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      Losing Another Runoff, Georgia Republicans Weigh an Election Shake-Up

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      Some in the party said that additional changes to election rules were likely, after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory put a new spotlight on a major 2021 voting law passed by the G.O.P.As Georgia Democrats won their third Senate runoff election in two years, the party proved it had crafted an effective strategy for triumphing in a decades-old system created to sustain segregationist power and for overcoming an array of efforts to making voting more difficult. Republicans, meanwhile, were quietly cursing the runoff system, or at least their strategy for winning under a state law they wrote after losing the last election.The various post-mortems over how Georgia’s runoff rules shaped the state’s Senate outcome on Tuesday put a spotlight on a major voting law passed by the Republican-led General Assembly last year. Some Republicans acknowledged that their efforts to limit in-person early voting days might have backfired, while others encouraged lawmakers to consider additional restrictions next year.With Georgia poised to remain a critical political battleground and with Republicans holding gerrymandered majorities in both chambers of its state legislature, some in the party said that additional election law changes were likely.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who oversees the state’s voting procedures, said in an interview on Wednesday that there would be a debate next year over potential adjustments to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory.Mr. Raffensperger said he would present three proposals to lawmakers. They include forcing large counties to open more early-voting locations to reduce hourslong lines like the ones that formed at many Metro Atlanta sites last week; lowering the threshold candidates must achieve to avoid a runoff to 45 percent from 50 percent; and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to come back to the polls again after the general election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there would be a debate next year over potential changes to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures. Audra Melton for The New York Times“The elected legislators need to have information so they can look at all the different options that they have and really see what they’re comfortable with,” Mr. Raffensperger said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Republicans are not the only ones hoping to end Georgia’s requirement that a runoff take place if no candidate in a general election wins at least half of the vote. Democrats have long viewed the practice — a vestige of racist 1960s efforts to keep Black candidates or candidates backed by Black voters from taking office — as an additional hurdle for working-class people of color.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative from Atlanta who was arrested last year after knocking on the closed door behind which Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s voting law, said that last Friday, she had driven for 30 minutes and then waited an hour to vote early in person.Runoffs, Ms. Cannon said, “are not to the benefit of working families.” She added, “It’s very difficult to, within four weeks of taking time off to vote, have to do that again.”Since the law was passed in 2021, Georgia Democrats have criticized the new barriers to voting that it set in place. During the runoff, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, spared no opportunity to highlight the law and characterize it as the latest in a decades-long push to minimize the influence of Black voters and anyone who opposed Republican control.His stump speech featured a regular refrain reminding supporters that Georgia Republicans had sought to prohibit counties from opening for in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, after the state’s Republican attorney general and Mr. Raffensperger concluded that doing so was in violation of state law. Mr. Warnock and Democrats sued, and a state judge agreed to allow for the Saturday voting.“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place.”Because of the new voting law, Tuesday’s runoff was held four weeks after the general election, rather than the nine-week runoff period under which Georgia’s high-profile Senate races in early 2021 unfolded. The nine-week runoff period that year had been ordered by a federal judge; runoff contests for state elections have always operated on a four-week timeline.Tuesday’s contest also included fewer days to vote and new restrictions on absentee ballots — and it ended with virtually the same result.The 3.5 million votes cast in Tuesday’s runoff amounted to 90 percent of the general-election turnout in the Senate race on Nov. 8. In 2021, when Mr. Warnock first won his seat, runoff turnout was 91 percent of the general-election turnout, which was higher because 2020 was a presidential year. The outpouring of voters in both years was orders of magnitude higher than in any prior Georgia runoff.A get-out-the-vote event on Tuesday near a polling site in Atlanta.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesThe booming turnout this year has led Georgia Republicans to insist that their voting law was not suppressive.“We had what I think was a nearly flawless execution of two huge elections in terms of turnout and in terms of accuracy and integrity,” said Butch Miller, a Republican leader in the Georgia State Senate who helped write the voting law and is leaving the chamber after losing the primary for lieutenant governor.Mr. Miller said he “didn’t care for” the way that some counties, including large Democratic-leaning ones in the Atlanta area, had opened for extra early voting days, a sentiment echoed by other Georgia Republicans after Mr. Warnock’s victory.The new law evidently had an effect on how Georgians voted. In the January 2021 runoffs, 24 percent of the vote came via absentee ballots that had been mailed to voters. On Tuesday, just 5 percent of the vote came through the mail, a result of restrictions on who could receive an absentee ballot and the shortening of the runoff period, which made it more difficult to request and receive a ballot within the allotted time period.The 2021 law also cut the amount of in-person early voting days to a minimum of five, but allowed Georgia’s counties to add more days before the state’s mandated early-voting week. The Warnock campaign pressed the state’s Democratic counties to open for early voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, giving voters who were more likely to vote for the senator extra days to do so.But then Mr. Raffensperger sought to enforce a state law that forbids in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, leading to Mr. Warnock’s successful lawsuit.Jason Shepherd, a former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said the push to stop Saturday voting “wasn’t worth the fight” and served to energize Democratic voters.