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      Virginia G.O.P.’s Choices for Governor: ‘Trumpy, Trumpier, Trumpiest’

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      As the party prepares to pick its nominee this weekend, the race embodies the collapse of Republican power in a state that has tilted more sharply to Democrats than perhaps any other.MIDLOTHIAN, Va. — One candidate brands himself a “conservative outlaw.” Another boasts of her bipartisan censure by the State Senate for calling the Capitol rioters “patriots.” A third, asked about Dominion voting machines — the subject of egregious conspiracy theories on the right — called them “the most important issue” of the campaign.These are not fringe candidates for the Republican nomination for Virginia governor.They are three of the leading contenders in a race that in many ways embodies the decade-long meltdown of Republican power in Virginia, a once-purple state that has gyrated more decisively toward Democrats than perhaps any in the country. In part, that is because of the hard-right focus of recent Republican officeseekers, a trend that preceded former President Donald J. Trump and became a riptide during his time in the White House.The party’s race to the right shows no sign of tempering as a preselected group of Republicans gather on Saturday at 39 sites around Virginia to choose a nominee for governor. That candidate will advance to a November general election that has traditionally been a report card on the party in power in Washington, as well as a portent of the midterms nationally.After a monthslong G.O.P. schism, Virginia Republicans decided to hold a nominating convention rather than a primary, which would attract a broader field of voters. At the party’s “disassembled convention,” as it is called, delegates who have been vetted by local Republican officials will choose the nominee, which critics say perpetuates the party’s narrow appeal.Al and Julia Kent, moderate Republican voters in the Richmond suburbs, won’t be participating.“It’s so confusing,” said Mr. Kent, an Air Force veteran who found the paperwork to register for Saturday’s nominating process to be intrusive. He said it had asked questions that “the Republican Party doesn’t need to know.”His wife, a retired preschool teacher, said, “I don’t think the Republican Party is listening to anybody — the normal class of people, what they want.”Kirk Cox, a former speaker of the House in the state’s General Assembly, is the favorite of establishment Republicans.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesThe Kents both voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, but they are worried about his legacy of divisiveness, in America and the G.O.P. “I think he’s ruined the Republican Party,” Ms. Kent said.Once a Republican stronghold, Virginia did not vote for a Democratic presidential nominee in 10 elections before 2008. But ever since 2009, Republicans have lost 13 consecutive statewide elections.Changing demographics are part of the reason: A booming economy in Northern Virginia has drawn educated, racially diverse professionals from out of state, as well as immigrants. Both groups have shifted the populous region leftward.Suburban changes have also remade greater Richmond, including Chesterfield County, south and west of the capital city, where the Kents live. President Biden carried Chesterfield County in November, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win here in 72 years.But demographics don’t tell the whole story. Republican candidates and their messages have also undermined the party’s appeal, G.O.P. elders said in interviews. In response to a changing state, Republicans have nominated ideologues who fanned polarizing social issues like abortion, illegal immigration and preserving Confederate statues. This year’s No. 1 priority for most candidates is “election integrity,” the base-rousing cause fueled by Mr. Trump’s false claims of a rigged 2020 vote.Former Gov. Bob McDonnell, the last Republican elected statewide, said his path to victory — a focus on “kitchen table issues” that appeal to “the working dad and soccer mom” — was rarely pursued by the party’s nominees anymore. “There’s been an inability for us to connect with the suburban voters,” he said.Instead, Republicans make their pitch to white voters in the state’s western mountains and other rural counties, which have turned redder as the majority of the state tilts Democratic.A poll this week by Christopher Newport University found that majorities of Virginia voters supported liberal policies, including “Medicare for all,” a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants and a Green New Deal to tackle climate change.Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said the Republican candidates for governor this year fit into three categories: “Trumpy, Trumpier, Trumpiest.”By embracing the former president, who lost Virginia by 10 percentage points last year, Republicans are trading electability in the general election for viability in a primary. “They play the Republican nominating game very well, but they go so far to the right that most people find them offensive,” Mr. Sabato said. “It’s not respectable anymore for well-educated people to identify with the Trump G.O.P.”Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with a large fortune from a career in private equity, has said election integrity is his top issue.Kendall Warner/The News & Advance, via Associated PressMany Virginia Republicans said the party’s decision to hold a nominating convention with preselected voters typified the party’s self-inflicted wounds. The move was made after a bitter public squabble among central committee members of the state party.The choice of a convention — to be held at disparate sites because the state has banned mass gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic — has historically favored candidates who appeal to party activists, rather than to the more ideologically diverse voters who show up for a primary.“We don’t just preach voter suppression, we practice it,” said former Representative Tom Davis, a moderate Republican who served seven terms in Northern Virginia. “Why don’t we try to build the party and be a welcoming party instead of being exclusionary? Frankly, it says a lot about where we are as a party.”The Republican Party of Virginia says that 53,524 people successfully signed up to participate in the convention, more than many predicted, but far fewer than the 366,000 who voted in the Republican primary for governor in 2017.There is no reliable public polling of the field because of the difficulty of surveying conventiongoers. Most insiders throw up their arms if asked which candidates have the edge.Kirk Cox, a former speaker of the House in the state’s General Assembly, is the favorite of establishment Republicans. Recognizing that he may not be the grass-roots favorite, he has appealed to be voters’ second choice. The ballot is formatted with ranked-choice voting, meaning that if no one wins more than 50 percent — as expected — the last-place finisher will be eliminated and his or her supporters’ second-choice votes will be allocated to the remaining candidates. That process will continue until a winner attains a majority. The outcome could take several days.Mr. Cox, a former high school teacher, represents a part of Chesterfield County that he calls “the bluest Republican-held district in the state,” which is his selling point to voters looking ahead to the general election.Still, party activists have not responded much to an electability message in recent years.Pete Snyder, a wealthy technology executive, is running as an “outlaw conservative.”Steve Helber/Associated PressCompetition for the Trump-centric base is split between State Senator Amanda Chase, a firebrand who was censured by fellow lawmakers in January, and Pete Snyder, a wealthy technology executive, who is the one running as the “outlaw conservative.”Ms. Chase recently visited Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida, hoping for his endorsement. She said she came away with a fist bump. The former president has not signaled a favorite in the race.The fourth top contender is Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with a large fortune from a career in private equity. He has said election integrity is his top issue.At a forum hosted by the Virginia Federation of Republican Women last month, he