Republican Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      In Pennsylvania, the 2020 Election Still Stirs Fury. And a Recount.

      by

      Election deniers in Lycoming County convinced officials to conduct a 2020 recount, a three-day undertaking that showed almost no change, but left skeptics just as skeptical.WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.A ballot cast for former President Donald J. Trump that was part of the county’s recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?It did not.“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday.“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.The county’s election professionals spent months responding to the arguments of the election deniers in public hearings and fielding their right-to-know requests for the minutiae of voting records. Mr. Lehman said he did not think an encounter with the facts would change the views of some people.“You close one election-denying door, they’ll open a window,” he said.Mr. Trump hosted a campaign rally in Lycoming County at the Williamsport Regional Airport in October 2020. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOne of the residents who pushed for the hand recount, Jeffrey J. Stroehmann, the former chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Lycoming County, said he was happy the results matched the 2020 voting machine counts, though he said other questions needed to be addressed.“Our goal from Day 1 when we approached the commissioners, we said our goal here is not to find fraud — if we find it, we’ll fix it — we just want to restore voter confidence,” said Mr. Stroehmann, a founder of the far-right Lycoming Patriots group.He and Ms. DiSalvo were inspired by the debunked claims of a retired Army officer named Seth Keshel, who gained attention in 2021 with the assertion that there were 8 million “excess votes” cast for Mr. Biden. His analysis has been dismissed by professors at Harvard, the University of Georgia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.A petition circulated by Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann noted that registered Republicans grew their numbers in Lycoming County compared with Democrats from 2016 to 2020, but that Mr. Biden managed to win more votes than Hillary Clinton. Election deniers found this suspicious.“If Republicans GAINED voters and Democrats LOST voters — why did Biden receive 30% MORE votes in the November 2020 election than Hillary Clinton did in 2016?” their petition asked.Mr. Lehman called the argument nonsensical. Party registration does not dictate how someone will vote, he said. Mr. Biden outperformed Mrs. Clinton in nearly every Pennsylvania county in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump also raised his vote totals in the county by 16 percent.“The voters’ unpredictability — it makes democracy both majestic and messy,” Mr. Lehman told county commissioners at a hearing last year. The commission ultimately approved the recount two to one, along partisan lines.Mr. Lehman monitoring ballots being recounted in Williamsport on Wednesday.Pat Crossley/Williamsport Sun-GazetteElection officials at every level have been harassed and vilified since 2020, when election conspiracists echoing Mr. Trump blamed officials and helped inspire the “Stop the Steal” movement. On an election conspiracy show that was streamed on Rumble, Mr. Stroehmann called for an investigation into Mr. Lehman, who he said is “part of the steal.”“Our director of voter services is playing for the other team,” Mr. Stroehmann said on the show. “He’s as liberal as the day is long.”Richard Mirabito, a Lycoming County commissioner who is a Democrat, said there was no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing by Mr. Lehman. “He’s held in the highest esteem of integrity,” he said. “Those kinds of statements undermine the confidence of people in our system.”Mr. Mirabito voted against the recount but was overruled by the two Republicans on the board. Scott L. Metzger, a Republican and the chair of the county commission, also vouched for Mr. Lehman. “He’s done an outstanding job,’’ he said. After the 2022 midterms, requests for recounts in Pennsylvania races that were not close inundated counties, delaying the certification of some results. In Arizona and New Mexico, rural county commissions held up certifying primary or general election results last year.Across the country, a wave of Trump-backed election conspiracists who ran for statewide offices with control over voting lost their races. But some election deniers won races at the local level, where pressure by activists on officials has a better chance of yielding results.Officials in Lycoming County, a rural area of north-central Pennsylvania, were still estimating the final cost of the recount.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Metzger — one of the two Republicans on the commission who approved the recount — said that he voted for it after thousands of people signed petitions, and others approached him on the street saying they didn’t want to vote because they distrusted the system. Now that the recount matched what voting tabulator machines showed in 2020 and that there was no evidence of fraud, Mr. Metzger said, it was time to move on. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with it,” he said.Before the commissioners voted for the recount, Ms. DiSalvo and Mr. Stroehmann presented the results of what they called a door-to-door canvass of some county residences. The canvassing was conducted by volunteers from Audit the Vote PA, a group founded in 2021 under the false belief that Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, won Pennsylvania.Canvassers claimed to have found multiple “anomalies,” including votes that were tabulated from people in nursing homes who did not recall voting, as well as people who said they had voted, though there was no record of it.Mr. Lehman said he and his staff addressed each case. For those in nursing homes, the election office pulled records showing they had returned a mail ballot with their signature on the envelope. The canvass, he said, lacked rigor, adding that he was not surprised some people might have claimed to have voted in a face-to-face interview when they actually had not.Election deniers have no plans to stand down. They have requested reams of documents that they believe will expose fraud once and for all.“We’ve received a series of crazy records requests,” Mr. Lehman said. “You can quote me. They are insane.”Stacks of boxes containing ballots from the 2020 election, which are stored in a secure room of the county’s elections department. Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesElection deniers asked for copies of every application for a mail ballot, requiring Mr. Lehman and his staff to laboriously redact all personal information. They are pressing for copies of every ballot cast on Election Day 2020, and they have gone to court to seek digital data from the voting machines at each of the 81 county precincts.Though observers from both parties watched the hand recount this week, Ms. DiSalvo raised questions about the process, including that Mr. Lehman oversaw the adding up of the recounted votes.“We asked to see the tally sheets before the final processing and were denied,” Ms. DiSalvo said, referring to the paperwork used by ballot counters. The elections director, she added, had a “vested interest in making sure the numbers aligned.”Her group has filed a right-to-know request for the hand-count tally sheets.Mr. Lehman, a former Eagle Scout and teacher, displays two iconic photographs in his office. One shows Harry S. Truman in 1948 holding aloft the famously erroneous “Dewey Defeats Truman” newspaper headline. The other shows Lyndon Johnson solemnly taking the oath of office on Air Force One in 1963 following the assassination of President Kennedy.“They’re both transitions of power,” Mr. Lehman said. “One is comic, the other tragic. We’ve managed to process them both as a country. I don’t know which category to put 2020 in. We need to get back to a place where we can process the outcomes of elections in a constructive, healthy way.” More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Will There Be a Biden Comeback?

