Republican Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump-Backed Conspiracy Theorist Vies to Take Over Arizona Elections

      by

      PHOENIX — This spring, Mark Finchem traveled to Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a documentary advancing the specious notion that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from President Donald J. Trump by an army of leftists stuffing drop boxes with absentee ballots. As a state representative and candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, Mr. Finchem was a minnow among the assembled MAGA stars, the likes of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.But he still got his face time.“President Trump took 20 minutes with me,” Mr. Finchem later recounted during a campaign stop. “And he said: ‘I want you to understand something. The Arizona secretary of state race is the most important race in the United States.’”Arizona, of course, occupies a special place on Mr. Trump’s map of election indignities — as the onetime Republican stronghold where President Biden’s narrow and crucial victory was first called by, of all networks, Fox News. Should Mr. Trump run again in 2024, a friendly secretary of state, as administrator of the state’s elections, could be in a position to help him avoid a repeat.Now, as Arizona prepares for its primaries on Tuesday, Mr. Finchem is the candidate of a Trump-backed America First coalition of more than a dozen 2020 election deniers who have sought once-obscure secretary of state posts across the country. While most of them have been considered extremist long shots, a recent poll gave Mr. Finchem an edge in Arizona’s four-way Republican race, though a significant majority of voters are undecided.Mr. Finchem’s campaign pronouncements are testament to the evolution of the “Stop the Steal” movement: It is as much about influencing future elections as it is about what happened in 2020.Mark Finchem, a proponent of the “Stop the Steal” narrative, appeared with former President Donald J. Trump at a rally this past month in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesTo that end, Mr. Finchem, who has identified himself as a member of the Oath Keepers militia in the past, may be the perfectly subversive candidate. Like his America First compatriots, he seeks, quite simply, to upend voting.He wants to ban early voting and sharply restrict mail-in ballots, even though the latter were widely popular in Arizona long before the pandemic. He is already suing to suspend the use of all electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona, in litigation bankrolled by the conspiracy theorist and pillow tycoon Mike Lindell. And he has co-sponsored a bill that would give the state’s Republican-led legislature authority to overturn election results.If he loses his own race, Mr. Finchem told a June fund-raiser, “ain’t gonna be no concession speech coming from this guy.”Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment for this article, and one of his lawyers declined to comment. But in a May email he assured Republican supporters that if he had been in office in 2020, “we would have won. Plain and simple.” In the days after the election, he was co-host of an unofficial hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel where Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, aired bogus stolen-elections claims. He was instrumental in trying to advance a slate of fake Trump electors in Arizona — part of a scheme to overturn the elections in a number of states that is being investigated by the Justice Department — and he is helping gather signatures to petition to decertify the state’s election results, even though that is not legally possible.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Eric Greitens May Just Get What He Deserves

