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      QAnon Candidates Aren’t Thriving, but Some of Their Ideas Are

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      PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Pamphlets, buttons and American flags cluttered booth after booth for political candidates at a conference center in Prescott, Ariz., this month. But the table for Ron Watkins, a Republican candidate for Congress who rose to fame for his ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, sat empty.“I thought it started at 11:30,” said Orlando Munguia, Mr. Watkins’s campaign manager, who arrived about 30 minutes after the event had begun and hastily laid out campaign materials without the candidate in tow.Mr. Watkins, a computer programmer in his 30s, is running into the same reality that many other QAnon-linked candidates have confronted: Having ties to the conspiracy theory does not automatically translate to a successful political campaign.More established Republican rivals have vastly outraised Mr. Watkins in Arizona’s Second District. Two other congressional candidates in Arizona who have shown some level of support for QAnon also trail their competitors in fund-raising ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. A fourth Arizona candidate with QAnon ties has suspended his House campaign. The same trend is playing out nationally.Primary results for QAnon-linked candidates More

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      A Hidden New Threat to U.S. Elections

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      Some Republican-led counties are refusing to certify election results — a move that could throw American democracy into chaos if it becomes widespread.It’s been more than nine weeks since the Pennsylvania primary. The election is still not certified.The reason: Three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster — are refusing to process absentee ballots that were received in a timely manner and are otherwise valid, except the voter did not write a date on the declaration printed on the ballot’s return envelope.The Pennsylvania attorney general has argued in court amid a lawsuit against those three counties that the state will not certify results unless they “include every ballot lawfully cast in that election” (emphasis theirs).The standoff in Pennsylvania is the latest attempt by conservative-leaning counties to disrupt, delay or otherwise meddle with the process of statewide election certification, a normally ceremonial administrative procedure that became a target of Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 contest.It’s happened in other states, too. Earlier this year, Otero County, a rural conservative area in southern New Mexico, refused to certify its primary election, citing conspiracy theories about voting machines, though no county commissioner produced evidence to legitimize their concerns.Eventually, under threat of legal action from the state’s attorney general and an order from the State Supreme Court, the commissioners relented and certified the county’s roughly 7,300 votes.Pro-democracy groups saw Otero County’s refusal to certify the results as a warning of potentially grave future crises, and expressed worries about how a state might be able to certify a presidential election under similar circumstances.The showdown in Pennsylvania is most likely less severe. The number of undated ballots is quite small, and if they had to, state officials could certify the election without counting those ballots, disenfranchising a small number of voters but preserving the ability to certify and send presidential electors to Congress (or elect a governor, senator or local official from the area). For now, the attorney general’s argument is to simply force the counting of every legal ballot.“It is imperative that every legal vote cast by a qualified voter is counted,” said Molly Stieber, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, who is now the state’s Democratic nominee for governor. “The 64 other counties in Pennsylvania have complied and accurately certified their election results. Counties cannot abuse their responsibility for running elections as an excuse to unlawfully disenfranchise voters.”The battle over the undated envelopes in Pennsylvania also presages what is likely to be another litigious election season, in which partisans will look to contest as many ballots as possible to help their side win, seizing on technicalities and immaterial mistakes in an effort to cancel votes.Election experts say that such sprawling legal challenges, combined with false accusations of fraud, could create chaos akin to the 2020 election aftermath.More From Democracy ChallengedRight-Wing Radio Disinformation: Conservative commentators falsely claim that “Democrats cheat” to win elections, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Jan. 6 Timeline: We pieced together President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to subvert American democracy and cling to power.The Far-Right Christian Push: A new wave of U.S. politicians is mixing religious fervor with conspiracy theories, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state.A Cautionary Tale on Democracy: A New Hampshire man pushed through a drastic budget change in his “Live Free or Die” town, angering the community — and jolting it out of indifference.