      by

      Something unusual happened to Joe Biden this week. A reputable poll, from The Economist and YouGov, showed him with a positive job approval rating — even hitting 50 percent approval among registered voters, against 47 percent disapproving.Maybe the poll was an outlier, a blip; Biden’s approval numbers have improved since his summertime nadir, but his polling average is still below 45 percent. Maybe any improvement will be undone by further revelations about stashed classified documents from his V.P. days — though it will be hard to top the comedy value of some of the papers being in the garage with his Corvette.But as congressional Republicans gear up for a year of internal knife fights and fiscal brinkmanship, it’s worth considering what it would take for a true Biden comeback, a return to actual popularity.Before the midterms I tried to identify three original sins in the Biden administration — three freely chosen, unnecessary courses that contributed to the president’s underwater numbers. They were the White House’s early decisions to limit energy production and roll back some Trump immigration policies (which were then followed by the gas-price spike and the border crisis), the surfeit of spending in the American Rescue Plan that contributed to the inflation surge and the failure to show any actual moderation on cultural issues to match Biden’s original moderate-Catholic-Democrat brand.One issue I didn’t include was the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, both because it wasn’t a major issue in the midterm campaign and because I thought the withdrawal itself was a necessary and gutsy decision, notwithstanding the disastrous execution. But if you look at the arc of Biden’s approval ratings, the fall of Kabul looks like a major inflection point, a moment that sowed the first serious doubts about the administration’s competence.So envisioning a Biden comeback requires imagining these liabilities being overcome or reversed, or just having their salience diminished. On the economy, such a scenario would run like this: The Republican House snuffs out any possibility of new inflationary spending, inflation continues to diminish without unemployment surging, China’s reopening helps normalize the global economy, Putin’s energy weapon proves to be a one-off blow rather than a continuing drag, and we get through this strange post-pandemic period without a real recession.On foreign policy, the Biden best case is probably further gains for the Ukrainians in the spring and then some kind of stable cease-fire, which would enable him to take credit for blunting Russian aggression and also successfully managing the risks of World War III. We may get more of a bloody stalemate instead, but the White House’s handling of the Ukraine war is probably its most successful policy to date; if it still looks successful in a year’s time, the memory of the Kabul breakdown should be fully washed away.On immigration and the border crisis, the Biden administration clearly thinks it’s pivoting rightward with new restrictions on asylum; the political effectiveness of the policy, though, will turn on whether it actually succeeds. On other cultural issues, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that Biden will execute any notable pivot — but the White House can hope that a divided government will effectively ease voter anxieties about wokeness without the administration needing to make any enemies to its left.The role of congressional Republicans generally is key to the recovery scenario. The Biden administration can look back on successful political rebounds by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that were clearly mediated by G.O.P. fecklessness. On the evidence of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership to date, history may be returning to those grooves.But with this important difference: Clinton and Obama were unusually talented politicians in the prime of their political lives, while Biden is something else — a likable-enough political insider who’s now conspicuously too old for his job.Occasionally this reality can be oddly advantageous for the White House. In cases like the classified-document revelations or the Hunter Biden imbroglios, the idea of Biden doing something shady accidentally or cluelessly, rather than with conscious corruption, is more plausible than in prior presidencies.But mostly Biden’s age creates challenges that the Clinton and Obama administrations didn’t have to worry about. When events turn against his administration, as they did in 2021 and certainly could again in 2023 if the above scenarios don’t pan out, this president can look especially overmastered, especially ill-equipped to lead or turn the ship around. And even when things are going relatively well — even in a clear rebound scenario — the shadow of Biden’s diminished capacities may still be a drag on his support.Presuming, that is, that the Republicans find an opposing candidate who draws clear contrast in vigor and capacity. If they return instead to a certain former president whom Biden beat once already — well, that’s the strongest comeback scenario, and the clearest path to another term.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