      by

      On Tuesday, Republican voters in Missouri will send a signal to G.O.P. leaders nationwide about what they will and won’t accept in a top candidate in the party’s current, Trumpian era: Namely, do they want a Senate nominee who exists in a perpetual swirl of scandal, including fresh accusations of domestic violence?For much of Missouri’s Senate primary race, it sure seemed Republicans were content to careen down this path. Consistently, if narrowly, the crowded G.O.P. field was led by Eric Greitens, the state’s disgraced former governor. Leaning into his bad boy rep, Mr. Greitens sold himself as an ultra-MAGA warrior being persecuted by his political enemies — just like a certain former president! — and a good chunk of the party’s base seemed ready, even eager, to buy his line.But it appears that MAGA may have its limits even in a deep-red state like Missouri. Certainly, electability has mattered more for many Republican officials and donors there, who have been less than enthusiastic about Mr. Greitens’s candidacy. It’s not necessarily that they found his behavior morally disqualifying — this is, after all, Donald Trump’s G.O.P. — so much as they were afraid his scandals would make him a weak general election candidate. (Democrats were certainly raring to run against him.) Losing this seat, currently held by the Republican Roy Blunt, who is retiring, would be a blow to the party’s midterm dream of winning control of the Senate. But efforts to nudge Mr. Greitens out of the race only ticked him off and provided fodder for his martyr self-mythologizing. He looked to be a classic example of how the G.O.P. had lost control of its MAGA monster.Until late last month. That’s when a group of Republicans rolled out a super PAC, named Show Me Values, aimed at bringing down Mr. Greitens. Just a few weeks — and an estimated $6 million in ad spending — later, the effort seems to be working. Multiple polls show the former governor’s support slipping, dropping him behind a couple of his opponents. The state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, appears to have taken the lead. He, too, is an election-denying Trump suck-up. But at this point the G.O.P. is operating on a curve; simply weeding out those alleged to be abusers and other possible criminals can feel like a major achievement.Polls are not votes, and the race remains too tight for anyone to exhale. But with only days to go, it looks as though Mr. Greitens’ political resurrection may flop. This would be a good thing for the people of Missouri. It could also serve as a model, or at least an encouraging data point, for more sensible Republicans looking to stave off the worst actors and excesses of Trumpism — and maybe eventually put their party back on the road to sanity.In an election cycle awash in MAGA bomb throwers vying for the title of biggest jerk, Mr. Greitens has been a top contender. Charismatic, combative and shameless, he is in many ways the essence of Trumpism. Heading into the race, he bore the stench of the multiple scandals — including allegations of sexual misconduct — that led him to step down as governor in 2018 to avoid impeachment by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature.Then, this March, his ex-wife filed an affidavit as part of a child custody dispute, swearing that he had physically abused her and their young son. (He has denied those allegations and, of course, blames dirty politics.) This was an offense too far for many Republicans, some of whom called on Mr. Greitens to leave the race. Among these was Senator Josh Hawley, who asserted, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”When you’ve lost the guy who gave the infamous fist salute to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, you know you’ve crossed a red line.In another era, or another party, a candidate dragging around such sordid baggage might have slouched quietly away. But Mr. Greitens has adopted the Trump guide to making vileness and suspected criminality work for you: Brace up, double down and bray that any and all allegations are just part of — all together now! — a political witch hunt.Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens is a political grievance peddler. Also like Mr. Trump, he saves his most concentrated bile for fellow Republicans. One of the most puerile ads of the midterms thus far has been Mr. Greitens’s “RINO hunting” spot, in which he leads a group of armed men in tactical gear as they storm a lovely little suburban home in search of G.O.P. heretics. “Get a RINO hunting permit,” Mr. Greitens urges. “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” Banned by Facebook, flagged by Twitter and trashed by pretty much everyone, the ad is pure political trolling.It was around the time of the RINO hunting ad that the Show Me Values PAC was announced. Team Greitens responded with characteristic invective. “These swamp creatures and grifters know their time at the trough is finished,” said Dylan Johnson, the campaign manager. “That’s why they’re scared of America First champion Governor Greitens.”Whatever its roots, fear is a powerful motivator. Show Me Values began gobbling up ad time like Skittles, becoming the race’s biggest spender on TV. The spots detailing the abuse allegations by Mr. Greitens’s ex-wife appear particularly devastating. It seems that, with the proper message — and money to drive that message home — even the most flamboyant MAGA candidates can perhaps be deflated.Mr. Trump did not pioneer the brazen-it-out strategy being attempted by Mr. Greitens. But he perfected and popularized it, and under his reign, the G.O.P. has grown ever more willing to tolerate its politicians’ sketchy, creepy, violent and possibly illegal behavior, as long as they toed the line.Just look at Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, who won his primary in May, putting him on a glide path to a third term. Republican voters stuck by him despite his having been under indictment on charges of securities fraud and other naughtiness since 2015 and, in 2020, having had multiple staff members ask federal authorities to investigate him for a smorgasbord of “potential criminal offenses.”And for sheer MAGA shamelessness, it’s hard to top Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Panhandle’s trash-talking mini-Trump. It takes real moxie to fund-raise off the fact that one is being investigated by the feds on suspicion of child sex trafficking. But that is how Matt rolls, and his voters seem cool with it.This is not the mark of a healthy political party. Neither is it sustainable. Republican leaders need to get serious about reining in the Frankenstein’s monsters they have so long nurtured — before the party devolves even further into a circus of thugs, grifters and conspiracy nutters. This Tuesday, Missouri voters will, hopefully, take a baby step in that direction.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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.

