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    How the Fight Over Abortion Rights Has Changed the Politics of South Texas

    In the Laredo region, long a Democratic stronghold, that single issue appears to be driving the decision for many voters, the majority of whom are Catholic.LAREDO, Texas — Like the majority of her neighbors in the heavily Latino community of Laredo, Angelica Garza has voted for Democrats for most of her adult life. Her longtime congressman, Henry Cuellar, with his moderate views and opposition to abortion, made it an easy choice, she said.But as up-and-coming Democratic candidates in her patch of South Texas have leaned ever more liberal, Ms. Garza, a dedicated Catholic, cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2016, primarily because of his anti-abortion views.In choosing Mr. Trump that year and again in 2020, Ms. Garza joined a parade of Latino voters who are changing the political fabric of South Texas. In the Laredo region, where about nine out of 10 residents are Catholic, many registered voters appear to be driven largely by the single issue of abortion.“I’m willing to vote for any candidate that supports life,” said Ms. Garza, 75. “That’s the most important issue for me, even if it means not voting for a Democrat.”With a pivotal primary election just a week away, Ms. Garza is ready to to turn away from Democrats. Pointing at a wall covered in folkloric angel figurines at the art store she owns in Laredo, she explained why: “They are babies, angels, and I don’t think anyone has the right to end their life. We have to support life.”Angelica Garza voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because of his anti-abortion views.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesVoters like Ms. Garza are worrying Democratic leaders, whose once tight grip and influence on the Texas-Mexico border region has loosened in recent electoral cycles. Republicans have claimed significant victories across South Texas, flipping Zapata County, south of Laredo on the bank of the Rio Grande, and a state district in San Antonio. They also made gains in the Rio Grande Valley, where the border counties delivered so many votes for Mr. Trump in 2020 that they helped negate the impact of white voters in urban and suburban areas of the state who voted for Joe Biden.Much is at stake in Laredo, the most populous city of the 28th Congressional District, where Latinos are a majority, and which stretches from the eastern tip of San Antonio and includes a western chunk of the Rio Grande Valley. Since the district was drawn nearly three decades ago, the seat has been held by Democrats. Mr. Cuellar has represented the district since 2005. His moderate and sometimes conservative views — he was the only Congressional Democrat to vote against a U.S. House bill that would have nullified the state’s near-total ban on abortion that went into effect last September — have frequently endeared him to social conservatives and Republicans.But he now finds himself locked in a tight fight against a much more liberal candidate backed by the progressive wing of the party that includes Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Cuellar, whose home was raided last month by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation that neither he nor the government has disclosed, beat his opponent, Jessica Cisneros, by four percentage points in 2020.Should he lose the primary on March 1 to Ms. Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer who supports abortion rights, the path to flip the House of Representatives could very well run through South Texas, as Republicans have vowed an all-in campaign focused on religious and other conservative values. More

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    Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

    False claims that Donald J. Trump can be reinstalled in the White House are picking up steam — and spiraling further from reality as they go.MADISON, Wis. — First, Wisconsin Republicans ordered an audit of the 2020 election. Then they passed a raft of new restrictions on voting. And in June, they authorized the nation’s only special counsel investigation into 2020.Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald J. Trump lost the state by 20,682 votes, an increasingly vocal segment of the Republican Party is getting behind a new scheme: decertifying the results of the 2020 presidential election in hopes of reinstalling Mr. Trump in the White House.Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than the last, but the Republican effort to overturn the election results here is picking up steam rather than fading away — and spiraling further from reality as it goes. The latest turn, which has been fueled by Mr. Trump, bogus legal theories and a new candidate for governor, is creating chaos in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its push to win the contests this year for governor and the Senate.The situation in Wisconsin may be the most striking example of the struggle by Republican leaders to hold together their party when many of its most animated voters simply will not accept the reality of Mr. Trump’s loss.In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker who has allowed vague theories about fraud to spread unchecked, is now struggling to rein them in. Even Mr. Vos’s careful attempts have turned election deniers sharply against him.“This is a real issue,” said Timothy Ramthun, the Republican state representative who has turned his push to decertify the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun has asserted that if the Wisconsin Legislature decertifies the results and rescinds the state’s 10 electoral votes — an action with no basis in state or federal law — it could set off a movement that would oust President Biden from office.“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We’re not fringe.”Although support for the decertification campaign is difficult to measure, it wouldn’t take much to make an impact in a state where elections are regularly decided by narrow margins. Mr. Ramthun is drawing crowds, and his campaign has already revived Republicans’ divisive debate over false claims of fraud in 2020. Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin Republicans were not confident in the state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to an October poll from the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.“This is just not what the Republican Party needs right now,” said Rob Swearingen, a Republican state representative from the conservative Northwoods. “We shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves about what happened, you know, a year and a half ago.”Wisconsin has the nation’s most active decertification effort. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state along with candidates for Congress have called for recalling the state’s electoral votes. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Mr. Biden’s victory there, but no organized effort materialized.In Wisconsin, the decertification push has Republican politics on its head. After more than a decade of Republican leaders marching in lock-step with their base, the party is hobbled by infighting and it’s Democrats who are aligned behind Gov. Tony Evers, who is seeking a second term in November.“Republicans now are arguing over whether we want democracy or not,” Mr. Evers said in an interview on Friday.Mr. Ramthun, a 64-year-old lawmaker who lives in a village of 2,000 people an hour northwest of Milwaukee, has ridden his decertification push to become a sudden folk hero to the party’s Trump wing. