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    Why Georgia is Bracing for More Political Hurricanes

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Political Hurricane Blew Through Georgia. Now It’s Bracing for More.The country’s most hotly contested state has calmed down after months of drama, court fights and national attention (even the death threats have slowed). But new storms are on the horizon.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, who became a target of former President Donald J. Trump for defending the validity of the state’s election results.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesMarch 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETATLANTA — The death threats finally appeared to be subsiding, Brad Raffensperger was happy to report.“I haven’t gotten one in a while,” said Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s embattled secretary of state, expressing hope that political passions might be cooling off in the state — though “cooling off” is relative in the country’s most heated battleground.Not since Florida’s presidential recount of 2000 has one state’s election cycle drawn so much national — even international — scrutiny. Polarizing figures, expensive campaigns and breathless plotlines have become a seemingly permanent feature of elections here. Analysts have identified Georgia as a major bellwether of the nation’s cultural, economic and demographic realignment, as well as a prime battlefield for showdowns over such fundamental civic matters as the right to vote.When exactly did this reliably Republican and relatively sleepy political sphere become such a vital center of contention and intrigue?Why does seemingly every politically interested observer in America have — à la Ray Charles — Georgia on their mind?The landmark event was President Biden’s becoming the first Democrat at the top of the ticket to carry Georgia since 1992, in what was the most closely decided state in last year’s presidential race. Former President Donald J. Trump appeared especially fixated on the state and made it the main focus of his efforts to reverse the results of the national election. Georgia then played host to double runoff contests in January that flipped control of the Senate to Democrats.The fervor and spotlight will endure: The state is a focal point for the nation’s persistent voting rights battle, as Republicans move swiftly to roll back ballot access in what opponents say is clear targeting of Black voters with echoes of Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement.In 2022, the Peach State’s race for governor is likely to include perhaps the Democratic Party’s leading champion of voting rights, Stacey Abrams, in a replay of the 2018 grudge match between her and Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican incumbent. One of the two Democrats who won their races in January, Senator Raphael Warnock, will also have to turn around and defend his seat next year in a race that Republicans are already eyeing as they seek to reclaim the chamber. Several local and national Republicans — including Mr. Trump — have tried to recruit the former University of Georgia football legend Herschel Walker to run for the seat, which could lend another wrinkle to the state’s political story, as if it needed one.Adding to the chaos, Mr. Kemp has become the target of a vendetta by Mr. Trump, who has condemned him for not doing more to deliver (or poach) victory for him in Georgia in November. This has also made Georgia the unquestioned center of the internal disputes that have roiled the Republican Party since November. Mr. Trump has seemed intent on making the state a key stop on a revenge tour he has waged against Republicans he has deemed insufficiently loyal to him — Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger chief among them.“It just feels like a hurricane blew through here politically in the last few campaigns that just keeps carrying over,” said former Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from the state.Stacey Abrams is seen as likely to run again for governor of Georgia in 2022, in a potential rematch of her 2018 race against Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesSenator Jon Ossoff, who prevailed alongside Mr. Warnock in the runoffs, said that “there’s a tension and complexity to the total arc of Georgia’s history that manifests itself in this particular moment.” That tension, he added, “is continually being expressed in our politics.”Towering stakes in a shifting statePeople tend to speak of Georgia politics these days in the most dramatic of terms: A struggle is underway “for the soul of Georgia,” and the New South in general. Every week seems to bring a new “existential battle” over some defining issue. A “foundational tension” is playing out in the racial politics of a place considered both a cradle of the civil rights movement and a pillar of the old Confederacy.Some days, state officials said, the stakes feel too high, the energy too charged and the language too extreme.“In my opinion, that’s not healthy, and that’s not what America should be,” said Gabriel Sterling, another top election overseer who, like Mr. Raffensperger, gained a national profile as Mr. Trump challenged Mr. Biden’s victory in the state with false claims of rampant voter fraud. (Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in December, pressuring him to “find” enough votes to overturn the results, was disclosed by The Washington Post and led Georgia prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into the former president.)“You’re not supposed to live and die by these elections,” Mr. Sterling said, noting that in a healthy democracy, the “normal” number of death threats directed at an official like him would be “zero.” He and Mr. Raffensperger were sitting in a tavern near the Georgia Capitol early this month, monitored by a security detail. They were unwinding after another day of pitched political battle in which the Republican-controlled legislature passed an election bill that would create a raft of new ballot restrictions.Republicans are now worried that their slipping grip on Georgia could make it a perennial swing state. Mr. Chambliss said that white suburban women, who have been the key component of the state’s Republican coalition, had defected en masse in recent years, more drastically around Atlanta than in other growing metropolitan areas around the country.Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff scored momentous victories for the Democratic Party when they won their runoff elections in January. Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York Times“The animosity toward Trump is real, and that’s a group that Republicans need to be courting in a heavy way,” Mr. Chambliss said. He added that such a goal would not be easy to achieve as long as Mr. Trump kept involving himself in the state’s politics.“A lot of us have been standing on mountaintops screaming that our margins in the suburbs have been collapsing,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Georgia. Much of the recent focus on those electoral shifts, he said, flowed from the tiny margin of votes separating Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in the state. That segued to the saturation media coverage of the Senate runoffs, the Republican election challenges and, of course, Mr. Trump’s conduct after Nov. 3.“Everything became all about Georgia,” Mr. Robinson said. “I was getting interviewed by newspapers from Switzerland.”The transformation of Georgia’s politics is largely a story of rapidly changing demographics. Atlanta is among the fastest-growing cities in the country, its suburbs evolving from a white Republican hotbed to a more diverse and progressive population of college-educated “knowledge workers.” Metropolitan Atlanta has attracted a substantial influx of younger immigrants and transplants from more crowded and expensive cities in the Northeast and the West.Likewise, the racial makeup has shifted rapidly. “Our demography is reflective of where many states are, and where the nation is headed,” said Ms. Abrams, who added that the majority of Georgia’s population was expected to be nonwhite by the end of this decade. “Politically, Georgia reflects what happens when all of these things come together. It’s a difficult thing to navigate on a national scale, and Georgia is the living embodiment of this.”A Democratic-led push for voting rightsThe point of convergence for much of this ferment has been the protracted struggle over voting rights. Ms. Abrams, who founded the political advocacy and voter registration group Fair Fight Action, has received broad credit for helping capture the state’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden and the Senate seats for Democrats.She became a voting rights cause célèbre herself in 2018 after enduring a bitter defeat in a governor’s race marred by accusations of voter suppression against Mr. Kemp in his former capacity as Georgia’s secretary of state. Ms. Abrams has to this day refused to concede defeat; Mr. Kemp, who oversaw the purging of hundreds of thousands of Georgians from the state’s voter rolls during his tenure, denied any wrongdoing. He declined to comment for this article.Ms. Abrams said that Republicans could not match the political energy and the demographic momentum that have propelled Democrats in Georgia, other than to pursue laws that would make it harder for traditional Democratic constituencies, such as African-Americans, to vote.The legislation currently making its way through the Capitol includes strict limits on weekend voting, a measure that could significantly impede the traditional role of Black churches in fostering civic engagement. A bill that passed the Georgia Senate early this month would repeal “no-excuse” absentee voting and require more stringent voter identification measures. The state’s political patriarch, the 96-year-old former President Jimmy Carter, said this past week that he was “disheartened, saddened and angry” about the legislation.Mr. Ossoff, left, and Mr. Warnock on Capitol Hill this month. Mr. Warnock will have to run for re-election next year in a race that Republicans are targeting.Credit…J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press“We know that some version of this bill is likely to pass because Republicans