“You can be completely right and it can send the wrong message, because it plays into the Democrats’ narrative about voter suppression,” Mr. Shepherd said on Wednesday.In the end, 28 of Georgia’s 159 counties opened for extra in-person early voting days. Of those, 17 ended up backing Mr. Warnock and 11 went for his Republican challenger, the former football star Herschel Walker.Compared with weekdays, when the entire state was open for in-person early voting, relatively few votes were cast on the extra voting days. Just over 167,000 votes in all were cast combined on the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, along with the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday, when just two counties opened for voting. By contrast, 285,000 to 352,000 votes were cast statewide on each day of weekday early voting.But voters who cast ballots during those extra in-person early voting days were likely to tilt heavily toward Mr. Warnock.The largest 14 counties to back Mr. Warnock — including seven in metropolitan Atlanta — all opened for extra early voting days. Just two of the 11 largest counties to back Mr. Walker opened for extra in-person early voting days.Maya King More

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      Brian Kemp, the Georgia Republican Who Emerged Stronger From Walker’s Defeat

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      Gov. Brian P. Kemp of Georgia — once derided by some of his fellow Republicans — has emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Senate runoff as a savvy political operator.ATLANTA — As Republicans smarting from Herschel Walker’s defeat in Georgia continue the process of assigning blame, one man seems to be conspicuously above reproach: Gov. Brian P. Kemp.The state’s Republican governor — once derided as an unhinged far-right disrupter following a series of wildly provocative 2018 campaign ads — has emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Senate runoff as one of his party’s savvier political operators.On Nov. 8, Mr. Kemp won re-election by a resounding eight-point margin — a remarkable transformation for a politician who went from being booed by conservatives at his own events in the May primary to defeating a national Democratic star, Stacey Abrams. His ability to deftly walk a fine line of providing just enough support to Mr. Walker without being damaged by his defeat was proof of Mr. Kemp’s formidable political instincts, Republicans inside and outside the state said. He has survived and even thrived in the face of Donald J. Trump’s mercurial opposition. Mr. Kemp started out earning Mr. Trump’s endorsement, then became the former president’s political enemy, overcoming a primary challenge that Mr. Trump had orchestrated. Just before last month’s general election, Mr. Trump suddenly switched gears and encouraged his followers to support the Georgia governor.Mr. Kemp has helped create a template for Republicans, showing them how to use Mr. Trump’s attacks to strengthen an independent political brand and not sacrifice support from the former president’s loyal base. His navigation of the Republican Party’s crosscurrents, along with an election performance that saw him outperform Mr. Trump in crucial suburban swing districts, has raised his national profile and heightened speculation about his future ambitions and a potential run for president in 2024. “The ceiling is extremely high for Brian Kemp right now,” said Stephen Lawson, a Georgia-based Republican strategist who ran a pro-Walker super PAC. “Whether that for him is the U.S. Senate in four years, whether that’s potentially looking at ’24 stuff or whether that’s just being a really good governor and a voice for your party, he is going to have a huge platform moving forward.”Mr. Kemp, a former homebuilder from Athens, Ga., has built his two-decade political career on a mix of luck, skill and occasional provocations — in one 2018 TV ad, he pointed a shotgun at an actor playing a suitor to one of his daughters. He speaks with a slow, deep Southern drawl that he sometimes plays up for the cameras, and as an alumnus of the University of Georgia, he has positioned himself as the fan-in-chief of its football team, which Mr. Walker helped lead to a national championship in 1980.The governor’s Democratic critics say that Mr. Kemp’s allegiance to far-right orthodoxy has harmed the state. He signed a restrictive 2019 abortion law that effectively bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy and refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a decision that has caused the state to forgo billions of dollars in federal health care money.Mr. Kemp, in Bremen, Ga., in November, said that his kind of outreach and willingness to campaign helped him win re-election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even his critics acknowledge his knack for presenting himself as an aw-shucks Georgian and making his case in small rural communities, handshake to handshake. In the eight years that he served as secretary of state, he built relationships with many of the local shot-callers — coroners, tax assessors, sheriffs — in Georgia’s 159 counties. Those ties likely helped insulate him from Mr. Trump’s attacks after the 2020 election among local Republican officials. “His success now really is a result of all these touches over the years — that ‘How’s your mama? How’s your daddy?’ kind of thing,” State Senator Jen Jordan, a Democrat and vocal Kemp critic, said. Such a face-to-face style may work locally and statewide, Ms. Jordan said, but may not translate beyond that. “Is that something you can do at the national level, like running for president?” she added.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Turnout by Republicans Was Great. It’s Just That Many of Them Didn’t Vote for Republicans.