      by

      It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style relief. The summer’s protests altered the public’s perception of race’s role in the criminal justice system. And analyses were pointing to Republican losses large enough to clear the way for the biggest burst of progressive legislation since the 1960s.Two years on, the truth is easier to see. We aren’t living in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, or Lyndon Johnson’s, or Donald Trump’s, or even Joe Biden’s. We’re living in Richard Nixon’s.Not the America of Nixon’s last years, though there are dim echoes of it in the Jan. 6 hearings, but the nation he built before Watergate brought him down, where progressive possibilities would be choked off by law and order’s toxic politics and a Supreme Court he’d helped to shape.He already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness,” he said, “when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.”There it is — the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency.Over the course of that year, he gave his pitch a populist twist by saying that he was running to defend all those hard-working, law-abiding Americans who occupied “the silent center.”A month later, after a major Supreme Court ruling on school integration, he quietly told key supporters that if he were elected, he would nominate only justices who would oppose the court’s progressivism. And on the August night he accepted the Republican nomination, he gave it all a colorblind sheen. “To those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply,” he said. “Our goal is justice for every American.”In practice it didn’t work that way. Within two years of his election, Nixon had passed two major crime bills laced with provisions targeting poor Black communities. One laid the groundwork for a racialized war on drugs. The other turned the criminal code of Washington, D.C., into a model for states to follow by authorizing the district’s judges to issue no-knock warrants, allowing them to detain suspects they deemed dangerous and requiring them to impose mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted of violent crimes.And the nation’s police would have all the help they needed to restore law and order. Lyndon Johnson had sent about $20 million in aid to police departments and prison systems in his last two years in office. Nixon sent $3 billion. Up went departments’ purchases of military-grade weapons, their use of heavily armed tactical patrols, the number of officers they put on the streets. And up went the nation’s prison population, by 16 percent, while the Black share of the newly incarcerated reached its highest level in 50 years.Nixon’s new order reached into the Supreme Court, too, just as he said it would. His predecessors had made their first nominations to the court by the fluid standards presidents tended to apply to the process: Dwight Eisenhower wanted a moderate Republican who seemed like a statesman, John Kennedy someone with the vigor of a New Frontiersman, Johnson an old Washington hand who understood where his loyalties lay. For his first appointment, in May 1969, Nixon chose a little-known federal judge, Warren Burger, with an extensive record supporting prosecutorial and police power over the rights of the accused.When a second seat opened a few months later, he followed the same pattern, twice nominating judges who had at one point either expressed opposition to the integration of the races or whose rulings were regarded as favoring segregation. Only when the Senate rejected both of them did Nixon fall back on Harry Blackmun, the sort of centrist Ike would have loved.Two more justices stepped down in September 1971. Again Nixon picked nominees who he knew would be tough on crime and soft on civil rights — and by then, he had a more expansive agenda in mind. It included an aversion to government regulation of the private sector — and so one pick was the courtly corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who had written an influential memo that year to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a robust corporate defense of the free enterprise system. Another item on Nixon’s agenda was to devolve federal power down to the states. William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general committed to that view, was his other pick. The two foundational principles of an increasingly energized conservatism were set into the court by Nixon’s determination to select his nominees through a precisely defined litmus test previous presidents hadn’t imagined applying.Our view of the Burger court may be skewed in part because Nixon’s test didn’t include abortion. By 1971, abortion politics had become furiously contested, but the divisions followed demography as well as political affiliation: In polling then (which wasn’t as representative as it is today), among whites, men were slightly more likely than women to support the right to choose, the non-Catholic college-educated more likely than those without college degrees, non-Catholics far more likely than Catholics, who anchored the opposition. So it wasn’t surprising that after oral arguments, three of the four white Protestant men Nixon had put on the court voted for Roe, and that one of them wrote the majority opinion.Justice Blackmun was still drafting the court’s decision in May 1972 when Nixon sent a letter to New York’s Catholic cardinal, offering his “admiration, sympathy and support” for the church stepping in as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.” The Republican assemblywoman who had led New York’s decriminalization of abortion denounced his intervention as “a patent pitch for the Catholic vote.” That it was. In November, Nixon carried the Catholic vote, thanks to a move that gave the abortion wars a partisan alignment they hadn’t had before.Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H. W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration. The ideological vetting of justices has increased in intensity and in precision.Mr. Trump’s term entrenched a party beholden to the configurations of politics and power that Nixon had shaped half a century ago. The possibility of progressive change that seemed to open in 2020 has now been shut down. The court’s supermajority handed down the first of what could be at least a decade of rulings eviscerating liberal precedents.Crime and gun violence now outstrip race as one of the electorates’ major concerns.Mr. Trump, in a speech on Tuesday, made it clear that he would continue to hammer the theme as he considers a 2024 run: “If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom,” he said, adding that “America First must mean safety first” and “we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it. And be tough. And be nasty and be mean if we have to.”An order so firmly entrenched won’t easily be undone. It’s tempting to talk about expanding the court or imposing age limits. But court reform has no plausible path through the Senate. Even if it did, the results might not be progressive: Republicans are as likely as Democrats to pack a court once they control Congress, and age limits wouldn’t affect some of the most conservative justices for at least another 13 years. The truth is the court will be remade as it always has been, a justice at a time.The court will undoubtedly limit progressive policies, too, as it has already done on corporate regulation and gun control. But it’s also opened up the possibility of undoing some of the partisan alignments that Nixon put into place, on abortion most of all. Now that Roe is gone, the Democrats have the chance to reclaim that portion of anti-abortion voters who support the government interventions — like prenatal and early child care — that a post-Roe nation desperately needs and the Republican Party almost certainly won’t provide.Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear. To do that, liberals must take up violent crime as a defining issue, something they have been reluctant to do, and then to relentlessly rework it, to try to break the power of its racial dynamic by telling the public an all-too-obvious truth: The United States is harassed by violent crime because it’s awash in guns, because it has no effective approach to treating mental illness and the epidemic of drug addiction, because it accepts an appalling degree of inequality and allows entire sections of the country to tumble into despair.Making that case is a long-term undertaking, too, as is to be expected of a project trying to topple half a century of political thinking. But until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of, most recently, “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      A New Yorker’s Opposition to Abortion Clouds Her House Re-Election Bid