and other candidates were asked if they would demand an audit of the coming November election if Dominion voting machines were used. Dominion is the company spuriously accused by Mr. Trump and his allies of changing votes in 2020; after the company filed and threatened lawsuits, it won retractions from Fox News, Newsmax and other conservative outlets.In response to the Dominion question, Mr. Youngkin said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most important issue we’re going to talk about right now.” He laid out “five steps to restore our trust” in elections.A former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group, Mr. Youngkin has spent at least $5.5 million of his own money on the race. Part of his appeal to Republicans is that in the general election, he could theoretically match the spending of the leading Democrat, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.Polls show that Mr. McAuliffe, with the advantage of name recognition from an earlier term, has a hefty lead over three Democratic rivals going into their party primary on June 8.To many observers, it was the 2013 race won by Mr. McAuliffe that began the rout of Virginia Republicans. Ahead of that election, social conservatives gained control of the G.O.P. central committee, canceled a primary and chose one of their own, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, at a Tea Party-flavored convention.Mr. Cuccinelli lost to Mr. McAuliffe, a Democratic fund-raiser and friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s — thus beginning Republicans’ years in the wilderness.“That’s a direct result of the Cuccinelli heist, if you will,” said Chris Peace, a Republican former state lawmaker. “Much of the old guard, the center-right of the party, was pushed out.”Four years later, the party’s nominee for governor in 2017, Ed Gillespie, lost decisively after making a Trumpian effort to stir fear of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. The next year, the party’s Senate nominee, Corey Stewart, ran on preserving Confederate statues — and lost in a landslide.And in 2019, the G.O.P. lost control over both houses of the state General Assembly for the first time in a generation.This year, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, Republicans hope their prospects will improve in November, especially after unified Democratic control in Richmond has pushed through a broad progressive agenda.Gov. Ralph Northam, who cannot run for a second consecutive term, has signed laws that repealed the state’s voter identification requirement, imposed broad gun restrictions, made Virginia the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty and will raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2026.“Democrats have a lot to answer for that they didn’t four years ago,” Mr. Cox said. “I see it as the best issue mix for Republicans since 2009.”Bridget O’Connell, a mother of four young children in Chesterfield County, called herself “a gun activist” and said Democrats had gone too far in their restrictions, including a “red-flag” law that lets the authorities seize weapons from a person deemed a threat.Ms. O’Connell, 32, voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but she did not vote last year. She was worried that Americans would become even angrier and more polarized if he remained in office, but she did not think Mr. Biden was the answer.She will not be participating in the Republican nominating convention. She did not know she had to preregister. As for November, she might or might not vote, depending on how divisive she perceives the candidates to be.“I think the majority of people don’t want that,” she said. “I think the majority of people really are normal kind of people.” More

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      Florida and Texas Join the March to Restrict Voting Access

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      The efforts in two critical battleground states with booming populations and 70 Electoral College votes between them represent the apex of the Republican effort to roll back access to voting.Hours after Florida installed a rash of new voting restrictions, the Republican-led Legislature in Texas pressed ahead on Thursday with its own far-reaching bill that would make it one of the most difficult states in the nation in which to cast a ballot.The Texas bill would, among other restrictions, greatly empower partisan poll watchers, prohibit election officials from mailing out absentee ballot applications and impose strict punishments for those who provide assistance outside the lines of what is permissible. The State House of Representatives was scheduled to debate the measure late into the evening with the possibility that it would pass it and send it to the Senate.Gov. Greg Abbott is widely expected to sign the bill into law.Briscoe Cain, the Republican sponsor of the bill, said he had filed it “to ensure that we have an equal and uniform application of our election code and to protect people from being taken advantage of.”He was quickly challenged by Jessica González, a Democratic representative and vice chair of the House Election Committee, who argued that the bill was a solution in search of problem. She cited testimony in which the Texas secretary of state said that the 2020 election had been found to be “free, fair and secure.”Florida and Texas are critical Republican-led battleground states with booming populations and 70 Electoral College votes between them. The new measures the legislatures are putting in place represent the apex of the current Republican effort to roll back access to voting across the country following the loss of the White House amid historic turnout in the 2020 election.Earlier on Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, with great fanfare, signed his state’s new voting bill, which passed last week. Held at a Palm Beach hotel with cheering supporters in the background, the ceremony showcased Mr. DeSantis’s brash style; the governor’s office barred most journalists and provided exclusive access to Fox News, a nose-thumbing gesture of contempt toward a news media he viewed as overly critical of the bill.“Right now, I have what we think is the strongest election integrity measures in the country,” Mr. DeSantis said, though he has praised Florida’s handling of last November’s elections.Ohio, another state under complete Republican control, introduced a new omnibus voting bill on Thursday that would further limit drop boxes in the state, limit ballot collection processes and reduce early in-person voting by one day, while also making improvements to access such as an online absentee ballot request portal and automatic registration at motor vehicle offices.Iowa and Georgia have already passed bills that not only impose new restrictions but grant those states’ legislatures greater control over the electoral process.Republicans have pressed forward with these bills over the protests of countless Democrats, civil rights groups, faith leaders, voting rights groups and multinational corporations, displaying an increasing no-apologies aggressiveness in rolling back access to voting.The efforts come as Republicans in Washington are seeking to oust Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership position in the House Republican caucus for her continued rejection of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and as Republicans at a party convention in Utah booed Senator Mitt Romney for his criticism of the former president.Together, the Republican actions reflect how deeply the party has embraced the so-called Big Lie espoused by Mr. Trump through his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after he signed a new voting bill into law during an event closed to all news outlets except Fox News.Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated PressDemocrats, gerrymandered into statehouse minorities and having drastically underperformed expectations in recent state legislative elections, have few options for resisting the Republican efforts to make voting harder.In Georgia and Texas, progressive groups applied pressure on local businesses to speak out against the voting measures. But Republican legislators have been conditioned during the Trump era to pay less attention to their traditional benefactors in chambers of commerce and more attention to the party’s grass roots, who are aligned with the former president and adhere to his lies about the 2020 election.And in Florida, Democrats didn’t even manage to organize major local companies to weigh in on the voting law.