“Had this unfolded on this kind of timeline in 2020, it really could have created problems, because there would have been questions about whether the state could have actually named a slate of electors,” said Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “You could imagine there being disputed slates of electors that were sent to Congress, and it could have been a big mess.”The issue reached the courts last year, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in a dispute over a judicial election that ballots could not be discounted because voters had not dated the return envelope’s declaration. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in June.In Pennsylvania’s tight Republican primary race for Senate between Mehmet Oz, now the nominee, and David McCormick, a state court again ruled that the undated ballots must be counted, but also instructed counties to report two separate tallies to state election officials — one including the undated ballots, and one without them — should there be a later decision on appeal going the other way.So far, there has been no new opinion allowing counties to not count the ballots. Local officials in each county have declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit.What to read this weekend about democracyIf Donald Trump takes back the White House in 2024, his allies plan to purge potentially thousands of civil servants from the federal government and fill career posts with MAGA loyalists, Jonathan Swan reports for Axios.In The Washington Post, Greg Sargent spoke with Rachel Kleinfeld, a scholar who has studied the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in many countries. She warns that America is well along a trajectory toward more serious political violence.This election cycle, at least 120 Republicans who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential contest have won the party’s nomination, FiveThirtyEight calculates.briefing bookProtesters in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesA pocket history of ‘Stop the Steal’Blake Hounshell and On Politics chatted on Thursday with Charles Homans, a New York Times reporter who just published a landmark feature article in The Times Magazine on the history of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Your story is called “How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right.” Was there ever any moment when that prospect was in doubt, or was it always destined to turn out this way?It’s impossible to imagine it taking root as it has if Donald Trump had conceded the election. That is the categorical difference between him and previous presidents. And it is what has distinguished “Stop the Steal” from the skepticism, both reasonable and conspiratorial, that surrounded previous elections.But if you look at the prehistory of the 2020 election, as I did in this story, it’s equally hard to imagine Trump conceding that election, or really any election. He was disputing the validity of elections he lost (and even some that he didn’t) going back to literally the first Republican caucus in 2016.And starting in those 2016 primaries, he had an ally in Roger Stone, who was trying to build a movement around Trump’s false claims — and linking those claims to the then-current preoccupation on the right with settling refugees from Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries.That connected Stop the Steal, from the beginning, to a whole cosmology of far-right conspiracism that extended well beyond Trump himself, and which you can still see reflected in the movement today.Do the politicians promoting Stop the Steal really believe this stuff? Or are some just playing along for political gain?Some do and some don’t. There are also Republican strategists and even some Stop the Steal activists who will complain (though rarely on the record) that the pursuit of the most baroque and obviously conspiracist claims about the election have given a bad name to what they argue would have otherwise been more credible arguments — in particular challenges to the legality of the expansions of absentee voting provisions and infrastructure in response to the pandemic in 2020 in some key states, which are generally thought to have helped Joe Biden.Those challenges have found success in the courts in only one state, Wisconsin, and no one has demonstrated that the expansions in question led to meaningful fraud (a point that even the conservative law firm that brought the Wisconsin lawsuit has made).But they do exist on a spectrum with the legal battles over voting rights that have played out between Republicans and Democrats and civil rights groups for years — the battles that William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, is reportedly joining now — and don’t rely on proving a vast conspiracy of voting-machine manufacturers or finding bamboo fibers on ballots.The grass-roots activists who are most intensely engaged in the project of overturning the 2020 election, however, are often very invested in the voting machine conspiracies and a range of other unproven or debunked claims. So are the figures who have invested the most money in the cause, like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com chief executive.And of course, so is Trump, who personally directed his Justice Department officials to run down some of the most out-there claims, and who has continued to repeat them since.One takeaway from your story is that Trump has used this fantasy of a stolen election to solidify his hold over G.O.P. base voters. Yet