face an existential crisis in Georgia,” Ms. Abrams said. By the same token, Democrats could face a crisis of their own if Republicans succeed at enacting more restrictive voting laws in Georgia and several other states with Republican-controlled legislatures.Mr. Ossoff, who at 34 is the youngest member of the Senate, said Georgia had become a textbook case of how political and generational realignment “can change power dynamics in a way that has massive national implications.”Mr. Ossoff’s life trajectory has offered him a firsthand view of these shifts. He grew up in a suburban Atlanta congressional district that was once represented in the House by Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker, and is now represented by Lucy McBath, an African-American Democrat.Mr. Ossoff began his career as an intern for the civil rights pioneer and Georgia congressman John Lewis, became the first Jewish senator from the Deep South and entered the chamber with first Black senator to represent Georgia, Mr. Warnock. He now sits at a Senate desk that was once occupied by the fierce civil rights opponent Richard Russell and the staunch segregationist Herman Talmadge. In accordance with Senate tradition, both long-dead senators carved their initials in the desk, though Mr. Ossoff said he had yet to do that himself.Republicans haltingly plan their next movesGeorgia Republicans say it would be shortsighted to think that legislation alone can stem the state’s recent tide of red to blue. Nor is it clear whether the most powerful motivating force in their party — Mr. Trump — has in fact motivated just as many voters to support Democrats in and around Atlanta.This dynamic has extended to Trump acolytes like Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the first-term Republican from the state’s northwest corner, whose far-right views, incendiary language and promotion of conspiracy theories have made her the biggest new attention magnet in Congress, for better or worse. “I have always subscribed to having a big tent,” Mr. Chambliss said. “By the same token, I don’t know where some of these people who wander into the tent ever come from.”Former Senator Kelly Loeffler, the Republican businesswoman whom Mr. Kemp appointed to replace the retiring Johnny Isakson in late 2019, announced plans last month to start a voter registration group of her own, geared toward disengaged conservatives. Ms. Loeffler, who lost to Mr. Warnock, envisions the organization, Greater Georgia, as a Republican counterbalance to Ms. Abrams’s efforts.Ms. Loeffler said she had committed a seven-figure sum of her own money to seed the effort. “When I stepped out of the Senate, I heard people say consistently that ‘someone needs to do something about Georgia,’” Ms. Loeffler said.Former Senator Kelly Loeffler said she had no timetable for deciding whether she would run again for the Senate in 2022.Credit…Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMs. Loeffler did not say precisely what “needs to be done about Georgia” whether she meant only finding new ways to reach and register conservative voters or working to support Republican-driven laws that would discourage Democrats from voting. Ms. Abrams dismissed the effort as “a shallow attempt at mimicry” and “a vile attempt to limit access based on conspiracy theories.”Ms. Loeffler said she was merely “working to ensure that voters trust the process of voting.” She leaned heavily on phrases like “transparency,” “uniformity” and “election integrity,” which critics deride as false pretenses for Republican efforts to impose voter suppression measures. “There’s no question that many Georgians did not trust the process,” she said.Ms. Loeffler’s brief foray into elective politics began in January 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial. She immediately began running for her November re-election, in a campaign that included Representative Doug Collins, a firebrand Republican and fierce defender of Mr. Trump who continually derided Ms. Loeffler as a “RINO” (Republican in name only) who was not adequately devoted to the former president. She then spent much of her brief Senate career trying to display her fealty to Mr. Trump — an effort that included a campaign ad literally portraying her as to the right of Attila the Hun.Ms. Loeffler, 50, said she had no timetable for deciding whether she would run against Mr. Warnock in what would be a rematch for her old seat. As for what other Republicans might run, speculation has produced (as it does) a colorful wish list, from Ms. Greene to Mr. Walker. David Perdue, the former Republican senator who was defeated by Mr. Ossoff, said last month that he would not run in 2022, and Mr. Trump has been trying to enlist Mr. Collins to take on Mr. Kemp in a Republican primary bid.Mr. Walker, the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner, signed his first professional football contract in the ’80s with Mr. Trump’s United States Football League team, the New Jersey Generals, and maintains a close friendship with his former boss. A native of Wrightsville, Ga., Mr. Walker is a Republican who has encouraged African-Americans to join the party, and he has not ruled himself out for 2022.He is also unquestionably beloved in his home state, and the feeling appears to be mutual, though Mr. Walker currently lives in Texas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Democrats Are Anxious About 2022 — and 2024

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Are Anxious About 2022 — and 2024The fretting starts with the party’s declining share of the Hispanic vote, but it doesn’t end there.Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.March 10, 2021Credit…Chip Litherland for The New York TimesIn the wake of the 2020 election, Democratic strategists are worried — very worried — about the future of the Hispanic vote. One in 10 Latinos who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 switched to Donald Trump in 2020.Although the Hispanic electorate is often treated as a bloc, it is by no means a monolith. It is, in fact, impossible to speak of “the Hispanic vote” — in practice it is variegated by region, by country of origin, by ideology, by how many generations have lived in the United States, by depth of religiosity (and increasingly denomination), as well as a host of other factors.From 1970 to 2019, the number of Latinos in the United States increased from 9.6 million to 60.6 million, according to Pew Research. The number is projected by the census to reach 111.2 million, or 28 percent of the nation’s population, by 2060.Public Opinion Strategies, which conducts surveys for NBC News/Wall Street Journal, provided me with data on presidential voting from 2012 to 2020 that show significant Republican gains among the roughly 30 percent of Black and Hispanic voters who self-identify as conservative.From 2012 to 2020, Black conservatives shifted from voting 88-7 for the Democratic candidate to 76-17. Black conservative allegiance to the Democratic Party fell by less, from 75 percent Democratic, 9 percent Republican to 71 percent Democratic, 16 percent Republican.The changes in voting and partisan allegiance, however, were significantly larger for self-identified Hispanic conservatives. Their presidential vote went from 49-39 Democratic in 2012 to 67-27 Republican in 2020. Their partisan allegiance over the same period went from 50-37 Democratic to 59-22 Republican.The 2020 expansion of Republican voting among Hispanics and Asian-Americans — and to a lesser extent among African-Americans — deeply concerns the politicians and strategists seeking to maintain Democratic control of the House and Senate in 2022, not the mention the White House in 2024.The defection of Hispanic voters, together with an approximately 3 point drop in Black support for Joe Biden compared with Hillary Clinton, threatens a pillar of Democratic competitive strength, especially among Black men: sustained high margins of victory among minority voters whose share of the population is enlarging steadily.The increased level of support for the Republican Party among minority voters has raised the possibility that the cultural agenda pressed by another expanding and influential Democratic constituency — well-educated, young activists with strongly progressive views — is at loggerheads with the socially conservative beliefs of many older minority voters — although liberal economic policies remain popular with both cohorts. This social and cultural mismatch, according to some observers, is driving a number of minority voters into the opposition party.Joshua Estevan Ulibarri, a partner in the Democratic polling firm, Lake Research, argues that a substantial number of Latinos do not view themselves as people of color, reject a political alliance based on that bond and “want to be seen as white or as part of the mainstream.”Ulibarri emailed me to say that he believes that “Hispanics see what white America has done to Black America, and the backlash leads to more G.O.P. votes.”In shifting their vote from Democratic to Republican, Ulibarri contends, “it is not just partisan identity they are shedding, but also some racial identity as well.” In the past, “they may have been conservative and Latino, but you were Latino first and the way you were treated as a group and discriminated against trumped some ideology. Now, less so.”The Democratic Party, Ulibarri said, is responsible in part for the losses it has suffered:It is not just conservative men who have drifted away from Democrats. More and more younger people are identifying less with my party not because they are Republican or conservative, but because Democrats do not keep their word; Democrats are weak. And who wants to align with the weak?Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at Berkeley, who wrote about the danger to the Democrats of Hispanic defections in a September 2020 Times oped, expanded his argument in an email on the Lake Research study of Hispanic voters, which found most Latinos fell into three categories.The first, roughly a quarter of the Hispanic population, is made up of those who self-identify as people of color, according to the study, “as a group that, like African Americans, remains distinct over generations.” More

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    ¿Por qué los hombres latinos votan por los republicanos?