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, has hosted Mr. Ramthun on his podcast. At party events, he shows off a 72-page presentation in which he claims, falsely, that legislators have the power to declare Wisconsin’s election results invalid and recall the state’s electoral votes.Mr. Ramthun has received bigger applause at local Republican gatherings than the leading candidates for governor, and last weekend he joined the race himself, announcing his candidacy at a campaign kickoff where he was introduced by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has financed numerous efforts to undermine and overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Trump offered public words of encouragement.“Who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent election?” the former president said in a statement.It did not take long before the state’s top Republicans were responding to Mr. Ramthun’s election conspiracies. Within days, both of his Republican rivals for governor released new plans to strengthen partisan control of Wisconsin’s elections.During a radio appearance on Thursday, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the party establishment’s preferred candidate, refused to admit that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election — something she had already conceded last September. Ms. Kleefisch declined to be interviewed.Kevin Nicholson, a former Marine with backing from the right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, declined in an interview to say whether the election was legitimate, but he said there was “no legal path” to decertifying the results.Mr. Vos spent nearly an hour Friday on a Milwaukee conservative talk radio show defending his opposition to decertification from skeptical callers.“It is impossible — it cannot happen,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I can say that.”A Tuesday rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison drew about 250 people who called for decertifying the 2020 presidential election. Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesYet, Mr. Ramthun claims to have the grass-roots energy on his side. On Tuesday, he drew a crowd of about 250 people for a two-hour rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.Terry Brand, the Republican Party chairman in rural Langlade County, chartered a bus for two dozen people for the three-hour ride. Mr. Brand in January oversaw the first county G.O.P. condemnation of Mr. Vos, calling for the leader’s resignation for blocking the decertification effort. At the rally, Mr. Brand stood holding a sign that said “Toss Vos.”“People are foaming at the mouth over this issue,” he said, listening intently as speakers offered both conspiracy theories and assurances to members of the crowd that they were of sound mind.“You’re not crazy,” Janel Brandtjen, the chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee, told the crowd.One speaker tied Mr. Vos, through a college roommate and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, to the false claims circulating in right-wing media that Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on Mr. Trump. Another was introduced under a pseudonym, then promptly announced herself as a candidate for lieutenant governor.The rally closed with remarks from Harry Wait, an organizer of a conservative group in Racine County called HOT Government, an acronym for honest, open and transparent.“I want to remind everybody,” Mr. Wait said, “that yesterday’s conspiracies may be today’s reality.”Mr. Ramthun says he has questioned the result of every presidential election in Wisconsin since 1996. (He does not make an exception for the one Republican victory in that period: Mr. Trump’s in 2016.) He has pledged to consider ending the use of voting machines and to conduct an “independent full forensic physical cyber audit” of the 2020 election — and also of the 2022 election, regardless of how it turns out.Mr. Ramthun has adopted a biblical slogan — “Let there be light” — a reference to his claim that Mr. Vos is hiding the truth from voters. If Wisconsin pulls back its electoral votes, Mr. Ramthun said, other states may follow.(American presidents can be removed from office only by impeachment or by a vote of the cabinet.)Robin Vos, the speaker of Wisconsin State Assembly, told reporters on Tuesday that Republicans aiming to undo Mr. Trump’s loss were wrong to be angry with him.Andy Manis/Associated PressAll of this has become too much for Mr. Vos, who before the Trump era was a steady Republican foot soldier focused on taxes, spending and labor laws.Mr. Vos has often appeased his party’s election conspiracists, expressing his own doubts about who really won in Wisconsin, calling for felony charges against Wisconsin’s top election administrators and authorizing an investigation into the 2020 election, which is still underway.Now, even as he draws the line on decertification, Mr. Vos has tried to placate his base and plead for patience. He announced this week the Assembly plans to vote on a new package of voting bills. (Mr. Evers said in the interview on Friday that he would veto any new restrictions.)“It’s simply a matter of misdirected anger,” he said, of the criticism he’s facing. “They have already assumed that the Democrats are hopeless, and now they are focused on those of us who are trying to get at the truth, hoping we do more.”Other Republicans in the state are also walking a political tightrope — refusing to accept Mr. Biden’s victory while avoiding taking a position on Mr. Ramthun’s decertification effort.“Evidence might be out there, that is something other people are working on,” said Ron Tusler, who sits on the Assembly’s elections committee. “It’s too early to be sure but it’s possible we try it later.”State Senator Kathy Bernier is the only of Wisconsin’s 82 Republican state legislators who has made a public case that Mr. Trump lost the state fairly, without widespread fraud.Ms. Bernier, the chairwoman of the State Senate’s elections committee, in November asked the Wisconsin Legislature’s attorneys to weigh in on the legality of decertifying an election — it is not possible, they said. In December, she called for an end to the Assembly’s investigation into 2020. Three weeks later, she announced she won’t seek re-election this year.“I have no explanation as to why legislators want to pursue voter-fraud conspiracy theories that have not been proven,” Ms. Bernier said in an interview. “They should not do that. It’s dangerous to our democratic republic. They need to step back and only speak about things that they know and understand and can do. And outside of that, they should button it up.”Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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    Jim Hagedorn, a Trump Ally in the House, Dies at 59

    A two-term Minnesota conservative, he backed efforts to overturn the election of Joseph Biden as president on spurious grounds of voter fraud.Representative Jim Hagedorn, a second-term Minnesota Republican who was a staunch ally of former President Donald J. Trump and who joined with other members of his party in seeking to overturn the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., died on Thursday. He was 59. His wife, Jennifer Carnahan Hagedorn, the former chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, announced the death on Facebook. She did not specify the cause or say where he died. He had long been public about his three-year struggle with cancer and announced in January that he had tested positive for Covid-19.Mr. Hagedorn was diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer in 2019, shortly after he was sworn in as a first-term member of the House of Representatives. He underwent immunotherapy treatment at the Mayo Clinic, and doctors removed the affected kidney in December 2020. He said at the time that 99 percent of the cancer was gone, but he announced in July that it had returned.Mr. Hagedorn had run for a House seat three times without success, in 2010, 2014 and 2016, when he lost by a hair to the incumbent, the Democrat Tim Walz. In 2018, after Mr. Walz left to run successfully for governor, Mr. Hagedorn narrowly won his seat in a race against the Democrat Dan Feehan.In a rematch against Mr. Feehan in 2020, Mr. Hagedorn won by a slightly larger margin, despite his health issues, and was raising money in anticipation of a re-election campaign in November.