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      No, the main G.O.P. problem wasn’t prioritizing Election Day voting over early voting.Republicans turned out in force, but Herschel Walker still lost in Georgia.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesAfter yet another disappointing showing for Republicans in Georgia’s Senate runoff on Tuesday, some conservatives — like Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and Kevin McCarthy — have begun to point to a surprising culprit: a failure to take advantage of early voting.The theory seems to be that Republicans are losing because early voting is giving Democrats a turnout edge. It follows a similar conversation after the midterm elections, when a chorus of conservatives said Republicans needed to start encouraging mail voting.But as more data becomes available on turnout in this year’s election, it is quite clear that turnout was not the main problem facing Republicans.In state after state, the final turnout data shows that registered Republicans turned out at a higher rate — and in some places a much higher rate — than registered Democrats, including in many of the states where Republicans were dealt some of their most embarrassing losses.Instead, high-profile Republicans like Herschel Walker in Georgia or Blake Masters in Arizona lost because Republican-leaning voters decided to cast ballots for Democrats, even as they voted for Republican candidates for U.S. House or other down-ballot races in their states.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Georgia is a fine example. While Mr. Walker may blame turnout for his poor showing in November and earlier this week, other Republican candidates seemed to have no problem at all. Gov. Brian Kemp won by nearly eight points over Stacey Abrams; Republican candidates for House won the most votes on the same day.Yet Senator Raphael Warnock won in Georgia anyway because a large group of voters willing to back other Republicans weren’t willing to back Mr. Walker.The final turnout figures make it clear that Republicans — including Mr. Walker — benefited from very favorable turnout last month. Unlike in recent years, Republican primary voters were likelier to vote than Democrats (by a modest margin). Meanwhile, the white turnout rate exceeded the Black turnout rate by the widest margin since 2006.We went back and looked at the respondents to our pre-election Times/Siena survey, and matched them to post-election vote turnout records. We found that the respondents who said they backed Mr. Walker were actually likelier to vote than those who said they backed Mr. Warnock.But Mr. Walker still lost.On Tuesday, Mr. Walker lost again. This time, he lost by three points — two points worse than in November. The final turnout data won’t be in for weeks, but for now it is reasonable to suppose that Mr. Warnock fared better because the turnout was incrementally more favorable to him than it was in November.But that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats enjoyed a great turnout. All of the Republicans running for statewide office — other than Mr. Walker — could have easily survived an electorate that was two points less favorable.By our estimates, the 2022 electorate was several points more favorable to Republicans in Georgia than the 2020 electorate — which wasn’t great for Democrats, either.Any Democratic gains in the runoff almost certainly weren’t because of early voting. After all, this election was held with just one week of early voting, as opposed to three weeks in the general election. The number of Election Day voters actually increased in the runoff. So did the share of votes cast on Election Day. But it was the Democrat who fared better.Georgia is just one example of a broader national turnout gap, including in many of the places where Republicans blame early voting for their woes.Take Maricopa County in Arizona. It’s home to Phoenix and around 70 percent of the state’s voters. Some Republicans say — without any clear evidence — they faltered in Arizona because some Maricopa voters were unable to cast ballots at the polls on Election Day, but the final turnout data shows that 75 percent of registered Republicans turned out, compared with 69 percent of Democrats. That was enough to yield an electorate in which registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by nine percentage points. Yet Republicans like Mr. Masters and Kari Lake lost their races for Senate and governor.Or consider Clark County in Nevada. There, 67 percent of Republicans voted, compared with 57 percent of Democrats, implying that Republicans probably outnumbered Democrats statewide. Yet the Democrat — Catherine Cortez Masto — prevailed in the Senate while Republicans won the governorship and also won the most votes for the House.Wherever I’ve dug into the data, I see a similar story. You can read comprehensive analyses of North Carolina, Florida or New York, all showing a considerable Republican edge as well.In the key Senate states mentioned in this article, Republican House candidates received more votes than Democratic ones. The final Times/Siena polls showed that voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada preferred Republican control of the Senate.It’s fair to say voters in these key states probably preferred Republican control of government, in no small part because more Republicans showed up to vote. They just didn’t find Republican candidates they wanted to support at the top of the ticket. More

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      Analysis: A Very Bad 3 Weeks for Trump After Losses and Legal Setbacks

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      For the former president, who raced to announce his third run for the White House in hopes of clearing the Republican field, the losses, legal setbacks and embarrassments are rapidly piling up.Donald J. Trump’s unusually early announcement of a third presidential campaign was aimed in part at clearing the Republican field for 2024, but his first three weeks as a candidate have undercut that goal, highlighting his vulnerabilities and giving considerable ammunition to those in the G.O.P. arguing to turn the page on him.Since emerging from the November election with a string of humiliating losses to show for his pretensions to be a midterm kingmaker, Mr. Trump has entertained a leading white supremacist and a celebrity antisemite at his South Florida mansion.He has suggested terminating the Constitution — the one that a president swears to preserve, protect and defend — in furtherance of his long-running lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.His business was just convicted on all 17 counts in a tax-fraud case in New York City.And his handpicked candidate for the Senate in Georgia — Herschel Walker, the football star Mr. Trump employed in a brief stint as a pro football team owner in the 1980s — went down to defeat Tuesday night after a campaign that will be remembered as a string of scandals and self-inflicted wounds.Extending his streak of self-sabotage, Mr. Trump himself spent Tuesday night entertaining yet another fringe character, posing for thumbs-up photos at his club with an adherent of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, ABC News reported.For Mr. Trump, the losses and embarrassments are rapidly piling up, aggravating longstanding concerns among his fellow Republicans that his 2016 victory may have been an aberration — and that his persistence with a comeback attempt could sink the party’s hopes of reclaiming the White House in 2024.