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      Republicans Think There Is a ‘Takeover’ Happening. They Have Some Reading to Do.

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      Much of what’s in the Constitution is vague, imprecise or downright unclear. But some parts are very straightforward.For example, Article 1, Section 4 states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia — quoting a previous ruling — argued in 2013 in his opinion for the court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, “The power of Congress over the ‘Times, Places and Manner’ of congressional elections ‘is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which it deems expedient; and so far as it is exercised, and no farther, the regulations effected supersede those of the State which are inconsistent therewith.’”The legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan put it this way in a 2006 report on the Voting Rights Act: “The Supreme Court’s recent decisions under the elections clause have confirmed the longstanding interpretation of the clause as a grant of essentially plenary authority.” In other words, Congress has absolute, unbending power to regulate federal elections as it sees fit.For this reason among many, it has been strange to see Republican politicians — including some self-described “constitutional conservatives” — denounce the Democrats’ proposed new voting rights legislation as an illegitimate “federal takeover” of federal elections.In an op-ed for The Washington Post, former Vice President Mike Pence denounced the bills and the effort to pass them as a “federal power grab over our state elections” that would “offend the Founders’ intention that states conduct elections just as much as what some of our most ardent supporters would have had me do one year ago.”On Twitter, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, called the bill — which would allow for same-day voter registration, establish Election Day as a national holiday and expand mail-in voting — “an unconstitutional federal takeover of our elections” that would “make it easier to cheat.”Not to be outdone, Mitch McConnell slammed the bill as a “sweeping, partisan, federal takeover of our nation’s elections.”“We will not be letting Washington Democrats abuse their razor-thin majorities in both chambers to overrule state and local governments and appoint themselves a national Board of Elections on steroids,” the Senate Republican leader declared.Although Reeves is the only lawmaker in this group to have called the Democratic election bill “unconstitutional,” the clear implication of the Republican argument is that any federal regulation of state elections is constitutionally suspect. We already know that this is wrong — again, the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate state elections for federal office — but it’s worth emphasizing just how wrong it is.In addition to the Supreme Court, which has affirmed — again and again — the power of Congress to set “the Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections, there are the framers of the Constitution themselves, who were clear on the broad scope of the clause in question.Alexander Hamilton defends it in Federalist 59 as a necessary bulwark against the interests of individual states, which may undermine the federal union. “Nothing can be more evident than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the national government, in the hands of the State legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy,” Hamilton writes.“If the State legislatures were to be invested with an exclusive power of regulating these elections,” he continues, “every period of making them would be a delicate crisis in the national situation, which might issue in a dissolution of the Union.”“Every government,” he says with emphasis, “ought to contain in itself the means of its own preservation.”Similarly, as the historian Pauline Maier recounted in “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” James Madison saw the Election Clause as a measure that would “allow Congress to use its power over elections against state electoral rules that were ‘subversive of the rights of the People to a free & equal representation in Congress agreeably to the Constitution.’”The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, expanded and reaffirmed the power of Congress to regulate federal elections, stating, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”Both the Enforcement Act of 1870, which established criminal penalties for interfering with the right to vote, and the Enforcement Act of 1871, which created a system of federal oversight for congressional elections, were passed under the authority granted by the Elections Clause and the 15th Amendment. The proposed Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have allowed voters to request direct federal supervision of congressional elections, was also written pursuant with the government’s expressly detailed power under the Constitution.It is one thing to say that a new election bill is unnecessary and that it attempts to solve a problem that does not exist. In large part because of the efforts of voting rights activists trying to overcome the obstacles in question, voter suppression laws do not appear to have a substantial impact on rates of voting, and overall voter turnout has increased significantly since the Supreme Court undermined the Voting Rights Act in 2013.But there is no question, historically or constitutionally, that Congress has the authority to regulate federal elections and impose its rules over those adopted by the states. Nor does this have to be bipartisan. Nothing in Congress does.The 1960s were one of the few times in American history when support for voting rights — or at least the voting rights of Black Americans — did not fall along strictly partisan lines. For a part of the 19th century, Republicans took the lead as the party of expanding the vote. Today, it is the Democratic Party that hopes to secure the right to vote against a political movement whose clear ability to win votes in fair elections has not tempered its suspicion of easy and unrestricted access to the ballot.There are times when the federal government needs to take election rules out of the hands of the states. Looking at the restrictions and power grabs passed by state Republican lawmakers in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, I’d say now is one of those times. It may not happen anytime soon — the voting rights legislation in question went down in defeat this week — but it should remain a priority. The right to vote is fundamental, and any attempt to curtail it should be fought as fiercely and as aggressively as we know how.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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      Republicans Want New Tool in Elusive Search for Voter Fraud: Election Police

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      Republicans in three states have proposed strike forces against election crimes even though fraud cases remain minuscule.WASHINGTON — Reprising the rigged-election belief that has become a mantra among their supporters, Republican politicians in at least three states are proposing to establish police forces to hunt exclusively for voter fraud and other election crimes, a category of offenses that experts say is tiny at best.The plans are part of a new wave of initiatives that Republicans say are directed at voter fraud. They are being condemned by voting rights advocates and even some local election supervisors, who call them costly and unnecessary appeasement of the Republican base that will select primary-election winners for this November’s midterms and the 2024 presidential race.The next round of voting clashes comes after the apparent demise of Democratic voting rights legislation in Washington on Thursday. It is a reminder that while the Democratic agenda in Washington seems dead, Republican state-level efforts to make voting harder show no sign of slowing down.Supporters say the added enforcement will root out instances of fraud and assure the public that everything possible is being done to make sure that American elections are accurate and legitimate. Critics say the efforts can easily be abused and used as political cudgels or efforts to intimidate people from registering and voting. And Democrats say the main reason Republican voters have lost faith in the electoral system is because of the incessant Republican focus on almost entirely imagined fraud.The most concrete proposal is in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the State Legislature last week for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office. The plan, which Mr. DeSantis has been touting since the fall, would include 20 sworn police officers and field offices statewide.Gov. Ron DeSantis asked the Florida Legislature for $5.7 million to create a 52-person “election crimes and security” force in the secretary of state’s office.