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans

      by

      In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.A 2021 background check revealed that Mr. Santos had likely lied about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, which The New York Times publicly revealed a year later.Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday, via Getty ImagesThe existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.But Democrats struggled to do so. In 2020, the party incumbent, Tom Suozzi, dismissed Mr. Santos as a nonviable threat, and conducted no opposition research at all while cruising to victory. When Democrats did vet him two years later, they failed to find some of the most egregious fabrications that prompted members of Mr. Santos’s campaign team to quit.Democrats then labored unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by higher-profile races, to dig into the troubling leads they did unearth. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small weekly newspaper on Long Island, which labeled Mr. Santos “a fake” — and a few opinion pieces in Newsday, New York’s media machine paid Mr. Santos scant attention.More on the George Santos ControversyBehind The Times’s Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how Representative George Santos was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Split View: New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of the newly elected representative after his pattern of deception was revealed. But House Republican leaders badly need his vote.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.“The reality is there’s no defense, it shouldn’t have happened,” said Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, a small but influential partner to the Republican Party that backed Mr. Santos. “It would be impossible and probably incorrect for me to say this could never happen again, but it won’t be from me not looking again.”Early warning signs missedMr. Santos had never held elected office until joining Congress in January.Jackie Molloy/BloombergMr. Santos was a political neophyte when he first showed interest in running for a House seat made up of parts of Queens and Nassau County in 2020. His only real electoral experience ended quickly: A year earlier, he was forced to drop his insurgent campaign for a low-level party position in Queens because he lacked enough valid signatures to make the ballot, according to Joann Ariola, a New York City Council member who led the Queens Republican Party at the time.Among the tight-knit Republican circles on Long Island, he was virtually unknown. And in Queens, party leaders were still sour over his initial foray.In normal circumstances, Mr. Santos would have been shooed away. Republicans in Nassau County, which comprises the bulk of New York’s Third Congressional District, have long been famous for exercising tight control over who runs, grooming and rewarding a stable of candidates like an old-school political machine.But with the country in lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and the district expected to remain under Democratic control, no one else put their hand up to run. Mr. Santos submitted a résumé and answered a vetting questionnaire riddled with lies, including that he had a 3.9 grade-point average from a college he never graduated from and job credentials he did not possess. A vetting team for the county Republican Party accepted his answers without question.“I guess unfortunately we rely on the person to be truthful to us,” Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Republican Party county chairman, said in an interview. This week, he called on Mr. Santos to resign and said he would no longer be welcome in the Nassau Republican Party.When Mr. Santos chose to run again two years later, local Republicans again gave him their support. They expected that flipping the district would once again be a stretch and, in any case, Mr. Cairo’s priority was winning state and local offices, which control thousands of local jobs and major tax and spending decisions. Efforts to recruit a more formidable candidate, like State Senator Jack Martins, did not pan out.There were already questions swirling by that time among donors and political figures about where exactly Mr. Santos lived and the source of the money that supported the lavish lifestyle he boasted about.In the summer of 2021, one of the former advisers to Mr. Santos, who insisted on anonymity, discovered his connections to Harbor City Capital, the Florida-based firm accused of a Ponzi scheme, and to other suspicious business practices that Mr. Santos had obscured. The adviser said he took the findings to a state party official later that fall and tried to pitch the story to a newspaper, which he said did not pursue it. The Harbor City connection was later reported in The Daily Beast.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican committee chairman, was among nearly two dozen local Republicans who recently called for Mr. Santos’s resignation.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAround that time, Mr. Santos began attracting the suspicion of a pair of friends and potential donors active in New York Republican circles. Mr. Santos claimed to one of them, Kristin Bianco, to have secured the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, when he had not. That prompted her to express concerns about Mr. Santos to plugged-in Republicans, including associates of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, one of Mr. Santos’s biggest early backers whose top political aide was assisting his campaign. Later Ms. Bianco and her friend became suspicious that they could not verify his work history.“We’re just so tired of being duped,” Ms. Bianco texted Mr. Santos in early 2022, after he refused her request to produce his résumé. Mr. Santos wrote back that he found the request “a bit invasive as it’s something very personal.”In the run-up to the 2022 contest, Dan Conston, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations who insisted on anonymity to describe them and declined to provide more detail.In the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos’s race suddenly became competitive, after a state court undid a Democratic gerrymander and adopted new congressional boundaries friendlier to Republicans. Despite the prime pickup opportunity, the Congressional Leadership Fund deliberately withheld support from the contest — but never spoke about it publicly. A spokesman for Mr. Conston’s group declined to comment on its campaign strategy or its leaders’ conversations.If party leaders were aware of any of the concerns about Mr. Santos, or others raised by his former vendors, they found ways to reassure themselves.“The thinking was the guy went through a campaign with Suozzi, who was a pretty tough and thorough guy,” said Peter T. King, a retired longtime Republican congressman from Nassau County. “So anything would have come out.”Opposition research misses the markRobert Zimmerman, center, opted not to spend campaign funds on opposition research against Mr. Santos as they ran to replace Representative Tom Suozzi, center right.John Minchillo/Associated PressThe assumption that any damaging information about Mr. Santos would have been found in the 2020 campaign turned out to be misguided. Mr. Suozzi, the popular Democratic incumbent, got a quote for the cost of an outside firm to do opposition research on Mr. Santos. But he decided not to spend the money — sparing Mr. Santos meaningful scrutiny in his first race.“No one knew George Santos, and he had less than $50,000 in campaign funds against a popular incumbent who never even said his name,” said Kim Devlin, a Suozzi adviser. “We didn’t feed anything to the press because why would we give him press?”With a more competitive race expected in 2022, researchers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did the first meaningful opposition research on Mr. Santos that summer, assembling an 87-page opposition research book. It extensively documents Mr. Santos’s past statements — including his extreme views on abortion rights and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Using public records, the committee’s researchers also turned up some red flags in Mr. Santos’s biography: multiple evictions; no I.R.S. registration for an animal charity he had claimed to have created; details about his involvement with Harbor City (Mr. Santos himself was not named in the Ponzi scheme allegations) and more recent suspicious business dealings; as well as apparent discrepancies in his financial disclosure forms that raised questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had lent his campaign.But with orders to produce similar research books on dozens of other candidates across the country, the committee’s strained research team left stones unturned. At several points, researchers explicitly flagged the need for follow-up inquiries, such as to “determine whether Santos has a criminal record.” And their study failed to turn up key problems that prompted Mr. Santos’s own vendors to quit months earlier: his fabricated educational record, his marriage to a woman and questions about his residency.A spokeswoman for the D.C.C.C. declined to comment.Opposition research by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee suggested that further inquiries should ascertain whether Mr. Santos had a criminal record.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressMr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, got hold of the research book in late August, right after he won a competitive and costly Democratic primary. He decided not to spend what would have likely been tens of thousands of dollars to do more rigorous outside research.Other Democrats have second-guessed that decision in recent weeks, but at the time, Mr. Zimmerman had his reasons. While presidential and Senate campaigns typically have the financial and staff resources for exhaustive opposition research, House campaigns tend to rely on the D.C.C.C. to conduct their research.Strapped for time and cash, Mr. Zimmerman concluded that his money would be better spent on advertising and canvassing operations. And he believed that the campaign committee’s report as well as Mr. Santos’s far-right views on abortion and Jan. 6 — two of the year’s most prominent campaign themes — gave him powerful campaign fodder.“We knew a lot about him did not add up; we were very conscious of that,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an interview. “But we didn’t have the resources as a campaign to do the kind of digging that had to be done.”Mr. Zimmerman said his campaign tried to prod reporters at local and national news outlets with leads about Mr. Santos, but had little luck. The candidate himself, a public relations executive, did not hold news conferences or use paid advertising to draw attention to known discrepancies in his opponent’s record.“The response we got back pretty universally was they just didn’t have the personnel, the time or the money to do it,” Mr. Zimmerman said, referring to the publications the campaign contacted. “One person said to me, there are 60 to 80 crazy people running, we can’t investigate them all.”One outlet stood out, The North Shore Leader in Long Island, run by a Republican lawyer and former House candidate, Grant Lally. The paper published a pair of articles casting doubt on Mr. Santos’s claims that he owned extravagant cars and homes, and labeling him a “fabulist — a fake,” though it did not have other specifics that would later come out about his falsified résumé or his past.None of the bigger outlets, including The Times, followed up with extensive stories examining his real address or his campaign’s questionable spending, focusing their coverage instead on Mr. Santos’s extreme policy views and the historic nature of a race between two openly gay candidates.What did top Republicans know?Representative Daniel Goldman of New York, who has called for Mr. Santos’s resignation, filed a formal ethics complaint against him.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn the aftermath of Mr. Santos’s exposure, Democrats have said that their researchers would likely not have turned up much of the information uncovered by The Times and other media outlets after the election. Private institutions like schools and businesses are more inclined to share educational and employment records with reporters than with political parties, they say.But the opposition research firm Mr. Santos hired in the fall of 2021 — his campaign reported spending $16,600 on Capital Research Group LLC — seems to have had relatively little trouble turning up some of that same information.People working for his campaign had grown accustomed to Mr. Santos’s braggadocio and outlandish claims. But when they approached him about conducting a vulnerability study, the objective was more routine: producing a record of his past statements and other public information that would be useful later when his opponents started crafting attacks.Mr. Santos quickly signed off, but as the research dragged on, he asked to cancel the contract with the firm. When the results came back, it was clear why.Researchers found no evidence that Mr. Santos had earned degrees at Baruch College and New York University, as he had claimed. They turned up records showing his involvement with the company accused of a Ponzi scheme — a relationship he had played down. They found eviction records, business records and a suspended Florida driver’s license, which together raised questions about whether he was a legal New York resident and as rich as he claimed to be.The report also said that Mr. Santos, who was openly gay and appeared to be living with a man at the time, had been married to a woman. The study missed other fabrications that The Times later uncovered, including false claims that he worked at Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Nor did it turn up records of fraud charges in Brazil years earlier.The Times has not seen the vulnerability study, but it was described in recent days by four people with knowledge of the report who were granted anonymity because it remains confidential.The people working for Mr. Santos convened an emergency conference call to discuss the results on Dec. 1, 2021. They presented him with a choice: bow out of the race with dignity, or stay in and risk letting the Democrats turn up the same information and use it to destroy his political and personal future.After promising to produce diplomas that would prove his degrees (he ultimately did not), Mr. Santos said he would think it over. When he came back a few days later, he said he had spoken with other advisers and was convinced the findings were not as bad as they were being portrayed. He was staying in the race. Most of his team quit.What top Republicans were told of Mr. Santos’s issues is more difficult to chart. Mr. Santos required those working for his campaign to sign nondisclosure agreements, limiting the spread of the vulnerability report. But one person who was briefed on its contents said that questions about Mr. Santos’s background were discussed well beyond campaign vendors. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which closely monitors House candidates and backed Mr. Santos, sometimes requests such reports as a condition of its support.A spokesman for the group declined to comment for this article, but pointed to an earlier statement denying it had previous knowledge that Mr. Santos’s record was largely fabricated. The N.R.C.C. typically does not conduct its own independent vulnerability studies on candidates.Mr. McCarthy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign, has said relatively little about the fabrications, and has refused calls to try to oust him from the House as the speaker seeks to maintain an exceedingly narrow majority in Washington. This week, Mr. McCarthy played down Mr. Santos’s lies, comparing them to other politicians who have embellished parts of their résumés and implying he would not undo the will of voters who elected him.The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has refused calls to push for Mr. Santos’s ouster.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSpokesmen for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, and a spokesman for Ms. Stefanik, the highest-ranking New York House Republican, declined to comment. Allies of Mr. McCarthy maintain that they did not know about the baldest fabrications and misrepresentations, like those turned up by Republican researchers in late 2021, but only had more general concerns about his honesty.Despite the financial resources he helped marshal to the race, Mr. McCarthy had good personal reason to be wary of Mr. Santos. Earlier in 2021, an aide to the candidate was caught impersonating Mr. McCarthy’s chief of staff while soliciting campaign contributions.By the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos was in need of a new team of consultants. With help from Ms. Stefanik’s top political aide, he chose a new consulting firm and shared the vulnerability study.The new crop of vendors, led by Big Dog Strategies, never spoke to their predecessors, though, and did not know why they had left the campaign. After Mr. Santos again insisted he had graduated from college, and addressed other red flags raised in the report, the new team accepted his explanations and began plotting a campaign. They would use issues — not the candidate’s biography — to win the race.Mr. Santos has said he will not resign, and intends to serve out his two-year term.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesReporting was contributed by More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Why Eli Crane Defied Kevin McCarthy