it’s also driven many Republican elites and college-educated voters away. Help us assess the political costs and benefits.As Trump’s claims about the election have hardened into a tenet of Republican orthodoxy, they’ve paradoxically become less tied up with him personally. They have become part of a more generalized story the right tells about the groups it perceives as its enemies — Democrats, “RINOs,” the media, the intelligence community, state-level bureaucrats — and the supposed lengths they’re willing to go to keep the right’s champions out of power.Trump is a martyr in that story, and of course remains by far the largest-looming figure on the right. But I don’t think a restoration of the Trump presidency is a singular goal of even the movement crystallized around the false election claims.To your second point, there are obvious limits to this view of politics when it comes to winning over anyone who’s not already a partisan. What I wonder, though, is how much these views matter to voters who are not especially partisan or particularly engaged.The polling around this subject has consistently shown an asymmetry that clearly benefits Republicans: Republican voters are highly worried about threats to democracy (which they presumably define in Trump-aligned terms) and Democrats are much less so.This is where the Democrats’ tactic of openly helping some of the most Stop the Steal-minded candidates in this year’s Republican primaries, aside from its cynicism, also strikes me as strategically dubious insofar as it presumes that their views on the 2020 election are something that swing voters will actually hold against them.A certain religious fervor runs through the “Stop the Steal” movement. To what extent do conservative Christians see Trump as a kind of Messiah-like figure? And if they do, does that help explain the passion behind the belief that he was robbed of a second term?I don’t think that even many far-right Christians view Trump as a Messiah-like figure. They did broadly view him as someone who was willing and able to deliver a country that was governed in accordance with their view of Christianity and its relationship to the state.I’m talking here about the set of beliefs (discrete from, if often overlapping with, conservative evangelical Christianity) that are sometimes described as Christian nationalism: the belief that America is a fundamentally Christian nation whose founding documents were divinely inspired, and which is meant to be governed accordingly, whether or not its leader is particularly pious.That’s different from the kind of conservative evangelical politics that were ascendant in this country 20 or 30 years ago, and it is very prominent in Stop the Steal. I think it does inform the passion behind the belief in Trump’s false claims, but it also helps explain the fervent support for the efforts to overturn the election even among people who may not really buy this stuff.ViewfinderPresident Biden disembarking from Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday.Cheriss May for The New York TimesAn illuminating imageOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Cheriss May told us about capturing the image above:When presidents return to the White House late at night or early in the morning, it’s usually quiet and uneventful.But President Biden’s arrival home from his trip to the Middle East was a bit different.As he got back in the early hours of Sunday, I focused on him inside Marine One and noticed that he was illuminated by a bluish glow inside the aircraft as he spoke to the pilot and gave him a thumbs-up.It reminded me of the 1985 martial-arts movie “The Last Dragon,” when Taimak gets “the glow,” which gives him an extra burst of energy. At that moment, I knew it wouldn’t be the typical early-morning presidential arrival.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on Monday.— BlakeIs 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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      Draghi’s Fall Reverberates Beyond Italy

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      The downfall of Italy’s prime minister has raised concerns across Europe about the power of populist movements and whether they will erode unity against Russian aggression.ROME — Just over a month ago, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy boarded an overnight train with the leaders of France and Germany bound for Kyiv. During the 10-hour trip, they joked about how the French president had the nicest accommodations. But, more important, they asserted their resolute support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. The pictures of the men tucked in a cabin around a wooden conference table evoked a clubby style of crisis management reminiscent of World War II.The mere fact that Mr. Draghi had a seat at that table reflected how, by the force of his stature and credibility, he had made his country — one saddled by debt and persistent political instability — an equal partner with Europe’s most important powers. Critical to that success was not only his economic bona fides as the former president of the European Central Bank but also his unflinching recognition that Russia’s war presented as an existential challenge to Europe and its values.All of that has now been thrown into jeopardy since a multi-flanked populist rebellion, motivated by an opportunistic power grab, stunningly torpedoed Mr. Draghi’s government this week. Snap elections have been called for September, with polls showing that an alliance dominated by hard-right nationalists and populists is heavily favored to run Italy come the fall.Mr. Draghi’s downfall already amounts to the toppling of the establishment that populist forces across Europe dream of. It has now raised concerns, far transcending Italy, of just how much resilience the movements retain on the continent, and of what damage an Italian government more sympathetic to Russia and less committed to the European Union could do to the cohesion of the West as it faces perhaps its greatest combination of security and economic challenges since the Cold War.