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThat was followed on Thursday by a pledge by David Perdue, the former Georgia senator who is a Republican candidate for governor, to create his own force of election police “to make Georgia elections the safest and securest in the country.” Mr. Perdue, who lost his Senate seat in 2020, claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking re-election, weakened election standards and refused to investigate claims of fraud following President Biden’s narrow win in the state.And in Arizona, a vocal supporter of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.Ms. Rogers’s bill probably faces an uphill road in the Legislature, where Republicans are only narrowly in control and have been battered for their support of a widely ridiculed multimillion-dollar inquiry into 2020 election results. Prospects for the Florida and Georgia proposals are less clear.The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him.Mr. DeSantis took a tough line in November when he unveiled his proposal, saying that the new unit would chase crimes that local election official shrug at. “There’ll be people, if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don’t do anything,” he said at an appearance in West Palm Beach.“I guarantee you this,” he added. “The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that.”None of the three states — and for that matter, none of the other 47 and the District of Columbia — reported any more than a minuscule number of election fraud cases after the 2020 races. Mr. DeSantis said after the 2020 vote that his was “the state that did it right and that other states should emulate.” The only notable hint of irregularity in Florida was the recent arrest on fraud charges of four men in a retirement complex north of Orlando. At least two of them appeared to be winter Floridians accused of casting ballots both there and in more frigid states to the north.Trump supporters gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in downtown Phoenix as ballots were counted in November 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Perdue say their strike forces are still needed to root out other election irregularities and to bolster their constituents’ sagging faith in the honesty of the vote. The same rationale has powered so-called audits of election results and clampdowns on election rules by Republican-run legislatures across the country.Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.Mr. Trump comfortably won Florida by about 370,000 votes in 2020, and his narrow losses in Arizona and Georgia were confirmed by expert audits, recounts and even the notorious Cyber Ninjas inquiry into the vote in Maricopa County.“We don’t need further investigations into elections that are freely and fairly conducted,” said Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local. “We’ve established that again and again and again. This is more pablum to the people who believe in fraud and conspiracy theories and lies that the last election was stolen.”Neither the new laws nor election autopsies appear to have shaken the conviction of many Trump supporters that the election system is suspect. Some scholars say they see the police forces as the latest bid by politicians to scratch that itch.Bids to curb so-called fraud are becoming standard for Republican candidates who want to win over voters, Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview. “Whoever is the nominee in 2024, whether it’s Trump or anyone else, it will likely be part of their platform,” Mr. Burden said.The idea of an election police force is not new, even in the states where they are being proposed. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already oversees 23 investigators whose purview includes election irregularities, and an assistant state attorney general exclusively prosecutes crimes in elections, the judiciary and local governments. The Arizona attorney general manages a relatively new “election integrity” investigative unit, and Florida election violations are prosecuted by both state and local authorities, as is true in most states. More

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      Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie

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      Why is Donald Trump’s “big lie” so hard to discredit?This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it what are their motives?A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey found striking linkages between attitudes on race and immigration on one hand and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 election on the other.According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, agreed that “the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity” and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.”Following up on the UMass survey, four political scientists — Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis — wrote in an essay posted on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage:Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that White people in the United States have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that White people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that White people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.According to experts I asked, Republican elected officials who either affirm Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, or refuse to call Trump out, base their stance on a sequence of rationales.Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, sees the origin of one rationale in demographic trends:I believe much of the polarization and discord in national politics comes from changing demographics. Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. writes about this in “The End of White Christian America” and I think this is a source of many politico-cultural divisions and plays out in electoral politics. There is an America (“American dream”) that many whites were privileged to know growing up and it now seems to be evaporating or at least becoming subservient to other cultural ideals and norms. So that spurs anxiety and it is translated to the language and posture of politics.McCurry went on:I think otherwise well-meaning G.O.P. senators who flinch when it comes to common sense and serving the common good do so because they have no vocabulary or perspective which allows them to deal with the underlying changes in society. They feel the changes, they know constituents whom they otherwise like who feel the changes, but they cannot figure out how to lower the level of angst.Some maintain that another rationale underpinning submission to the lie is that it is signals loyalty to the larger conservative cause.Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that acceptance of Trump’s false claims gives Republican politicians a way of bridging the gap between a powerful network of donors and elites who back free trade capitalism and the crucial bloc of white working-class voters seeking trade protectionism and continued government funding of Social Security and Medicare:Embracing the Big Lie is an empty approach to populism for a lot of these politicians. It allows them to cast their rivals, and the system itself, as corrupt — to cash in on that widespread sentiment — and to cast themselves as exceptions to the rule. It allows them to portray themselves as allies of “the people,” but without actually changing anything in terms of the policies they advocate for, in terms of how they do business.For those Republicans leaders, al-Gharbi continued, “who are the swamp, or could be reasonably construed as such, it is important to create an apparent distance from ‘the establishment.’ Flirting with the Big Lie is a good way of doing so.”