      by

      The freshman Republican from Arizona was the only newcomer to hold out against Speaker Kevin McCarthy until the very end.WASHINGTON — Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, was still weeks away from being sworn in to Congress for the first time when Donald J. Trump, the former president, called to try to persuade him to support Kevin McCarthy for speaker.Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Crane during his campaign, helping him emerge victorious in a crowded Republican primary. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee aligned with Mr. McCarthy, had donated to his campaign. The pressure to fall in line, Mr. Crane said, was immense.“That’s always a tough situation, when you have a lot of respect and admiration for somebody, and the commitments that you’ve made to your voters,” Mr. Crane recalled in an interview in his new office this week, just days after he voted against Mr. McCarthy 14 times in a row.Mr. Crane, 43, a former member of the Navy SEALs and a contender on “Shark Tank,” last week was the sole newly elected congressman to vote against Mr. McCarthy until the bitter, drawn-out end — typically a perilous position for a freshman who harbors any ambition to serve on a powerful committee or play a role in legislating.But Mr. Crane said his constituents viewed Mr. McCarthy as part of the establishment they had sent him to Washington to upend — and he was not about to disappoint them as his first official act on Capitol Hill.On the December call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Crane said he had told the former president, “Sir, I’m sorry, we love you out in Arizona, but I’ve been listening to my voters.”Over five days in which Mr. McCarthy suffered defeat after humiliating defeat, Mr. Crane said he had heard a lot of “What’s it going to take” from the speaker’s allies as they tried to pull together the necessary votes to win the race. He did not want a particular committee. There was no change in the rules that he was after. He said he was not seeking notoriety. He was simply there to vote against Mr. McCarthy.“I did not want to come up here and be a representative who heard what my voters said and came up here and caved to the pressure,” Mr. Crane said. “I didn’t want anything, other than to do what I was sent here to do.”Before entering politics, Mr. Crane served five wartime deployments and 13 years in the military.Samuel Corum/Sipa, via Associated PressHis rigid anti-McCarthy stance caught many Republicans by surprise. Mr. Crane had never made voting against Mr. McCarthy a campaign promise, as some far-right candidates in other districts had done. He was not even the most far-right candidate in his primary.In fact, Mr. Crane had been quiet about his position on the speaker’s race until he signed on to a Dec. 8 letter demanding concessions from the incoming speaker. Some McCarthy allies assumed he was under the sway of a fellow lawmaker from Arizona, Representative Andy Biggs, who was mounting a protest bid for speaker against Mr. McCarthy.A Divided CongressAfter a dayslong spectacle over the House speakership, the 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.Abortion: As part of an anti-abortion rights effort, House Republicans pushed through a bill that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.I.R.S. Funds: Republicans in the House voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the agency.A Wide-Ranging Inquiry: The House approved the creation of a powerful new committee to scrutinize what Republicans say is the “weaponization” of government against conservatives.But Mr. Crane said his unshakable opposition was more reflective of his military background, which taught him to tough things out.“I’ve been through a ton of very difficult situations, and I’m very grateful for those,” he said.Still, it was a stunning way to enter Congress, where Mr. Crane was still getting lost in the hallways while also being one of a handful of holdouts who stood between Mr. McCarthy and the speakership..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Half the time, I’m trying to find where the bathroom is and where the gym is,” he said of his first days in Washington. “We finally found the gym.”It’s all a new world for Mr. Crane, who flipped his seat in November, defeating the Democratic incumbent, Tom O’Halleran, in a mostly rural district in northeastern Arizona whose lines had been redrawn to include more Republicans.During his campaign, Mr. Crane said he supported decertifying the 2020 election, a stance that did not appear to hurt him in the newly conservative district. He was by no means the furthest to the right in his primary; another candidate was Ron Watkins, a prominent conspiracy theorist suspected of being behind the QAnon conspiracy theory.Before entering politics, Mr. Crane served five wartime deployments and 13 years in the military. He then started Bottle Breacher, a company featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” whose signature product was a .50-caliber bullet fashioned into a bottle opener and marketed as a gift for men and groomsmen. He became a brand ambassador for Sig Sauer, the firearms manufacturer.With tattooed arms and dark, slick-backed hair, Mr. Crane stands out in the sea of suits that is the Republican Conference, where he is now bent on disrupting the status quo simply for disruption’s sake.“He’s a new breed of MAGA,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, who is close with Mr. Crane. “Smart, tough, lethal.”Late last Friday night after the 14th vote, the remaining holdouts were Mr. Biggs, Representatives Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Mr. Crane. Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, two of the most vocal opponents in the final days, had finally relented and switched their votes to “present” on the second-to-last ballot.“Everybody was pressuring,” Mr. Crane said. As the group of defectors shrank from 20 to four, he said, “the pressure just kept escalating.”Mr. Crane was something of a wild card because he had said little, at all, throughout the process. And he was the sole freshman in the group.“The consensus between the group was: ‘We came this far together. If we go out, we’re going out together,’” he said. “When the suggestion was made to put this thing to bed when we knew we could not win, I wanted to make sure I did not leave those that had stood to the end.”At one point, he said, after the 13th failed vote, things became personal and heated. Mr. McCarthy, unable to spare a single supporter, had called a pair of Republican lawmakers back to Washington for the late-night vote, and a lawmaker approached Mr. Crane on the House floor to berate him for his intransigence.“No matter how this shakes out, make sure you go apologize to Wesley Hunt and all the other guys you’re screwing over this weekend who can’t be there for their families,” Mr. Crane said a colleague had told him.Mr. Hunt had left Washington to be with his wife, who had gone into labor earlier in the week and delivered their son prematurely, and returned to the hospital with postpartum complications.“I was very upset with him for saying that to me,” Mr. Crane said of the colleague, whom he did not know at the time and would not name. “I let him know that.”Mr. Crane said he has expressed interest in serving on the Natural Resources, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committees, but is fully prepared to be punished for his vote.“I expect it,” Mr. Crane said, even though Mr. McCarthy assured some defectors last week that there would be no retribution against members who had voted against him. “We’ll see what happens. I might wind up in the broom closet.” More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      G.O.P. Leaders Stand by Santos as New York Republicans Call on Him to Resign