“Elections have consequences both ways, and we are living in the consequences of the Trumpiest governor in America here in Florida,” said Sean Shaw, a former state representative who was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Florida attorney general. “The ultimate strategy is, what are we going to do in 2022? How are we going to beat the dude?”Mr. Shaw, who offered an extended laugh when first asked what his party’s strategy was for combating Florida’s new voting law, said he was planning to start a campaign this month to place referendums on the state’s 2022 ballots for constitutional amendments that would make voting easier.“We are not Mississippi or Alabama,” he said. “We are not that kind of conservative state, but we are governed by this mini-Trump person. All we can do as Democrats is let the people know what they’ve got.”Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer, filed a lawsuit nine minutes after Mr. DeSantis had signed the legislation, saying that the new Florida law violated the First and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.“It’s not true that states could not change their voting laws whenever they want,” Mr. Elias said in an interview Thursday. “You have to weigh the burden on the voter with the interest of the state.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Tom Perez, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, said a case could be made that the new voting laws would improperly make it harder for Black and Hispanic people to vote, and he called on the U.S. Justice Department to take the lead in the legal battle against the Republican-passed laws.“Ten years ago when I was running the Civil Rights Division, the Georgia law would never have seen the light of day,” Mr. Perez said Thursday. “The Justice Department needs to get involved, and having the imprimatur of the Justice Department sends a really important message about our values.”A protest against new voting restrictions at the Texas Capitol in Austin on Thursday.Eric Gay/Associated PressMr. Biden’s nominee to lead the Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, had a Senate hearing last month but has not yet been confirmed. Mr. Biden said in March, after the Georgia law had been signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, that the Justice Department was “taking a look” at how best to protect voting rights. A White House official said that the president, in his comments, had been assuming the issue was one the department would review.Democrats argued on Thursday that the Republican crackdowns on voting in Florida and Texas had made it more urgent for the Senate to pass the For the People Act, which would radically reshape the way elections are run, make far-reaching changes to campaign finance laws and redistricting and mitigate the new state laws.“We are witnessing a concerted effort across this country to spread voter suppression,” Jena Griswald, the Colorado secretary of state, said Thursday on a call with progressive groups in which the new Florida law was condemned. “The For the People Act levels the playing field and provides clear guidance, a floor of what is expected throughout the nation.”The scene in Austin on Thursday was tense, as Republicans in the House decided to replace the language of a bill that passed the senate, known as SB 7, with the language of a House voting bill, known as HB 6. The swap removed some of the more onerous restrictions that had originally been proposed, like banning drive-through voting, banning 24-hour voting and adding limitations on voting machine allocation that could have led to a reduction of polling locations in densely populated areas.But the bill before the House included a host of new restrictions. It bans election officials from proactively mailing out absentee ballot applications or absentee ballots; sets strict new rules for assisting voters and greatly raises the punishment for running afoul of those rules; greatly empowers partisan poll watchers; and makes it much harder to remove a partisan poll watcher for bad behavior. The expansion of the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers has raised voter intimidation concerns among civil rights groups.In the debate Thursday evening, Mr. Cain, the sponsor of the House bill, was unable to cite a single instance of voter fraud in Texas. (The attorney general found 16 instances of minor voting fraud after 22,000 hours of investigation.)Democratic lawmakers also seized on Texas’ history of discriminatory voting legislation and likened the current bill to the some of the state’s racist electoral practices of the past.“In light of that history, can you tell me if or why you did not do a racial impact analysis on how this legislation would affect people of color?” said Rafael Anchía, a Democratic representative from Dallas County.Mr. Cain admitted that he had not consulted with the attorney general’s office or conducted a study of how the bill might affect people of color, but he defended the bill and said it would not have a discriminatory impact.Patricia Mazzei More

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      Arizona Election Results Review Is Riddled With Flaws, Says Official

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      Arizona’s top election official said the effort ordered by Republican state senators leaves ballots unattended and lacks basic safeguards to protect the process from manipulation.Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting.All of these issues with the Republican-backed re-examination of the November election results from Arizona’s most populous county were laid out this week by Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a scathing six-page letter. Ms. Hobbs, called the process “a significant departure from standard best practices.”“Though conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly cheering on these types of inspections — and perhaps providing financial support because of their use — they do little other than further marginalize the professionalism and intent of this ‘audit,’” she wrote to Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state and the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting it.The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds. But it has become so troubled that the Department of Justice also expressed concerns this week in a letter saying that it might violate federal laws.“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.The scene playing out in Arizona is perhaps the most off-the-rails episode in the Republican Party’s escalating effort to support former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that he won the election. Four months after Congress certified the results of the presidential election, local officials around the country are continuing to provide oxygen for Mr. Trump’s obsession that he beat Joseph R. Biden Jr. last fall.In Arizona, the review is proving to be every bit as problematic as skeptics had imagined.Last month, the Arizona Republic editorial board called for the state’s G.O.P. Senate majority to stop “abusing its authority.”“Republicans in the Arizona Legislature have set aside dollars, hired consultants, procured the hardware and software to conduct what they call ‘an audit’ of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County,” the editorial said. “What they don’t have is the moral authority to make it credible.”Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, said the process had ignored long-established safeguards against mistakes or deliberate manipulation of the election results.Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinRepublican state senators ordered a review of the election in Maricopa County, whose 2.1 million ballots accounted for two-thirds of the entire vote statewide, in December, after some supporters of Mr. Trump refused to accept his 10,457-vote loss in Arizona. Democrats had flipped the county, giving Mr. Biden more than enough votes to ensure his victory statewide.The senators later assigned oversight of the effort to a Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had publicly embraced conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines had been rigged to deliver the state to Mr. Biden. Since then, supporters of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election story line have been given broad access to the site of the review, while election experts, the press and independent observers have struggled to gain access, sometimes resorting to going to court.In one much-noted instance, Anthony Kern, a former state representative photographed on the Capitol steps on the day of the insurrection — and who was on the Maricopa ballot both as a legislative candidate and as a presidential elector — was hired to help recount ballots.Among other concerns, Ms. Hobbs’s letter contended that stacks of ballots were not properly protected and that there was no apparent procedure for preventing the commingling of tallied and untallied ballots.The security violations spotted by observers, the letter stated, included ballots left unattended on tables and ballots counted using scrap paper instead of official tally sheets. Counters receive “on the fly” training. Ballots from separate stacks are mixed together. Software problems cause ballot images to get lost. The letter also noted that some aspects of the process “appear better suited for chasing conspiracy theories than as a part of a professional audit.”For instance, some ballots are receiving microscope and ultraviolet-light examinations, apparently to address unfounded claims that fraudulent ballots contained watermarks that were visible under UV light — or that thousands of fraudulent ballots were flown in from Southeast Asia using paper with bamboo fibers.John Brakey, an official helping supervise the effort, said high-powered microscopes were being used to search for evidence of fake ballots, according to a video interview with the CBS News affiliate in Phoenix.“There’s accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in, to Arizona, and it was stuffed into the box,” he said in a taped interview. “And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia, OK. And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.”“I don’t believe any of that,” he added. “I’m just saying it’s part of the mystery that we want to un-gaslight people about.”Republicans in the Senate signed a contract agreeing to pay $150,000 for the vote review, a figure that many said then would not cover its cost. A variety of outside groups later started fund-raisers to offset extra expenses, including the right-wing One America News cable channel and an Arizona state representative, Mark Finchem, who argues the election was stolen. How much in outside donations has been collected — and who the donors are — is unclear.The letter from the secretary of state also said that equipment and software being used to display images of ballots had not been tested by a federal laboratory or certified by the federal Election Assistance Commission, as state law requires. That left open the possibility, the letter said, that the systems could have been preloaded with false images of ballots or that the software had been designed to manipulate ballot images — concerns similar to those that believers in a stolen election had themselves raised.Ms. Hobbs also said the procedures for checking the accuracy of the effort included no “reliable process for ensuring consistency and resolving discrepancies” among the three separate counts of ballots. It also appeared that the task of entering recount results into an electronic spreadsheet was performed by a single person rather than a team of people from both political parties, the letter stated.Mr. Bennett, the liaison between Republicans in the State Senate and the company conducting the vote review, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But Ms. Hobbs concluded her letter to him by saying, “you know that our elections are governed by a complex framework of laws and procedures designed to ensure accuracy, security, and transparency. You also must therefore know that the procedures governing this audit ensure none of those things.“I’m not sure what compelled you to oversee this audit, but I’d like to assume you took this role with the best of intentions. It is those intentions I appeal to now: either do it right, or don’t do it at all.” More

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      Stefanik Moves to Oust Cheney, Resurfacing False Election Claims

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      Republicans say Liz Cheney, their No. 3, is being targeted because she won’t stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies. Her would-be replacement is campaigning on them.WASHINGTON — As House Republicans have made the case for ousting Representative Liz Cheney, their No. 3, from their leadership ranks, they have insisted that it is not her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies that they find untenable, but her determination to be vocal about it.But on Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have anointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, loudly resurrected his false narrative, citing “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to cast doubt on the results.“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, in the first of a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of the former president.The comments, Ms. Stefanik’s first in public since she announced she was taking on Ms. Cheney, reflected how central the former president’s election lies have become to the Republican Party message, even as its leaders insist they are determined to move beyond them and focus on attacking Democrats as radical, big-spending socialists before the 2022 midterm elections.Far from staying quiet about the false election claims on Thursday, Ms. Stefanik effectively campaigned on them, describing Mr. Trump on Mr. Bannon’s show as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” and asserting that Republicans would work with him as “one team.”“The job of the conference chair is to represent the majority of the House Republicans, and the vast majority of the House Republicans support President Trump, and they support his focus on election integrity and election security,” Ms. Stefanik later told Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump. The job, she said in an unmistakable jab at Ms. Cheney, “is not to attack members of the conference and attack President Trump.”While Ms. Stefanik avoided claiming outright that the election was stolen, she praised the Arizona audit, a Republican-led endeavor that critics in both parties have described as a blow to democratic norms and a political embarrassment, as “incredibly important.” She said recounting votes there and scrutinizing how Pennsylvania and other states administered the 2020 election were “valid, important questions and issues that the American people deserve policy proposals and answers on.”It was a stark contrast from Ms. Cheney, who has relentlessly upbraided the former president for falsely claiming the election was stolen and on Wednesday beseeched Republican lawmakers in a scathing opinion piece to excise him from the party. Ms. Cheney voted against her party’s efforts to invalidate the election results on Jan. 6, while Ms. Stefanik — like most House Republicans — voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Biden.Some Republicans, including the hard-right lawmakers who led a charge to try to remove Ms. Cheney in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, readily conceded that they were unwilling to tolerate dissent from their party leaders.“All the polling indicates that President Trump is still the titleholder,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Fox News. Ms. Cheney “can tell what her version of the truth is, but she can’t do it as the leader of the Republican Party in Congress.”For many Republicans, however, the calculation to boot Ms. Cheney, a strict conservative, in favor of Ms. Stefanik, who has a far more moderate voting record but has wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Trump, is more complicated.In interviews with lawmakers and party operatives, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the internal turmoil, several expressed concern about the optics of purging the only female member of leadership and a daughter of a conservative dynasty for her resolve to call out Mr. Trump’s lies. They worried that the move to oust Ms. Cheney could spook donors who might chafe at sending money to Republicans so closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, and ultimately voters who might be alienated by the party’s refusal to brook dissent.But they were also wrestling with the political downsides of keeping Ms. Cheney in her post, worried that they would continue to be forced to answer for her unyielding broadsides against the myth of a stolen election that many of their voters believe. Several lawmakers privately lamented her stubbornness and said they wished Ms. Cheney would focus solely on attacking Democrats.