“He’ll forever be known as a common sense conservative who championed fair tax policy, American energy independence, peace through strength foreign policy and southern Minnesota’s way of life and values,” his campaign said in a statement.Throughout his short tenure in office, Republicans were in the minority in the House. All the while, Mr. Hagedorn remained a strong conservative, worked on behalf of small businesses and rural entrepreneurs, and stood as an ally of Mr. Trump, who won Mr. Hagedorn’s district in 2016 by 15 percentage points.“I’ve said repeatedly since 2016 that of course I support Donald Trump,” Mr. Hagedorn told the Minnesota newspaper The Star Tribune in 2019, “because I felt like if he’d lost, we’d have lost the country.”In December 2020, Mr. Hagedorn was one of 126 Republican members of the House who filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the election of Mr. Biden as president, a brief based on spurious and disproved allegations of widespread voter fraud. The court rejected the suit, which had sought to throw out the election results in four battleground states.Just hours after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of Trump supporters, Mr. Hagedorn was among 147 Republicans who objected to certifying Mr. Biden’s election.“There was no stronger conservative in our state than my husband,” his wife wrote in her statement, “and it showed in how he voted, led and fought for our country.”Mr. Hagedorn, right, was on hand when President Donald J. Trump arrived in Minneapolis in 2018. At center was Dave Hughes, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Tom Brenner for The New York TimesJames Lee Hagedorn was born on Aug. 4, 1962, in Blue Earth, Minn., near the Iowa border. His father, Tom Hagedorn, was a U.S. House member and represented some of the same southern Minnesota territory as his son later did. His mother, Kathleen (Mittlestadt) Hagedorn, was a homemaker.Jim was raised on the family farm near Truman, Minn., and in McLean, Va., while his father served in Congress, from 1975 to 1983.He graduated from George Mason University in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in government and political science in 1993. While a student, he worked as a legislative aide to Representative Arlan Stangeland, another Minnesota Republican. He later worked as a congressional liaison at the Treasury Department and as the congressional affairs officer for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing until 2009.During the early 2000s, Mr. Hagedorn wrote a blog called “Mr. Conservative,” which has since been deleted. His posts took aim at Native Americans, gay people and women, among others.In 2005, when President George W. Bush nominated a woman, the White House counsel Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court (she ultimately withdrew her name), Mr. Hagedorn described her nomination as an effort “to fill the bra of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.”The blog posts resurfaced during Mr. Hagedorn’s unsuccessful run for the House in 2014; he told The Star Tribune that they were old and had been satirical in nature. They surfaced again in 2018, when he won the seat chiefly by proclaiming his loyalty to Mr. Trump.Complete information on his survivors was not available.The final piece of legislation that Mr. Hagedorn introduced, on Feb. 9, was a resolution to place a national debt clock in the House chamber.“The American people deserve full transparency about this nation’s fiscal affairs,” he said, “and this resolution will be a strong reminder to lawmakers as they vote on proposals that could put our country further in debt.” More

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    As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

    With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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    What President Biden Could Learn from Ronald Reagan

    Blame is a hallmark of American politics. Ronald Reagan couldn’t escape it in his first midterm elections 40 years ago. Can Biden?They’re called election cycles for a reason. In politics, everything’s on repeat.In 1982, a new president faced his first midterm elections after he was swept into office amid an economic slump, high inflation and deep dissatisfaction with the previous occupant of the White House.Sound familiar?Forty years later, President Biden is facing a completely different set of problems, including a persisting pandemic and a predecessor who refuses to accept that he was defeated. Yet Biden and Ronald Reagan have shared a similar burden: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either one was elected. Both men won the presidency by promising restoration, but both saw their approval ratings sink when they couldn’t immediately deliver.“Blame in American politics runs through the president,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “He is the most prominent salient actor in American politics.”Reagan began his presidency with a double-digit inflation rate. In the months leading up to the election, as inflation settled down, unemployment rose. Throughout 1982, Reagan’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s, where Biden has been stuck since late last summer. In those November midterms, Republicans lost 26 House seats and gained one Senate seat, by replacing one conservative independent with a Republican.We spoke with several historians and Republicans directly involved with the 1982 campaign, and they all warned that as long as the country feels economic pressure during Biden’s first midterm, it’s nearly impossible to dodge the dictum that the party in power loses House seats. Republicans’ 1982 campaign message — “Stay the course”— might have stemmed their losses, but losses were inescapable.The comparison breaks down in one key way for Democrats. Reagan had already been crowned “the Great Communicator” by the 1982 midterms. Biden’s failure to communicate a clear, compelling message to voters has been one of his biggest liabilities so far.However, there’s still time for an upswing in the economy. And even if the economy doesn’t rebound by November, it’s possible for Biden to cut his losses and even win back seats in 2024.Edwin Meese III, who was counselor to Reagan in 1982 before becoming attorney general, noted that Reagan’s “Stay the course” midterm was followed by his optimistic “Morning in America” re-election. He won a second term in a landslide.“It’s a matter of faith,” said Meese, 90, an emeritus fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “President Ronald Reagan knew that there would be difficult times, and the difficult times were not yet over, but that they would be.”