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    Fotos de  la turba en el Capitolio

    Elecciones en Georgia

    6 falsedades sobre la elección

    Ataque a la democracia

    La diversidad del voto latino

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    Roy Blunt of Missouri, No. 4 Senate Republican, Plans to Retire

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoy Blunt of Missouri, No. 4 Senate Republican, Plans to RetireMr. Blunt, a fixture of Republican leadership in Congress who had been known for his ability to work with both parties, said he would not seek re-election in 2022.Republicans are confident they can hold Senator Roy Blunt’s seat in a state that has swung hard to the right over the last decade.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesMarch 8, 2021Updated 6:34 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 4 Senate Republican, announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2022, the latest in a string of party veterans who have opted to exit Congress as the G.O.P. remakes itself in the mold of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Blunt, a fixture of the Republican establishment, had told reporters in January that he was planning to run for a third term and had taken steps to avoid alienating the former president. But with his surprise announcement on Monday, he joined a growing group of institutionalists who have chosen to leave rather than potentially subject themselves to party primaries that promise to be contests of which candidate can tie himself more closely to Mr. Trump.“After 14 general election victories — three to county office, seven to the United States House of Representatives and four statewide elections — I won’t be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate next year,” Mr. Blunt, 71, said in a two-minute video posted on social media.Speaking later to reporters in Springfield, Mo., Mr. Blunt predicted he would have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement and prevailed if he had run again, but said he did not want to commit to another eight years of campaigning and service in Congress.“I felt good about getting elected, but what I felt less good about was whether I wanted to go from 26 years in the Congress to 32 years in the Congress and maybe eliminate the other things I might get a chance to do,” he said.Republicans are confident they can hold his seat in a state that has swung hard to the right over the last decade. Still, Mr. Blunt’s departure adds to a brain drain already underway among Senate Republicans.A bipartisan deal maker and stalwart of Washington social circles known for well-tailored suits and disarming charm, he is the rare figure who has served in high-ranking posts in both House and Senate leadership. Mr. Blunt was also in charge of planning President Biden’s inauguration in January, a delicate task that required him to navigate explosive political crosscurrents and the threat of violence after the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol.His decision not to seek another term follows similar ones by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, one of Republicans’ leading policy minds and a seeker of bipartisan compromises; Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, a deal-making former chairman of the Appropriations Committee; and Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a top party voice on free-market economics. Republicans are still closely watching Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, 87, their longest-serving member, to see if he will seek another term.In their place has emerged a crop of Trump acolytes who have mirrored the former president’s combative style, shunned compromise with Democrats and so far been more willing to buck Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the long-serving top Republican leader with whom Mr. Blunt closely allied himself.“There are two kinds of politicians in Washington — those who want to make a point, and those who want to make a difference. Senator Blunt always worked to make a difference,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former longtime Republican aide who worked for Mr. Blunt in the House and later for Mr. McConnell. “There is no question that his departure, on top of those like Senators Alexander and Shelby, leaves a hole of those who know how to forge bipartisan legislative deals.”In a fawning statement, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Blunt a “policy heavyweight” who had helped bring home legislative victories for Republicans and the Senate as a whole. Among Mr. Blunt’s proudest were billions of dollars in new funding he helped secure as an appropriator for medical research, including for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and mental health. He was also a savvy political tactician who was talked about both as a possible successor to Mr. McConnell and as a sought-after negotiating partner for Democrats.Those qualities, once prized in government, have slowly become political liabilities among Republican primary voters whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and distrust of official Washington have reshaped the party. Mr. Blunt had not formally drawn a primary challenger, but his close alliance with Mr. McConnell, who has openly sought to purge Mr. Trump from the party, and his status as a consummate Washington insider put him at risk.Eric Greitens, a Republican who resigned as Missouri’s governor in a cloud of scandal in 2018, said last week that he was “evaluating” whether to challenge Mr. Blunt in a primary. Mr. Greitens, a decorated member of the Navy SEALs, has sought to position himself as an heir to Mr. Trump and accused Mr. Blunt of inadequately backing him.“It’s not enough to have an ‘R’ behind their name. We have to have people who are willing to take on the establishment to actually fight against the swamp,” Mr. Greitens told a St. Louis radio station.Mr. Blunt had only occasionally criticized Mr. Trump during his four years in office, careful not to anger the former president who helped him secure a narrow victory in 2016.The Capitol riot proved a more difficult path to walk. Afterward, Mr. Blunt broke with most of Missouri’s Republican delegation and voted to confirm Mr. Biden’s election victory after the attack. He called Mr. Trump’s actions “clearly reckless” and said Jan. 6 had been “a sad and terrible day in the history of the country.” But he vocally opposed Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Blunt had no cross words for either Mr. Trump or Mr. Greitens on Monday, but he warned against the ascendant brand of politics in his party focused not on solving problems for people but on drawing lines in the sand and picking fights.“The country in the last decade or so has sort of fallen off the edge of too many politicians saying, ‘If you’ll vote for me, I’ll never compromise on anything,’” he told reporters in Springfield. “That is a philosophy that particularly does not work in a democracy.”Among other Republicans considering running for the seat are Jay Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state; Eric Schmitt, the attorney general; Jean Evans, a former state party leader; Mike Kehoe, the lieutenant governor; Representatives Jason Smith and Ann Wagner; and Carl Edwards, a former NASCAR driver.With Republicans’ newfound dominance in Missouri, statewide contests have increasingly been decided in G.O.P. primaries. But John Hancock, a former state party chairman, warned that there was always a risk that so many ambitious young Republicans vying for the nomination could lead to a “divisive primary” backfiring.“There are benefits and detriments to having a deep bench,” he said.Democrats, who have lost nearly every race for statewide office over the last decade, have no clear front-runner at the moment.Scott Sifton, a veteran of the Missouri statehouse, has already jumped into the race and put together a full campaign team. Democrats in the state have suggested one of its two Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush of St. Louis and Emanuel Cleaver II of Kansas City, could also run. And Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, expressed interest on Monday.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Josh Hawley Is ‘Not Going Anywhere.’ How Did He Get Here?

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeThe Lost HoursThe Oath KeepersJosh Hawley of Missouri was the first senator to announce he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJosh Hawley Is ‘Not Going Anywhere.’ How Did He Get Here?The senator’s objection to the election results surprised some supporters. But interviews with dozens of people close to him show his growing comfort with doing what it takes to hold on to power.Josh Hawley of Missouri was the first senator to announce he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyElaina Plott and March 7, 2021Updated 9:13 p.m. ETMost Republicans who spoke at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., avoided acknowledging the events of Jan. 6. But less than 30 seconds into his speech, Senator Josh Hawley confronted them head on.That day, Mr. Hawley said, had underscored the “great crisis moment” in which Americans currently found themselves. That day, he explained, the mob had come for him.The “woke mob,” that is. In the weeks since, they had “tried to cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me down.” To “stop me,” Mr. Hawley said, “from representing you.”“And guess what?” he went on, his tempo building, the audience applauding: “I’m here today, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not backing down.”The appeal from Missouri’s junior senator reflected what has become standard fare in a Republican Party still in thrall to Donald J. Trump. As Mr. Hawley’s audience seemed to agree, his amplification of the former president’s false claims of a stolen election was not incitement for the mob of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6; it was a principled stand against the “radical left.”Yet to some of the senator’s earliest supporters, it was precisely for its ordinariness that the speech stood out, the latest reminder of the distance between the Josh Hawley they thought they had voted for and the Josh Hawley who now appeared regularly on Fox News.Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P., the idea had been that Mr. Hawley was different. Sworn in at 39 years old, he ascended to the Senate in part by selling himself as an intellectual in a movement that increasingly seemed to shun intellect. Whereas Mr. Trump fired off brash tweets littered with random capitalizations and adverbs like “bigly,” Mr. Hawley published essays on subjects like medieval theology.Throughout his life, whether as a student at Stanford or a law professor in Missouri, Mr. Hawley had impressed people as “thoughtful” and “sophisticated,” a person of “depth.” And as a growing number of conservatives saw it, he also had the proper ideas. From the time he was a teenager, he had criticized the free-market allegiance at the center of Republican orthodoxy; when he arrived in Washington, he immediately launched into a crusade against Big Tech. The conservative think-tank class embraced him as someone who had the right vocabulary, the right suits and the right worldview to translate Mr. Trump’s vague populist instincts into a fresh blueprint for his party’s future — someone elite enough, in other words, to be entrusted with the banner of anti-elitism.Which is in part why, when Mr. Hawley became the first senator to announce that he would object to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president, many of his allies underwent a public mourning of sorts. They’d expected as much from, say, Ted Cruz — as one senior Senate aide put it, the Texas Republican, who had filibustered Obamacare while its namesake was still in office, had always been transparent about his motivations. But Mr. Hawley?To survey Mr. Hawley’s life is indeed to see a consistency in the broad strokes of his political cosmology. Yet interviews with more than 50 people close to Mr. Hawley cast light on what, in the haze of charm and first impressions, his admirers often seemed to miss: an attachment to the steady cadence of ascension, and a growing comfort with doing what might be necessary to maintain it.Mr. Hawley’s Stanford adviser, the historian David Kennedy, struggled to reconcile his memories with the now-infamous image of the senator, fist raised in solidarity with pro-Trump demonstrators shortly before they descended on the Capitol. “The Josh I knew was not an angry young person,” he recalled. “But when I see him now on television, he just always seems angry — really angry.”Dr. Kennedy acknowledged that Mr. Hawley was just one of many Republicans in the Trump era who had steeped their brand in “anger and resentment and grievance.” But for many of those once close to Mr. Hawley, that was the point: How did a man who seemed so special turn out to be just like everyone else?And what, they wondered, did Josh Hawley have to be so angry about?Mr. Hawley, then Missouri’s attorney general and a candidate for the Senate, at a rally with the president in 2018.Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAn un-misspent youthIn the late 1990s, the Jesuit high school Mr. Hawley attended in Kansas City, Mo., turned to him for damage control.“There was a group of seniors in our class who had a party that got out of hand, and it became a news story,” recalled Ben Capoccia, a classmate. “They had Josh and I go on the news to make it look like we were not all these bad kids.” He added, “I know what he said was much more eloquent than what I said.”Mr. Hawley was an academic star, champion debater and National Merit finalist who won Rockhurst High’s Kloster award, given to “a young man who consistently puts the welfare of his fellow students above his own interests.”A 1998 high school yearbook photo of Mr. Hawley at an awards ceremony.Credit…Rockhurst High SchoolBut in recent weeks, some of Mr. Hawley’s old classmates and teachers have been aghast at his role in undermining confidence in America’s elections.“I’ve been very disappointed to see who he has become,” said Kristen Ruehter-Thompson, a close friend growing up who was once Mr. Hawley’s prom date.Even his middle school principal, Barbara Weibling, has weighed in. “I’m not surprised he’s a politician and that he’s shooting for the presidency,” said Ms. Weibling, a vocal supporter of Democrats. “The only thing is, I think he had a strict moral upbringing, and I was really disappointed he would suck the country into the lies that Trump told about the election. I just think that’s wrong.”There was never any question that Mr. Hawley was going places. Born on the last day of the 1970s, he was raised with an eye toward the future and a destiny aimed beyond Lexington, a small town about an hour east of Kansas City, where a Civil War cannonball remains embedded in a column at the courthouse. His views and trajectory were shaped by his parents, Ron and Virginia, who met at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. She was Kansas Junior Miss in 1973 and graduated summa cum laude, majoring in English. Ron was a football player who worked as a probation officer after college, before becoming a prosperous banker.Theirs was a traditional, patriarchal and churchgoing household. After pursuing a career as a teacher, Mrs. Hawley “became a speaker and leader of Christian spiritual renewal conferences and retreats in Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas,” according to an account in a Kansas paper. She also ran prayer groups at the family’s Methodist church.Ms. Ruehter-Thompson said Mr. Hawley’s “dad was more of the influence,” adding, “There were always discussions of Rush Limbaugh.”From early on, Mr. Hawley harbored a deep fascination with politics. At 12, he wrote about the 1992 presidential election for his school paper, breaking down how many moderators there would be at the debates; three years later, in writings recently unearthed by The Kansas City Star, he expressed sympathy for militia movements in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. (“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” he wrote.)Later in middle school, he dragged friends to movies like “Nixon.” He also signed their eighth grade yearbooks with variations of “Josh Hawley 2024,” according to Ms. Ruehter-Thompson and another classmate, Andrea Randle, as well as Tim Crosson, the vocal music teacher at the school. (“Sounds like revisionist history,” a Hawley spokeswoman said. “How about they produce a hard copy.”)Mr. Crosson said he and Mr. Hawley would spar about politics. “He would come into my room and announce the number of days left in Bill Clinton’s term, and I would fire back, ‘Four more years,’” Mr. Crosson recalled.Ms. Randle, a Black classmate, was frustrated that Mr. Hawley didn’t do enough to respond to the police killing of George Floyd last May. After initially expressing sympathy, he later accused an alliance of Democrats and the “woke mob” of dividing the country.“We played around after school, and I remember him pulling my hair after history class, that’s what I remember, so it’s so bizarre,” she said. “Me and my friends have talked about it, even over Christmas. Was he always like this and we didn’t know?”At Rockhurst, an all-boys school, a populist ideology began to evolve that didn’t align neatly with either political party. Mr. Hawley seemed most disturbed by the veneration of individual liberty and pluralism in American society. In a “Young Voices” column for The Springfield News-Leader, he called the “rights of the individual vs. the rights of the community” a “fierce debate that so dominates our age.” “The philosophy of radical individualism,” he wrote, was both “cause and symptom of the continuing decline of America’s shared civic life.”The world according to HawleyCollege is often one’s first exposure to knotty questions of identity, politics and faith, but Mr. Hawley moved through Stanford University with unusual conviction. Writing for The News-Leader the summer after his freshman year, in 1999, he invoked a recent speech by his school’s provost, Condoleezza Rice, to argue for a “fresh discussion of first principles and a fundamental rethinking of the role of government and the aims of freedom.” He was 19.At Stanford, Mr. Hawley wrote for the conservative student newspaper as an undergraduate.Credit…Preston Gannaway for The New York TimesOn campus, Mr. Hawley wrote columns for the conservative Stanford Review and was active in student ministry groups. He described his worldview in gauzy phrases like “a proper sense of shared citizenship,” but drew a clearer line on at least one issue. Above his bed he hung a sepia-toned poster of a shirtless male model cradling a newborn; when asked by classmates, he said it reflected his fervent stance against abortion. (The Hawley spokeswoman said the poster is “not something he remembers. But he’s proudly pro-life.”)Political aspirations seemed likely. Classmates recall his careful attention to his image, how he wouldn’t sit for a photo until a stray red Solo cup had been disposed of. Still, he was not viewed as a firebrand; he seemed more animated by the pursuit of an intellectual identity than a partisan affiliation. His first principles were guided by his Christianity.Mr. Hawley sharpened his thinking in conversations with his adviser, Dr. Kennedy. Americans, Mr. Hawley argued, were suffering a crisis of “loneliness,” prisoners of a culture of individualism unmoored from any shared sense of purpose. Hastening this plight, in his view, was the American right’s devotion to the free market.Dr. Kennedy was somewhat surprised to learn years later that his advisee was evangelical; for him, Mr. Hawley’s ideological instincts had called to mind “Rerum Novarum,” the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 condemning unfettered capitalism and endorsing measures like trade unionism as means of reinforcing the dignity of the working class.“I do think there was something reflexively present in Josh from early on that was aligned with that kind of thinking,” Dr. Kennedy said.After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 2002 and spending a year as a teaching intern at an all-boys school in London, Mr. Hawley went on to Yale Law School. He seemed torn between politics or a life in the ivory tower he would ultimately spend so much time castigating. Both Dr. Kennedy and a Yale classmate remember him on the “knife’s edge,” as the former put it, of pursuing a doctorate in history.In other words, his first imperative was not — did not appear to be — power.“My impression of Josh back then was he was kind of what we need in our democracy,” recalled Ian Bassin, a Yale classmate turned harsh critic. “I always found him to be curious to hear why I came to conclusions I did, and vice versa. And I always felt what brought him to his conclusions were very honest, very genuine, very principled views.”Several classmates, however, observed a change in Mr. Hawley toward the end of his time at Yale. On a campus where success is often measured in Supreme Court clerkships, ambition is a given. But it was nonetheless striking when Mr. Hawley suddenly seemed more interested in winning prestigious posts than in doing the work once he won them.A former classmate recalled Mr. Hawley’s excitement when both were named editors at the Yale Law Journal. Eventually, however, their friendship frayed. Mr. Hawley was very engaged, this person said, when his role meant collecting the business cards of Federalist Society members as he asked them to contribute articles. But when it came to finalizing footnotes the night before deadline, fellow editors often found that he forgot to check his email.Irina Manta recalls a similar experience. She and Mr. Hawley were rivals at the campus Federalist Society chapter and served together as vice presidents of events. “I tried really hard to work with him,” Ms. Manta said. But as the year went on, she found herself organizing events and debates alone. “When I would send emails, I just wouldn’t hear back from him,” she said. “He wasn’t exactly into working hard if he could help it.” (Ms. Manta wrote an article about her time at Yale with Mr. Hawley for USA Today on Jan. 5.)In joining the Federalist Society, Mr. Hawley had moved into the orbit of an ascendant legal community that, for a conservative on campus, offered the clearest avenue to power. Eventually he defeated Ms. Manta for the Yale chapter’s presidency, a title he embraced proudly. (The Hawley spokeswoman said that Ms. Manta was “bitter” about losing the election, and that Mr. Hawley had an “outstanding record in law school” that “speaks for itself.”)The members he was looking to impress were not necessarily his own chapter’s. In August 2005, when John Roberts was asked during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings about his ties to the Federalist Society, Mr. Hawley