“I know a lot of people in our party love the former president,” Senator Mitt Romney said on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, responding to Mr. Walker’s defeat. “But he’s, if you will, the kiss of death for somebody who wants to win a general election. And at some point, we’ve got to move on and look for new leaders that will lead us to win.”Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist and former top adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the last three weeks “devastating for Trump’s future viability.”“His rushed announcement, serious legal setbacks and the defeat of his handpicked Senate candidates — which once again cost the G.O.P. control of the Senate — have raised serious concerns with his donors and supporters,” Mr. Reed said.“Abandonment,” he added, “has begun.”It is too soon to weigh the long-term effects on Mr. Trump’s latest candidacy of the current run of defeats and denunciations, especially given his long track record of weathering controversies.His rise reflected, and accelerated, the ascendancy of the right wing of the Republican Party, and with a solid one-fourth or more of the G.O.P. still solidly in his corner, he remains a clear favorite in polls of potential Republican contenders. But it is not clear that Mr. Trump will be able to replicate his appeal to the much broader coalition that delivered him an unexpected victory in 2016.A Trump rally in Texas in October.Jordan Vonderhaar For The New York Times/Getty Images North AmericaIt has been an inauspicious beginning for Mr. Trump, who has now led Republicans to defeat or disappointment in three straight election cycles.Ignoring most of his advisers, Mr. Trump chose to announce his campaign a week after the midterm election, counting on a strong result for Republicans. Instead, the G.O.P. barely captured the House and failed to take the Senate, prompting many in the party to assign blame to Mr. Trump, for endorsing flawed candidates and pressuring them to embrace his lies about the 2020 election.“If we would have taken the Senate, and the House by a good majority instead of a slim margin, then that would have paved the way for Trump to get the nomination and wrap it up quickly,” said Lori Klein Corbin, an Arizona member of the Republican National Committee. “Now, we just don’t know.”Mr. Trump has held no campaign events since he got into the race, has yet to name people to key campaign posts and has not established a campaign headquarters. He has largely kept to Mar-a-Lago, participating remotely in just a few public events, like a rally by telephone for Mr. Walker in Georgia.Yet Mr. Trump found time to dine on Nov. 22 with Kanye West, the rap artist whose approval Mr. Trump had repeatedly sought as president, and who had been widely denounced for a series of antisemitic comments, and with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, a notorious racist and Holocaust denier. (And when his former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, was among those to chastise him, Mr. Trump responded by privately complaining that Mr. Friedman had shown disloyalty.)In a statement, Steven Cheung, a senior communications adviser to Mr. Trump, dismissed questions about the start of the campaign, calling Mr. Trump “the single, most dominant force in politics” and insisting that all was going according to plan.“We’re focused on building out the operation and putting in place a foundation to wage an overwhelming campaign that’s never been seen before,” Mr. Cheung said. “We’re building out teams in early voting states and making sure we are positioned to win on all levels.”Mr. Trump’s losing streak includes serious legal setbacks.His four-year effort to block congressional Democrats from obtaining his tax returns ended in defeat at the Supreme Court, and the House Ways and Means Committee said on Nov. 30 that it had obtained access to six years of his returns. A federal appeals court on Dec. 1 shut down a lawsuit by Mr. Trump that had, for nearly three months, slowed the inquiry into whether he illegally kept national security records at Mar-a-Lago.Trump supporters at his 2024 campaign announcement in Florida in November.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesOutside Trump Tower in Manhattan after the 2024 announcement.Adam Pape for The New York TimesThen, in New York on Tuesday, a jury returned guilty verdicts against Mr. Trump’s family business on all 17 counts related to a tax-fraud scheme, detailing what prosecutors called a “culture of fraud and deception” at the company that bears his name.A hardware store Bath County, Va., showing its 2024 allegiance.Eze Amos for The New York TimesMr. Walker’s defeat Tuesday night in his runoff with Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, came as a final blow capping Mr. Trump’s miserable year as a political mastermind.Mr. Trump had pressed Mr. Walker to run and endorsed him early on, disregarding Republicans in Washington who urged caution before anointing Mr. Walker given the allegations of domestic violence in his past. Mr. Trump was adamant that Mr. Walker would prevail, just as Mr. Trump himself had weathered his own scandals.But while Mr. Walker kept the race surprisingly close, given the crush of headlines about the previously undisclosed children he had fathered and abortions he had reportedly urged romantic partners to get, he lost by nearly 100,000 votes — and Democrats gained an invaluable 51st seat in the Senate.Julianne Thompson, a Republican consultant in Atlanta and former spokeswoman for the state G.O.P., said the overall midterm results in Georgia — where voters rejected Trump-endorsed candidates for Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general — showed that “a lot of people are questioning the direction of the party.”“There is a big part of the Republican Party that is ready to move on,” she said.More broadly, Mr. Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad three weeks appear to have called into question whether his seeming imperviousness to the normal rules of political gravity may have worn off at long last.“People see what’s been happening, and will interpret that as weakness and as an opportunity to challenge President Trump,” said Michael Barnett, the Republican chairman in Palm Beach County, Fla. “I don’t think his influence has dropped that much — if at all — but he’s going to have opponents.”Emily Cochrane More

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      Wait! Wait! Georgia’s Over?

