said in a speech to supporters in Orange, Texas. He added that even in defeat his campaign had started a movement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republican Navy Veteran Will Face Henry Cuellar in South Texas

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      Jay Furman, a retired Navy officer, has won the Republican nomination to challenge embattled Representative Henry Cuellar of South Texas in November, according to The Associated Press.Mr. Furman defeated his challenger, Lazaro Garza Jr., a rancher, in a runoff after the two emerged as the top vote-getters in a crowded March primary. Mr. Cuellar, a centrist Democrat, is still largely expected to win re-election in Texas’ 28th Congressional District. But the terrain has become somewhat more favorable for Republicans after Mr. Cuellar was indicted this month on federal bribery and money-laundering charges.Mr. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, are accused of accepting at least $598,000 over seven years from a Mexican bank and an oil company owned by the government of Azerbaijan, according to the federal indictment. He has denied any wrongdoing.In his district, which stretches from his hometown, Laredo, and the U.S. southern border to the eastern outskirts of San Antonio, Mr. Cuellar is considered an institution. He has powerful allies on both sides of the aisle and has survived two bruising Democratic primary contests. Even former President Donald J. Trump — who is on trial over allegations that he falsified business records — has come to his defense, arguing Mr. Cuellar became a target of the Biden administration because he supports tight border policies.Mr. Cuellar’s fund-raising efforts have dwarfed those of his Republican opponent. At the end of March, Mr. Cuellar had raised nearly $2 million and had more than $415,000 cash on hand. As of May, Mr. Furman had raised just under $195,500 and had roughly $2,013 cash on hand, according to the latest federal filings for each campaign.Still, Mr. Furman is betting the charges against Mr. Cuellar have improved his odds. The election forecasters Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball have both shifted their rating for the general election from likely Democratic to leans Democratic.Mr. Furman, who grew up in Austin and lives in San Antonio, served in the military for nearly 30 years before returning to Texas. Like Mr. Garza, he has made immigration central to his campaign. He echoes Mr. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and calls for hard-line actions, including mass deportations. On his website, he also has promised to tackle inflation, empower small businesses and block “‘woke’ insanity.”In an interview, Mr. Furman argued the charges against Mr. Cuellar were “exactly in line with what the people have come to expect of the Cuellar dynasty.” But he also echoed Mr. Trump in his criticism of the Justice Department, which he contended had been weaponized against conservatives.“My goal is not only to highlight his charges,” he said, “but also the arbitrary capricious enforcement of the law by our Department of Justice.” More

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      Trump Warms Up to Bringing Haley ‘On Our Team in Some Form’

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday opened the door to bringing Nikki Haley into his circle, another step in what looked to be a thawing of hostilities between the two former rivals.“Well, I think she’s going be on our team because we have a lot of the same ideas, the same thoughts,” Mr. Trump told News 12, the New York area cable outlet, one day after Ms. Haley said that she would vote for him in the November election.That admission from Ms. Haley, his one-time United Nations ambassador-turned-bitter rival for the Republican presidential nomination, was a seemingly requisite first step toward reconciliation between the two.In the interview after his rally in the Bronx on Wednesday, he also engaged in a rare moment of praise for Ms. Haley, calling her “a very capable person.”During the lopsided G.O.P. primary race, which ended in March with Ms. Haley’s withdrawal, Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley exchanged frequent attacks.Mr. Trump repeatedly called Ms. Haley “birdbrain” and insinuated that her husband, a National Guardsmen, left for a deployment in order to escape her.Ms. Haley increasingly clapped back at Mr. Trump and his attempts to push her out of the race, referring to him in late January as “unhinged.”Until recently, the prospects of the two making amends appeared to be uncertain, with Mr. Trump shooting down a report this month that he was considering Ms. Haley as his running mate.Mr. Trump has enlisted several other former G.O.P. opponents in his bid to avenge his defeat in the 2020 election: Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur.Mr. Trump’s “team of rivals mantra,” one made famous by Abraham Lincoln, appears to be a recognition of Ms. Haley’s potential value to his campaign, both in terms of dollars and votes.Despite leaving the G.O.P. nominating contest more than two months ago, Ms. Haley has continued to draw significant numbers of voters in subsequent primaries, chipping away at critical support that Mr. Trump is likely to need in a close election against President Biden. In Wisconsin, she received more than 75,000 votes (nearly 13 percent of ballots cast) in this month’s Republican primary.And then there are Ms. Haley’s connections to donors. In April, she was named the Walter P. Stern chairwoman at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank with a formidable list of high-dollar donors.Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Voters Oust Progressive Prosecutor in Portland