had his back. In an op-ed in The Hartford Courant, he chided Democrats for attempting to portray the group as a “secret society of scary people.” “Far from subverting the country’s legal order,” he argued, “Federalists seek to strengthen it.”In 2007, a year after finishing law school, Mr. Hawley moved to Washington to clerk for Chief Justice Roberts.One of his fellow clerks was Erin Morrow. She had been just one year ahead of Mr. Hawley at Yale, but it wasn’t until the two shared an office that they became close.Mr. Hawley would later occasionally adopt the folksy affect of a farm child, but Ms. Morrow was the real thing. She had grown up on a cattle farm in New Mexico and, as a student at Texas A&M, had been a member of the All-American Livestock Judging Team. (One of her professors would recall her as among his most impressive students “in her understanding of what is really important in beef-cattle breeding.”) Yale classmates remembered her as brilliant and unpretentious. She and Mr. Hawley wed in 2010.When Thomas Lambert, who was on the appointments committee at the University of Missouri School of Law, learned that the Hawleys were open to moving to Columbia, he jumped at the chance to hire them. “It’s really quite a feather in your cap to hire law clerks from the Supreme Court,” he said. “And here was an opportunity to get two.” The couple began teaching in the fall of 2011.Much of their first years in Missouri centered on their faith. They led a Bible study at an Evangelical Presbyterian church and mentored Christian law students. Mr. Hawley wrote about faith and politics, arguing in a 2015 Notre Dame Law Review essay for a “return to political theology.” Contending that religion had been “quarantined” and “roped off” from politics and law, he railed against the postwar liberal order and called for putting “the state’s sovereignty in its proper and subordinate place.”Not long after returning to Missouri, Mr. Hawley had begun asking Republican consultants to coffee. One of them suggested a state legislative bid. The consultant recalled Mr. Hawley laughing. He wanted to run for attorney general.In Missouri, 30 counties account for most of the primary vote. The consultant advised Mr. Hawley to contact the local Republican Party chairs and ask to speak at their events. He had a winning pitch. In 2014, he helped represent Hobby Lobby in its successful Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. Conservatives enjoyed hearing him talk about the case.The consultant recalled Mr. Hawley contacting him after traversing the state. “OK,” he asked, “now what?”Becoming a politicianAs successful as these tours were, Mr. Hawley’s growing coterie of advisers realized quickly that their candidate disdained, as one termed it, the “people part” of campaigning — the unannounced visits to local diners, the niche roundtable conversations with voters.Yet when it came to selling himself to kingmakers, he thrived.In a campaign season that coincided with Mr. Trump’s political ascent, Mr. Hawley found an eager audience among Missouri’s donor class and Republican elders. He dazzled them by seeming to be everything Mr. Trump was not: tempered, thoughtful, a reservoir of adjectives like “Burkean.” When asked about their first meetings with Mr. Hawley, powerful people in Missouri recalled being enchanted not so much by his vision for office, but by the fact that he sounded smart.A 2018 campaign stop at G.O.P. headquarters in Jefferson City.Credit…Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times“He can get up and talk about issues and look you straight in the eye the whole time,” said Daniel Mehan, president of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce. He added, “He impresses you as someone who knows what he’s talking about.”Among Mr. Hawley’s first — and most important — enthusiasts was John Danforth, the former senator and elder statesman of Missouri Republicans. His blessing was crucial for an ambitious young man looking to scale the state’s political ranks.The two had met years before, when Mr. Danforth visited Yale for a dinner. They stayed in touch. “He referred me to a couple of books: One was by a British politician and political philosopher named Danny Kruger, and the other by Yuval Levin,” Mr. Danforth recalled. “And I thought, well, this is interesting.” He saw in Mr. Hawley “a real intellectual,” a conservative version of his old friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan.Yet when asked, Mr. Danforth couldn’t recall what it was he thought Mr. Hawley wanted to accomplish, as attorney general or as a senator. “I don’t know that I had an impression of that,” he said after a pause.Mr. Danforth helped Mr. Hawley gain the support of the state’s major Republican contributors. Chief among them was David Humphreys, Mr. Hawley’s largest donor, who has given millions of dollars to his campaigns and political action committee.People close to Mr. Hawley recalled his skill in convincing donors that he saw the world as they did; as one early booster put it, it was as if he held up a mirror as he spoke to them. His rejection of Republican economic orthodoxy was well documented, but he convinced libertarian-minded conservatives like Mr. Humphreys and David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, of his devotion to the free market.The most memorable commercial of the campaign featured the candidate surrounded by ladders being climbed by men in suits. In the ad, he castigated “career politicians just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” Yet shortly after he was sworn in as attorney general in January 2017, Republicans including Mr. Danforth and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, began urging him to challenge Missouri’s vulnerable Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill. Mr. Hawley obliged.His actual job appeared to take a back seat.“I don’t think he had much interest in that office, really,” said J. Andrew Hirth, who served as deputy general counsel under Mr. Hawley’s predecessor, Chris Koster, a Democrat. “From the moment he got there, he was looking toward the Senate.”He was increasingly absent from the office. Sometimes he was meeting with potential backers for his Senate campaign; one local paper reported that he was leaving work midday to exercise at a gym about a half-hour away. A photograph of a casually clothed Mr. Hawley buying wine on a workday afternoon circulated on social media.The attorney general’s office was quickly hollowed out of talent as Mr. Hawley appointed key officials with stronger religious than managerial credentials. The most notable was Michael Quinlan, who was a “mediator and conflict coach” at a Christian marriage counseling group when he was recruited to oversee civil litigation.He was hired despite having been frequently quoted defending a local bishop who was found guilty of a misdemeanor after shielding a priest who took pornographic pictures of girls. Mr. Hawley’s aides said they hadn’t been aware of those comments. Mr. Quinlan later departed after a female employee complained about receiving an unwelcome lecture from him about her sex life; he denied accusations of acting improperly.Experienced lawyers who defended state agencies against lawsuits headed for the exits. Only one litigator who had worked under Mr. Hawley’s predecessor stayed on in the main office, in Jefferson City. As morale continued to sag, eight of Mr. Hawley’s own hires quit too.Amid the turmoil, outside public relations consultants took an unusually prominent role. In 2017, before a raid on massage parlors in Springfield, the consultants told the attorney general’s staff that they were angling for an appearance with the CNN anchor Jake Tapper. They instructed aides that Mr. Hawley, “should be wearing some kind of law enforcement garb — like a police jacket and hat,” according to internal emails.During the raids, Mr. Hawley gathered reporters in a strip-mall parking lot, his expression grim and a large badge hanging around his neck.“Josh was the chief law enforcement officer of the state,” the Hawley spokeswoman said. “He wore a badge.”A ‘champion in the Senate’When Mr. Hawley arrived in Washington in January 2019 as Missouri’s junior senator, he positioned himself as the intellectual heir of Trumpism — the politician who could integrate the president’s populist instincts into a comprehensive ideology for the G.O.P. In his maiden speech, he summoned the lamentation of cultural erosion he’d been refining since high school, arguing that the “great American middle” had been overlooked by a “new, arrogant aristocracy.”Mr. Hawley was sworn in as a senator in January 2019, at age 39.Credit…Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesFor conservatives who felt Mr. Trump had identified uncomfortable truths about the party despite ultimately governing like a typical Republican, Mr. Hawley’s arrival was timely. That July, conservative writers and policy experts gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington for the inaugural National Conservatism Conference, meant to map a departure from the corporate-class policies that for decades had defined conservatism. Mr. Hawley, who in his keynote speech decried the “cosmopolitan consensus,” was introduced as the fledgling movement’s “champion in the Senate.”He did not discourage whispers about 2024, and some younger Trump campaign aides, who saw him as the “refined” version of their boss, mused privately about working for him should he run. It wasn’t long before Donald Trump Jr. was inviting him to lunch at his father’s Washington hotel.Even so, he baffled his party’s leadership as he tried to derail the confirmation of some of Mr. Trump’s conservative judicial nominees, deeming their records on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage insufficiently pure.But it was Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results that offered the first real stress test for the brand Mr. Hawley had labored to cultivate — whether it was possible to be both the darling of the conservative intelligentsia and the “fighter” the party’s base craved.He had reason to believe it was. He was comfortable paying “the price of admission,” as one Republican official put it, to a place in Mr. Trump’s G.O.P., in part because nothing in his short political career had suggested there would ever be a cost. Early on, few had blinked when he embraced the president during a visit to Missouri. He had courted far-right figures during his campaign, yet still received plum speaking slots at high-minded conferences.And so on Dec. 30, Josh Hawley became the first Senate Republican to announce his intent to challenge Mr. Biden’s congressional certification.Mr. Hawley’s team was adamant that he had not been motivated by a potential presidential bid in 2024, but among other things had been moved by a December video conference with 30 constituents who said they felt “disenfranchised” by Mr. Biden’s victory.