“Draghi’s departure is a real problem for Europe, a tough blow,” said Gianfranco Pasquino, professor emeritus of political science at Bologna University. “Draghi had a clear position against the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Europe will lose in compactness because the next prime minister will almost certainly be less convinced that the responsibility for the war lies with Russia.”If there was any question of where the sympathies of European leaders lie in Italy’s power struggle, before his downfall Mr. Draghi received offerings of support from the White House, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and others.Mario Draghi, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron examining debris as they visited Irpin, outside Kyiv, Ukraine, last month.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinPrime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain wrote “Europe needs leaders like Mario.” When Mr. Draghi made his last-ditch appeal to Italy’s fractious parties to stick with him on Wednesday, Prime Minister Antonio Costa of Portugal wrote him to thank him for reconsidering his resignation, according to a person close to Mr. Draghi.But now, with Mr. Macron lamenting the loss of a “Great Italian statesman,” anxiety has spread around the continent about what will come next.Mr. Draghi’s rebalancing of Italy’s position on Russia is all the more remarkable considering where it started. Italy has among Western Europe’s strongest bonds with Russia. During the Cold War, it was the home of the largest Communist Party in the West, and Italy depended on Russia for more than 40 percent of its gas.Mr. Draghi made it his mission to break that pattern. He leveraged his strong relationship with the U.S. treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, to spearhead the sanctions on the Russian Central Bank.By the example of his public speeches, he pressured his allies, including Mr. Macron, to agree that Ukraine should eventually be a member of the European Union.In the days before the fatal vote in the Senate that brought down his government, Mr. Draghi visited Algeria to announce a gas deal by which that country will supplant Russia as Italy’s biggest gas supplier.Those achievements are now at risk after what started last week as a rebellion within his coalition by the Five Star Movement, an ailing anti-establishment party, ended in a grab for power by conservatives, hard-right populists and nationalists who sensed a clear electoral opportunity, and went for the kill.They abandoned Mr. Draghi in a confidence vote. Now, if Italian voters do not punish them for ending a government that was broadly considered the country’s most capable and competent in years, they may come out on top in elections.Prime Minister Draghi speaking to ministers and Senators on Wednesday, the day his national unity coalition collapsed. Andreas Solaro/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesThe maneuvering by the alliance seemed far from spontaneous.Ahead of the vote, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the hard-right League party, huddled with former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi over a long sweaty lunch at the mogul’s villa on the Appian Way and discussed what to do.Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party with post-fascist roots who has incessantly called for elections from the opposition, said she spoke with Mr. Berlusconi a few days earlier and that he had invited her to the meeting as well, but that she demurred, saying it was better they meet after the vote. She said she spoke on the phone with Mr. Salvini only after Mr. Draghi’s speech in parliament.“I didn’t want them to be forced to do what they did,” she said, referring to Mr. Salvini and Mr. Berlusconi, who abandoned Mr. Draghi and collapsed the government. “I knew it would only work if they were sure about leaving that government.”Each has something to be gained in their alliance. Mr. Salvini, the hard right leader of the League party, not long ago the most popular politician in the country, had seen his standing eroded as part of Mr. Draghi’s government, while Ms. Meloni had gobbled up angry support from the opposition, supplanting him now as Italy’s rising political star. Mr. Berlusconi, nearly a political has-been at age 85, was useful and necessary to both, but also could use their coattails to ride back to power.Together, polls show, they have the support of more than 45 percent of voters. That is worrying to many critics of Russia. Mr. Salvini wore shirts with Mr. Putin’s face on them in Moscow’s Red Square and in the European Parliament, his party signed a cooperation deal with Mr. Putin’s Russia United party in 2017.Ms. Meloni, in what some analysts see as a cunning move to distinguish herself from Mr. Salvini