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      Mike Schmidt, the progressive prosecutor in Portland, Ore., who has held office during a tumultuous period of street protests, drug overdoses and violent crime, lost his seat to a co-worker who has called for more aggressive prosecution of criminals, The Associated Press said on Wednesday.The co-worker, Nathan Vasquez, a deputy district attorney in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, had mounted a campaign that blamed Mr. Schmidt for the city’s recent problems. Mr. Schmidt, a Democrat, was one of a series of progressive prosecutors around the country who had vowed to reshape the criminal justice system.But in the years since Mr. Schmidt’s election in 2020, voters in Portland have signaled an interest in cracking down on crime and homelessness. As businesses fled the city center, people reported feeling unsafe on the streets. Homicides and overdoses soared.Mike Schmidt in 2020.Sean Meagher/The Oregonian, via Associated PressMr. Vasquez called for a new approach, setting up a bitter campaign against his boss. He promised to take on lawless behavior and petty crimes, differentiating himself from Mr. Schmidt, who had won four years ago with pledges to move away from focusing on low-level crimes.Mr. Schmidt tried to highlight the progress seen in the last year, when car thefts dropped rapidly and homicides were coming down from record highs. He backed an effort to partially roll back Oregon’s drug decriminalization law.Mr. Vasquez, an independent who previously was a registered Republican, is the latest public official in a West Coast city to be elected with a promise to be tougher on crime. In 2021, voters in Seattle elected a Republican as the city prosecutor after she vowed more action on low-level crimes. The next year, voters in San Francisco recalled the progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.The district attorney position in Portland is nonpartisan, and with only two candidates on the primary ballot Mr. Vasquez’s victory means he is set to take over the office next year. More

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      What to Watch in Primaries in Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho and Oregon

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      Voters are headed to the polls on Tuesday in several states. In California’s 20th Congressional District, the most conservative in the state, two Republicans will face off in a special election to determine who will temporarily fill the seat of Representative Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted as House speaker last year and then resigned. The winner will serve until January, when the next Congress is sworn in. Vince Fong, a state lawmaker and onetime aide to Mr. McCarthy, had a significant lead in the primary. He will face Mike Boudreaux, the longtime sheriff of Tulare County. (They will face each other again in the fall in the quest for a full term.)Georgia, Kentucky, Oregon and Idaho have primary contests today. In Kentucky and Oregon, voters will also weigh in on the presidential primaries, raising the possibility of protest votes against both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.Here is what else to watch.The Trump prosecutor Fani Willis will be on the ballot in Georgia.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, will face a challenger in the Democratic primary for her position. Her opponent is Christian Wise Smith, a lawyer who placed third in the primary against Ms. Willis in 2020 and was defeated in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general in Georgia.Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s trial in Georgia, is also in a competitive race against Robert Patillo II, a civil rights lawyer and radio host. A third candidate, Tiffani Johnson, was disqualified and is fighting that decision.A progressive vies for a rematch in a swing district in OregonJamie McLeod-Skinner, a progressive challenger, knocked out a moderate seven-term Democratic representative in Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District during the 2022 primaries, but ultimately lost to her Republican opponent, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, by a two-point margin — a result that contributed to Republicans’ taking a thin majority in the House that year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the Manhattan Trial Is Probably Helping Trump