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      As the sun sinks over Georgia, we bid adieu to the Senate runoff election that seems to have been contested since the beginning of time.Yes, dinosaurs once ruled the earth and Senate candidate Herschel Walker probably has a theory about how they could be killed by a werewolf. Or maybe a vampire.This certainly was a race to remember. But now it’s over; Georgia very rightly decided that Senator Raphael Warnock, an estimable candidate, was better for the job than a guy who couldn’t seem to be clear about how many children he’d fathered or abortions he’d paid for.But … Wait! Wait! Warnock got only a little more than 51 percent of the vote. That means more than 1.7 million Georgians thought it’d be a better plan to have a senator whose theory on global warming is: “Don’t we have enough trees?”And who had his legal address in Texas for tax-saving purposes.Let’s face it: Warnock was running against one of the worst candidates in modern American history. Who once referred to the upcoming election as an “erection.” It was one of the most expensive races of all time, during which the Warnock folks were able to buy about $54 million in TV ads — more than twice what Walker could afford.Warnock, a much-respected minister at Martin Luther King’s old church, had served in the Senate with dignity. (His maiden speech was a call for — what could be more daring? — making it easier for people to exercise the right to vote.) His campaign was as dignified as Walker’s was … not. You’d think he’d at least win by four or five points.Georgia’s election is part of the “Wait! Wait! There’s More!” theme that’s been dominating our politics lately.Good news always seems to have a disturbing downside. And it’s never just one weird/bad/unnerving thing. You think this is all because of Donald Trump?Well, the Herschel Walker candidacy sure was. How many times have we heard the stirring story about Trump first noticing Walker’s great gifts when the young man joined the United States Football League, of which Trump was, of course, a great team owner?Walker played for three seasons with the U.S.F.L., and really impressed Trump, who was also otherwise engaged in running the whole league into the ground.OK, forget the football stuff. That’s hardly core to Trump’s identity, which he’s always assured us is that of a great businessman.Wait! Wait! (You knew that was coming, right?) This week the Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud and other assorted crimes. Seventeen counts in all, including giving free off-the-books-don’t-tell-the-I.R.S. cars and apartments and cash to top employees.Yep. However, Trump wasn’t really on trial himself. It was just his people.But wait, wait … there are other potential crimes under investigation. What about the whole Mar-a-Lago classified records thing?Well, it’s hardly the same as that mean old New York court case. Our former president probably feels he deserves kudos for personally hiring people to search his golf course and Trump Tower and the storage closet at Mar-a-Lago to make sure there weren’t any overlooked official documents there.But wait, wait, wait, wait … Those papers were all supposed to go to the National Archives, right?Yeah, but the Trumpians will assure you that we’ve moved far away from the central matter of the Donald’s identity as a wealth-building genius. Snatching up official presidential documents and stashing them in your private home has nothing to do with bad business practices whatsoever.We certainly are living in a time of wait-wait. Whatever we thought yesterday turns out to be way less interesting and less awful than what we learn today. Imagine all those stolid Republican politicians who’ve spent years finding ways to express support for their former president when he says something … scary.You know, you just get used to smiling vaguely when a reporter asks you whether you think it’s strange that the former president was hanging out with an antisemitic rapper and an antisemitic white supremacist. Or why he was telling the nation nobody would be able to get a turkey for Thanksgiving. And you’re feeling you’ve got things pretty well in hand and then — wait, wait! He just called for terminating the Constitution.We’ve been going down this road a long time, folks, and things are the way they are. I don’t know about you, but I just want to forget about Georgia and Senate races and get back to thinking about a future when we’ll have different stuff to talk about.Wait, wait — stuff like the next presidential election? Trump tooting his horn a trillion times a day while folks like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, try to help you really get to know them. You’re going to see so much of those folks, Herschel Walker will begin to seem like an old pal you should have invited on a trip to the Catskills.OK, maybe not. But I hear Joe Biden’s pretty much got his hat in the ring. How many times a day are we going to have to hear Republicans mention the possibility of an 86-year-old in the White House?Gee, at this very moment, that doesn’t sound terrible at all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Where Trump Stands in Early (Very Early) 2024 Polls

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      The former president’s support has not collapsed. But Republican voters appear strikingly open to another Florida-based politician.Donald Trump’s support in the Republican Party has not collapsed, and perhaps it never will. But a look at the major polls taken since Election Day suggests that the ice is shifting beneath his feet.The data also shows Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida gaining ground in hypothetical 2024 matchups, even though he has yet to declare his intentions.And it underscores the careful line any presidential hopeful must walk with Republican voters; whatever they might think about Trump’s third bid for the White House, there’s little evidence of a clear anti-Trump majority that wants to repudiate him altogether.One of the sharpest articulations of this point I’ve seen came from Nate Hochman, a conservative writer. “If DeSantis allows himself to be defined as the Never Trump — or even the anti-Trump — candidate, he will be permanently discredited in the eyes of many of the voters he needs to win,” Hochman wrote in an essay for Unherd. “If he can convince those voters that he is the next step in the MAGA movement, he may just have a chance.”As Hochman noted in an interview, that will be a far harder trick to pull off when DeSantis actually enters the arena against Trump and the attacks start flying. And he won’t be facing the former president alone, or at least not right away.