      by

      Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the city’s lone Republican House member, has tried to maintain some distance from the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.As the lone Republican in the New York City congressional delegation, Representative Nicole Malliotakis has adopted certain stances that would make her an understandable outlier in a deeply Democratic city.Just days after taking office in early 2021, she voted to discard the legitimate 2020 election results, voting for a debunked conspiracy theory that claimed President Donald J. Trump actually won the election. She followed up by voting against Mr. Trump’s second impeachment as a result of the deadly Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.But as she seeks re-election in November, Ms. Malliotakis has tried to tread a finer line around guns and abortion, two polarizing social issues that have taken on added prominence in light of recent Supreme Court decisions. (In June, the court overturned the federal right to abortion, as well as a New York law governing concealed weapons.)On guns, for example, Ms. Malliotakis has voiced some support for new regulations, even voting for several Democratic gun control bills proffered in the wake of the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. She later, however, voted against the omnibus bill package, contending that it was “constitutionally suspect” and “represented a partisan overreach.”Ms. Malliotakis opposes abortion rights, favoring restrictions on using taxpayer funding for the procedure and on late-term abortions. But she has said that she believes that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, such as when the life of the mother is at risk.But Ms. Malliotakis has also tried to maintain some distance from the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, saying in a recent interview that she “didn’t weigh in on it.” Yet earlier this month, the congresswoman voted against a pair of bills that would have banned states from restricting abortions and prohibited them from blocking access to out-of-state abortion services.Republicans, who are expected to fare well in November’s midterm elections, have long fought to overturn Roe. Yet some of the party’s candidates have not rushed to embrace the Dobbs ruling, wary of alienating voters who, according to polls, may be swayed by social issues in ways that help Democrats.Ms. Malliotakis is a prime example. Her district encompasses Staten Island and a swath of southwest Brooklyn, some of the city’s most conservative areas. Yet New York remains an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and the recent Supreme Court rulings were profoundly unpopular here.So, like many of her Republican colleagues, Ms. Malliotakis, a first-term congresswoman, is instead trying to steer the conversation toward bottom-line issues like inflation and high gas prices.“People are struggling putting gas in their tanks, putting food on their tables, paying their bills,” Ms. Malliotakis said in a recent interview.New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: This year, for the first time in over 75 years, the state ballot appears destined to offer only two choices: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican. Here is why.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.“For some people who are single-issue individuals, it could potentially have an impact,” she added, of her statements on guns and abortion. “But I know that crime and pocketbook issues are the most important issues to the people I represent.”Ms. Malliotakis is expected to easily win her Republican primary next month against John Matland, a badly underfunded rival, setting her up for a likely rematch against Max Rose, the former Democratic congressman whom she unseated in 2020.Mr. Rose, a combat veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan and awarded the Bronze Star, has sought to tie Ms. Malliotakis to the extreme elements of the Republican Party, including Mr. Trump, and to the Capitol riot by the president’s supporters, saying he is running to protect “the soul of America.”“Everything that our country was built upon wasn’t just spit at: They tried to destroy it,” he said during a campaign walkabout on July 11 in Bay Ridge. “And even after — even after — Nicole, and everyone else in Congress who were almost killed, they still voted to decertify.”He is also openly derisive of Ms. Malliotakis’s seeming duality on some hot-button issues, mocking her limited embrace of gun control, for example, as nothing more than “a few ceremonial votes.”“When it came time for the package to be voted on, as she always does, she played both sides,” he said, referring to the omnibus bill. “Voted for it before she voted against it. Who knows what’s going on here?”Max Rose, right, has tried to highlight Ms. Malliotakis’s position on abortion, portraying her as being on “the wrong side of history.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMr. Rose has also held a handful of public events after the Supreme Court ruling on abortion — including one at Ms. Malliotakis’s Brooklyn district office in Bay Ridge — to portray her as out of touch with her district, even on Staten Island, saying the congresswoman is “on the wrong side of history.”