and make herself a more acceptable candidate for prime minister, has emerged as a strong supporter of Ukraine.League leader Matteo Salvini and Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni meeting with with Silvio Berlusconi, right, in October 2021.Guglielmo Mangiapane/ReutersMr. Berlusconi used to host Mr. Putin’s daughters at his Sardinian villa and was long Mr. Putin’s closest ally in Western Europe. But now, some of Mr. Berlusconi’s longtime backers say, he has forgotten his European values and crossed the Rubicon to the nationalist and Putin-enabling side.Renato Brunetta, Italy’s Minister for Public Administration, and a long time member of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, quit the party after it joined with the populist League party in withdrawing support from Mr. Draghi and destroying the government.He said he left because Mr. Berlusconi’s decision to abandon the government was irresponsible and antithetical to the values of the party over the last 30 years. Asked whether he believed Mr. Berlusconi, sometimes shaky, was actually lucid enough to make the decision, he said “it would be even more grave” if he was.Italy, long a laboratory for European politics, has also been the incubator for the continent’s populism and transformation of hard-right movements into mainstream forces.When Mr. Berlusconi entered politics, largely to protect his business interests in the 1990s, he cast himself as a pro-business, and moderate, conservative. But in order to cobble together a winning coalition, he had brought in the League and a post-fascist party that would become Ms. Meloni’s.Now the situation has inverted. Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini need Mr. Berlusconi’s small electoral support in order to win elections and form a government. They are in charge.“It is a coalition of the right, because it is not center-right anymore,” said Mr. Brunetta. “It’s a right-right coalition with sovereigntist tendencies, extremist and Putin-phile.”Supporters of Mr. Draghi take some solace in the fact that he will stick around in a limited caretaker capacity until the next government is seated, with control over issues related to the pandemic, international affairs — including Ukraine policy — and the billions of euros in recovery funds from Europe. That money is delivered in tranches, and strict requirements need to be met before the funds are released.Supporters of Mr. Draghi acknowledged that major new overhauls on major problems such as pensions were now off the table, but they argued that the recovery funds were more or less safe because no government, not even a hard-right populist one, would walk away from all that money, and so would follow through on Mr. Draghi’s vision for modernization funded by those euros.But if the last week has shown anything, it is that political calculations sometimes outweigh the national interest.Supporters of Prime Minister Draghi demonstrating in Milan on Monday.Mourad Balti Touati/EPA, via ShutterstockThe government’s achievements are already “at risk” over the next months of Mr. Draghi’s limited powers, said Mr. Brunetta, but if the nationalist front won, he said, “obviously it will be even worse.”Mr. Brunetta said Mr. Draghi arrived on the political scene in the first place because there was a “crisis of the traditional parties” in Italy. He said that the 17 months in government, and the support it garnered in the public, showed that there was “a Draghian constituency,” which wanted moderate, pragmatic and value-based governance.The problem, he said, was there were “no political parties, or especially a coalition, to represent them” and he hoped one could be born before the election but “there was little time.”And in the meantime, he said, some things were for sure. Italy had lost influence in Europe and the continent would suffer, too, for the loss of Mr. Draghi.“Europe,” he said, “is weakened.”Gaia Pianigiani More

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      Survey Looks at Acceptance of Political Violence in U.S.

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      One in five adults in the United States would be willing to condone acts of political violence, a new national survey commissioned by public health experts found, revelations that they say capture the escalation in extremism that was on display during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The online survey of more than 8,600 adults in the United States was conducted from mid-May to early June by the research firm Ipsos on behalf of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, which released the results on Tuesday.The group that said they would be willing to condone such violence amounted to 20.5 percent of those surveyed, with the majority of that group answering that “in general” the use of force was at least “sometimes justified” — the remaining 3 percent answered that such violence was “usually” or “always” justified.About 12 percent of survey respondents answered that they would be at least “somewhat willing” to resort to violence themselves to threaten or intimidate a person.And nearly 12 percent of respondents also thought it was at least “sometimes justified” to use violence if it meant returning Donald J. Trump to the presidency.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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      How Dan Cox Won the Republican Race for Maryland Governor