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have annointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, has loudly resurrected Mr. Trump’s false election narrative.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThat has been the approach taken by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who was initially vocal in his criticism of Mr. Trump and support of Ms. Cheney, but more recently has refused to broach either subject.On Thursday, for the second day in a row, he sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney, saying he was solely focused on challenging Mr. Biden and Democrats, and “looking forward — not backward.”“Members do not want to have to defend themselves against attacks from members of their own leadership team,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former House leadership aide. “The primary job of the House Republican Conference chair is to set up and facilitate the weekly press conferences conducted by the House Republican leadership. If you go out of your way to embarrass your leaders at those press conferences, you are not doing your job and you won’t last in that position very long.”Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a rising freshman star who voted against her party’s attempt to invalidate the election results, came out on Thursday in support of Ms. Stefanik, saying she respected Ms. Cheney’s “strong conservative record and service to our country” but wanted relief from the infighting that had plagued the conference.“If Republicans are divided, and not focusing all of our efforts against radical Democrat policies, Speaker Pelosi will remain in power,” Ms. Hinson said in a statement that called Ms. Stefanik “the right person to unify and lead our conference at this time.”Others appeared torn. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who had vocally condemned Mr. Trump for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and warned that the Republican Party could not define itself solely around the former president, said she was tired of “having these fights publicly.”“I want to move forward,” Ms. Mace told Fox Business’s Neil Cavuto. “I want to win back the House in a year and a half. We can get the majority back, and we’ve got to stop fighting with each other in public.”Ms. Mace warned that if the party continued “to make our party and our country about one person, and not about hard-working Americans in the this country, we’re going to continue to lose elections.” Asked whether she was referring to Mr. Trump or Ms. Cheney, Ms. Mace replied, “All of the above.”Some arch-conservative Republicans who are eager to oust Ms. Cheney — many of whom have despised her hawkish foreign policy views for years — have been quietly skeptical of Ms. Stefanik despite her endorsement from Mr. Trump, noting the low rankings conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Conservative Union have given her. On Wednesday night, the anti-tax Club for Growth opposed her campaign, branding her “a liberal.”“House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group wrote in a statement on Twitter.But despite the hand-wringing among the rank-and-file, by Thursday, Ms. Stefanik’s allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, publicly predicted that she would be conference chairwoman as soon as Wednesday, when Republicans plan to meet.“For sure the votes are there,” Mr. Jordan said on Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican Party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”Carl Hulse More

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      In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies

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      House Republicans were lobbying to replace Representative Liz Cheney, who has vocally called out Donald J. Trump’s lies, with Representative Elise Stefanik, who has embraced them.WASHINGTON — Top Republicans moved swiftly on Wednesday to purge Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks for vocally rejecting Donald J. Trump’s election lies, laying the groundwork to install a replacement who has embraced his false claims of voting fraud.The move to push out Ms. Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a Trump loyalist who voted to overturn President Biden’s victory in key states, reflected how thoroughly the party’s orthodoxy has come to be defined by fealty to the former president and a tolerance for misinformation, rather than policy principles.“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” Ms. Cheney wrote in a searing opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Wednesday evening. She framed her fate as a referendum on the party’s future and warned that Republicans must “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”Ms. Cheney, 54, is a conservative who rarely defected from Mr. Trump’s policy positions in Congress, but she has refused to absolve him or the party of their roles in fomenting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol with groundless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Ms. Stefanik, 36, is more moderate and has more often parted ways with Republicans over her years in Congress, but she has emerged recently as one of Mr. Trump’s most vociferous defenders, willing to indulge and even amplify those claims.After days of quiet discussions about ousting Ms. Cheney, the effort erupted into open Republican warfare on Wednesday morning. Party leaders and Mr. Trump himself publicly boosted Ms. Stefanik, both women issued defiant statements about their intentions and dueling factions in the party competed to frame an episode with broad implications for the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.By day’s end, even President Biden had weighed in on what he called a “mini-rebellion” in the Republican ranks, arguing that the party was plagued by an inability to define itself.The turmoil illustrated how heavily Mr. Trump still looms over the Republican Party, where a pilgrimage to pay homage to the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., has become a required stop for elected leaders and efforts to restrict voting — in the name of his claims of a stolen election — are proliferating around the country.What was clear on Wednesday was that House Republicans were headed for a confrontation, as soon as next week, that now appears likely to result in Ms. Cheney’s firing from her leadership post. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, became the highest-ranking figure to call for her removal, endorsing Ms. Stefanik as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, lobbied behind the scenes on the New Yorker’s behalf.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, a spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Support from Mr. McCarthy, in particular, had helped save Ms. Cheney from a similar challenge in February after her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. But the top leader, like rank-and-file Republicans, had grown increasingly frustrated in recent weeks as Ms. Cheney continued to call out Mr. Trump in media interviews and took shots at her own party for tolerating his falsehoods, including during a party retreat in Orlando last week.By Wednesday, as it became clear that Mr. McCarthy had turned on her, Ms. Cheney was hitting back at him personally, noting that while the leader had initially condemned Mr. Trump for failing to call off his supporters during the Jan. 6 riot, “he has since changed his story.”Mr. Trump, who had been furious at Mr. McCarthy and others for backing Ms. Cheney earlier this year, sought to drive a nail in her political coffin on Wednesday. In a statement, he derided her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsed Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, a fourth-term congresswoman representing New York’s Adirondack region, had initially been wary of appearing as if she was pushing Ms. Cheney out for personal gain. But mere minutes after receiving Mr. Trump’s support, she abandoned any hint of reticence and took her campaign to replace Ms. Cheney public. “We are unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!” she wrote on Twitter.Seeing votes stacking up against Ms. Cheney, her supporters said she would not fight the drive to dethrone her; unlike in February, she has not tried to rally her allies on or off Capitol Hill. But they said she also did not intend to go quietly.Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, perhaps Ms. Cheney’s most outspoken supporter, demanded on Twitter that every lawmaker “go on the record as to how they will vote on @RepLizCheney in operation #coverupJan6 and concerned donors should take notes.”Ms. Cheney herself sought to appeal to like-minded Republicans in her opinion piece, warning that they risked driving the party toward irrelevance for short-term gain.“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney wrote. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Yet she found few other Republicans willing to defend her publicly, even among those who forcefully condemned Mr. Trump after Jan. 6 and sought to wrestle control of the party away from him.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader who vocally stood behind Ms. Cheney in the past and had previously made clear he wanted to purge Mr. Trump from the party, declined to address her predicament on Wednesday.“One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this administration,” he said, repeating the sentence almost word for word in response to follow-up questions about the move to oust Ms. Cheney.Weighing in on Wednesday from the White House, Mr. Biden, who has sought out Republican support to pass a series of sprawling infrastructure plans, expressed regret about what he characterized as a party at risk of imploding.“We badly need a Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said. “We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system.”In rallying around Ms. Stefanik, Republicans were turning to a figure who has embodied elements of the party’s transformation since she arrived in the House in 2015, as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time. A Harvard graduate and former aide to President George W. Bush and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Stefanik has shifted easily from the old Republican establishment to a new one forming around Mr. Trump.Representative Liz Cheney has refused to absolve Mr. Trump or the Republican Party of their roles in fomenting the assault on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWhile she began as one of the more moderate members of the Republican Conference — her voting record is far less conservative than Ms. Cheney’s, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation — Ms. Stefanik became one of Mr. Trump’s most strident loyalists. That role has buoyed her rapid ascension and brought in millions of dollars in campaign donations.In a lengthy, error-riddled statement published on Jan. 6 explaining why she would vote to invalidate the election, Ms. Stefanik repeated a number of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread improprieties, including incorrectly claiming that “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased and otherwise unauthorized voters” in one county in Georgia alone.Her metamorphosis mirrored that of her upstate New York district, where voters had supported a string of Democratic presidential candidates — including Barack Obama twice — before throwing their backing to Mr. Trump in 2016.Yet Ms. Stefanik has also been at the forefront of her party’s efforts to improve its standing and representation among women at a time when Mr. Trump’s caustic style threatened to alienate them and further narrow Republicans’ appeal. Her political action committee supported several of the current freshman class’s rising stars, all of them women who almost single-handedly secured the party’s impressive gains against Democrats in last year’s elections.“I know I am here in Congress because Republican women like Elise Stefanik paved the way,” said Representative Young Kim, Republican of California. “She saw the importance of helping women candidates to make it out of the primary if Republicans were serious about electing more women and growing the G.O.P. base.”Her allies argue that Ms. Stefanik’s ascendancy will bolster the party as Republicans seek to win back the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, describing her as a disciplined messenger with easy mastery over policy.“They are going to find a very smart, charming and confident younger member of Congress,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked with Ms. Stefanik as an aide to Mr. Ryan in 2012. “And I think that is a good thing for the Republican Party right now.”In a glowing blurb for Time magazine’s “100 Next” list in 2019, Mr. Ryan, who has also backed Ms. Cheney, hailed Ms. Stefanik as the future of the Republican Party.“Like any good architect, Elise sees around the corner,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “She is thinking about the big picture when the crowd is scrambling to capitalize on the controversy of the day.” More

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      The Truth Is About to Set Liz Cheney Free

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      The No. 3 Republican in the House faces a party uprising over her acknowledgment of reality.When Senator Joseph McCarthy was caught on national television pressing a case built on falsehoods against the supposed threat of communism in the U.S. Army, it was his breaking point.Edward R. Murrow gave voice to a frustrated public as it awoke to the bamboozling, and McCarthy’s political career was done.When President Donald Trump perpetrated the false narrative that his re-election had been stolen from him, leading his supporters into what became a fatal attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was booted from Twitter and Facebook. But he didn’t lose most of his support.And for the Republican Party’s rank-and-file, whose modern-day Murrow is Tucker Carlson, that falsehood is still the dominant narrative.That fact is hitting home hard on Wednesday for Representative Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, whose refusal to bow to Trump’s lies has put her on the brink of being purged from G.O.P. leadership. In a tweet on Monday, Cheney called out Trump and anyone promoting his stolen election narrative for “spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”For House Republicans in thrall to a Trump-loyalist base, and who just weeks earlier had voted down an attempt to depose her, Cheney’s challenge to the story line was a bridge too far. The effort to remove her regained momentum, and on Wednesday Representative Steve Scalise, the Republican whip, became the highest-ranking member of his party to publicly support Cheney’s ouster.Cheney has not shied from the fight: Late Wednesday afternoon, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post entreating her fellow Republicans to respect “the rule of law,” and to be mindful of the eyes of history. “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” she wrote.In the process, they will decide on her fate: House Republicans are expected to hold a vote as early as next week on whether to relieve her of her leadership post.“This is not good for the party, certainly not good for a party that has had problems with suburban women, educated women — to go at somebody because they’re speaking what most of them know is the truth,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman who represented a district in suburban Virginia until she was swept out by the anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. “Ronald Reagan, who is why I became a Republican, certainly allowed for dissent in his own party, and for people to be critical. I think it’s a very disturbing development.”Representative Elise Stefanik, who hails from an upstate New York district, has emerged as the party’s choice to replace Cheney, and her own history works as a metaphor for what’s going on with the G.O.P. more broadly.Stefanik flipped her district red in 2014, and she had amassed a relatively moderate record until her aggressive questioning of Democratic witnesses during Trump’s first impeachment trial, which earned her direct praise from him. She took his endorsement and ran with it, and in the past year-plus has become a staunch ally to his cause. She disputed the election results in Pennsylvania in a House vote on Jan. 6, and she later voted against impeaching him.Her policies, of course, are another thing entirely. The 36-year-old Stefanik actually voted with Trump less often during his four years as president than Cheney did. Notably, she voted against his signature tax cut bill, which Republicans are now hastening to defend.Pool photo by Caroline BrehmanBut the line that’s being drawn in the Republican sand isn’t about policy. It’s about loyalty to a narrative of Trump’s creation, and in G.O.P. primaries across the country, contravening can be fatal.