“I generally do believe that when it comes down to it, people are on the side of women having the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves,” he said. In recent weeks, Mr. Rose continued that line of attack, saying the congresswoman had “tweeted over 180 times and issued 13 press releases” since the Dobbs decision, but “has said nothing about millions of women losing control over their bodies.”When asked specifically about the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Ms. Malliotakis demurred.“My constituents, they know that nothing is going to change in New York,” she said. “The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, so we have to accept the Supreme Court’s decision regardless.”Ms. Malliotakis’s comments have also given fodder to her opponents on the right, including Mr. Matland, a health care worker who lost his job for refusing to be vaccinated, and who is seeking to oust Ms. Malliotakis in the Aug. 23 primary with a low-budget, anti-establishment campaign.Mr. Matland, who is making his first run for public office, said that Ms. Malliotakis has “often alienated the Republican base,” and that she has only been voted into office because of her name recognition — she served five terms in the State Assembly and ran unsuccessfully in 2017 for mayor of New York City — and her district’s aversion to Democratic candidates.“People say ‘I only voted for her’ — and I’m guilty of this myself — ‘because I thought she was a much better option than Max Rose,’” Mr. Matland said, adding, “And that’s the exact reason we have primaries: so we can get a better option.”John Matland is challenging Ms. Malliotakis in the Republican primary on Aug. 23.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesConsidering the likelihood of a tough year for Democrats nationally, most observers think that Mr. Rose will have an uphill battle in November, assuming he wins his primary in August against two challengers: Brittany Ramos DeBarros, a progressive community activist, and Komi Agoda-Koussema, an educator.Mr. Rose’s campaign was also dealt a setback earlier this year when a state judge threw out new Democrat-drawn congressional lines that could have tilted the district heavily in his favor. The refashioned lines, drawn by a redistricting expert in May, left the district looking largely the same, though its section of Brooklyn — about half as populous as the Staten Island portion — did favor President Biden over Mr. Trump by about 12 points in the 2020 election.Ms. Malliotakis accused Mr. Rose of entering the race only “because he thought they were going to change the lines in his favor.” “The good news about reruns is we know how they end,” Ms. Malliotakis said of her rematch against Mr. Rose.Vito Fossella, the Republican who serves as the Staten Island borough president, echoed that sentiment, saying he didn’t “see how the dynamics” of the race have changed much since 2020, and suggesting that abortion and guns would not be major issues for Staten Island voters.“On balance, what people care about is ‘Are we safe? Are we comfortable economically? Do we have a brighter future?’” said Mr. Fossella, who is a supporter of Ms. Malliotakis.A path to re-election for Ms. Malliotakis, 41, will likely include a big win on the island’s South Shore, a Republican stronghold, to offset the more liberal neighborhoods in the north. And for South Shore residents like Edward Carey, a retired banking executive who winters in Florida but has a house in the Eltingville neighborhood, Ms. Malliotakis is already a sure thing. He noted the backing of Mr. Fossella, as well as other factors.“She’s a Republican, she’s a woman, she’s young,” said Mr. Carey, 83, a registered Republican who said the last Democrat he voted for was John F. Kennedy. “That’s good enough for me.”Ms. Malliotakis may be headed for a November rematch with Mr. Rose, whom she unseated in 2020.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesStill, State Senator Diane J. Savino, a moderate Democrat who has represented the north part of Staten Island for nearly two decades, said “you cannot pinpoint Staten Island voters.”“It’s not that they’re Republican or Democrat, left-leaning or right-leaning: It’s whether or not that candidate speaks to what touches Staten Islanders,” she said, noting the island’s recent history of vacillating between parties. “Anybody who thinks that they can put their finger on the pulse of Staten Island voters doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”She also criticized Ms. Malliotakis for being wishy-washy on critical issues, but noted that voters don’t seem to care.“Up until now, Nicole has skirted on this,” Ms. Savino said, referring to Ms. Malliotakis’s anti-abortion votes in Washington and Albany. “No one ever holds her accountable. So I don’t think that’s going to drive voters here. What’s going to drive voters is whether or not they think they’re going to have someone who is going to fight for them in Washington.”Vin DeRosa, a patron at Jody’s Club Forest, a popular bar near the North Shore where Mr. Rose has been known to drink, is a registered Democrat but said he considers himself an independent who “votes for the person” rather than the party line.Mr. DeRosa, a retired telecommunications professional, said that he had voted for Mr. Rose in 2020, and that he likely would again, if only because of Ms. Malliotakis’s association with Mr. Trump.“I’m not sure I want a congressperson who has to call Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. DeRosa said, “to find out what to do.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Could the G.O.P. Beat Whitmer in Michigan? Party Chaos Has Hurt Its Chances.