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, noted in an email that “fear of electoral retribution from Trump — and from Republican voters — drives Senate G.O.P. reluctance to break with Trump.”The former president, she continued,has succeeded in reshaping the G.O.P. as “his” party. This electoral dynamic applies in spades to Republicans’ unwillingness to challenge Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection — or like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to back down from their initial criticisms. It seems as if fealty to Trump’s alternative version of the events of Jan. 6 is the litmus test for Republicans.The underlying policy agreements between Republican incumbents and Trump reinforces these straightforward concerns over re-election, in Binder’s view:For all of Trump’s nativist immigration, trade, and “America First” views, he was lock step with Republicans on cutting taxes and regulations and stacking the courts with young conservatives. In that light, certainly while Trump was in office, Senate Republicans held their noses on any anti-democratic behavior and stuck with Trump to secure the policies they craved.Along similar lines, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, observes that Republican elected officials make their calculations based on the goal of political survival:What perhaps looks like collective derangement to many outside the party ranks is really just raw political calculation. The best strategy for regaining Congressional control is to keep Trump and his supporters inside the party tent, and the only way to do that is to go along with his myths in order to get along with him.This approach, Cain continued, “is the path of least political resistance. Trump in 2016 demonstrated that he could win the presidency” while rejecting calls to reach out to minorities, by targeting a constituency that is “predominantly white and 80 percent conservative.” Because of its homogeneity, Cain continued, “the Republican Party is much more unified than the Democrats at the moment.”While there was considerable agreement among the scholars and strategists whom I contacted that Republican politicians consciously develop strategies to deal with what many privately recognize is a lie, there is less agreement on the thinking of Republican voters.Lane Cuthbert, along with his UMass colleague Alex Theodoridis, asked in an op-ed in The Washington Post:How could the “Big Lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of “expressive responding,” a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief.In their own analysis of poll data, Cuthbert and Theodoridis concluded that most Republicans are true believers in Trump’s lie:Apparently, Republicans are reporting a genuine belief that Biden’s election was illegitimate. If anything, a few Republicans may, for social desirability reasons, be using the “I’m not sure” option to hide their true belief that the election was stolen.Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:Most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the Big Lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys, and would support politicians who make similar professions, because these professions serve as a sign of defiance against the prevailing elites, they serve as signs of group solidarity and commitment.Poll respondents, he continued,often give the factually wrong answer about empirical matters, not because they don’t know the empirically correct answer, but because they don’t want to give political fodder to their opponents with respect to their preferred policies. And when one takes down the temperature on these political stakes, again, often the differences on ‘the facts’ also disappear.One way to test how much people actually believe something, al-Gharbi wrote, “is to look out for yawning gaps between rhetoric and behaviors.” The fact that roughly 2,500 people participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection suggests that the overwhelming majority of Republicans do not believe the election was stolen no matter what they tell pollsters, in al-Gharbi’s view:If huge shares of the country, 68 percent of G.O.P. voters, plus fair numbers of Independents and nonvoters, literally believed that we were in a moment of existential crisis, and the election had been stolen, and the future was at stake — why is it that only a couple thousand could muster the enthusiasm to show up and protest at the Capitol? In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly 1 out of every 5 adults in the U.S.) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of Jan. 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.Whatever the motivation, Isabel V. Sawhill, a Brookings senior fellow, warned that Republican leaders and voters could be caught in a vicious cycle:There may be a dynamic at work here in which an opportunistic strategy to please the Trump base has solidified that base, making it all the more difficult to take a stance in opposition to “whatever-Trump-wants.” It’s a Catch-22. To change the direction of the country requires staying in power but staying in power requires satisfying a public, a large share of whom has lost faith in our institutions, including the mainstream media and the democratic process.Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, noted in an email that the “big lie” fits into a larger Republican strategy: “In an economically unequal society, it is important for the conservative economic party to use culture war politics to win elections because they are unlikely to win based on their economic agenda.”“There are a number of reasons why some Republican elites who were once anti-Trump became loyal to Trump,” Grumbach continued:First is the threat of being primaried for failing to sufficiently oppose immigration or the Democratic Party, a process that ramped up first in the Gingrich era and then more so during the Tea Party era of the early 2010s. Second is that Republican elites who were once anti-Trump learned that the Republican-aligned network of interest groups and donors — Fox News, titans of extractive and low wage industry, the NRA, evangelical organizations, etc. — would mostly remain intact despite sometimes initially signaling that they would withhold campaign contributions or leave the coalition in opposition to Trump.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, took a different tack, arguing that Republican members of Congress, especially those in the Senate, would like nothing better that to have the “big lie” excised from the contemporary political landscape:I disagree with the premise that many senators buy into the “big lie.” Congressional Republicans’ stance toward the events of Jan. 6 is to move on beyond them. They do not spend time rebuking activists who question the 2020 outcome, but they also do not endorse such views, either. With rare exception, congressional Republicans do not give floor speeches questioning the 2020 elections. They do not demand hearings to investigate election fraud.Instead, Lee argued, “Many Republican voters still support and love Donald Trump, and Republican elected officials want to be able to continue to represent these voters in Washington.” The bottom line, she continued, is thatRepublican elected officials want and need to hold the Republican Party together. In the U.S. two-party system, they see the Republican Party as the only realistic vehicle for contesting Democrats’ control of political offices and for opposing the Biden agenda. They see a focus on the 2020 elections as a distraction from the most important issues of the present: fighting Democrats’ “tax and spend” initiatives and winning back Republican control of Congress in the 2022 midterms.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argues thatTrump lives by Machiavelli’s famous maxim that fear is a better foundation for loyalty than love. G.O.P. senators don’t fear Trump personally; they fear his followers. Republican politicians are so cowed by Trump’s supporters you can almost hear them moo.Trumpism, Begala wrote in an email, “is more of a cult of personality, which makes fealty to the Dear Leader even more important. How else do you explain 16 G.O.P. senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, all refusing to even allow it to be debated in 2022?”Begala compares Senator Mitch McConnell’s views of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — “America’s history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents one of this country’s greatest steps forward in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream” — to McConnell’s stance now: “This is not a federal issue; it ought to be left to the states.”Republican politicians, in Begala’s assessment,have deluded themselves into thinking that Trump and the Big Lie can work for them. The reality is the opposite: Republican politicians work for Trump and the Big Lie. And they may be powerless to stop it if and when Trump uses it to undermine the 2024 presidential results.It is at this point, Begala continued, “where leadership matters. Trump stokes bigotry, he sows division, his promotes racism, and when other G.O.P. politicians fail to disavow Trump’s divisiveness, they abet it. What a contrast to other Republican leaders in my lifetime.”Like Begala, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., was blunt in his analysis:There’s generally a lack of nuance in considering why Republican senators fail to abandon Trump. Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10. He is mean and vindictive and speaks to a set of supporters who are willing to take their energy and animus to the polling place in the primaries — or at least, that’s the worry. They are also motivated by racial animus and by Christian millennialism.These voters, according to Stewart,are not a majority of the Republican Party, but they are motivated by fear, and fear is the greatest motivator. Even if a senator doesn’t share those views — and I don’t think most do — they feel they can’t alienate these folks without stoking a fight. Why stoke a fight? Few politicians enter politics looking to be a martyr. Mainstream Republican senators may be overestimating their ability to keep the extremist genie in the bottle, but they have no choice right now, if they intend to continue in office.Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of Texas, argued in an email that Republican acceptance of Trump’s falsehoods is a reflection of the power Trump has over members of the party:It’s the very fact that they know Trump’s claims are ludicrous — that is the point: like other bullies, he amuses himself and solidifies his authority by humiliating people and what can be more humiliating than compelling people to publicly announce their endorsements of something they know and everyone else knows to be false?Thomas Mann, a Brookings senior fellow, made the case in an email that Trump has transformed the Republican Party so that membership now precludes having “a moral sense: honesty, empathy, respect for one’s colleagues, wisdom, institutional loyalty, a willingness to put country ahead of party on existential matters, an openness to changing conditions.”Instead, Mann wrote:The current, Trump-led Republican Party allows no room for such considerations. Representative Liz Cheney’s honest patriotism would be no more welcome among Senate Republicans than House Republicans. Even those current Republican senators whose earlier careers indicated a moral sense — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Robert Portman, Ben Sasse, Richard Shelby — have felt obliged to pull their punches in the face of the Big Lie and attempted coup.Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.If Republican officials and their voters are willing to swallow an enormous and highly consequential untruth for political gain, they have taken a first step toward becoming willing allies in the corrupt manipulation of future elections.In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far.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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      Who Is King of Florida? Tensions Rise Between Trump and Ron DeSantis

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      A spat over Covid has exposed friction between the former president and a rising G.O.P. governor unwilling to curb his ambitions.For months, former President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Mr. Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Mr. Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Mr. Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.“The magic words,” Trump has said to several associates and advisers.That long-stewing resentment burst into public view recently in a dispute over a seemingly unrelated topic: Covid policies. After Mr. DeSantis refused to reveal his full Covid vaccination history, the former president publicly acknowledged he had received a booster. Last week, he seemed to swipe at Mr. DeSantis by blasting as “gutless” politicians who dodge the question out of fear of blowback from vaccine skeptics.Mr. DeSantis shot back on Friday, criticizing Mr. Trump’s early handling of the pandemic and saying he regretted not being more vocal in his complaints.The back and forth exposed how far Republicans have shifted to the right on coronavirus politics. The doubts Mr. Trump amplified about public health expertise have only spiraled since he left office. Now his defense of the vaccines — even if often subdued and almost always with the caveat in the same breath that he opposes mandates — has put him uncharacteristically out of step with the hard-line elements of his party’s base and provided an opening for a rival.But that it was Mr. DeSantis — a once-loyal member of the Trump court — wielding the knife made the tension about much more.At its core, the dispute amounts to a stand-in for the broader challenge confronting Republicans at the outset of midterm elections. They are led by a defeated former president who demands total fealty, brooks no criticism and is determined to sniff out, and then snuff out, any threat to his control of the party.That includes the 43-year-old DeSantis, who has told friends he believes Mr. Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. That refusal has set up a generational clash and a test of loyalty in the de facto capital of today’s G.O.P., one watched by Republicans elsewhere who’ve ridden to power on Mr. Trump’s coattails.Already, party figures are attempting to calm matters.“They’re the two most important leaders in the Republican Party,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist with connections to both men, predicting Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis “will be personal and political friends for the rest of their careers.”Mr. Trump’s aides also have tried to tamp down questions about the former president’s frustrations, so as not to elevate Mr. DeSantis.Still, Mr. Trump has made no secret of his preparations for a third run for the White House. And while Mr. DeSantis, who is up for re-election this year, has not declared his plans, he is widely believed to be eyeing the presidency.Mr. Trump and his aides are mindful of Republicans’ increasingly public fatigue with the drama that trails Mr. Trump. The former president’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election — which Mr. DeSantis has not challenged — and his role in the events leading to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol have some Republicans looking for a fresh start.Mr. DeSantis is often the first name Republicans cite as a possible Trump-style contender not named Trump.“DeSantis would be a formidable 2024 candidate in the Trump lane should Trump not run,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “He’s Trump but a little smarter, more disciplined and brusque without being too brusque.”Notably, Mr. Trump, a longtime student of charisma and mass appeal, as well as an avid reader of polling, has refrained so far from publicly attacking Mr. DeSantis, who is a distant but potent second to him in polls on the 2024 G.O.P. field. His restraint is a break from the mockery and bullying he often uses to attack Republicans he perceives as vulnerable. Mr. Trump made no reference to the governor at a rally in Arizona on Saturday.Mr. DeSantis has $70 million in the bank for his re-election, a war chest he stocked with help from the Republican rank-and-file and donor class, alike. He has raised his profile in the same spaces Mr. Trump once dominated. The governor is ubiquitous on Fox News, where he is routinely met with the sort of softballs that once arced toward Mr. Trump. And he frequently mixes with the well-tanned Republican donor community near the former president’s winter home in South Florida.It was not always this way.Mr. DeSantis was a little-known Florida congressman in 2017, when Mr. Trump, who was then the president, spotted him on television and took keen interest. Mr. DeSantis, an Ivy League-educated military veteran and smooth-talking defender of the new president, was exactly what Mr. Trump liked in a politician.It wasn’t long before Mr. Trump blessed Mr. DeSantis’s bid for governor and sent in staff to help him, lifting the lawmaker to a victory over a better-known rival for the party’s nomination.Mr. DeSantis survived the general election and has often governed in a style that mirrors his patron, slashing at the left and scrapping with the news media. But that alone doesn’t placate Mr. Trump. As with other Republicans he has endorsed, the former president appears to take a kind of ownership interest in Mr. DeSantis — and to believe that he is owed dividends and deference.“Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Mr. Trump said in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Insurgency,” on the rightward shift of the Republican Party, by the New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters. Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. DeSantis “didn’t have a chance” of winning without his help.The former president’s expectation of deference from Mr. DeSantis is a reminder to other Republicans that a Trump endorsement comes with a price, a demand that could prove particularly consequential should he run again and have a stable of Republican lawmakers in his debt.At times, Mr. Trump has sought to kindle his relationship with Mr. DeSantis. He has suggested the governor would be a strong choice for vice president. Similar courtship has helped win deference from other potential rivals. But Mr. DeSantis has not relented.“I wonder why the guy won’t say he won’t run against me,” Mr. Trump has said to several associates and advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.Mr. Trump began the recent contretemps by attacking the governor’s refusal to acknowledge whether he had received a Covid-19 booster shot.“The answer is ‘Yes,’ but they don’t want to say it, because they’re gutless,” Mr. Trump said in a television interview this month, referring only to “politicians” but clearly alluding to Mr. DeSantis. “You got to say it — whether you had it or not, say it.”Mr. DeSantis’s response came on Friday in an interview on the conservative podcast “Ruthless.” Speaking in front of an in-person audience near St. Petersburg, Fla., the governor said one of his biggest regrets was not forcefully opposing Mr. Trump’s calls for lockdowns when the coronavirus first began to spread in the spring of 2020.