      by

      Republican congressional leaders badly need the newly elected representative’s vote, but local officials and lawmakers are eager to distance themselves from his scandal.WASHINGTON — New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of Representative George Santos, the newly elected congressman from Long Island who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé and is under multiple local and federal investigations into his yearslong pattern of political deception.House Republican leaders, not so much.Amid mounting calls for his resignation from Republican members of Congress from New York and state party officials, Mr. Santos still has the backing of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other House Republican leaders.In a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday, Mr. McCarthy made it clear that he had no intention of barring Mr. Santos from congressional committees or otherwise penalizing him for winning election under false pretenses.“The voters of his district have elected him,” Mr. McCarthy said. “He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference.”Mr. McCarthy downplayed the likelihood that allowing Mr. Santos to serve might put national security at risk, even though members of Congress routinely receive classified briefings from top military and other government officials.“I don’t see any way that he’s going to have top secret” information, Mr. McCarthy said Thursday at his first news conference since winning the speaker’s gavel, adding, “He’s got a long way to go to earn trust.”He added that Mr. Santos would face the House Ethics Committee, which considers allegations of misconduct by members.“If anything is found to be wrong, he will be held accountable exactly as anybody else in this body would be,” Mr. McCarthy said.The disconnect between the reaction from Nassau County Republicans and those in Washington reflects the differing political realities for both groups. In Congress, Republicans, who hold a paper-thin majority in the House, do not feel directly culpable for Mr. Santos’s misdeeds and have much more on the line if they lose his seat. Mr. McCarthy can’t spare a single vote in the House — least of all one who was a reliable supporter during the 15 rounds it took for him to secure the speakership.In the 2020 presidential election, President Biden won Mr. Santos’s district by 8.2 points. If he were to resign from Congress, prompting a special election for the seat, there is no guarantee that Republicans would be able to win it again.More on the George Santos ControversyBehind the Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how he was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Going to Washington: Despite being under scrutiny for lies about his background, George Santos brings his saga to Capitol Hill, where he will face significant pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.Embellished Résumés: While other politicians have also misled the public about their past, few have done so in as wide-ranging a manner as Mr. Santos.The New York Republicans who have repudiated Mr. Santos, by contrast, fear suffering by association with a man whose scandals threaten to tarnish what was a resurgent year for the party throughout the state. Five of the six representatives who have called on Mr. Santos to step down won seats in competitive districts where they are expected to face fierce challenges from Democrats in 2024.Other local Republicans have suggested that newly installed leaders in Washington are more concerned with their own short-term survival than the potential long-term consequences of backing Mr. Santos.“We have to think about our brand as a party,” said Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive. “Are we a party that’s behind people of good character and integrity who are transparent? Or are we a party that, for cynical reasons, we are going to allow this to continue?”With Mr. McCarthy consumed by his own political future last week as he struggled for five days to secure the votes he needed to become speaker, the confounding issue of what was to be done with Mr. Santos was left up in the air.Speaker Kevin McCarthy can’t afford to lose a seat in the House, where his party holds a sliver of a majority.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBut now that the speakership has been settled, Republicans are split on how to punish a member who is under active investigation by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns, as well as fraud charges from Brazilian law enforcement officials.Representatives Anthony D’Esposito, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams, all newly elected from New York, have called for Mr. Santos’s resignation on Wednesday. Of those, only Mr. Langworthy, who serves as the state party chair, is in a safely Republican district. The Nassau County G.O.P. chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., has also called for Mr. Santos to step down.On Thursday, two more Republican freshmen from New York, Representatives Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro, said that they, too, believed Mr. Santos should resign.Mr. Lawler said in a statement that his fellow newcomer had “lost the confidence and support of his party, his constituents and his colleagues,” adding that Mr. Santos could not fulfill his duties as a member of Congress.At the news conference on Wednesday where a host of local Republican elected officials demanded Mr. Santos’s resignation, Mr. Cairo said he had not spoken with Mr. McCarthy.But, he added, he hoped that House Republican leaders “would support us.”Instead, they have taken a hands-off stance. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 Republican who endorsed Mr. Santos during his campaign, notably sided with her fellow party leaders rather than her state’s congressional delegation, defending her new colleague.“It will play itself out,” Ms. Stefanik told CNN. “He’s a duly elected member of Congress. There have been members of Congress on the Democrat side who have faced investigations before.”Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and majority leader, brushed off questions about Mr. Santos, declaring it a matter that would be settled “internally.”Mr. Santos may be benefiting from the fact that his district is not further to the right. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill speculated privately that leaders might have made a different political calculation if Mr. Santos represented a district that former President Donald J. Trump had won by double digits in the presidential race.Mr. D’Esposito on Thursday tried to play down any tension within the fractured conference.“We are unified,” Mr. D’Esposito said. He and other local officials, he said, had felt that “we need to make our position known based on the fact that we have constituents that we represent there who are personally offended by the lies that George Santos has told or made.” But he said he had faith that Mr. McCarthy would make sure Mr. Santos was properly held “accountable.”Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County G.O.P. chair, called for Mr. Santos’s resignation. The New York Republicans who have repudiated Mr. Santos fear being tarnished by his scandal.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesWhat may unify them is a political gene for self-protection.“They may be bailing on Santos faster because it’s a better topic for them than why the vetters didn’t vet him,” said Stu Loeser, a former press secretary to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, referring to party operatives’ failure to dig into any of Mr. Santos’s claims that turned out to be brazenly fabricated, choosing instead to blindly back his candidacy.At the news conference in New York, Mr. Cairo was quick to dub Mr. Santos an outsider, saying he was not representative of Long Island Republicans because he initially came from neighboring Queens. (His district does encompass part of Queens.)“I think George Santos is an exception to the rule,” Mr. Cairo said, adding that he hoped Nassau County voters would make judgments in future elections based on the issues and not “one individual who, unfortunately, was not truthful and ran on Long Island.”Mr. Santos, for now, is defying calls to resign and portraying himself as a partisan warrior. In an interview on the podcast “Bannon’s War Room” with Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida on Thursday, Mr. Santos said he was in Washington to “serve the people” and that he planned to continue doing so.“I was elected by 142,000 people,” Mr. Santos said. He said we would “find out in two years” if those voters didn’t want him.Mr. Santos also said confidently that he had outperformed the politicians calling for his resignation, saying “I beat them by double their margins in the victory.”Though he did outperform Mr. Lawler significantly, he fell far short of Mr. Langworthy’s 30-point win. Mr. LaLota won his race with a double-digit margin. Mr. Santos won his race by 7.6 points.Mr. Santos, who initially appeared out of his depth when he arrived in Washington last week, sitting alone in the House chamber and dodging the media as he got lost in the basement corridors of the Capitol complex, has quickly learned his way around Congress.By the end of the week, he was sitting on the House floor next to the center of the action, alongside Mr. Gaetz and at another point laughing with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.On Thursday, he portrayed himself as a fighter.“I just pray for all of you,” he said, “when they come for you, that you have the strength I have.”Michael Gold More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia Juggles Local Issues and National Ambition