‘Give the guy a chance’ In 1982, concerns about midterm losses and disagreements over economic policy led to divisions and finger-pointing within the Republican Party. Even so, the party urged voters to “give the guy a chance.”Nancy Dwight, who was running the House Republicans’ campaign arm at the time, cautions against reading too much into the 1982 example, but sees Biden taking a page from Reagan’s playbook in urging patience as he attempts to get the economy back on track. “He wouldn’t dare use that line, but he’s staying the course,” Dwight told us.Reagan was determined to see his economic plans through, even as the public lost confidence. Given the circumstances, Dwight recalled that she felt relieved that Republicans didn’t lose even more House seats. “I knew it could have been much worse,” she said.Joe Gaylord, who worked with Dwight at the House campaign committee in 1982, said Reagan’s economic crisis was more deep-rooted than Biden’s — with interest rates, inflation and unemployment all blocking recovery.But he said the basic contours of the problem that Biden faced were all too similar. Combine Reagan’s low approval rating with a country that believes it’s on the wrong track, and one thing happens, he said: “You get change.”A “huge problem that Biden has right now is that none of the things he’s done is working, either,” Gaylord added.When the unemployment rate surpassed 10 percent in September 1982, Gaylord said, “Republican candidates just dropped like flies,” as voters’ patience with the Reagan administration evaporated. He recalled hearing frustrated Republicans assert that the problem was simply a failure to communicate with voters — that if Republicans had been clearer about their accomplishments, voters would have supported them.That’s a theory that many Democrats, including Biden himself, have repeated in addressing why the public hasn’t been more supportive of his administration.But the message won’t get through if it doesn’t resonate, Gaylord said: “​​It’s a little tough to make a communication work when people don’t feel it.”Still, in some congressional races, Gaylord credited the “Stay the course” message with keeping seats in 1982. Republicans’ House minority shrunk, but they managed to keep control of the Senate and even gain a seat.President Biden arriving in Cleveland on Thursday. He and former President Ronald Reagan have shared one broad challenge: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either was elected.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesThe blame gameThere are plenty of reasons a president struggles in the midterms.Binder, the fellow at the Brookings Institution, ran through some of them. Voters like to distribute party power when they think it’s too concentrated. Supporters of the newly-elected president are more content and therefore less excited to turn out. Voters aren’t following the intricacies of policy.Jill Lepore, the historian and journalist, suggested thinking about the situation not as political intrigue, but as family drama.“You think about some bad situation in your extended family where your cousin and your aunt don’t speak to each other,” she said. But the conflict all began, she added, with a past inflammatory comment from your grandmother, who’s not engaged in the drama but lit the fire in the first place.“You need the whole story. But that’s not how we think politically, right?”Looking back, Meese said that he and Reagan, along with his top advisers, were confident that the policies Reagan enacted would allow Republicans to rebound in 1984. He didn’t see losing about 25 seats as all that bad, but rather “in keeping with historical norms.”“I don’t think anybody likes the idea of losing seats,” Meese said. “But I think the president felt that to do anything other than continue the program he had started was the wrong thing to do.”What to read A judge ruled that New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, can interview Donald Trump as well as two of his adult children as part of an inquiry into Trump’s business practices.Nicholas Kristof, a former New York Times columnist, cannot run for governor of Oregon, according to a Thursday ruling by the state’s Supreme Court. Even though he has connections to Oregon, the court ruled he had not fulfilled the three-year residency requirement to run, reports Mike Baker.The Ottawa protests “will likely live on long after the last trucks depart,” Natalie Kitroeff and Dan Bilefsky report. The protests have evolved into a “wider movement against pandemic restrictions in general and the premiership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”in the momentThe police confronting Trump loyalists outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesCriticizing the R.N.C., from the benchA federal judge took a swipe at the Republican National Committee on Thursday, taking issue with the committee’s recent move to condemn two Republican lawmakers for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Key Developments in the Jan. 6 InvestigationCard 1 of 3Piecing the evidence together. More

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    There’s a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers

    The truckers’ protest in Ottawa is the latest barrage from the world’s disaffected in the revolt that found expression in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2017 Unite the Right march on Charlottesville, the rise of QAnon, and the Jan. 6 insurrection in the halls of Congress.One thing that stands out in the Canadian truckers’ protests against vaccination requirements specifically and the Trudeau government generally is the strong support they are getting from conservative political leaders and media figures in this country.“We want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way,” Trump told rally-goers in Conroe, Texas on Jan. 29.“I see they have Trump signs all over the place and I’m proud that they do,” he added.On Feb. 12, Trump brought it home to America during a Fox News appearance: “That’s what happens, you can push people so far and our country is a tinderbox too, don’t kid yourself.”The former president is not alone.“I hope the truckers do come to America,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, told The Daily Signal, a conservative website. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.”Nor was all this confined to North America. “Ottawa truckers’ convoy galvanizes far right worldwide,” an article in Politico on Feb. 6 declared: “Leading Republicans, right-wing influencers and white supremacist groups have jumped at the chance to promote the standoff in Ottawa to a global audience.”In “Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party,” by Shanker Satyanath of N.Y.U., Nico Voigtländer of U.C.L.A. and Hans-Joachim Voth of the University of Zurich offer a counterintuitive perspective on the spread of right-wing organizing in Canada, Hungary, Brazil, India, Poland, Austria and in the United States.The three authors argue that in the 1930s in EuropeDense networks of civic associations such as bowling clubs, choirs, and animal breeders went hand-in-hand with a more rapid rise of the Nazi Party. Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least one-third faster entry. All types of associations — veteran associations and nonmilitary clubs, “bridging” and “bonding” associations — positively predict National Socialist Party entry. Party membership, in turn, predicts electoral success. These results suggest that social capital aided the rise of the Nazi movement that ultimately destroyed Germany’s first democracy.Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Cornelius Lipp, all of the London School of Economics, pick up this argument in a November 2021 paper on the paradoxical role of social capital in fostering far right movements. Noting that the “positive view of social capital has, more recently, been challenged,” the three economic geographers write:The rise in votes for Trump was the result of long-term economic and population decline in areas with strong social capital. This hypothesis is confirmed by the econometric analysis conducted for US counties. Long-term declines in employment and population — rather than in earnings, salaries, or wages — in places with relatively strong social capital propelled Donald Trump to the presidency and almost secured his re-election.It is, the three authors continue,precisely the long-term economic and demographic decline of the places that still rely on a relatively strong social capital that is behind the rise of populism in the U.S. Strong, but declining communities in parts of the American Rustbelt, the Great Plains, and elsewhere, reacted at the ballot box to being ignored, neglected and being left behind.Translated to the present, in economic and culturally besieged communities, the remnants of social capital have been crucial to the mobilization of men and women — mostly men — who chanted “You will not replace us” and “blood and soil” in Charlottesville, who shot bear