      by

      A handwritten letter from Betsy DeVos, last seen trying to remove Donald Trump from office, elicited an 11th-hour endorsement. But is that enough to make peace among Michigan’s warring Republicans?PONTIAC, Mich. — “Dear Mr. President,” the letter began.Donald J. Trump’s estranged former education secretary, Betsy DeVos — last seen trying to remove him from office using the 25th Amendment after the Capitol riot — took pen in hand the other day to plead with him to look past Michigan’s no-holds-barred Republican infighting and side with her powerful political family’s choice for governor.“I hear that some have implied that my family and I are working against you in Michigan,” Ms. DeVos wrote in looping cursive on personal stationery. “That is fake news. Those telling you that are doing so for their own personal gain.”She added that her preferred candidate, Tudor Dixon, a former conservative media personality, was “the only one who can stand toe to toe with ‘that woman from Michigan’” — Mr. Trump’s sobriquet for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat whom Republicans desperately want to topple.“Your support of Tudor can make the winning difference!” Ms. DeVos closed her Wednesday letter. “Very sincerely, Betsy.”The letter worked, to an extent: Late Friday, Mr. Trump issued an 11th-hour endorsement of Ms. Dixon ahead of Tuesday’s primary. But it also highlighted what has been the fiercest, bitterest and potentially most consequential Republican infighting in the country.Betsy DeVos and her family were major donors to Donald J. Trump for years, but she broke with him over the Capitol riot.Kevin Lamarque/ReutersFor much of the spring and summer, Ms. DeVos and her billionaire relatives — the most influential Republican family in Michigan — have been at war with Mr. Trump’s followers in the state, choosing different sides in consequential primaries for the state Legislature and endorsements at the state party’s convention.The former president’s late nod in the governor’s race only compounded the confusion and heightened the suspense about what his followers would do on Primary Day. Just the day before the endorsement, eight of his chosen down-ballot candidates sent him an open letter urging him not to do political business with the DeVos family.The open hostilities have emboldened an ascendant grass roots wing of Michigan Republicans who are devoted to Mr. Trump and his agenda. And his endorsement will test the degree to which the former president has the wherewithal to lead them.All told, Republicans are in danger of bungling what earlier this year appeared to be a promising opportunity to oust Ms. Whitmer. The party’s strongest two candidates were jettisoned from the ballot because of a signature-forgery blunder. The resulting field, aside from the untested Ms. Dixon, includes one candidate facing misdemeanor charges related to the Capitol riot and another dogged by years-old lawsuits over allegations that he made racist and sexually explicit comments to employees.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Why Andrew Yang’s New Third Party Is Bound to Fail