      by

      Virginia’s Republican governor is considering a presidential run, but a divided state legislature may thwart his ambitions for conservative policy victories.VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Gov. Glenn Youngkin headlined a rally on Saturday outside the red-brick City Hall here, urging voters to back a fellow Virginia Republican in a special election for State Senate.It was part of a broader effort by the governor to use the 2023 session of the Virginia legislature to bolster his conservative credentials and agenda as he tests a possible presidential run in 2024. “I need Kevin in the Senate to help me get it done, so we have to win this election now,” Mr. Youngkin told the crowd, referring to Kevin Adams, the State Senate candidate.But Tuesday’s election was a bust for Mr. Youngkin and Virginia Beach Republicans: Mr. Adams was narrowly defeated, Democrats flipped the Republican-held seat he was seeking and one of the governor’s prominent right-wing initiatives — a 15-week abortion ban — seemed all but doomed as Democrats expanded their narrow majority in the upper chamber of the General Assembly.Mr. Youngkin’s 2021 election in blue Virginia instantly set off speculation about a potential White House run in 2024. In just his second year in office, he has had both a local and national focus.The governor has laid out priorities beyond abortion for the legislative session that begins this week: a proposed $1 billion in tax cuts, improving crisis mental health care and luring 2,000 police officers from other states that, as he put it, “do not support law enforcement.” He has also cultivated big donors and Republican voters outside Virginia, traveling widely before the midterms to support 15 Republican candidates for governor and appearing frequently on Fox News, where he advances the “parents’ matter” agenda that helped get him elected.Mr. Youngkin campaigned in October in Arizona with Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor. She lost her race.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesIn September, Mr. Youngkin stumped for Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who won his race.Audra Melton for The New York TimesBut unlike some other potential Republican contenders in 2024, Mr. Youngkin is facing home state political dynamics that make it harder to notch clean conservative victories.Although other Republican governors testing the presidential waters enjoy Republican-led statehouses — in New Hampshire, Florida and South Dakota — Mr. Youngkin has a divided legislature. After the G.O.P. defeat in the special election for State Senate, Democrats hold a 22-18 majority. Republicans control the House of Delegates.“His challenge is that he can talk about things, but because of the political environment of Virginia, which is different from, let us say, Florida, he can by no means accomplish these conservative goals,” said Bob Holsworth, the founding director of the School of Government at Virginia Commonwealth University.Mr. Youngkin’s rising profile has attracted the attention of former President Donald J. Trump, whose unusually early announcement of a third presidential campaign in November was aimed in part at clearing the Republican field for 2024. On his social media platform, Mr. Trump wrote on Nov. 11 that his endorsement of Mr. Youngkin had cemented the governor’s 2021 victory. And Mr. Trump also made a racist remark about Mr. Youngkin’s name.“Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me,” the former president said in a series of posts on Truth Social.Mr. Youngkin’s victory — becoming the first Republican elected governor of Virginia since 2009 — stemmed from appealing to the Trump-centric base while keeping Mr. Trump himself at arm’s length to win suburban voters, whom he wooed with promised tax cuts. But he has now signaled a more aggressive approach toward Mr. Trump.Mr. Youngkin became the first Republican governor of Virginia since 2009.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesIn a brief interview before the rally on Saturday in Virginia Beach, Mr. Youngkin rejected Mr. Trump’s taunt about his name as the opposite of how he deals with people.“I do not roll that way,” Mr. Youngkin said. “I do not call people names. I treat people well, and I believe that’s the way that everyone should behave and sometimes in politics I think folks forget that.”Since the midterms, when many Trump-endorsed candidates lost their races, some of Mr. Youngkin’s backers perceive Mr. Trump’s influence on the wane and the opportunities for challengers on the rise. Furthermore, the former president has all but disappeared into his Florida estate after announcing his bid for re-election.Mr. Youngkin is little known to Republican voters beyond Virginia, barely registering in early primary polls. His main appeal is to political consultants and to the donor class, those who connect with him as a wealthy former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group, a financial investment firm.Ron DeSantis, Florida’s pugilistic governor, is the leading Trump alternative. But Youngkin supporters paint him as a worthy alternative with a more affable, less prickly personality, someone who transitioned easily from a corporate glad-hander to a first-time candidate. Supporters envision Mr. Youngkin winning over droves of primary voters in the intimate campaign settings of Iowa and New Hampshire.“He’s got this very likable persona,” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. “He’s not angry. He walks into a room and he smiles.” Mr. Davis called Mr. DeSantis “the shiny new object right now,” but added, “When you get into one-on-one campaigning, I would just say Glenn is a natural.”Jimmy Centers, a Republican strategist in Iowa, said Mr. Youngkin’s championing of parent rights — over how America’s racial history is taught or what books students can be exposed to — grabbed the attention of conservatives nationally in 2021. But now, Mr. Centers said, Mr. Youngkin needs to build on that victory.“One could argue he was the first candidate to demonstrate parental rights was a winning issue,” Mr. Centers said. “That issue and his position will open doors for him in Iowa and other states, but my sense is that voters and caucusgoers will also want to measure results now that he is in office.”Mr. Youngkin, who is 56, insisted on Saturday that he had no timeline for making up his mind about a presidential run.“There’s no plans for decisions,” he said. “What there really is a plan for is to focus on delivering the agenda when Virginians hired me.”Mr. Youngkin signing executive orders on his first day in office in 2022.Steve Helber/Associated PressA political action committee Mr. Youngkin set up to support the campaigns of fellow Virginia Republicans and to tend to his own political future raised $4.8 million from donations of $10,000 or more through last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. The PAC paid $94,183 in 2022 to Axiom Strategies, a top G.O.P. consulting firm.Jeff Roe, the head of Axiom and Mr. Youngkin’s chief political adviser, addressed major Youngkin donors at a September retreat at a luxury resort outside Charlottesville. No specific plans were laid for 2024, according to attendees.“Youngkin is obviously somebody I’d very much like to run,” said Ray Washburne, a major G.O.P. donor from Dallas, who attended. But he said he wanted to hear more about Mr. Youngkin’s potential strategy, and gauge his legislative achievements, before making a lasting commitment. “After he finishes this session, let’s see what that world looks like.”Virginia Republicans were lowering expectations for the new legislative session even before this week’s special election solidified Democrats’ State Senate majority. The Virginia Beach race drew tens of thousands of dollars from pro- and anti-abortion groups. After Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, tossing abortion regulation down to the states, Mr. Youngkin told an anti-abortion forum he would “gleefully” sign any bill “to protect life.” In December, while unveiling a new state budget, he proposed a 15-week abortion ban.At the rally in Virginia Beach, however, Mr. Youngkin did not mention abortion once in an eight-minute speech. It suggested he wished to draw no further attention to an issue on which he could not deliver a conservative victory.The special election was a preview of a more important crucible for the governor this fall, when every seat in both legislative chambers is on the ballot.If Republicans hold their House majority and flip the Senate, the governor can present himself nationally as a giant slayer, someone who fully turned around a blue state. If, however, his party suffers further setbacks, Mr. Youngkin will have fewer claims on conservatives outside Virginia.Mr. Youngkin in Lansing, Mich., campaigning for Tudor Dixon, the candidate for governor who lost her race.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesCampaigning widely for Republicans running for governor last year, including Kari Lake in Arizona and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, both of whom lost, Mr. Youngkin was sometimes trailed by a media crew filming him for future TV ads. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News last week to denounce a Virginia high school for delaying notification to students who earned distinction on a national test. “They didn’t want the other students to feel bad,” Mr. Youngkin said.Although Mr. Youngkin issued an executive order on his first day in office banning teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools (educators said it wasn’t taught in the first place), other initiatives have gone less smoothly. A revision of state history standards, influenced by Youngkin appointees, was withdrawn after an uproar that it downplayed slavery as a cause of the Civil War and referred to Native Americans as the “first immigrants.” More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Coming Year of Republican Drama