spray at police officers on Jan. 6 and who brought Ottawa to its knees for more than two weeks.In a separate paper, “The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places,” Rodríguez-Pose argued:Populism is not the result of persistent poverty. Places that have been chronically poor are not the ones rebelling.” Instead, he continued, “the rise of populism is a tale of how the long-term decline of formerly prosperous places, disadvantaged by processes that have rendered them exposed and almost expendable, has triggered frustration and anger. In turn, voters in these so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ have sought their revenge at the ballot box.In an email, Rodríguez-Pose wrote:Social capital in the U.S. has been declining for a long time. Associationism and the feeling of community are no longer what they used to be and this has been documented many times. What my co-authors and I are saying is that in those places (counties) where social capital has declined less, long-term demographic and employment decline triggered a switch to Donald Trump. These communities have said “enough is enough” of a system that they feel bypasses them and voted for an anti-system candidate, who is willing to shake the foundations of the system.In a separate email, Lee noted that while most analysts view higher social capital as a healthy development in communities, it can also foster negative ethnic and racial solidarity: “Social capital can be a great thing when it is open and inclusive. But when everyone knows each other, this can result in in-group dynamics — particularly when people are led to be concerned about other groups.”The accompanying graphic, produced by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, shows the geographic distribution of social capital by county in the United States as of 2018. Social capital is highest in yellow areas and lowest in dark blue regions. The variables used to measure social capital included levels of family unity, collective efficacy, institutional health and community health.Joint Economic CommitteeSocial capital correlated positively with the volunteer rate, the share of adults who made charitable contributions, the share married and the share who trust their neighbors. It correlated negatively with heavy television watching by children, the share of children living with a single parent and the share of births that were to unwed mothers.Regina Anne Bateson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, wrote me in a Feb. 14 email: “The situation in Canada is often described as a truckers’ protest. However, it’s not just truckers who are participating, and this is not just a protest.”The situation in Ottawa quickly devolved, Bateson argues,into an illegal occupation, with heavy elements of extortion. Many people here describe it as a hostage situation. The convoy has deployed tactics intended to harm local residents, such as deafening horn-blowing, in an attempt to extract concessions from the government. More than 400 hate incidents have been reported to police, and there have been coordinated attacks on the 9-1-1 system, flooding it with calls so residents cannot get through.The occupation of Ottawa has become a “militia-like activity,” Bateson writes. “The convoy has resupply bases on the outskirts of town, as well as mobile squads of pickup trucks that rove around the city, delivering supplies and harassing local residents.” The protest organizers have “even been experimenting with governance, including providing services like snow and trash removal. Remarkably, they recently inaugurated a cohort of ‘peace officers,’ who are authorized to detain people if needed. Justin Ling, a journalist, reports that some of the convoy’s peace officers have subsequently tried to arrest Ottawa police.”Perhaps most important, Bateson described thesignificant international involvement, including political support, media coverage, and crowdfunding dollars from the United States. We are also seeing evidence of social media manipulation designed to increase polarization. The includes the use of fake and hijacked social media accounts, troll farms and bots, and inflammatory photos and messages being pumped out en masse.Asked what the potential consequences of the protests are, Bateson replied:There are many medium- and long-term consequences, including emboldened populist and extremist movements within Canada, increased international visibility for those groups (particularly in U.S. media outlets), new recruits to those movements, and the use of crowdfunding as a new form of grassroots foreign intervention. In areas directly affected by the convoy, such as Ottawa, there is also a profound sense of abandonment and loss of trust in the authorities, particularly the police. The convoy has undermined the rule of law in Canada, and they have upended the norms that govern social and political life here.In this context, I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality, and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University, Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics, and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article, “Progressive Cities: Urban-rural polarization of social values and economic development around the world.”Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”The urban-rural conflict between post-materialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”In an email, Luca elaborated:There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in Second Demographic Transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.In their October 2017 paper “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment, and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”The accompanying graphic demonstrates the pattern of Trump’s strength compared with Romney’s, the red bars showing characteristics of areas that voted more for Trump than Romney, the blue bars showing the characteristics of communities that cast more votes for Romney than for Trump.”More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” by Shannon M. Monnat and David L. BrownTrump’s populist message, Monnat and Brown write in their conclusion,may have been attractive to many long-term Democratic voters in these places who felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that has failed to articulate a strong pro-working class message, whose agendas often emphasize policies and programs to help the poor at what seems like the expense of the working-class, and who evidently believed it did not have to work very hard to earn votes from behind the “big blue wall.”In “Social Capital, Religion, Wal-Mart, and Hate Groups in America” a 2012 paper, Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State, Anil Rupasingha, a research economist at the Department of Agriculture, and Scott Loveridge of Michigan State University found that “Higher incomes, more income inequality, higher crime rates, and the presence of more Wal-Mart Stores and foreign-born populations are each associated with a more likely presence of one or more hate groups in the county.”The Wal-Mart effect, they wrote, likely results from the “economic turmoil” as communities “experience steep decline in their traditional downtown shopping districts.”Two factors work to lower the likelihood of hate group formation, they write: “a higher stock of social capital is associated with fewer hate groups” and “a greater share of mainline Protestant adherents is associated with fewer hate groups.”The opposite is true, Goetz, Rupasingha and Loveridge found, “for evangelical Protestant adherents,” writing that “for every 10 percent additional evangelical in a county, the number of hate groups in that county increases by 17 percent.”Regardless of the sources of discontent and regardless of the characteristic of those leading the assault on the liberal democratic state, there is no question that the trucker’s insurgency in Canada is catching fire abroad — currently in France, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand and Australia.“Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests go global: Australia to Austria witness anti-COVID vaccine agitations,” read the Feb. 11 FirstPost headline on a story that described the following developments: “Police and anti-vaccine protesters clashed on the grounds of New Zealand’s parliament, with dozens arrested after demonstrators who laid siege to the legislature for three days were ordered to move on.”And: “Brussels authorities have banned an upcoming ‘freedom convoy’ protest from entering the Belgian capital.”And: “French police warned Thursday they would prevent so-called ‘Freedom Convoys’ from blockading Paris, as protesters against Covid rules began to drive towards the capital.”And: “Austria also announced a ban on any motor protests as several hundred vehicles were set to converge Friday in central Vienna, as well as near a major public park in the Austrian capital.”There will also be a test of the vitality of the trucker protest movement in the United States. “The People’s Convoy” has issued a call to “truckers and all freedom loving Americans” to join together at a rally March 4 and 5 at Coachella Valley in Indio, Calif, which is expected to then aim for Washington D.C.The organizers claim they will provide “fuel reimbursement upon arrival for all attending this event” and “the convoy will roll out of California following the rally. Convoy details will be forthcoming.”There are risks and opportunities on both sides. For Joe Biden, a protest that brings traffic and commerce to a standstill in the nation’s capital would test his skill as the country’s commander in chief, a test that could restore his faltering public image or send him on the road to defeat in 2024. For Trump and his allies on the right, such a protest could mobilize core voters going into the coming elections or it could reinforce the Jan. 6 image of unconstrained chaos, severely damaging Republican prospects.Non-college whites in the United States, like the protesting truckers in Canada, continue to face grim prospects, subordinated by meritocratic competition that rewards what they lack: advanced education and top scores on aptitude tests — accomplishments that feed the resource allocation, the status contests and the employment hierarchies that dominate contemporary life and leave those who cannot prevail out in the cold.As long as these voters remain on a downward trajectory, they will continue to be a disruptive force, not only in the political arena but in society at large.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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    Opposition Research Goes Hyperlocal

    The liberal group American Bridge is launching a new project to collect information for campaigns against Republicans running for state and local offices.Some of the loudest Stop the Steal voices on the right are actually far removed from the levers of America’s election machinery. When a member of Congress makes false claims about hacked voting machines or stolen ballots, he or she has little authority to do much about it.Across the United States, however, there are tens of thousands of state, county and local officials who do have that power. They will set and enforce the rules on voting, then go about counting and reporting the votes in the elections to come.To the alarm of independent experts, allies of Donald Trump have been targeting these once-anonymous offices, seeking to fill them with hard-core partisans all the way down to the level of precinct captain.Now, the Democratic organization American Bridge, known primarily for its opposition research into Republicans, has launched what it says is a $10 million campaign to influence the races for election administration in a dozen key states. The local elections project is part of a $100 million paid media campaign that American Bridge announced a year ago.The group has hired 22 researchers to scrub the records and public statements of candidates and officials running for statewide offices involved in election administration, along with the sort of races unlikely to garner attention outside of their communities: county boards of supervisors, boards of canvassers, local judges and state legislators. They plan to dig up dirt on officials and candidates to ruin their chances of getting elected or re-elected.“It’s about how do we take what we’ve already been expert at and expose the behavior of Republican candidates and officeholders and take it down ballot to these secretaries of state races, the attorneys general races, as well as on down the ballot to the county level,” said Jessica Floyd, the American Bridge president.The sheer scale of America’s decentralized election system presents a formidable challenge to anyone seeking to influence it. In Wisconsin alone, there are 1,850 municipal clerks who administer voting, with rules set by a bipartisan six-member state commission, whose members are appointed by state legislators and the governor.Rick Hasen, the author of several books about elections and democracy, said the use of such hardball political tactics in local elections was “probably a necessary evil.” He added: “Efforts to subvert elections can happen in lots of places.”The Democrats are starting from behind in this effort. There is plenty of evidence that Republicans — more than half of whom remain convinced of Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud — are more motivated than Democrats by concerns about the voting system. And there has been a Republican financial advantage.In 2021, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which invests in state legislative and secretary of state races, raised $33 million, a record for a year in which most states didn’t hold state elections. The Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, took in $21 million, which it too crowed was the most ever in an off-year, but well behind the Republicans.‘You want to win these elections’Floyd, who worked for a handful of Washington’s major Democratic organizations and was an aide to Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said their tactics will help motivate base Democrats. But she added that the American Bridge researchers are in search of information that they believe voters will use to disqualify Republicans from winning local elections.In some communities, she said, that might be a commissioner who didn’t pay property taxes. Elsewhere, it might mean amplifying an untoward statement from a local radio station that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. For statewide candidates, American Bridge plans to hire “trackers” to follow them with cameras.“We’re not making an assumption that voters are going to be paying attention to how a race impacts the future of American democracy, because that’s not necessarily how people are treating the ballot box,” Floyd said. “You want to win these elections. We’re figuring out what’s the information that we have and how to disseminate that information in order to win as many elections as possible.”Kari Lake, a Republican, campaigning for governor in Florence, Ariz., last month.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSome of what American Bridge finds will be handed to news organizations, sometimes with and sometimes without the organization’s fingerprints attached. Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, called on school districts to install cameras to monitor teachers in classrooms in a local radio interview. The group took credit for the story being reported in the Arizona Republic and other local outlets.But more and more, American Bridge has been pushing its research on its own. One of its more prolific researchers maintains a Twitter account devoted to monitoring every local radio interview and television appearance by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Republican Senate candidates.