“He knows the state well after two campaigns, and I think he knew that Missourians supported the president,” said James Harris, a longtime political adviser to Mr. Hawley.He tried to thread the needle as he always had, wrapping his objection not in fevered “STOP THE STEAL” tweets but in questions about the constitutionality of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.And, had there been no violence, perhaps his gambit would have worked. But when Mr. Hawley and others lent their voices to Mr. Trump’s lie of rampant voter fraud, people listened.Mr. Hawley spent much of Jan. 6 hiding with his colleagues in a Senate committee room as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He sat hunched against the wall, eyes fixed on his phone, as Republicans and Democrats alike blamed him for the madness. Later that evening, when senators safely reconvened to finish certifying the election, Mr. Hawley forged ahead with his objection.The reckoning was swift. Simon & Schuster dropped plans to publish his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Major donors severed ties. Mr. Danforth called supporting Mr. Hawley “the biggest mistake of my life.” His wife, Erin, was collateral damage: Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm where she had briefly practiced, purged an old biography from its website. She was scheduled to teach a course in constitutional litigation at the University of Missouri, but “after the events of Jan. 6, people were not so happy about that,” said Professor Lambert, who brought the couple to the school; in response, he had stressed that “you cannot hold her responsible for her husband’s views.”Mr. Hawley at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to confirm the Electoral College results.Credit…Pool photo by Erin SchaffYet something else happened, too. Mr. Hawley saw a surge in small-dollar donations to his campaign, making January his best fund-raising month since 2018. As Axios first reported, the $969,000 he amassed easily offset defections from corporate political action committees. Added to that was the applause of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has since bundled more than $300,000 for Mr. Hawley.Mr. Hawley had a choice. He could commit to his burgeoning fighter persona. “My No. 1 piece of advice was: You can’t go back on this now. You go back on this now, and you make absolutely everyone angry,” recalled his adviser Gregg Keller.Or he could try to reclaim the scholarly identity that had long propelled him. Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, a think tank that aims to advance a more working-class-friendly conservatism, had frequently praised Mr. Hawley for defying Republican dogma. But he called the senator’s objections to the election “obnoxious” and “self-serving.” He urged him to acknowledge his “failure of judgment.”As his advisers saw it, the lessons of the Trump era — that success in today’s G.O.P. means never having to say you’re sorry — were clear. And Josh Hawley was nothing if not a star student.In the weeks since, Mr. Hawley has vowed to sue the “woke mob” at Simon & Schuster for dropping his book. He’s written for The New York Post about “the muzzling of America.” He has appeared on Fox News to discuss said muzzling. And while he said shortly after the riot that he would not run for president in 2024, his advisers have continued to hype him as “one of the favorites” of a potential Republican primary field, as Mr. Keller put it.Mr. Hawley tested his new cri de coeur on a live audience on Feb. 26, at the gathering of the conservative faithful in Orlando. “You know, on Jan. 6, I objected to the Electoral College certification,” he began. “Maybe you heard about it.”The room erupted. “I did,” he went on, “I stood up —” His words were drowned out by cheers.It had not been the mood of his speech. But as he paused to take in the standing ovation, Mr. Hawley seemed happy.Sheelagh McNeill and More

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    In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in ElectionsNew proposals by the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature have targeted Sunday voting, part of a raft of measures that could reduce the impact of Black voters in the state.Israel Small spent most of last fall helping members of his church with the absentee voting process.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesNick Corasaniti and March 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSAVANNAH, Ga. — Sundays are always special at the St. Philip Monumental A.M.E. church. But in October, the pews are often more packed, the sermon a bit more urgent and the congregation more animated, and eager for what will follow: piling into church vans and buses — though some prefer to walk — and heading to the polls.Voting after Sunday church services, known colloquially as “souls to the polls,” is a tradition in Black communities across the country, and Pastor Bernard Clarke, a minister since 1991, has marshaled the effort at St. Philip for five years. His sermons on those Sundays, he said, deliver a message of fellowship, responsibility and reverence.“It is an opportunity for us to show our voting rights privilege as well as to fulfill what we know that people have died for, and people have fought for,” Mr. Clarke said.Now, Georgia Republicans are proposing new restrictions on weekend voting that could severely curtail one of the Black church’s central roles in civic engagement and elections. Stung by losses in the presidential race and two Senate contests, the state party is moving quickly to push through these limits and a raft of other measures aimed directly at suppressing the Black turnout that helped Democrats prevail in the critical battleground state.“The only reason you have these bills is because they lost,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees all 534 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. “What makes it even more troubling than that is there is no other way you can describe this other than racism, and we just need to call it what it is.’’The push for new restrictions in Georgia comes amid a national effort by Republican-controlled state legislatures to impose harsh restrictions on voting access, in states like Iowa, Arizona and Texas.But the targeting of Sunday voting in new bills that are moving through Georgia’s Legislature has stirred the most passionate reaction, with critics saying it recalls some of the racist voting laws from the state’s past.“I can remember the first time I went to register,” said Diana Harvey Johnson, 74, a former state senator who lives in Savannah. “I went to the courthouse by myself and there was actually a Mason jar sitting on top of the counter. And the woman there asked me how many butterbeans were in that jar,” suggesting that she needed to guess correctly in order to be allowed to register.“I had a better chance of winning the Georgia lottery than guess how many butterbeans,” Ms. Harvey Johnson continued. “But the fact that those kinds of disrespects and demoralizing and dehumanizing practices — poll taxes, lynchings, burning crosses and burning down houses and firing people and putting people in jail, just to keep them from voting — that is not that far away in history. But it looks like some people want to revisit that. And that is absolutely unacceptable.”Diana Harvey Johnson, a former Georgia state senator, said she remembered facing “dehumanizing practices” when registering to vote in her youth.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThe bill that passed the House would limit voting to at most one Sunday in October, but even that would be up to the discretion of the local registrar. It would also severely cut early voting hours in total, limit voting by mail and greatly restrict the use of drop boxes — all measures that activists say would disproportionately affect Black voters.A similar bill is awaiting a vote in the Senate. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has indicated he supports new laws to “secure the vote” but has not committed to all of the restrictions.Voting rights advocates say there is deep hypocrisy embedded in some of the new proposals. It was Georgia Republicans, they point out, who championed mail balloting in the early 2000s and automatic voting registration just five years ago, only to say they need to be limited now that more Black voters have embraced them.Georgia was one of nine mostly Southern states and scores of counties and municipalities — including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan — whose records of racist voter suppression required them to get federal clearance for changes to their election rules. The requirement fell under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights era law that curtailed the disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South.The changes Republicans are now pursuing would have faced stiff federal review and possible blockage under the part of the act known as Section 5. But the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, effectively gutted that section in a 2013 ruling.Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, churches played a key role in civic engagement, often organizing nonpartisan political action committees during the 1970s and ’80s that provided, among other resources, trips to vote on Sunday where it was permitted. The phrase “souls to the polls” took root in Florida in the 1990s, according to David D. Daniels III, a professor of church history at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Raphael Warnock, one of the Democrats who won a special Senate race in January, is himself the pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.Historically, churches provided Black congregants more than just transportation or logistical help. Voting as a congregation also offered a form of haven from the intimidation and violence that often awaited Black voters at the polls.“That was one of the things that my father said, that once Black people got the right to vote, they would all go together because they knew that there was going to be a problem,” said Robert Evans, 59, a member of St. Phillip Monumental. “Bringing them all together made them feel more comfortable to actually go and do the civic duty.”In Georgia, the role of the A.M.E. church in civic engagement has been growing under the guidance of Bishop Jackson. Last year he began Operation Voter Turnout, seeking to expand the ways that A.M.E. churches could prepare their members to participate in elections. The operation focused on voter education, registration drives, assistance with absentee ballots and a coordinated Sunday voting operation.Bishop Reginald T. Jackson in Atlanta. He began a program to better prepare church members to participate in elections.Credit…Matthew Odom for The New York TimesIt had an impact in last November’s election, even amid the coronavirus pandemic: According to the Center for New Data, a nonprofit research group, African-Americans voted at a higher rate on weekends than voters identifying as white in 107 of the state’s 159 counties. Internal numbers from Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, found that Black voters made up roughly 37 percent of those who voted early on Sunday in Georgia, while the Black population of Georgia is about 32 percent.State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican and chief sponsor of the House bill, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did three other Republican sponsors. In introducing the bill, Republicans in the Legislature portrayed the new restrictions as efforts to “secure the vote” and “restore confidence” in the electoral process, but offered no rationale beyond that and no credible evidence that it was flawed. (Georgia’s election was pronounced secure by Republican electoral officials and reaffirmed by multiple audits and court decisions.)Limiting Sunday voting would affect Black voters beyond losing the assistance of the church. It would inevitably lead to longer lines during the week, especially in the Black community, which has historically been underserved on Election Day.The bill would also ban what is known as “line warming,” the practice of having volunteers provide water, snacks, chairs and other assistance to voters in line.Latoya Brannen, 43, worked with members of the church and a nonprofit group called 9 to 5 to hand out snacks and personal protective equipment in November.