“The challenge is that members don’t want to be primaried,” said Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster. “These seats are mostly drawn as Democratic or Republican seats, so the way to lose isn’t in November, it’s in a primary.”Still, he added, “the difference between being a majority or a minority is decided in November. But politicians, understandably so, think of themselves first, and what’s good for me is good for the party.”In Texas, a primary election last weekend in a suburban House district set up a confrontation between the two wings of the party. A Trump-backed Republican, Susan Wright, won nearly 20 percent of the vote, while Jake Ellzey, a Republican who has the endorsement of former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, came in second place. The two candidates now advance to a runoff, and here’s the rub: All the district’s voters will be eligible to participate, not just Republicans.In the Senate, most Republican lawmakers have done their best to look away from the 211-car pileup taking place in the House Republican Conference, and have mostly moved on from discussions of the 2020 election. But there’s far less willingness to do so among House Republicans, whose every-two-year election cycle keeps them in closer conversation with the party’s base.And a flamboyant coterie of relatively young Republican lawmakers in the House has begun to emerge, led in part by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a frequent presence on Fox News and prominent Trump ally, who has helped put Stefanik in position for her ascent.Just a month ago, Cheney seemed to have survived the attempt on her political life; her allies in the Wyoming state legislature beat back an effort to change election rules that would have imperiled her in the 2022 primary. The former Republican speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner committed to helping her fund-raise.Cheney had decided against a run for Senate last year because she saw an auspicious future in the House leadership, possibly even as speaker.But now she finds herself at odds with a party whose leader is silent in the press but still a fan favorite among the party faithful. “A guy who got 47 percent is not the future of our party,” Comstock said, referring to Trump’s total in the 2020 election. “The toxic personality divided our country and is now dividing our party.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.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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      Scalise Backs Ouster of Cheney from House G.O.P. Leadership

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      Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, hit back at leaders of her own party on Wednesday, warning her colleagues that “history is watching” as they consider expelling her from their leadership ranks for continuing to reject Donald J. Trump’s election lies.Ms. Cheney’s broadside, published Wednesday afternoon as an opinion essay in The Washington Post, came as the top two House Republicans were working to oust and replace her with a Trump loyalist, and after the former president weighed in demanding Republicans dethrone her. At issue is Ms. Cheney’s insistence on repeatedly rebuking her party for its role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and for embracing Mr. Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.In the column, Ms. Cheney warned that the Republican Party was at a “turning point,” and suggested that some Republicans were playing a dangerous game by continuing to support “the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney said. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Ms. Cheney also lashed out at Mr. McCarthy, noting that he initially agreed that Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the riot, only to walk the remarks back.“History is watching. Our children are watching,” Ms. Cheney concluded. “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”Ms. Cheney’s column effectively acted as a rejoinder to Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, who on Wednesday morning became the highest-ranking party figure to openly call for Ms. Cheney’s ouster and the elevation of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York in her place as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking position. Lawmakers said Mr. McCarthy was also working the phones behind the scenes, urging colleagues to support Ms. Stefanik, a close ally and rising Republican star.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, Mr. Scalise’s spokeswoman. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Mr. Trump, who has seethed over Ms. Cheney’s criticism of him, piled on a short time later, deriding her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsing Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote in a statement. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, who had been quietly building support among colleagues behind the scenes, wasted no time after Mr. Trump’s endorsement in declaring her intentions publicly. In a post on Twitter just minutes after his statement, she thanked him for his support and said Republicans were “unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!”It was a remarkable show of force by the party’s top leaders to run out a once-popular figure now deemed unacceptable by fellow Republicans because she has rejected Mr. Trump’s lies and refused to absolve him or the party of its role in perpetuating the false claims of a fraudulent election that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The fate of Ms. Cheney, who survived a February bid to oust her after she voted to favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for his role in stirring up the riot, has once again become a bellwether for the direction of the Republican Party. It has implications for Republicans’ chances of wresting control of the House in 2022, and has become a test of whether loyalty to Trump and a tolerance for misinformation have overtaken conservatism as the party’s guiding orthodoxy.The turmoil could come to a head as early as next week, when House Republicans are expected to meet and could call a vote to replace Ms. Cheney. More

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      Why Democratic Departures From the House Have Republicans Salivating

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      A growing number of Democrats in battleground districts are either retiring or leaving to seek higher office, imperiling the party’s control of the House and President Biden’s expansive agenda. WASHINGTON — With 18 months left before the midterms, a spate of Democratic departures from the House is threatening to erode the party’s slim majority in the House and imperil President Biden’s far-reaching policy agenda.In the past two months, five House Democrats from competitive districts have announced they won’t seek re-election next year. They include Representative Charlie Crist of Florida, who on Tuesday launched a campaign for governor, and Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who will run for the Senate seat being vacated by Rob Portman. Three other Democrats will leave vacant seats in districts likely to see significant change once they are redrawn using the data from the 2020 Census, and several more are weighing bids for higher office.An early trickle of retirements from House members in competitive districts is often the first sign of a coming political wave. In the 2018 cycle, 48 House Republicans didn’t seek re-election — and 14 of those vacancies were won by Democrats. Now Republicans are salivating over the prospect of reversing that dynamic and erasing the Democrats six-seat advantage.