“In some ways, Trump is in a stronger position now than he was in 2015,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio.A methodological note: Keep in mind that the margin of error goes up whenever you’re looking at smaller subsamples like this. So don’t take the numbers themselves as definitive; focus on the overall trend lines.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      How Can Democrats Use Their Final Weeks in Power?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.The Democratic Party’s success in securing a 51st Senate seat in the Georgia runoff Tuesday is certainly consequential, but it did nothing to avert an imminent shift in the national political environment: On Jan. 3, Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives, and it will be two years at least — if not much longer, given historical trends — before Democrats again have the power to enact major legislation.This period between an election and the transition of power is known as a lame-duck session, and in recent years, it’s often when Congress has been most productive. How will Democrats make use of this one? Here are just some of the most pressing legislative priorities on the party’s agenda that could be accomplished without fear of a Republican filibuster in the Senate, or with the possibility of enough Republican votes to block such a move.Keeping the government — and the global financial system — runningCongress is staring down a Dec. 16 deadline to pass a budget for the 2023 fiscal year. If it doesn’t, the government could be forced to shut down, as it did in 2013 and twice in 2018, depriving hundreds of thousands of government workers of pay and disrupting public services.But an even more urgent threat, German Lopez of The Times recently wrote, is that Republicans will refuse to raise the limit on how much money the government can borrow, which Congress frequently must do to fund the budget it has approved. If the government hits the debt ceiling, which could happen early next year, it could eventually lose the ability to make debt payments and be forced, for the first time, to default, with potentially calamitous effects for the global economy.Once a pro forma administrative task, raising the debt ceiling became a matter of high-stakes brinkmanship during the Obama administration, as Republicans repeatedly leveraged the threat of default to push for spending cuts and regulatory rollbacks. In October, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader hoping to become speaker, suggested that his party would deploy this strategy again to force “structural changes” to programs like Social Security and Medicare.Democrats have two options to avert financial crisis, Peter Orszag, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, explains: Win over enough Senate Republicans to form a filibuster-proof majority to raise the debt ceiling, or raise it unilaterally through the reconciliation process, which would require only 50 votes.“Any Democrats averse to taking such a painful vote now should consider how much leverage their party will lose once Republicans control the House — and how much higher the risk of default will be then,” he writes in The Washington Post.The trade-off, however, is that raising the debt ceiling with only Democratic votes would take much longer — about two weeks — than if Republicans were on board. “This might crowd out Democrats’ ability to pass almost any other legislative priority while they still control both chambers,” notes Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post.Preventing a repeat of Jan. 6Given concerns about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election, another major Democratic priority is modernizing the Electoral Count Act, a 1887 law governing the Electoral College counting procedure. The law’s ambiguous language became the legal basis for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Reforming the law to prevent such schemes has bipartisan support: Nearly 40 senators, including 16 Republicans, have signed on to a bill introduced in the Senate over the summer, and the House passed its own bill in September.“Both the Senate and House bills are far better than what we have right now, and either one would go a long way to ensuring that the electoral-count law cannot be used as a tool for subverting the election in 2024 or beyond,” the Times editorial board wrote last month. “Congress needs to pass the overhaul now, when it has willing majorities in both houses and well before anyone casts a ballot in 2024.”Reforming the immigration systemNearly two years after President Biden proposed the most comprehensive immigration reform since the Reagan administration, Democrats have made very little headway on the issue. But this week, there were signs of a potential breakthrough when a bipartisan pair of senators reportedly drafted a framework for legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for two million DACA recipients and improve the asylum system. In exchange, it also contains provisions for expediting the deportation of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum and continuing the use of Title 42, a Trump-era emergency public health order that restricts the right to claim asylum.Some immigration advocates have called on congressional Democrats to seize the opportunity. “House Republicans are not likely to allow any measures to improve immigration matters to reach a vote, preferring to have the political issue for the next elections rather than solutions,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice. “This year and the remaining weeks in this Congress present the best opportunity to enact legislation.”But obstacles to a bipartisan immigration deal are formidable. Republican senators “might decide that the G.O.P. won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent ‘border crisis’ as