“We’ve learned that giving people just those small items helps keep them in line,” Ms. Brannen said. She said she had occasionally handed out bubbles to parents who brought young children with them.If Sunday voting is limited, it could induce more Black Georgians to vote by mail. During the pandemic, churches played an instrumental role in helping African-Americans navigate the absentee ballot system, which they had not traditionally used in the same proportion as white voters.At Greater Gaines Chapel A.M.E., a church about a half-mile from St. Philip Monumental, Israel Small spent most of last fall helping church members with the absentee process.“We took people to drop boxes to help make sure it would be counted,” said Mr. Small, 79. He said he was angered to learn this winter that Republicans were moving to restrict mail voting, too.Among the changes Republican state legislators have proposed is a requirement that voters provide proof of their identification — their license numbers or copies of official ID cards — with their absentee ballot applications.That signals a shift for Republicans, who have long controlled the Statehouse; in 2005 they passed a similar proposal, but for in-person voting.Pastor Bernard Clarke of St. Philip Monumental A.M.E. church has marshaled the effort to get his congregation to the polls for five years.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThat measure included a new “anti-fraud” requirement that voters present one of a limited set of government-issued identification cards, like a driver’s license, at voting stations.The restrictions affected Black voters disproportionately, data showed. At the same time, state Republicans were moving to ease the process of absentee voting — predominantly used by white voters then — by stripping requirements that absentee voters provide an excuse for why they couldn’t vote in person and exempting them from the new photo-identification requirement.Justice Department lawyers reviewed the proposals under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and found that the new ID law would likely make voting disproportionately harder for Black citizens. The attorneys recommended that the George W. Bush administration block it.In a memo that the department’s political leadership ultimately disregarded, staff lawyers noted that a sponsor of the legislation had told them that she believed Black voters were likely to vote only when they were paid to do so, and that if the new law reduced their voting share it was only because it would limit opportunities for fraud.The memo also stated that the law’s sponsors defended the more lenient treatment of mail voting — like its exemption from the ID provision — by arguing that it was more secure than in-person voting because it produced a paper trail.Now, after an election year in which Mr. Trump repeatedly and falsely disparaged mail voting as rife with fraud, state Republicans are arguing that mail-in voting needs more restrictions.There is no new evidence supporting that assertion. But one thing did change in 2020: the increase in Black voters who availed themselves of absentee balloting, helping Democrats to dominate the mail-in ballot results during the presidential election.“It’s just really a sad day,” Mr. Small, from the Greater Gaines church, said. “It’s a very challenging time for all of us, just for the inalienable right to vote that we fought so hard for, and right now, they’re trying to turn back the clock to try to make sure it’s difficult,” he said.Pastor Clarke of St. Philip Monumental said the Republican effort to impose more restrictions could backfire, energizing an already active electorate.“Donald Trump woke us up,” he said. “There are more people in the congregation that are more aware and alert and have a heightened awareness to politics. So while we know that and we believe that his intentions were ill, we can honestly say that he has woken us up. That we will never be the same.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    DeSantis Is Ascendant and Cuomo Is Faltering

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn Politics With Lisa LererDeSantis Is Ascendant and Cuomo Is FalteringFor both men, their political fortunes and the tests imposed by their parties seem disconnected from the central question of this moment: How did they govern through a challenging year?March 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Credit…Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Hans Pennink, via Associated PressGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is a darling of the right-wing media, a staunch Trump conservative trying to position himself as the heir to the former president’s political brand. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York is a descendant of a liberal political dynasty, a Trump antagonist with his own, long-simmering presidential ambitions.Both have been on the front lines of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. But recent twists in their political fortunes underscore how differently both parties are keeping score in this volatile moment. Democrats and Republicans aren’t just on different teams in this pandemic, they’re playing by different rules altogether.Less than a year ago, Mr. Cuomo was a Democratic darling, heralded for his handling of the virus in a state that was hit hard by the pandemic. Celebrities declared themselves “Cuomosexuals,” his daily briefings became must-see TV and political wags murmured about a presidential bid. The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded him an Emmy for his 111 “masterful” coronavirus briefings. He published a memoir about his leadership, taking a victory lap with the race far from over.There were no such accolades for Mr. DeSantis. Referred to as “DeathSantis” and mocked for allowing “Florida Morons” to pack state beaches, Mr. DeSantis faced national scorn for his resistance to shutdowns. Last fall, he lifted all restrictions, keeping schools open for in-person learning and forbidding local officials from shutting down businesses or fining people for not wearing masks.“I see, in many parts of our country, a sad state of affairs: schools closed, businesses shuttered and lives destroyed,” Mr. DeSantis said, offering a rousing defense of his pandemic response at the opening of Florida’s legislative session this week. “While so many other states kept locking people down, Florida lifted people up.”The same could be said about Mr. DeSantis’s political ambitions.For Republicans, loyalty to the former president and his pet issues has become the ultimate litmus test. Mr. DeSantis checked all the boxes: fighting with the media, questioning scientific experts, embracing baseless claims of election fraud and railing against liberals.Conservatives rewarded the governor for his fealty. His approval rating rose above water in recent weeks, with some polling of Republicans showing Mr. DeSantis with higher ratings than Mr. Trump. He finished first in a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend covering a field of potential presidential candidates that did not include Mr. Trump, fueling chatter about a 2024 bid.The Democratic Party has embraced a very different kind of political standard, one based not on allegiance to President Biden but ideological and cultural purity. Throughout the Trump era, Democrats equated politics with morality as a way to attack a Republican president who trafficked in racist and sexist attacks. They cast themselves as the party of #MeToo accountability, pressuring those in their ranks accused of sexual misconduct to step down.That’s left Democrats facing charges of hypocrisy when it comes to Mr. Cuomo, who is now accused of sexually harassing several younger women. While Mr. Cuomo has few defenders, many powerful New York Democrats, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, are pushing for an independent investigation rather than an immediate resignation. The allegations have left his party divided between those who believe he must leave office and others who worry that the party is eating its own by cleaving to a standard Republicans largely ignore.It doesn’t help that before this current scandal, Mr. Cuomo was already under investigation for allegedly manipulating statistics on deaths of nursing home residents during the pandemic — chipping away at his image as a masterful manager of the virus and the Democratic brand of good governance. Once sailing toward a fourth term as governor, Mr. Cuomo is now fighting for his political career. His approval ratings have fallen nearly 30 points from last May.Yet, for both men, their political fortunes and the tests imposed by their parties seem disconnected from the central question of this moment: Did they effectively govern their states through an extraordinarily challenging year?The data is fairly inconclusive. When adjusted for population, Florida has a lower rate of deaths than New York, including at long-term care facilities like nursing homes, but a higher rate of cases over all, and it leads the country in the number of cases of the more contagious and deadlier U.K. variant of the virus. Slightly more Floridians — 8.7 percent of the population — than New Yorkers have received two doses of a Covid vaccine, but nearly the same percentage of the population in both states has received the first dose.Of course, numbers don’t tell the whole story. New York was the epicenter of the country’s first wave, before doctors had the equipment, experience and medications to fight a new disease. States like Florida learned from New York. Yet, for all Mr. Cuomo’s efforts to use his platform to stop the spread of the disease, he resisted early calls for lockdowns — a delay that undeniably played a role in the high death toll.About a year into the pandemic, Mr. Cuomo has fallen from his perch as a liberal icon. Mr. DeSantis has ascended to conservative stardom. And New Yorkers and Floridians are still mourning, masking and waiting for brighter days.Drop us a line!Over the past year, life has changed in ways big and small. We’re curious how the virus affected your political views. Maybe you went from MAGA-head to Bernie bro? Found a new love of big government after decades of worrying about the debt? Or even a new set of QAnon friends?The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Democrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.The retirement of a moderate Republican senator and conservative infighting have raised Democratic ambitions in the state, a longtime political bellwether that is increasingly tilting red.Ohio served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground for years, but has recently been dominated by Republicans.