      by

      Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.Why am I so confident that the Forward Party will amount to nothing? Because there is a recipe for third-party success in the United States, but neither Yang nor his allies have the right ingredients.First, let’s talk about the program of the Forward Party. Writing for The Washington Post, Yang, Whitman and Jolly say that their party is a response to “divisiveness” and “extremism.”“In a system torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes,” they write, “you must reintroduce choice and competition.”The Forward Party, they say, will “reflect the moderate, common-sense majority.” If, they argue, most third parties in U.S. history failed to take off because they were “ideologically too narrow,” then theirs is primed to reach deep into the disgruntled masses, especially since, they say, “voters are calling for a new party now more than ever.”It is not clear that we can make a conclusion about the public’s appetite for a specific third party on the basis of its general appetite for a third party. But that’s a minor issue. The bigger problem for Yang, Whitman and Jolly is their assessment of the history of American third parties. It’s wrong.The most successful third parties in American history have been precisely those that galvanized a narrow slice of the public over a specific set of issues. They further polarized the electorate, changed the political landscape and forced the established parties to reckon with their influence.This also gets to the meaning of success in the American system. The two-party system in the United States is a natural result of the rules of the game. The combination of single-member districts and single-ballot, “first past the post” elections means that in any election with more than two candidates, there’s a chance the winner won’t have a majority. There might be four or five or six (or even nine) distinct factions in an electorate, but the drive to prevent a plurality winner will very likely lead to the creation of two parties that take the shape of loose coalitions, each capable of winning that majority outright.To this dynamic add the fact of the presidency, which cannot be won without a majority of electoral votes. It’s this requirement of the Electoral College that puts additional pressure on political actors to form coalitions with each other in pursuit of the highest prize of American politics. In fact, for most of American history after the Civil War, the two parties were less coherent national organizations than clearinghouses for information and influence trading among state parties and urban machines.This is all to say that in the United States, a successful third party isn’t necessarily one that wins national office. Instead, a successful third party is one that integrates itself or its program into one of the two major parties, either by forcing key issues onto the agenda or revealing the existence of a potent new electorate.Take the Free Soil Party.During the presidential election of 1848, following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of antislavery politicians from the Democratic, Liberty and Whig Parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!”The Free Soil Party, notes the historian Frederick J. Blue in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” “endorsed the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to extend slavery and must in fact prohibit its extension, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, declared its platform, “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject and is thus responsible for its existence.”This was controversial, to put it mildly. The entire “second” party system (the first being the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) had been built to sidestep the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party — which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, for president in the 1848 election — fought to put that conflict at the center of American politics.It succeeded. In many respects, the emergence of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of mass antislavery politics in the United States. They elected several members to Congress, helped fracture the Whig Party along sectional lines and pushed antislavery “Free” Democrats to abandon their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few short years they transformed American party politics. And when the Whig Party finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, after General Winfield Scott’s defeat in the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil Party would become, in 1854, the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which brought an even larger coalition of former Whigs and ex-Democrats together with Free Soil radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, antislavery party.There are a few other examples of third-party success. The Populist Party failed to win high office after endorsing the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, for president in 1896, but went on to shape the next two decades of American political life. “In the wake of the defeat of the People’s party, a wave of reform soon swept the country,” the historian Charles Postel writes in “The Populist Vision”: “Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”“By turn of fate,” Postel continues, “Populism proved far more successful dead than alive.”On a more sinister note, the segregationist George Wallace won five states and nearly 10 million ballots in his 1968 campaign for president under the banner of the American Independent Party. His run was proof of concept for Richard Nixon’s effort to fracture the Democratic Party coalition along racial and regional lines. Wallace pioneered a style of politics that Republicans would deploy to their own ends for decades, eventually culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.This is all to say that there’s nothing about the Forward Party that, as announced, would have this kind of impact on American politics. It doesn’t speak to anything that matters other than a vague sense that the system should have more choices and that there’s a center out there that rejects the extremes, a problem the Democratic Party addressed by nominating Joe Biden for president and shaping most of its agenda to satisfy its most conservative members in Congress.The Forward Party doesn’t even appear to advocate the kinds of changes that would enable more choices across the political system: approval voting where voters can choose multiple candidates for office, multimember districts for Congress and fundamental reform to the Electoral College. Even something as simple as fusion voting — where two or more parties on the ballot share the same candidate — doesn’t appear to be on the radar of the Forward Party.The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. “On every issue facing this nation,” they write, “we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”No, we can’t. When an issue becomes live — when it becomes salient, as political scientists put it — people disagree. The question is how to handle and structure that disagreement within the political system. Will it fuel the process of government or will it paralyze it? Something tells me that neither Yang nor his allies have the answer.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