“We should be exposing bad behavior,” Floyd said.What to read Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer profile Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate candidate of Ohio, and his political journey to the far right.U.S. officials are using creative methods to try to understand the thinking of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s enigmatic leader, report David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued a fresh batch of subpoenas, Luke Broadwater reports, including of two top Trump campaign officials and several state legislators.Charlie Savage explains a mysterious filing by John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who has been investigating the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.FrameworkJim Lamon, an Arizona Republican, starred in a gunslinging Super Bowl ad.Jim Lamon for U.S. SenatePrimary matchups at the Super BowlIt’s nothing new for politicians to use the Super Bowl to gain exposure. But on Sunday, two ads that went after the president pushed the boundaries of anti-Biden rhetoric. One repeated a phrase that has become code for a slur against President Biden, and the other showed a candidate shooting at him.The two Republicans behind the ads are running for Senate.Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican, aired an ad that repeated a crowd chanting the “Let’s Go Brandon” anti-Biden phrase for nearly the entire 30-second spot. Jim Lamon, a candidate in Arizona, aired a Wild-West-themed ad in which he shoots at Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mark Kelly, who is up for re-election this year. In the ad, the three Democrats are armed and prepared to duel, but Lamon shoots down their weapons. In what seems to be an effort at slapstick humor, the trio runs away, unscathed and disarmed. Lamon had previously aired another “Let’s Go Brandon” ad.Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, pointed out what was the dual audience that Lamon was speaking to — Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters and Trump himself. It’s an expensive way, in other words, to get the former president’s attention and his possible endorsement.“The people running for Senate in Arizona are all trying to win the Trump primary, not necessarily the Republican Party primary,” Robb told us.It cost the Lamon campaign $25,000 to place an ad in Tucson, Ariz., during the Super Bowl, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks television ad spending. McCormick’s campaign spent $70,000 to place the ad in the Pittsburgh media market.Both ads employed rhetoric that appeals to a smaller segment of the electorate, the most fervent Republican primary voters, even though a much more expansive audience actually watched it.There’s a chance that ads like these end up backfiring on the Republican candidates during the general election. Both Lamon and McCormick ran in states that Biden won in 2020. And, in Arizona, the Trump presidency coincided with Republicans losing both U.S. Senate seats and only narrowly preserving their majority in the State Legislature.Trump drove record turnout in Arizona, Robb said, but it wasn’t just his supporters who came out in record numbers. His opponents turned out as well.Lamon tried to show that he’s wealthy enough to afford a Super Bowl ad to “communicate this very narrow reach message,” Robb said. “But it does alienate the majority of the Arizona electorate.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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    How Josh Mandel, Son of Suburban Ohio, Became a Right-Wing Warrior

    The Senate candidate was a rising Republican when he abandoned his moderate roots. Now, those who have watched his transformation wonder if his rhetoric reflects who he really is.BEACHWOOD, Ohio — In the fall of 2016, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign was pressing Ohio’s young state treasurer, Josh Mandel, to step it up. A former Marine, he held some sway with Republican voters, and Trump aides wanted him doing more public events.But Mr. Mandel couldn’t quite find the time. He just had so many scheduling conflicts, he joked over breakfast with Matt Cox, a Republican lobbyist and, at the time, a friend. Mr. Cox recalled Mr. Mandel rattling off the excuses he used to avoid being too closely linked to a candidate he wasn’t sold on: Running after his three children, other political commitments, his observance of all those Jewish holidays.Once Mr. Trump won, any reluctance from Mr. Mandel fell away fast. Within weeks, he spoke at the president-elect’s first victory rally, slamming those who were “avoiding Trump” during the election. Five days after the rally, he launched his second bid for Senate, borrowing Mr. Trump’s catchphrases of a “rigged system” and “drain the swamp” for his announcement video.Mr. Mandel has not looked back. As he runs for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, the 44-year-old politician has become one of the nation’s most strident crusaders for Trumpism, melding conspiracy theories and white grievance politics to amass a following that has made him a leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination in this Republican-leaning state.His political evolution — from a son of suburban Cleveland to warrior for the Make America Great Again movement — isn’t unique. Across the country, rising stars of the pre-Trump era have shed the traditional Republicanism of their past to follow Mr. Trump’s far-right brand of politics, cementing the former president’s influence over the next generation of the party’s leaders.Mr. Mandel with a supporter at the Faith and Freedom Rally in Troy, Ohio, last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBut Mr. Mandel’s transformation has been particularly striking. Friends, strategists and supporters who powered his start in public life say that Mr. Mandel has so thoroughly rejected his political roots in Cleveland’s liberal-leaning suburbs that he is nearly unrecognizable to them. Some are convinced that his shift began as a clear political calculation — following his party to the right. But with his recent entrenchment on the fringe, many now wonder if it is not just Mr. Mandel’s public identity that has changed, but also his beliefs.“He’s twisting himself into something he wasn’t, just to win an election.” said Mr. Cox, who is not a Trump supporter and has donated to Mr. Mandel’s opponents. “Telling obvious lies,” he said, “is not part of the game. It’s intentional. And you have to believe that, if you say it that often.”Mr. Mandel has burned protective masks and blamed the “deep state” for the pandemic and has claimed that former President Barack Obama runs the current White House. He has rejected the separation of church and state and said that he wants to “shut down government schools and put schools in churches and synagogues.” The grandson of Holocaust survivors who were aided by resettlement organizations, he has compared a federal vaccine-or-testing mandate to the actions of the Gestapo, and today’s Afghan refugees to “alligators.”And he denies that President Biden was legitimately elected. “He is my president,” Mr. Mandel said recently in a video, pointing to a Trump sign in an Ohio cornfield.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.“I want to believe that this is a character he is playing,” said Rob Zimmerman, a Democrat and former city councilman from Shaker Heights, Ohio. Mr. Zimmerman spent hours advising and fund-raising for Mr. Mandel, viewing him as a politician who could bridge partisan divides. “It is jaw-droppingly different. The Josh Mandel of 2003 — of 2016, even — would not recognize the Josh Mandel of 2021.”“This,” Mr. Zimmerman added, “has broken my heart.”Since launching this campaign, his third for the Senate, Mr. Mandel has largely spoken through conservative media outlets and his active Twitter account.