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMarch 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCOLUMBUS, Ohio — For Democrats of late, winning in Ohio has been a bit like Lucy and the football.First, Hillary Clinton made a late push there in 2016, returning to the state on the weekend before the election with no less a local celebrity than LeBron James, even though she had stayed away for much of the fall. Then, in the 2018 governor’s race, Democrats were optimistic about Richard Cordray, the wonky former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And in November, it was President Biden who made an 11th-hour stop in Ohio, even though his campaign was also skeptical about its chances there.Each candidate lost, and for the two presidential hopefuls, it was not even close.But Ohio Democrats are getting their hopes up again, aiming to capitalize on Senator Rob Portman’s surprise announcement last month that he was retiring and on Republican infighting after more than a decade of G.O.P. dominance at the state level.“I think people will look for something different,” Senator Sherrod Brown, the only remaining Democrat in statewide office, said of his party’s chances to pick up the Portman seat in 2022. “There’s a whole lot of people whose lives have gotten worse in the last five to 10 years.”If Democrats are to increase their Senate seats significantly beyond the 50 they now hold, with the party relying on Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker in the event of a 50-50 deadlock, states like Ohio are essential. They owe their narrow advantage to the fast-growing South and West, having picked up Republican-held seats in three states — Georgia, Arizona and Colorado — that Mr. Biden also carried in November.Yet the president’s recent challenges with some of his appointments and coronavirus relief legislation make the limitations of such fragile Senate control vividly clear: To claim something larger than what’s effectively a Joe Manchin majority, in which appointments and the shape of legislation can be determined by a single red-state senator, Democrats will have to go on the offensive next year in a part of the country that has proved far more fickle for them: the industrial Midwest.Mr. Biden’s hopes for working with a more expansive majority will hinge on whether his party can capture a cluster of Republican-held seats across the Big Ten region: in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. Former President Barack Obama won all of those states both times he ran, but they have become more forbidding for Democrats, or at least more competitive, as working-class white voters have become more reliable Republicans since the rise of former President Donald J. Trump.“If we’re going to have a real majority for Biden, we’ve got to figure out how we can get up to 52 to 53 seats, and that means Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin,” said Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist. (Iowa, which has been as difficult for Democrats as Ohio in recent years, may be competitive as a Senate battleground, but only if its longtime Senator Charles E. Grassley, 87, retires.)Senator Rob Portman of Ohio announced he would not seek re-election in 2022, creating an open seat during the midterm elections.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBeyond the question of the Senate majority, how these states behave in 2022 could carry profound implications. If they revert to a more Democratic orientation in the aftermath of the Trump era, it would suggest that the rightward shift of working-class white voters in recent years was driven by affection for one outsize figure. If Republicans win across the region, though, it may portend a more enduring realignment and raise sobering questions for Democrats about the Senate and presidential maps.And few states, in the Midwest or beyond, have the symbolic resonance of Ohio, which for decades served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground. Now, however, even the most optimistic Ohio Democrats acknowledge that they reside in a Republican-leaning state and must take lessons on how to compete from their ideological counterparts in other precincts of red-state America.“We should look at how Democrats won in Montana and Kansas,” said Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, who is planning a run for governor next year. “That’s a new place for us to look because we’ve always been a battleground, but national messages don’t fit right into Ohio.”One of the most consequential questions for Ohio Democrats is out of their hands: What direction will Republicans take in the Biden era? “Where they land is going to be a big deal,” Ms. Whaley said.Had Mr. Portman run for re-election, this would have been a far less weighty question in Ohio. He and Gov. Mike DeWine, another establishment-aligned and well-known incumbent, would have campaigned on their own political brands, never confronting Mr. Trump but also never embracing him, either.Now, though, the open Senate seat is thrusting the loyalty-obsessed former president to the forefront of his party’s nascent primary, as the announced candidates compete to see who can hug Mr. Trump tightest.Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who twice ran against Mr. Brown before withdrawing from the 2018 race and disappearing from public view, has resurfaced as an ardent MAGA man. In interviews and tweets since entering the race to succeed Mr. Portman, he has claimed that Mr. Trump’s second impeachment prompted him to run — never mind his previous two bids — and vowed to advance Mr. Trump’s “America First Agenda.”Perhaps more striking, though, is the maneuvering by Jane Timken, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017 in part because Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step as president-elect to make calls to party activists on her behalf.Mr. Portman, hinting where his eventual preferences may lie, has praised Ms. Timken, saying that “over the last couple of years, she has somehow managed through her communications and her organizing to keep all wings of the party moving in the same direction.”Jane Timken, right, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017, is expected to begin a campaign for the Senate seat.Credit…Aaron Doster/Associated PressYet Ms. Timken’s conduct since the start of this year illustrates the high-wire act Mr. Trump may force Republicans to execute in next year’s election.The weekend after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Ms. Timken, then still the state party chair, sent an email to Republicans urging them to “remember that whether it comes to our country or our party, our shared progress and prosperity is never about one person, one candidate or one government official.”A few weeks later, addressing a question about the decision by Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio to vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Ms. Timken said she was not sure she would have made the same choice but added that he had “a rational reason” for his vote. She called him “an effective legislator.”Ms. Timken changed her tune, however, just hours before quitting her state party post last month as she prepared to enter the Senate race.“Anthony Gonzalez made the wrong decision on impeachment and I disagree with his vote,” she said. “This sham impeachment is illegal and unconstitutional.”And then, just this week, Ms. Timken, under pressure to show her fealty to Mr. Trump, issued a statement demanding that Mr. Gonzalez resign from his seat. Her campaign, seeing private polling that showed an overwhelming majority of Ohio Republicans wanted to oust Mr. Gonzalez, realized it needed to put the issue to bed, according to one adviser.Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents a district in northeastern Ohio in Congress, is considering a run for Senate in the stateCredit…Eric Thayer for The New York TimesA number of Ohio Republicans were struck by the speed of her shift, including one who may also enter the Senate race: Representative Steve Stivers, the former chair of the House G.O.P. campaign arm.“Wait till you quit before you attack somebody,” Mr. Stivers said of Ms. Timken’s broadside on Mr. Gonzalez.While he has yet to announce his intentions, Mr. Stivers, who has said he would prefer Mr. Trump to enjoy a quiet retirement à la George W. Bush, believes the competition to cozy up to the former president could leave an opening in the primary.“My lane is looking pretty empty,” he said. “I should be able to go about 180 miles per hour in it.”Though it’s uncertain how strong Mr. Trump’s political standing will be next year, particularly if he were to be indicted in one of the criminal investigations he faces, many veterans of Ohio politics believe the only path to the Republican Senate nomination is through the former president.“Jane would be honored to have the president’s endorsement,” said Corry Bliss, who ran Mr. Portman’s 2016 campaign and is advising Ms. Timken. He made sure to note that she had been Mr. Trump’s “handpicked chair.”To a number of Ohio Republicans, the importance of their eventual nominee pales in comparison to what they believe is the fundamental political math of a state that absorbs the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Our suburban losses are dwarfed by their losses among working-class whites,” said Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based G.O.P. strategist.Ohio Democrats don’t deny that they are underdogs — or that to win, they may need the Republican Party to remain fractured.They point to the scandal-plagued Statehouse, where the House speaker is under federal indictment on corruption charges, as well as tensions between Trumpian legislators and the mild-mannered Mr. DeWine. Then there’s Mr. Trump and the widening gap between how he’s viewed by Republican activists and the broader electorate.“I don’t know if I’d call it a prerequisite for us to win, but their chaos is our opportunity,” said Liz Walters, the newly elected Ohio Democratic state chair.But Ohio Democrats may have their own drama.Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader, said progressive groups had encouraged her to run for the Senate seat.Credit…Paul Vernon/Associated PressWhile Representative Tim Ryan, a veteran Youngstown-area lawmaker, has been clear about his intent to run for Mr. Portman’s seat, he may face a primary that would highlight some of the tensions in the Democratic coalition.Lamenting how Mr. Trump had tapped into the “angst, anger and frustration” of onetime Ohio Democrats, longtime Representative Marcy Kaptur said that Mr. Ryan, who like her represents one of the lowest-income, predominantly white districts in the country, would “be able to reach people” the party has lost.A handful of other Democrats are considering entering the Senate race. They include Amy Acton, the former director of the state health department; Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader; and Kevin Boyce, a local official in Columbus who previously served in the state House. Ms. Sykes said the party’s turnout efforts in Ohio’s cities had been “awful” and called for a new approach.“Recreating Sherrod Brown — that doesn’t work because Sherrod Brown is Sherrod Brown,” she said, a barely veiled reference to Mr. Ryan’s attempt to pitch himself as a white populist. “We’re going to have to find a candidate who’s exciting and can appeal to women and people of color.”Ms. Sykes, who is Black, said she had been encouraged to run for the Senate by a handful of progressive advocacy groups and was assessing the landscape.She spoke for a number of Ohio Democrats when she said that Mr. Portman’s surprise retirement had prompted an otherwise depressed party to again place hope over history.“Had he not done that, it would’ve been a lost cause,” she said of the senator’s exit. “But now there’s new energy and we have to at least try.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More