“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” Mr. DeSantis said. The governor said he had been “telling Trump ‘stop the flights from China’” but argued he never thought in early March 2020 that the virus “would lead to locking down the country.”Mr. DeSantis then moved quickly to place blame on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who advised Trump on the country’s Covid response, a much safer target with conservatives.The former president did not immediately respond. Without a Twitter account, his hair-trigger retorts have become less frequent. A spokesman for Mr. Trump also did not respond to requests for comment. An adviser to Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.Mr. DeSantis, however, has touched on a delicate issue, one of the few on which Mr. Trump is to the left of his party’s hard-liners: the efficacy of the vaccine and deference to public health experts’ advice on how to curb the spread of the virus.Mr. Trump has begun blasting warning shots at Mr. DeSantis and other aspiring Republicans, signaling he intends to defend the vaccines his administration helped develop. In an interview with Candace Owens, a right-wing media personality, the former president said “the vaccine worked” and dismissed conspiracy theories. “People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine,” he said.Mr. DeSantis, though, has been much more eager to focus on his resistance to Covid-19 restrictions, past and present, than to make a robust case for vaccination and booster shots.Notably, at his rally on Saturday, Mr. Trump did not promote vaccines and criticized so-called Covid “lockdowns.”Mr. Trump’s loudest antagonists are likely to continue to stoke the tension between the two men. Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who has fallen out with the former president, delighted in the dust-up this week.“Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantis’s booster status, and I can now reveal it,” Ms. Coulter wrote on Twitter. “He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016, but then he learned our president was a liar and con man whose grift was permanent.”In an email, Ms. Coulter, herself a part-time Florida resident, put a finer point on what makes Mr. DeSantis’s rise unsettling for the former president. “Trump is done,” she wrote. “You guys should stop obsessing over him.”Jeremy W. Peters More

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      Tensions Rise Between Trump and Ron DeSantis

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      A spat over Covid has exposed friction between the former president and a rising G.O.P. governor unwilling to curb his ambitions.For months, former President Donald J. Trump has been grumbling quietly to friends and visitors to his Palm Beach mansion about a rival Republican power center in another Florida mansion, some 400 miles to the north.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man Mr. Trump believes he put on the map, has been acting far less like an acolyte and more like a future competitor, Mr. Trump complains. With his stock rising fast in the party, the governor has conspicuously refrained from saying he would stand aside if Mr. Trump runs for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.“The magic words,” Trump has said to several associates and advisers.That long-stewing resentment burst into public view recently in a dispute over a seemingly unrelated topic: Covid policies. After Mr. DeSantis refused to reveal his full Covid vaccination history, the former president publicly acknowledged he had received a booster. Last week, he seemed to swipe at Mr. DeSantis by blasting as “gutless” politicians who dodge the question out of fear of blowback from vaccine skeptics.Mr. DeSantis shot back on Friday, criticizing Mr. Trump’s early handling of the pandemic and saying he regretted not being more vocal in his complaints.The back and forth exposed how far Republicans have shifted to the right on coronavirus politics. The doubts Mr. Trump amplified about public health expertise have only spiraled since he left office. Now his defense of the vaccines — even if often subdued and almost always with the caveat in the same breath that he opposes mandates — has put him uncharacteristically out of step with the hard-line elements of his party’s base and provided an opening for a rival.But that it was Mr. DeSantis — a once-loyal member of the Trump court — wielding the knife made the tension about much more.At its core, the dispute amounts to a stand-in for the broader challenge confronting Republicans at the outset of midterm elections. They are led by a defeated former president who demands total fealty, brooks no criticism and is determined to sniff out, and then snuff out, any threat to his control of the party.That includes the 43-year-old DeSantis, who has told friends he believes Mr. Trump’s expectation that he bend the knee is asking too much. That refusal has set up a generational clash and a test of loyalty in the de facto capital of today’s G.O.P., one watched by Republicans elsewhere who’ve ridden to power on Mr. Trump’s coattails.Already, party figures are attempting to calm matters.“They’re the two most important leaders in the Republican Party,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime Florida lobbyist with connections to both men, predicting Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis “will be personal and political friends for the rest of their careers.”Mr. Trump’s aides also have tried to tamp down questions about the former president’s frustrations, so as not to elevate Mr. DeSantis.Still, Mr. Trump has made no secret of his preparations for a third run for the White House. And while Mr. DeSantis, who is up for re-election this year, has not declared his plans, he is widely believed to be eying the presidency.Mr. Trump and his aides are mindful of Republicans’ increasingly public fatigue with the drama that trails Mr. Trump. The former president’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election — which Mr. DeSantis has not challenged — and his role in the events leading to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol have some Republicans looking for a fresh start.Mr. DeSantis is often the first name Republicans cite as a possible Trump-style contender not named Trump.“DeSantis would be a formidable 2024 candidate in the Trump lane should Trump not run,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. “He’s Trump but a little smarter, more disciplined and brusque without being too brusque.”Notably, Mr. Trump, a longtime student of charisma and mass appeal, as well as an avid reader of polling, has refrained so far from publicly attacking Mr. DeSantis, who is a distant but potent second to him in polls on the 2024 G.O.P. field. His restraint is a break from the mockery and bullying he often uses to attack Republicans he perceives as vulnerable. Mr. Trump made no reference to the governor at a rally in Arizona on Saturday.Mr. DeSantis has $70 million in the bank for his re-election, a war chest he stocked with help from the Republican rank-and-file and donor class, alike. He has raised his profile in the same spaces Mr. Trump once dominated. The governor is ubiquitous on Fox News, where he is routinely met with the sort of softballs that once arced toward Mr. Trump. And he frequently mixes with the well-tanned Republican donor community near the former president’s winter home in South Florida.It was not always this way.Mr. DeSantis was a little-known Florida congressman in 2017, when Mr. Trump, who was then the president, spotted him on television and took keen interest. Mr. DeSantis, an Ivy League-educated military veteran and smooth-talking defender of the new president, was exactly what Mr. Trump liked in a politician.It wasn’t long before Mr. Trump blessed Mr. DeSantis’s bid for governor and sent in staff to help him, lifting the lawmaker to a victory over a better-known rival for the party’s nomination.Mr. DeSantis survived the general election and has often governed in a style that mirrors his patron, slashing at the left and scrapping with the news media. But that alone doesn’t placate Mr. Trump. As with other Republicans he has endorsed, the former president appears to take a kind of ownership interest in Mr. DeSantis — and to believe that he is owed dividends and deference.“Look, I helped Ron DeSantis at a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” Mr. Trump said in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Insurgency,” on the rightward shift of the Republican Party, by the New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters. Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. DeSantis “didn’t have a chance” of winning without his help.The former president’s expectation of deference from Mr. DeSantis is a reminder to other Republicans that a Trump endorsement comes with a price, a demand that could prove particularly consequential should he run again and have a stable of Republican lawmakers in his debt.At times, Mr. Trump has sought to kindle his relationship with Mr. DeSantis. He has suggested the governor would be a strong choice for vice president. Similar courtship has helped win deference from other potential rivals. But Mr. DeSantis has not relented.“I wonder why the guy won’t say he won’t run against me,” Mr. Trump has said to several associates and advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.Mr. Trump began the recent contretemps by attacking the governor’s refusal to acknowledge whether he had received a Covid-19 booster shot.“The answer is ‘Yes,’ but they don’t want to say it, because they’re gutless,” Mr. Trump said in a television interview this month, referring only to “politicians” but clearly alluding to Mr. DeSantis. “You got to say it — whether you had it or not, say it.”Mr. DeSantis’s response came on Friday in an interview on the conservative podcast “Ruthless.” Speaking in front of an in-person audience near St. Petersburg, Fla., the governor said one of his biggest regrets was not forcefully opposing Mr. Trump’s calls for lockdowns when the coronavirus first began to spread in the spring of 2020.“Knowing now what I know then, if that was a threat earlier, I would have been much louder,” Mr. DeSantis said. The governor said he had been “telling Trump ‘stop the flights from China’” but argued he never thought in early March 2020 that the virus “would lead to locking down the country.”Mr. DeSantis then moved quickly to place blame on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who advised Trump on the country’s Covid response, a much safer target with conservatives.The former president did not immediately respond. Without a Twitter account, his hair-trigger retorts have become less frequent. A spokesman for Mr. Trump also did not respond to requests for comment. An adviser to Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.Mr. DeSantis, however, has touched on a delicate issue, one of the few on which Mr. Trump is to the left of his party’s hard-liners: the efficacy of the vaccine and deference to public health experts’ advice on how to curb the spread of the virus.Mr. Trump has begun blasting warning shots at Mr. DeSantis and other aspiring Republicans, signaling he intends to defend the vaccines his administration helped develop. In an interview with Candace Owens, a right-wing media personality, the former president said “the vaccine worked” and dismissed conspiracy theories. “People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine,” he said.Mr. DeSantis, though, has been much more eager to focus on his resistance to Covid-19 restrictions, past and present, than to make a robust case for vaccination and booster shots.Notably, at his rally on Saturday, Mr. Trump did not promote vaccines and criticized so-called Covid “lockdowns.”Mr. Trump’s loudest antagonists are likely to continue to stoke the tension between the two men. Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who has fallen out with the former president, delighted in the dust-up this week.“Trump is demanding to know Ron DeSantis’s booster status, and I can now reveal it,” Ms. Coulter wrote on Twitter. “He was a loyal booster when Trump ran in 2016, but then he learned our president was a liar and con man whose grift was permanent.”In an email, Ms. Coulter, herself a part-time Florida resident, put a finer point on what makes Mr. DeSantis’s rise unsettling for the former president. “Trump is done,” she wrote. “You guys should stop obsessing over him.”Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting. More

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      Trump Rally Underscores GOP Tension Over How to Win in 2022

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      Donald Trump’s rally in Arizona on Saturday has featured a host of election deniers. His involvement in state races and his inability to let go of his 2020 loss worries many Republicans. FLORENCE, Ariz. — Former President Donald J. Trump returned on Saturday to Arizona, a cradle of his political movement, to headline a rally in the desert that has been a striking testament to how he has elevated fringe beliefs and the politicians who spread them — even as other Republicans openly worry that voters will ultimately punish their party for it.Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.And one of his most unflinching defenders in Congress is Representative Paul Gosar, who was censured by his colleagues for posting an animated video online that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.All three spoke at Mr. Trump’s rally in front of thousands of supporters on Saturday in the town of Florence, outside Phoenix. It was the first stadium-style political event he has held so far in this midterm election year in which he will try to deepen his imprint on Republicans running for office at all levels.But as popular as the former president remains with the core of the G.O.P.’s base, his involvement in races from Arizona to Pennsylvania — and his inability to let go of his loss to Mr. Biden — has veteran Republicans in Washington and beyond concerned. They worry that Mr. Trump is imperiling their chances in what should be a highly advantageous political climate, with Democrats deeply divided over their policy agenda and Americans taking a generally pessimistic view of Mr. Biden’s leadership a year into his presidency.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and other senior party officials have expressed their misgivings in recent days about Mr. Trump’s fixation on the last election, saying that it threatens to alienate the voters they need to win over in the next election in November.Those worries are particularly acute in Arizona, where the far-right, Trump-endorsed slate of candidates could prove too extreme in a state that moved Democratic in the last election as voters came out in large numbers to oppose Mr. Trump. The myth of widespread voter fraud is animating Arizona campaigns in several races, alarming Republicans who argue that indulging the former president’s misrepresentations and falsehoods about 2020 is jeopardizing the party’s long-term competitiveness.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans are already poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s race will be at the center of the political universe this year, but there are several important contests across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.“I’ve never seen so many Republicans running in a primary for governor, attorney general, Senate,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant who has worked on statewide races in Arizona for two decades. “Usually you get two, maybe three. But not five.”At the rally on Saturday, every speaker who took the stage before Mr. Trump repeated a version of the false assertion that the vote in Arizona in 2020 was fraudulent. Mr. Gosar, the congressman, did so in perhaps the darkest language, invoking the image of a building storm, a metaphor commonly used by followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. And he called for people involved in counting ballots in Arizona in 2020 to be imprisoned. “Lock them up,” Mr. Gosar told the crowd. “That election was rotten to the core.”For Republicans who are concerned about Mr. Trump’s influence on candidates they believe are unelectable, the basic math of such crowded primaries is difficult to stomach. A winner could prevail with just a third of the total vote — which makes it more than likely a far-right candidate who is unpalatable to the broader electorate can win the nomination largely on Mr. Trump’s endorsement.One of the rally’s featured speakers was Representative Paul Gosar, who was censured by his colleagues for posting a violent animated video online.