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      Throughout the Republican primary campaign (such as it was), it was perfectly clear that the multiple indictments of Donald Trump helped him consolidate support. This was a source of moral exasperation to liberals, but their bafflement coexisted with the hope that what played well with the MAGA faithful would have the opposite effect in the general election. Trump’s cries of persecution might rally conservatives in a primary, but the trials themselves would help Joe Biden cruise to re-election.The trial that we’re actually getting, the prosecution of Trump for falsified business records related to hush money payments related to his assignation with the porn star Stormy Daniels, could theoretically still have that effect; a guilty verdict could shake loose a couple of points from Trump’s modest but consistent polling lead.But watching the trial play out so far, it seems just as likely that as in the primaries, so now in the general election: Any political effect from being charged and tried is probably working marginally in Trump’s favor.First, consider how this trial plays if you are not paying close attention to the legal details. Follow the coverage casually, the headlines about Daniels’s testimony especially, and it appears that Trump is on trial for cheating on his wife in a distinctly sordid way and then trying to conceal it — for being a political figure, a candidate for high office, and lying about sex.As it happens, America spent a pretty important period of time litigating the question of whether it’s a serious offense for a lecherous politician (one whose campaign apparatus notoriously labored to prevent “bimbo eruptions”) to conceal an inappropriate sexual liaison. Indeed, we even litigated the question of whether committing brazen perjury while trying to conceal a sexual liaison is a serious offense. And the country answered this question by embracing the consensus position of American liberalism at the time and offering Bill Clinton tolerance, forgiveness, absolution.Admittedly some politically engaged Americans are too young to directly recall the Clinton presidency. But the Lewinsky affair still casts a meaningful cultural shadow, and many of the Trump trial’s headlines cast the prosecutors in a Kenneth Starr-like part. Nothing really new is being revealed about Trump’s conduct here; the country already knows that he’s a philanderer and scoundrel. Instead the revelations are about the seeming hypocrisy of his political enemies, and how easily the former Democratic indifference to lying-about-sex gave way to prurience when it offered a path to getting Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sarah Elfreth, Maryland’s Youngest Female State Senator, Wins House Primary

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      Sarah Elfreth, the youngest woman ever elected to Maryland’s State Senate, won a crowded Democratic primary race on Tuesday in Maryland’s Third Congressional District, according to The Associated Press.Ms. Elfreth, 35, emerged from a field of more than 20 Democrats vying in the deep-blue district to succeed Representative John Sarbanes, a Democrat who announced last October that after nine terms he would not seek re-election.First elected to the Maryland State Senate in 2018, Ms. Elfreth often highlighted her political résumé during her run and played up the bipartisan legislative victories she helped to secure while serving in the General Assembly. She ran on a platform with standard Democratic fare that included pledges to protect abortion rights, combat gun violence and fight climate change.Ms. Elfreth drew support from several local Democrats. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who did not seek re-election this year, spoke favorably of her while appearing on the trail alongside her last week — though he stopped short of a formal endorsement.Her most prominent rival was Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who was on duty during the attacks on Jan. 6, 2021, and rose to national fame after testifying in the House investigation into the attack. Mr. Dunn, a first-time candidate, had significantly out-raised his opponents in the race since announcing his run in January, and was endorsed by a number of prominent national Democrats.Ms. Elfreth had raised about $1.5 million since starting her campaign in November, significantly less than the $4.6 million that Mr. Dunn had amassed. But she received support from outside groups, including more than $4.2 million in spending from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group.Her support drew attacks from Mr. Dunn, who swore off funding from outside groups and criticized Ms. Elfreth for at times voting alongside Republicans in the State Senate. Ms. Elfreth, for her part, said she would prioritize campaign finance reform in Congress, and her campaign said that Mr. Dunn had distorted Ms. Elfreth’s record.Ms. Elfreth will be favored in the heavily Democratic district in November. More

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      West Virginia Attorney General Wins the Republican Nod for Governor

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      Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, won the Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, making him the likely next chief executive of the deeply Republican state.In the general election, he will face Steve Williams, the mayor of Huntington, and the only Democrat on the primary ballot. The winner will succeed Jim Justice, who has led the state for eight years , and who is running for U.S. Senate.Mr. Morrisey, now in his third term as the state’s attorney general, was one of six candidates vying for the Republican nomination, including two political scions. One was Moore Capito, a former state lawmaker, whose mother is Senator Shelly Moore Capito, and whose grandfather was Arch Moore Jr., a three-term governor. The other was Chris Miller, the owner of an auto dealership group, who is the son of U.S. Rep. Carol Miller and the grandson of Samuel Devine, who represented Ohio’s 12th district in Congress for 11 terms. Also among the Republican candidates was Mac Warner, the West Virginia secretary of state.The Republican candidates ran hard to the right in the campaign, accusing one another other of being Republicans in name only, and of being insufficiently opposed to transgender rights.Mr. Morrisey, 56, challenged Joe Manchin III for his U.S. Senate seat in 2018 and came up just short. But he since made a name for himself by aggressively litigating against President Biden’s policies. He has joined or led several coalitions of Republican state attorneys general challenging the federal government over environment regulations, vaccine mandates and gun sales.The winner of the general election will take over a state that has scored poorly on a host of metrics. West Virginia has one of the highest child poverty rates and lowest labor force participation rates in the country, and a large portion of the population has reported heath problems. Following a major cut last year in the state’s income tax, significant revenue shortfalls are forecast in the years ahead. More