      by

      G.O.P. infighting figures to be the political story line of 2023.A 2015 presidential primary debate included, from left, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The first Republican primary debate this cycle is expected to be in late spring or summer.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe Coming Year of Republican DramaGood morning, everyone! I’m finally back from a few weeks abroad and excited to get back in the swing of things. I hope you had a great holiday season.The start of an odd-numbered year is always an odd period for political analysts. We’re still litigating what happened in the last election, and yet it’s already time to look ahead to the next campaign. This year, the pivot from one election to the next is going even more slowly than usual.The Republican primary campaign hasn’t really gotten underway. By the end of January in 2019, a half-dozen Democratic candidates had entered the fray. This time, only former President Donald J. Trump has formally announced, and I wouldn’t say he “entered the fray.” There isn’t a fray if you’re alone in the arena.We did at least get a bit of January drama in lieu of a presidential race: the most rounds of voting for House Speaker since before the Civil War.Kevin McCarthy’s slog to the speakership was a fitting enough way to start the year. No, it’s not a half-dozen entrants to a presidential primary. But it’s still Republican infighting — and Republican infighting promises to be the political story line of the year, whether it’s in Washington or on the presidential debate stage (assuming that President Biden seeks the Democratic nomination without a serious contest).It has been a few years since Republicans have held center stage in such drama. The last year might have been 2017, before Mr. Trump established his dominance over the Republican Party and inaugurated an era of relative peace and unity — something like a conservative Pax Romana or Pax Britannica.But Mr. Trump’s dominance appears to be waning, and the fault lines and fissures of a still deeply factionalized Republican Party are being gradually re-exposed.This year, one of our biggest tasks will be to survey the newly revealed Republican landscape. This is not necessarily an easy assignment. In some ways, Republicans are a tougher challenge for political analysts than Democrats, who can usually be analyzed on a simple ideological spectrum or with the readily available demographic traits of members or their supporters, like race and education.The same can’t always be said for Republicans, a majority of whom are white conservatives. I do think educational attainment will be a central dividing line in this year’s Republican primary electorate, but good luck capturing the difference between Mr. McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus leader, Scott Perry — two conservative, California-born white Christians from evangelical denominations, ages 57 and 60 — based on demographics or their positions on the issues. It’s not Joe Biden versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that’s for sure.The old ways of thinking about the Republican Party may not be so useful anymore. In that regard, this month’s fight for House Speaker — which was eerily reminiscent of Obama-era fights between House leadership and the Freedom Caucus — may prove to be somewhat misleading. The pre-Trump Republican Party will not be making a comeback in most other respects. Carthage didn’t make a comeback with the decline of Rome, and Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants won’t be making a comeback in 2023, either.Instead, 2023 offers opportunities for new players — most obviously Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. And those new players on the national stage will mean a new set of hard-to-predict issues and fault lines. After so many years when Republicans were allied with Mr. Trump or else cowered on the sidelines, it is not at all obvious how Republican Party politics will scramble and realign if and when a vigorous challenge to Mr. Trump emerges.It’s not obvious how a challenge to Mr. Trump will divide the Republican electorate, either. For all we know, Mr. DeSantis might run at Mr. Trump from his right and attack him for bringing Dr. Anthony Fauci into our lives and the vaccine into our bodies. Maybe he’ll blame Mr. Trump’s trillion dollar coronavirus spending packages for bringing about inflation. Exactly how Mr. Trump might go after Mr. DeSantis is a mystery in its own right.It may not all add up to a “new era” of American politics or anything quite so grandiose. Mr. Trump could still win the Republican nomination again. But this year could look pretty different than what we’ve gotten used to over the last half decade. We’ll have our work cut out for us in the new year. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Crime Concerns Drove Asian Americans Away From New York Democrats