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesConservative activists in Arizona have long supplied Mr. Trump with the energy and ideas that formed the foundation of his political movement.In 2011, when the real estate developer and reality television star was testing the waters for a possible presidential campaign, his interest in the conspiracy theories that claimed former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery led him to Arizona Tea Party activists and a state legislator. They were pushing for a state law to require that political candidates produce their birth certificates before qualifying for the ballot. Mr. Trump invited them to Trump Tower.One of those activists, Kelly Townsend, now a state senator, spoke to the crowd on Saturday and praised those who sought to delegitimize Mr. Biden’s win.Arizona has been a hotbed of distortions about the 2020 election. Allies of the former president demanded an audit in the state’s largest county, insisting that the official outcome had been compromised by fraud. But when the results of the review were released — in a report both commissioned and produced by Trump supporters — it ended up showing that he actually received 261 fewer votes than first thought.Still, the myth lives on. And those who question it quickly become targets of the former president and his allies. They have attacked two prominent Arizona Republicans — Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich for their roles in Arizona’s formal certification of its election results.Mr. Trump issued a statement on Friday, insisting that if Mr. Ducey decided to run for the United States Senate seat occupied by Mark Kelly, a Democrat, the governor would “never have my endorsement or the support of MAGA Nation!” Mr. Brnovich is running in that Senate primary, and a Republican political group supporting one of his opponents recently ran an ad accusing the attorney general of “making excuses instead of standing with our president” over the 2020 election.Few Republicans have been willing to call Mr. Trump out publicly for misleading his supporters in a state where all four Republicans in its House delegation voted to overturn the results of the election when Congress convened to certify on Jan. 6. Mr. Gosar was the first House member to object that day. Those who have broken ranks with their party include Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, who has started a political action committee to support Republicans running for state and local office who accept the validity of the last election. But even those who have resisted going along with Mr. Trump’s false claims have been unable to completely duck the issue when faced with pressure from the president and his supporters. When a group of 18 Republican attorneys general signed onto a far-fetched lawsuit from their counterpart in Texas that sought to delay the certification of the vote in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Brnovich did not join his colleagues. He declared at the time that the “rule of law” should prevail over politics. But as a candidate for Senate who still occupies the office of the attorney general, he has investigated claims of fraud at the behest of Trump supporters. More

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      Democrats Face a Dilemma on Voting: Compromise or Keep Pressing?

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      With their broad voting rights push nearing a dead end, Democrats must soon decide whether to embrace a far narrower bipartisan effort to protect vote counting and administration.WASHINGTON — With their drive to secure far-reaching voting rights legislation nearing a dead end, Senate Democrats face a decision they had hoped to avoid: Should they embrace a much narrower, bipartisan effort to safeguard the vote-counting process, or continue what increasingly looks like a doomed push to protect access to the ballot box?A growing group of Senate Republicans and centrist Democrats is working on legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century law that former President Donald J. Trump sought to exploit to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That effort is expanding to include other measures aimed at preventing interference in election administration, such as barring the removal of nonpartisan election officials without cause and creating federal penalties for the harassment or intimidation of election officials.Democratic leaders say they regard the effort as a trap — or at least a diversion from the central issue of voter suppression that their legislation aims to address. They argue that the narrower measures are woefully inadequate given that Republicans have enacted a wave of voting restrictions in states around the country that are geared toward disenfranchising Democratic voters, particularly people of color.Still, even if there is no consensus to be found on a bill addressing how votes are cast, proponents say there is a growing sentiment in favor of ensuring that those that are cast are fairly counted.“There is a lot of interest, a lot of interest,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who is leading one effort with Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, both centrist Democrats, and Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Joni Ernst of Iowa, all Republicans.Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, are part of a group working on a narrower bill to ensure votes are fairly counted.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesSenator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, also listened in on a call on the matter this month but remains noncommittal.“I’m not saying this is going to be easy,” Ms. Collins added, “but I’m optimistic.”A separate group — including two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Senator Angus King, a left-of-center independent from Maine — is looking at changing how Congress formalizes the election results to head off another attempt like the one Mr. Trump made to have allies on Capitol Hill try to toss out state electoral votes.But most Democrats are reluctant even to discuss the matter until after the far more comprehensive voting rights bill they call the Freedom to Vote Act is put to rest next week, a near certainty after Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin said this week that they would not vote to change Senate rules on the filibuster to enable their party to push it through unilaterally.“There are two issues going on right now in the country. One is voter suppression — these subtle laws that make it harder for people to vote,” Mr. King said. “The other piece is voting administration, where you get into substituting partisan people for nonpartisan administrators, purging voter election boards, allowing election boards to eliminate polling places and also the whole mechanics of counting.”He added, “There’s a reasonable opportunity here for a bipartisan bill, but my concern is that it will be viewed as a substitute for the Freedom to Vote Act, and that’s just not the case.”Members of both parties are concerned about the counting and certification of ballots after they have been cast. President Biden was emphatic on the point when he emerged Thursday from a fruitless lunch with Senate Democrats, pleading with them to change the filibuster rules around voting.“The state legislative bodies continue to change the law not as to who can vote, but who gets to count the vote, count the vote, count the vote,” he said, his voice rising in anger. “It’s about election subversion.”And some academic experts say protecting election administration and vote counting, at this moment, is actually more critical than battling restrictions on early and absentee voting and ballot drop boxes.“I’ve been saying this for the last year: The No. 1 priority should be ensuring we have a fair vote count,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has drafted his own prescriptions for safeguarding elections after Election Day. “We are in a new level of crisis. I never expected in the contemporary United States that we would have to have legislation around a fair vote count, but we have to have it now.”Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has opened the door a crack to changing the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his legal advisers speciously claimed gave the vice president the power to unilaterally reject the electors from states deemed contested.“It obviously has some flaws. And I think it should be discussed,” Mr. McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. “That is a totally separate issue from what they’re peddling on the Democratic side.”Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has opened the door to a narrower effort by saying the Electoral Count Act has flaws.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesDemocrats are leery. They fear Republicans want to reassure Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema that if, as promised, they reject their party’s efforts to do away with the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, they will have the bipartisan alternative they crave.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has said not only would that alternative be wholly insufficient, but it also would probably not materialize.In 2019, as Democrats were pushing for gun safety legislation after a pair of mass shootings, Republican leaders who opposed the bill raised the prospect of narrower legislation to help law enforcement take guns from those who pose an imminent danger. Once the Democratic bills failed, the more modest one did, too.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      Frustrated Democrats Call for ‘Reset’ Ahead of Midterm Elections