“The two biggest headaches of any cycle are redistricting and retirements and when you have both in one cycle it’s a migraine,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2012 and 2014.Democrats face other vexing challenges as well: Republican legislators control redistricting in key states where they can draw boundaries in their favor. Reapportionment alone — with red states picking up additional seats — could provide Republicans the seats they need to control the House. And historic political trends almost always work against the president’s party in midterm elections.The prospect of losing the House majority adds a greater level of urgency for the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats eager to push through expansive policy proposals. It also raises questions about the staying power of Democrats, after an election in which they barely ousted an unpopular president while suffering a surprising number of downballot losses in races they expected to win. The results appeared to blunt the momentum the party generated in 2018 when it picked up 41 seats in the House. Democrats’ failure to qualify for the runoff in a Dallas-area special House election Saturday only added to the party’s anxiety. While Republicans were always heavy favorites to retain the seat, which became vacant when Representative Ron Wright died from the coronavirus, not placing a candidate among the top two finishers is likely to hurt recruiting efforts, Democratic officials said.This could be just the beginning of the Democratic departures: The high season for congressional retirements typically comes in early fall after members spend the August recess taking the political temperature of their districts. Further complicating the picture for Democrats is the Census Bureau’s months-long delay in completing the reapportionment process and delivering to states the final demographic and block-level population data. That has left the House committees in a state of suspended animation, unable in many instances to recruit candidates and devise electoral strategy. While each day brings announcements of new 2022 candidates, many are not being specific about which district they’re running in and dozens more are waiting until the fall, when they see the new boundaries, to decide whether they will formalize their campaigns.“It’s like going to war on a battlefield but you don’t know where you’re fighting, when you’re fighting or who you’re fighting,” Mr. Israel said.Representative Charlie Crist, Democrat of Florida, announced on Tuesday that he would run for governor.Chris O’Meara/Associated PressThe largest concentration of competitive and vacant House seats may be in Central Florida. In addition to Mr. Crist, who represents St. Petersburg, two other Democratic representatives, Stephanie Murphy of Winter Park and Val Demings of Orlando, are weighing runs for statewide office. All three now hold seats in districts President Biden carried handily last November, but with Republicans in control of Florida’s redistricting process, the state’s congressional map is likely to soon be much better for Republicans than it is now.Each of them would be exceedingly expensive for a new candidate to run in because of the high cost of media in Florida, further stretching the party’s resources in what is expected to be a difficult election cycle.“You have to assume that because Republicans get to control reapportionment, that it’s not going to get any easier,” said Adam Goodman, a Florida-based Republican media strategist, who predicted the G.O.P. would take two of the three seats now held by Mr. Crist, Ms. Demings and Ms. Murphy. “The Crist seat — it took a Charlie Crist type of person to hold that seat in ’20. The Democrats won’t have that person this time.” Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner who is weighing her own run for governor, echoed that assessment as she tweaked Mr. Crist at her own news conference that competed for attention with his campaign launch. “It’s a time when we need his voice and his vote up in Washington, D.C.,” Ms. Fried said. “His seat is one that only probably Charlie Crist can hold on to, so really would like to have encouraged him to stay in Congress.”Democratic strategists said it is hardly unusual for members of Congress to seek a promotion to statewide office. “A lot of us lived through 2009 and 2010 and we’re not seeing that level of rush to the exits that we did then,” said Ian Russell, a former D.C.C.C. official. “It’s not surprising that members of Congress look to run statewide, that has been happening since the founding of the republic and doesn’t indicate a bigger thing.” Representative Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, will run for an open Senate seat next year.Sarah Silbiger/ReutersRepublicans, optimistic about being on offense for the first time since 2014, cited potential pickup opportunities in western Pennsylvania, where Representative Conor Lamb is weighing a run for the state’s open Senate contest; New Hampshire, where Representative Chris Pappas may run for governor rather than seek re-election to a district likely to become more Republican; and Iowa, where Representative Cindy Axne told the Storm Lake Times last month that her first two options for 2022 are running for Senate or governor. “House Democrats are sprinting to the exits because they know their chances of retaining the majority grow dimmer by the day,” said Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Representative Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, who last year entered an alcohol rehabilitation program after falling on the Washington Metro, also chose not to seek re-election. Representative Cheri Bustos, whose district covering a swath of Central and Northwest Illinois swung to Donald J. Trump, announced her retirement last week. Last year Ms. Bustos led the House Democrats’ campaign arm through a disappointing cycle, when the party lost 13 seats after they expected to flip Republican-held districts. Along with Florida, Republicans are expected to draw themselves more favorable congressional districts in Georgia, where Democrats hold two competitive districts in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, and Texas, which will add two new seats for the 2022 elections. Mr. Ryan’s Democratic district in northeast Ohio is likely to disappear when Ohio Republicans draw a map with one fewer House seat, and Representative Filemon Vela of Texas, whose Rio Grande Valley district became eight percentage points more Republican from 2016 to 2020, chose retirement rather than compete in what was likely to be his first competitive re-election bid. “This is where Democratic underperformance in 2020 really begins to hinder Democrats downballot,” said Ken Spain, a veteran of the House Republicans’ campaign arm. “Republicans fared well at the state level last cycle and now they’re going to reap the benefits of many of those red states drawing a disproportionate number of the seats.” Because Republicans hold majorities in more state legislatures, and Democrats and voters in key states such as California, Colorado and Virginia have delegated mapmaking authority to nonpartisan commissions, the redistricting process alone could shift up to five or six seats to Republicans, potentially enough to seize the majority if they don’t flip any other Democratic-held seats. Democrats are expected to press their advantages where they can, particularly in Illinois and New York, states that lost one House district each in last week’s reapportionment. New York’s new map is certain to take a seat from Republicans in Upstate New York, and one Republican-held seat in Central Illinois may be redrawn to be Democratic while another is eliminated. For the moment there are more House Republicans, six, not seeking re-election, than the five House Democrats retiring or running for aiming for a promotion to statewide office. But of the Republicans, only Representatives Lee Zeldin and Tom Reed of New York represent districts that are plausibly competitive in 2022. With Democrats holding supermajority control of the New York State Legislature, Mr. Zeldin, who is running for governor, and Mr. Reed, who retired while apologizing for a past allegation of groping, could both see their districts drawn to become far more competitive for Democrats. Reid J. Epstein reported from Washington and Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami. More