      by

      Worries about public safety, especially attacks against Asian Americans, caused some in the once-reliably Democratic bloc to vote Republican last year.Asian Americans have typically formed a crucial and reliable voting bloc for Democrats in recent years, helping the party maintain its political dominance in liberal states like New York.But Republicans shattered that presumption in November when they came within striking distance of winning the governor’s race in New York for the first time in 15 years, buoyed in part by a surge of support among Asian American voters in southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens.Now, Democrats are trying to determine how they can stem — and, if possible, reverse — the growing tide of Asian American voters drifting away from the party amid a feeling that their concerns are being overlooked.Interviews with more than 20 voters of Asian descent, many of them Chinese Americans who had historically voted for Democrats but did not in 2022, found that many went with the Republican candidate for governor, Lee Zeldin, even if begrudgingly, largely because of concerns about crime.One lifelong Democrat from Queens, Karen Wang, 48, who is Chinese American, said she had never felt as unsafe as she did these days. “Being Asian, I felt I had a bigger target on my back,” she said.“My vote,” she added, “was purely a message to Democrats: Don’t take my vote for granted.”Besides crime, Asian American voters expressed concern over a proposal by former Mayor Bill de Blasio to change the admissions process for the city’s specialized high schools.Democratic leaders, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, have acknowledged their party’s failure to offer an effective message about public safety to counter Republicans’ tough-on-crime platform, which resonated not just with Asian Americans, but with a constellation of voters statewide.In Flushing, Queens, home to one of New York City’s most vibrant Chinatowns, homespun leaflets posted on walls in English and Chinese encouraged passers-by to “Vote for Republicans” before the November election, blaming Democrats for illegal immigration and a rise in crime.One flier portrayed Ms. Hochul as anti-police and sought to link her to the death of Christina Yuna Lee, who was fatally stabbed more than 40 times by a homeless man inside her apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown last February.Over Zoom, a group of 13 Chinese American friends, most of them retired union workers, met regularly to discuss the election before casting their ballots. A mix of Republicans, Democrats and political independents, they all voted for Mr. Zeldin.Gov. Kathy Hochul and other leading New York Democrats have acknowledged their party’s failure to offer an effective message about public safety.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAlthough Mr. Zeldin lost, his support among Asian American voters helped lift other Republican candidates to surprise victories in down-ballot legislative races.In one of the southern Brooklyn districts with a majority of Asian American voters, Peter J. Abbate Jr., a 36-year Democratic incumbent, lost to Lester Chang, the first Asian American Republican to enter the State Legislature.Mr. Chang’s entrance, however, was clouded by questions about his legal residency, prompting the ruling Assembly Democrats to consider trying to expel him. They ultimately decided not to seek his expulsion, with one lawmaker, Assemblyman Ron Kim, noting that such a move would have provoked a “strong backlash from the Asian community.”For Democrats, repairing ties with Asian American voters, who account for about 15 percent of New York City’s population and make up the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group, may be a difficult yet critical challenge given the significant role such voters are poised to play in future elections.State Senator John Liu, a Queens Democrat, said that Mr. Zeldin’s campaign message on the crime issue “simply resonated better,” and that Democrats had to improve the way they communicated with Asian Americans, particularly on education policy.“Democrats can begin by understanding the Asian American perspective more deeply,” said Mr. Liu, who was born in Taiwan. “The broader issue is that many of the social justice issues in this country are still viewed from a Black and white lens, and Asian Americans are simply undetected by that lens and therefore feel completely marginalized.”Republicans performed well in parts of New York City with the largest Asian American populations, drawing voters who said they were concerned primarily with public safety, especially amid a spate of high-profile hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.In Assembly District 49 in Brooklyn, for example, which includes portions of Sunset Park and Dyker Heights, and is majority Asian, Mr. Zeldin won 61 percent of the vote, even though it appears white voters turned out to vote in higher numbers. Mr. Zeldin won by similar margins in a nearby Assembly district that is heavily Chinese and includes Bensonhurst and Gravesend.In Queens, Mr. Zeldin managed to obtain 51 percent of the vote in Assembly District 40, which includes Flushing and is about 70 percent Asian: mostly Chinese and Korean immigrants.Support for Mr. Zeldin, who came within six percentage points of beating Ms. Hochul, was palpable across those neighborhoods before Election Day, with much of the pro-Republican enthusiasm appearing to grow organically. And posts in support of Mr. Zeldin spread broadly across WeChat, a Chinese social media and messaging app widely used by Chinese Americans.Interviews with Asian American voters revealed that their discontent with the Democratic Party was, in many cases, deep-rooted and based on frustrations built over years. Many of them described becoming disillusioned with a party that they said had overlooked their support and veered too far to the left. They listed Democratic priorities related to education, criminal justice and illegal immigration as favoring other minority groups over Asian Americans, and blamed Democratic policies for a rise in certain crimes and for supporting safe injection sites.Voters traced their sense of betrayal in part to a divisive 2018 proposal by Mayor de Blasio, a Democrat, to alter the admissions process for the city’s elite high schools, several of which are dominated by Asian American students, to increase enrollment among Black and Hispanic students.The plan would have effectively reduced the number of Asian American students offered spots at the elite schools, which made some Asian Americans feel that Democrats were targeting them.Mayor Eric Adams, Mr. de Blasio’s successor, moved away from his predecessor’s plan to diversify the city’s top schools, but the effort galvanized Asian Americans politically, prompting parents to become more engaged and laying the groundwork for Republicans to make inroads among aggrieved voters. Indeed, one vocal political club that emerged from the education debate, the Asian Wave Alliance, actively campaigned for Mr. Zeldin.“Why should I support Democrats who discriminate against me?” said Lailing Yu, 59, a mother from Hong Kong whose son graduated from a specialized high school in 2018. “We see Democrats are working for the interest of African Americans and Latino communities against Asian communities.”After years as a registered Democrat, Ms. Lu switched her party registration to Republican last year and voted for Mr. Zeldin. She ticked off a litany of recent instances of street violence — including one involving a stranger who spit at her while she was taking out her trash — that she said made her feel less safe now than when she arrived in the United States 50 years ago.“I think what upset me to see Asian Americans veer right is that they were swayed by fear and fear alone,” said Representative Grace Meng, a Queens Democrat of Taiwanese descent. “It’s important that we are working with the Asian American community, but also with our leaders up and down the ballot to make sure they’re listening and responsive to our concerns, which is not just substance, but outreach, especially during campaigns.”Sam Ni at his Sunset Park computer store. He said his shift to the Republican Party was prompted by a proposal to alter the admissions process for the city’s specialized high schools. Janice Chung for The New York TimesSam Ni, a father of two high school students, began shifting to the right after the debate over high school admissions. He described the city’s diversification effort as an attempt to “punish” Asian American students.Mr. Ni said fears over subway crime had disrupted his daily life and further estranged him from the Democratic Party. His wife, he said, recently began to drive the couple’s son to school from southern Brooklyn to Upper Manhattan, forcing her to spend hours in traffic instead of working at the computer store the family owns in Sunset Park.“If I told my son to go to the subway, we will worry about it,” said Mr. Ni, 45, who was a Democrat since immigrating to the United States from China in 2001 but who switched parties and voted for President Donald J. Trump in 2020.This year, Mr. Ni decided to play an active role in getting other Asian Americans to the polls: He helped organize an effort that raised about $12,000 to print get-out-the-vote banners, fliers and bags in English and Chinese.“If you don’t vote, don’t complain,” read the signs, a slogan that also spread on WeChat and other social media platforms. The message did not explicitly urge voters to back Mr. Zeldin, whom Mr. Ni voted for, but the materials were passed out primarily at rallies for Mr. Zeldin in the city’s Chinese neighborhoods.Mr. Ni helped organize an effort that raised money to print banners and other materials in Chinese and English encouraging people to vote. Janice Chung for The New York TimesThere were also larger forces at play.A week before the election, Asian American voters in New York City received mailings that appeared to be race-based. They accused the Biden administration and left-wing officials of embracing policies related to job qualifications and college admissions that “engaged in widespread racial discrimination against white and Asian Americans.”The mailings, part of a national Republican-aligned campaign targeting Asian American voters, were distributed by America First Legal, a group founded by Stephen Miller, a former top adviser to Mr. Trump who helped craft the president’s hard-line immigration policies.Democratic officials said they believed that many Asian Americans that voted Republican tended to be East Asian, particularly Chinese voters who may be more culturally conservative. Republicans may have also found success among first-generation immigrants who may not be as attuned to the history of racial inequity that has led Democrats to enact policies that Republicans have targeted, such as reforms to New York’s bail laws.Mr. Zeldin also made a point of meeting with, and raising money from, Asian American leaders and activists. The approach helped him win — and, in some cases, run up the vote — in many districts dominated by Asian American voters and enabled him to chip into Ms. Hochul’s overwhelming support in the rest of the city.Even so, some Asian American leaders noted that Mr. Zeldin’s near singular focus on crime — his campaign framed the election in existential terms: “Vote like your life depends on it, because it does” — allowed him to run up his numbers across many voting groups, including white and suburban voters, not just Asian Americans.Mr. Zeldin at a campaign rally shortly before Election Day. His near-singular focus on the issue of crime won over many Asian American voters. Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMany Democratic officials noted Ms. Hochul’s effort to rally Asian American voters in the campaign’s closing weeks, but characterized the push as too little, too late.After the election, the governor acknowledged that Democrats had fallen short in communicating their message about public safety to Asian American voters, saying that “more could have been done to make sure that people know that this was a high priority of ours.”“Obviously, that was not successful in certain communities who were hearing other voices and seeing other messaging and seeing other advertising with a contrary message about our priorities,” Ms. Hochul said in November after signing two bills aimed at curbing hate crimes. More