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      Democrats already were expecting a rough election year. But their struggle to advance priorities has some calling for a course correction.WASHINGTON — With the White House legislative agenda in shambles less than a year before the midterm elections, Democrats are sounding alarms that their party could face even deeper losses than anticipated without a major shift in strategy led by the president.The frustrations span the spectrum from those of the party’s liberal wing, which feels deflated by the failure to enact a bold agenda, to the concerns of moderates, who are worried about losing suburban swing voters and had believed Democratic victories would usher a return to normalcy after last year’s upheaval.Democrats already anticipated a difficult midterm climate, given that the party in power historically loses seats during a president’s first term. But the party’s struggle to act on its biggest legislative priorities has rattled lawmakers and strategists, who fear their candidates will be left combating the perception that Democrats failed to deliver on President Biden’s central campaign promise of rebooting a broken Washington.“I think millions of Americans have become very demoralized — they’re asking, what do the Democrats stand for?” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent in charge of the Senate Budget Committee. In a lengthy interview, he added, “Clearly, the current strategy is failing and we need a major course correction.”Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat from a blue-collar Ohio district who is running for the state’s open Senate seat, said his party isn’t addressing voter anxieties about school closures, the pandemic and economic security. He faulted the Biden administration, not just for failing to pass its domestic agenda but also for a lack of clear public health guidance around issues like masking and testing.“It seems like the Democrats can’t get out of their own way,” he said. “The Democrats have got to do a better job of being clear on what they’re trying to do.”The complaints capped one of the worst weeks of the Biden presidency, with the White House facing the looming failure of voting rights legislation, the defeat of their vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers at the Supreme Court, inflation rising to a 40-year high and friction with Russia over aggression toward Ukraine. Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s top domestic priority — a sprawling $2.2 trillion spending, climate and tax policy plan — remains stalled, not just because of Republicans, but also opposition from a centrist Democrat.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans are already poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s race will be at the center of the political universe this year, but there are several important contests across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.“I’m sure they’re frustrated — I am,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, when asked this week about the chamber’s inability to act on Mr. Biden’s agenda. Discussing the impact on voters ahead of the midterm elections, he added, “It depends on who they blame for it.”The end of the week provided another painful marker for Democrats: Friday was the first time since July that millions of American families with children did not receive a monthly child benefit, a payment established as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan that Democrats muscled through in March without any Republican support.Plans to extend the expiration date for the payments, which helped keep millions of children out of poverty, were stymied with the collapse of negotiations over the sprawling domestic policy plan. And additional pandemic-related provisions will expire before the end of the year without congressional action.“That’s just about as straightforward as it gets,” said Mr. Ryan. “If the Democrats can’t get on with a tax cut for working families, what are we for?”In recent days, Mr. Biden has faced a wave of rising anger from traditional party supporters. Members of some civil rights groups boycotted his voting rights speech in Atlanta to express their disappointment with his push on the issue, while others, including Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia, were noticeably absent. Mr. Biden vowed to make a new forceful push for voting right protections, only to see it fizzle the next day.And last week, six of Mr. Biden’s former public health advisers went public with their criticisms of his handling of the pandemic, calling on the White House to adopt a strategy geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely. Others have called for the firing of Jeffrey Zients, who leads the White House pandemic response team.“There does not seem to be an appreciation for the urgency of the moment,” said Tré Easton, a senior adviser for Battle Born Collective, a progressive group that is pushing for overturning the filibuster to enable Democrats to pass a series of their priorities. “It’s sort of, ‘OK, what comes next?’ Is there something that’s going to happen where voters can say, yes, my life is appreciatively more stable than it was two years ago.”White House officials and Democrats insist that their agenda is far from dead and that discussions continue with key lawmakers to pass the bulk of Mr. Biden’s domestic plans. Talks over an omnibus package to keep the government open beyond Feb. 18 have quietly resumed, and states are beginning to receive funds from the $1 trillion infrastructure law. “I guess the truth is an agenda doesn’t wrap up in one year,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.Mr. Biden’s top domestic priority, the $2.2 trillion spending, climate and tax policy plan, is stalled by opposition from Senator Manchin.Al Drago for The New York TimesWhile there’s widespread agreement around the electoral peril that the party faces, there’s little consensus over who, exactly, is to blame. Liberals have been particularly scathing in their critique of two centrist senators, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and their longstanding objections to undermining the Senate filibuster, as well as Mr. Manchin’s decision to abruptly reject the $2.2 trillion spending plan last month. For months, Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials have been raising concerns about sinking support among crucial segments of the party’s coalition — Black, female, young and Latino voters — ratings many worry could drop further without action on issues like voting rights, climate change, abortion rights and paid family leave.“In my view, we are not going to win the elections in 2022 unless our base is energized and ordinary people understand what we are fighting for, and how we are different than the Republicans,” Mr. Sanders said. “That’s not the case now.”But many in the party concede that the realities of their narrow congressional majorities and united Republican opposition have blocked their ability to pass much of their agenda. Some have faulted party leaders for catering to progressives’ ambitions, without the votes to execute.“Leadership set out with a failed strategy, and while I guess, maybe they can message that they tried, it actually isn’t going to yield real laws,” said Representative Stephanie Murphy, a Florida centrist, who is retiring but has signaled aspirations for a future Senate run.Representative Cheri Bustos, a Democrat from rural Illinois, said Democrats should consider less ambitious bills that could draw some Republican support to give the party accomplishments it can claim in the midterm elections.“We really kind of need to reset at this point,” said Ms. Bustos, who is retiring from a district that swung to Donald J. Trump in 2020. “I hope we focus on what we can get done and then focus like crazy on selling it.”Mr. Biden effectively staked his presidency on the belief that voters would reward his party for steering the country out of a deadly pandemic and into economic prosperity. But even after a year that produced record job growth, widely available vaccines and stock market highs, Mr. Biden has not begun to deliver a message of success nor focused on promoting his legislative victories.Many Democrats say they need to do more to sell their accomplishments or risk watching the midterms go the way of the off-year elections, when many in the party were surprised by the intensity of the backlash against them in races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York.“We need to get into the business of promotion and selling and out of the business of moaning and groaning,” said Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic group.Others say that as president, Mr. Biden has fallen out of step with many voters by focusing on issues like climate change and voting rights. While crucial for the country, those topics aren’t topping the list of concerns for many voters still trying to navigate the uncertainties of a pandemic stretching into a third year.“The administration is focused on things that are important but not particularly salient to voters and sometimes as president you have to do that,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Now, we need to begin to move back to talking about the things that people do care about. More