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesMr. Mandel declined to be interviewed for this article. Since launching this campaign, his third for the Senate, he has largely spoken through conservative media outlets and his active Twitter feed, which was restricted last year for violating the platform’s rules on “hateful conduct.” (Mr. Mandel created a poll asking which “illegals” — either “Muslim Terrorists” or “Mexican Gangbangers” — would commit more crimes.)When a reporter for The New York Times attended a campaign event on Jan. 25 at a church in Troy, Ohio, Mr. Mandel singled him out and denounced the newspaper in Trump-like terms, calling it “the enemy of the people” and “evil.”Elsewhere, Mr. Mandel has disputed that his politics have changed, arguing instead that he is in sync with the people he hopes to represent. “The voters in Ohio in the past two presidential elections have made it very clear, they don’t want a moderate running Ohio or running America,” he told a local cable news station after announcing his candidacy last year. “I’m the opposite of a moderate.”Other Republicans challenge Mr. Mandel’s assessment of what most Ohio voters want. Brad Kastan, a Republican donor who has known Mr. Mandel for two decades, said he worried that the candidate was “painting himself into a corner so far out that he can’t win” in a general election.In a state that has moved to the right, backing Mr. Trump by eight percentage points in 2020, Mr. Mandel has been polling ahead of his primary rivals, including Jane Timken, a former head of the Ohio Republican Party, and J.D. Vance, an author made famous by his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Much of the primary has revolved around winning Mr. Trump’s endorsement.Last spring, when summoned along with other candidates to Mar-a-Lago to jockey for Mr. Trump’s support, Mr. Mandel promised to hold nothing back to win the seat, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting who asked for anonymity to reveal a private conversation.Mr. Mandel’s stridency has surprised some in Beachwood, an affluent, predominantly Democratic suburb dotted with synagogues, where Mr. Mandel was a quarterback for his high school football team and then married into a wealthy Cleveland family.Mr. Mandel showed an early talent for standing out in a crowd at Ohio State, where he erected a 30-foot inflatable King Kong on the campus green to draw attention to his run for student government and won the presidency, twice.Shortly after graduating from the School of Law at Case Western Reserve, he won a City Council seat in Lyndhurst, a Cleveland suburb, drawing on support from his tight-knit community. When Albert Ratner, a major real estate developer and Ohio power broker, hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Mandel, the candidate made a point of downplaying his Republican affiliation: “I really don’t care about partisanship,” he said, according to several people who recounted the gathering.Mr. Mandel attended just one City Council meeting before deploying to Iraq as an intelligence specialist in the Marine Corps Reserve. On his return trip home, his re-entry into U.S. airspace was announced at a high school football game to a cheering crowd.Mr. Mandel played quarterback for Beachwood High School’s football team and served in Iraq with the Marine Reserve Corps.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesAt 29, he won a seat in the Ohio Legislature, where he showed a keen understanding of the conservative causes that energized party activists. At one point, he took on the State House speaker, a fellow Republican, over a policy requiring ministers who led prayers in the chamber to submit their remarks in advance. The rationale was to avoid proselytizing in the Legislature. Mr. Mandel declared it an affront to religious liberty.“You know who fought the battle for our religious freedom? A 28-year-old Jewish guy,” said Lori Viars, an abortion-rights opponent who supports Mr. Mandel’s Senate bid. “I was so pleased to see him standing up when really no others did.”Running for state treasurer in 2010, Mr. Mandel was accused of trafficking in Muslim stereotypes after a campaign ad falsely implied that Kevin Boyce, the Democratic incumbent and Black man, was a Muslim.But Mr. Mandel’s reaction to the criticism cuts a contrast with the “fighter” image that he projects today. His campaign pulled the ad and he expressed regret, both publicly and privately to Mr. Boyce.“I think he had a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and I think he knew that wasn’t a right ad,” said Mr. Boyce, whom Mr. Mandel defeated. “He had a very strong reputation then as a moderate Republican and he seemed a little more reasonable.”Mr. Mandel had pledged to serve a full four-year term as treasurer. But he took the first steps toward a Senate campaign just five months after winning the job.He won the 2012 primary by courting Tea Party activists, but ran in the general election against Senator Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Democrat, as a business-friendly Republican. Campaigning that year for Mitt Romney, the G.O.P. presidential nominee, Mr. Mandel said he believed that Ohio voters rejected “hyperpartisanship” and wanted leaders who would “rise above it all to do the right thing.”(Mr. Mandel’s appraisal of Mr. Romney, now a senator and Trump critic, has curdled. “Mitt Romney is a loser,” he said last year.)Mr. Mandel had initially endorsed Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential race, but he later backed Donald J. Trump. Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Mandel’s sharpest political pivot came after the 2016 presidential race. He had endorsed Marco Rubio, then fell in behind Mr. Trump after he captured the nomination, though he privately expressed doubts about Mr. Trump’s credibility and business acumen and sometimes gave excuses when asked to stump for him, according to friends and former Trump campaign aides.After the October release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, Mr. Mandel condemned the remarks but affirmed his support for Trump, saying he would be better than Democrats on issues like gun rights, religious liberty and the Supreme Court.Within weeks after Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Mandel was matching Mr. Trump in rhetoric and tone.At the postelection Trump rally in Cincinnati, he said Ohio’s cities would become so-called sanctuary cities “over my dead body,” over chants of “Build the wall!”Today, he calls himself Mr. Trump’s “number one ally” in Ohio.Mr. Mandel’s second Senate campaign ended in his withdrawal from the race in January 2018, citing his wife’s health. The two later divorced. The Cincinnati Enquirer is suing to unseal his divorce records. A campaign worker now involved in a relationship with Mr. Mandel has been cited in local news reports as having driven other employees to quit.In Beachwood, discussions of Mr. Mandel’s politics can be as emotionally intense as a family feud. More than a dozen people approached in the affluent suburb declined to be interviewed, some saying they did not want to have to avert their eyes when they saw his relatives at the local coffee shop or the Beechmont Country Club.Some friends and former supporters said that in more recent encounters with Mr. Mandel they had searched for signs of the young man they once supported or even pleaded with him to cease his drift into far-right-wing politics.The criticism, they said, didn’t seem to register.“He made the decision that ‘My path here is to be all-in on Trump,’” said Alan Melamed, a Democratic political consultant who first met Mr. Mandel decades ago. “Since then, he has been going down the path of ‘How far to the right can I go, and how outrageous can I be?’”“People can change,” Mr. Melamed added. “And he did.”Mr. Mandel denies that President Biden was legitimately elected, and has referred to Trump as his president.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesKevin Williams More