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Eric Greitens Faces Ad Blitz and a Growing Threat to His Political Future

      by

      If Eric Greitens, a retired Navy SEAL and former Rhodes scholar who resigned in disgrace four years ago as governor of Missouri, loses his bid for a Senate seat in next week’s Republican primary, his defeat will be a lesson that the laws of political gravity do, in fact, still apply.A late advertising onslaught highlighting Mr. Greitens’s past scandals blanketed the airwaves over the last few weeks, funded by donors from his own party. The barrage of attack ads has taken the former governor from a seemingly invulnerable lead in the polls to a position somewhere behind Eric Schmitt, the state’s attorney general.Mr. Greitens, a political chameleon who first ran for office in 2016 as an anti-establishment outsider, only to lose his perch two years later, reinvented himself as an “ultra-MAGA” warrior as he sought to replace Senator Roy Blunt, who is retiring.But his past conduct and aggressive campaign posture have alienated many traditional conservatives in Missouri, while failing to attract their intended audience of one: former President Donald J. Trump, who has not endorsed anyone in the bitterly contested Aug. 2 primary.That decision has left a vacuum that has been filled by Mr. Greitens’s many adversaries, who pooled their resources in a last-ditch attempt to end his political career once and for all. Local donors enlisted Johnny DeStefano, a Kansas City-bred political operative who worked in Mr. Trump’s White House, to lead Show Me Values, a super PAC whose negative ads appear to have done real damage to Mr. Greitens’s standing with voters.Rene Artman, the chairwoman of the St. Louis County Republican Central Committee, said Mr. Greitens’s biggest liability was his treatment of women, after allegations of abuse from his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, and a former hairdresser with whom he had a sexual relationship.Ms. Artman and other female Republican leaders in the state had tried and failed to pressure the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party to come out more forcefully against Mr. Greitens’s candidacy.“We are not to stand in judgment, but marriage vows are the most sacred,” she said. “If you can’t keep those vows, if you have betrayed those vows, how can I believe any promises you make to me as a senator?”At campaign events like this one in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Greitens has cast himself as a political outsider being targeted by establishment enemies.Chase Castor for The New York TimesIn response, Mr. Greitens has lashed out against his perceived enemies, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whom he accused without evidence of scheming in Washington to defeat him; Karl Rove, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush who has quietly encouraged donors and political operatives in Missouri to ensure that Mr. Greitens is defeated; and his own ex-wife, who finalized their divorce in 2020 and moved to Texas, where she is now seeking to relocate the ongoing battle over custody of their two children.She has made sworn allegations of domestic abuse that have reverberated during the campaign, underscoring Mr. Greitens’s image in Missouri as a man with a history of violent behavior.Asked for comment, Mr. Greitens’s lawyer in the custody dispute said only that “Eric’s primary focus is on protecting the children” and pointed to a statement from March that questioned Ms. Greitens’s motives.Dylan Johnson, a spokesman for Mr. Greitens’s campaign, said, “Governor Greitens has received tremendous support from the grass-roots,” adding, “We have seen biased and fake polling throughout U.S. Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and these same pollsters are playing the same game in Missouri.”Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More