an issue,” writes Greg Sargeant of The Washington Post. On the Democratic side, he adds, “the continuation of Title 42, which has been a human rights disaster, and the beefed up removal process might make it a nonstarter among progressives in both chambers.”De-escalating the war on drugsAs overdoses soar and public opinion turns against the war on drugs, proponents of drug law reform say there may be an opening for Congress to save lives by passing bipartisan measures like the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, which would increase access to medication used to treat opioid addiction, and the Medicaid Re-Entry Act, which would reduce disruptions in medical care for people who have just been released from jail or prison.Another bill called the EQUAL Act, which would end the federal sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses, already has more than 10 Republican co-sponsors, “so it can withstand a filibuster and seems ripe for some action this lame-duck session,” Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, said last month.Staying ahead of the coronavirusThe Biden administration last month asked Congress for an additional $9 billion to fund its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which is still killing more than 280 Americans per day and remains a leading cause of death in the United States.Some of the $9 billion would go toward researching long Covid and ensuring continued access to vaccines and treatments, which have fallen out of reach for more and more uninsured Americans as federal money has dried up.About $5 billion would go toward creating a program in the mold of Operation Warp Speed, to develop next-generation therapeutics and vaccines, like nasal sprays that could block more infections and universal, variant-proof coronavirus shots.Many scientists believe that nasal vaccines could be crucial to reducing Covid’s disease burden, but the United States has lagged other countries in developing one because of underinvestment. Congressional Republicans have rebuffed requests for more pandemic funding, having accused the administration of mishandling previous allocations. They have also questioned the necessity of more aid, pointing to Biden’s declaration in September that “the pandemic is over.”Democrats now find themselves in the awkward position of trying to make the case for more funding without admitting error: “While COVID-19 is no longer the disruptive force it was when the president took office,” the White House wrote in a November letter to Congress, “we face the emergence of new subvariants in the United States and around the world that have the potential to cause a surge of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, particularly as we head into the winter months.”Protecting marriage equalityOne major legislative effort that is likely to advance is the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriage. The issue took on newfound importance this summer after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” the 2015 precedent establishing the right of gay couples to marry.Some conservatives have dismissed the bill as a response to an imaginary threat and one that endangers religious liberties; many liberals argue the bill doesn’t go far enough, since it wouldn’t prevent states from refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Nonetheless, the measure attracted enough Republican support to pass in the Senate last week and is expected to win final approval in the House.To some, the success of a bill that was considered just a few months ago to be dead on arrival suggests there might be opportunities for more congressional breakthroughs, albeit within a very limited window. “As with the same-sex marriage bill, bipartisan legislation revising the 19th century Electoral Count Act wasn’t politically possible before the midterm elections and wouldn’t be once Trumpian Republicans are in charge of the House schedule in four weeks,” writes Jackie Calmes, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. “Enjoy these few weeks of what passes for bipartisanship as Congress waddles to its end. You won’t be seeing much of that over the next two years.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“Can Republicans and Democrats Find a Way Forward on Immigration?” [The New York Times]“What should Democrats do in the lame-duck Congress?” [The Economist]“Same-Sex Marriage Bill Passes Senate After Bipartisan Breakthrough” [The New York Times]“Here’s how Congress can make the lame-duck session a mighty one”[The Washington Post] More

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      in Elections

      Warnock’s Narrow Victory Over Walker in Georgia

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      More from our inbox:Trump’s Very Bad DayThe Crypto IllusionEncourage BreastfeedingFood Buying That Reflects Our Values Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Warnock Victory Hands Democrats 51st Seat in Senate” (front page, Dec. 7):Although I am relieved that Senator Raphael Warnock prevailed in the Georgia runoff, I am absolutely disgusted that this election was so close.We have lost our way as a country when we do not see that political leadership takes skill; knowledge of the law, the Constitution and history; the ability to negotiate and cooperate; and a worldview that is larger than your own.I would not be at all qualified to play professional football, and it was clear from the start that Herschel Walker did not have the knowledge or skill to be a U.S. senator.Dawn MenkenPortland, Ore.The writer is the author of “Facilitating a More Perfect Union: A Guide for Politicians and Leaders.”To the Editor:I have new respect for Herschel Walker: He gave a concession speech. He declared that he lost. He called on his supporters to respect their elected officials and to believe in America. He said he had no excuses for his loss because he put up a good fight. This probably reflects both who he is and his football heritage — you win but also lose games fair and square.He may have helped us back to the old pre-Trump norms. We may disagree with his views and abhor his scandals, but the most important thing is that he believes in democracy. Let’s hope Donald Trump watched that concession speech.When Mr. Walker said, “I want you to believe in America and continue to believe in the Constitution and believe in our elected officials most of all,” it could be the biggest takeaway of the election.James AdlerCambridge, Mass.To the Editor:Raphael Warnock was extremely lucky to win the Senate race in Georgia — lucky because he faced an opponent plagued by ignorance, myriad character flaws and an endorsement by Donald Trump. Almost certainly, a moderate Republican, Black or white, could have defeated Mr. Warnock, perhaps by a margin as large as the seven-plus percentage points that Brian Kemp scored over Stacey Abrams for the Georgia governorship just four weeks earlier.I am very happy about Mr. Warnock’s win, but it should not be interpreted as signaling a major shift in the political landscape of Georgia.Peter S. AllenProvidence, R.I.To the Editor:Every time the Republicans lose an election — most recently Tuesday in Georgia — the Times coverage predicts that the party will engage in “soul-searching,” suggesting that the G.O.P. has a desire to change course. Yet, again and again, the party persists in its pandering to far-right, anti-democratic forces of white nationalism and heteropatriarchy.The G.O.P. has made its soul abundantly clear. Perhaps some Republican voters have done their own soul-searching and decided to reject what their party has become.Pamela J. GriffithBrooklynTo the Editor:As a liberal Democrat I am very pleased with the results of the Georgia runoff and most of the rest of the 2022 U.S. Senate results in competitive races. How do we make sure that Donald Trump continues to influence the choice of Republican candidates for Senate in 2024?Michael G. RaitenBoynton Beach, Fla.Trump’s Very Bad Day Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Tuesday was a Trumpian negative hat trick: a defeat in the Senate runoff in Georgia, the conviction of the Trump Organization on tax fraud and other crimes, and a report of grand jury subpoenas from the special counsel to local officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.Of course the Republican Party has neglected to take any prior offramps to dump Donald Trump, most notably Jan. 6, so unfortunately the latest Trump failures will probably go by the wayside too. And the G.O.P. of yore — the party of Lincoln, T.R. and Ike — will continue to be the clown car it has become.Bill MutterperlBeverly Hills, Calif.The Crypto IllusionFederal authorities are trying to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against the founder of the crypto firm FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and others over the company’s collapse.Winnie Au for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “‘It Just Angers Me.’ Crypto Crisis Drains Small Investors’ Savings” (front page, Dec. 6):Is it too early, or far too late, to suggest that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” in relation to the FTX and BlockFi difficulties? Should this concern be extended to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general?There was a time when people earned the coins in their wallets from the sweat on their brow rather than from a computer program most people can’t understand that creates imaginary coins to be stored in wallets that seem easy to rob or lose. It is, however, sad to read of people who have lost so much in such a short time.As a teacher, I wasn’t that well paid, and so I saved as much as I could to buy a house and set myself up for retirement by sensible, boring approaches. But the gains to be made from Bitcoin are in its questionable uses or in realizing the increase in its value before it drops. For me it seems to have no actual value or use, and I doubt that I am the only one who thinks that.It’s time for me to forget the world of imaginary computer profits and go back to a boring life on my unicorn farm.Dennis FitzgeraldMelbourne, AustraliaEncourage Breastfeeding Vanessa Leroy for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What It Really Takes to Breastfeed a Baby” (news article, Dec. 6):As a pediatrician who spends many hours with new mothers and their babies discussing the challenges and difficulties that come with breastfeeding, I felt that this article was not as positive as it should have been. It focused on following mothers who were having a hard time keeping up their breastfeeding.These days, any literature or news related to breastfeeding should only be encouraging new mothers to breastfeed, not scaring them away from doing it and making it sound so hard while working and raising other children.In my practice, I share my own personal experiences of breastfeeding my three children, each for a year, while working in a busy pediatrics office. My stories are useful and effective in making the breastfeeding experience achievable to the new moms I meet.We need to reverse the steady decline of breastfeeding mothers in this country.Naomi JackmanPort Washington, N.Y.Food Buying That Reflects Our Values Pavel PopovTo the Editor:Re “Help Black Farmers This Holiday Season,” by Tressie McMillan Cottom (column, Nov. 30):New York State’s food procurement laws are an extension of the disenfranchisement of Black farmers. Provisions require that municipalities contract with farmers who sell their produce at the “lowest” cost. This often comes at the expense of small, hyperlocal farmers and bars them from entering negotiations for public contracts — meaning that opportunities to support historically marginalized food producers are currently limited in New York.The Good Food New York bill would democratize local food purchasing decisions by allowing municipalities to galvanize around racial equity, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, nutrition, local economies and workers’ rights — and contract with producers that uphold these values.It is more critical than ever to rectify the wrongs of this country’s past and prepare for a future where the strength of our food systems and supply chains will be tested by the consequences of climate change. New York State legislators, we are counting on you to make the right decision for our food futures.Ribka GetachewTaylor PateNew YorkThe writers are, respectively, director and campaign manager of the NY Good Food Purchasing Program Campaign for Community Food Advocates. More