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      Maryland’s Republican contest for governor was the third election this year in which Democrats have effectively teamed up with Republicans loyal to former President Donald J. Trump to help a far-right candidate win a blue-state primary.Weeks ahead of Maryland’s Republican primary for governor, private Democratic polling showed the Trump-endorsed candidate, Dan Cox, with a slight lead over his establishment-backed rival, Kelly Schulz, a former cabinet secretary to Gov. Larry Hogan.But polls showed that once Republican voters were told Mr. Cox, who spent just $21,000 on TV and radio advertising, had been endorsed by Mr. Trump and held staunchly conservative views on abortion, his advantage ballooned.The Democratic Governors Association proceeded to spend more than $1.16 million on TV ads reminding Republican voters of Mr. Cox’s loyalty to Mr. Trump and endorsement from him.Mr. Cox won his race on Tuesday by double digits. He became the latest Republican primary winner to demonstrate both the power of the party’s far-right base in selecting G.O.P. nominees and the establishment wing’s inability to halt Democratic meddling in primaries.On Wednesday, Mr. Cox — who wrote on Twitter during the Capitol riot that Vice President Mike Pence was a “traitor” — dismissed the idea that he had been propped up by Democrats. They supported his primary bid in the belief that he cannot win the general election in Maryland, which Mr. Trump lost by 33 points in 2020.“The Democrats didn’t win this race,” Mr. Cox said in an interview on “Fox & Friends,” the morning program watched regularly by Mr. Trump. “The arguments of my opponent were replayed over and over again, smearing me.”The chief antagonist of Mr. Cox’s campaign was less any future Democratic opponent or even Ms. Schulz than it was Mr. Hogan, who won two terms as governor of an overwhelmingly Democratic state by focusing on Maryland’s economy while avoiding thorny social issues.Mr. Cox’s strategy of playing to the Trumpist base of the party won him a commanding primary victory, though tens of thousands of uncounted absentee ballots are likely to narrow his 16-point margin.Still, sowing division among Republicans and alienating moderate Democrats is the opposite of how Mr. Hogan won the last two elections. Mr. Cox is likely to face challenges broadening his support.Mr. Cox’s Democratic opponent is likely to be Wes Moore, a best-selling author and former nonprofit executive.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesIn the past, Mr. Cox has associated himself with followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He has tweeted the group’s hashtag, and in April he appeared at an event called Patriots Arise at a hotel in Gettysburg, Pa., that was organized by a right-wing social media influencer whose website has promoted a QAnon slogan.There, Mr. Cox promoted a similar brand of Christian nationalism that has animated the campaign of Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, who has endorsed Mr. Cox.“The Constitution does not give us our liberties. It merely protects those that were given by God,” Mr. Cox said at the event. “We have natural rights that supersede any governor, any government, any official, all of which is based upon the fact that we are created in his image.”Mr. Cox, in his Fox interview on Wednesday, played down the suggestion that he would not be able to build a winning coalition.But Mr. Hogan didn’t wait 24 hours before signaling that he would not vote for Mr. Cox. “The governor will not support the QAnon candidate,” said Mr. Hogan’s spokesman, Mike Ricci.Mr. Cox’s campaign manager, his daughter Patience Faith Cox, declined an interview request.The state’s business community, after eight years of being aggressively courted by Mr. Hogan, might soon turn to the Democrats.Rick Weldon, the president of the local chamber of commerce in Frederick, Md., said on Wednesday that he had better conversations about the needs of small businesses in the state with Wes Moore, who leads the still-uncalled Democratic primary, than with Mr. Cox, a state legislator from Frederick.“Mr. Cox is a crusader,” Mr. Weldon said. “Crusaders, once they get elected, make relatively ineffective elected officials.”Democrats’ backing of Mr. Cox was helped by Ms. Schulz’s minimal attempts to define him as unelectable. She never attacked him in television ads, hoping to employ the Hogan strategy of appealing to all manner of Republicans while also winning a substantial amount of Democratic votes in November.Kelly Schulz, Mr. Cox’s top rival, raised about $2.5 million through early July — about five times as much as he took in.Matt Roth for The New York TimesOfficials at the Democratic Governors Association bore no guilt about elevating a series of election-denying, Trump-loyal candidates who would seek to ban abortion, among a range of other measures, if they prevail in November.David Turner, a spokesman for the D.G.A., said his organization was focused on “winning these elections in November.” If giving a boost to far-right candidates increases the chances that Democrats will prevail, he said, it is worth the risk of placing in a governor’s mansion someone like Mr. Cox, Mr. Mastriano or Darren Bailey, an Illinois state senator who was the beneficiary of $35 million of Democratic advertising before winning his primary last month.“If the Republican Party had more leaders and less cowards at the top willing to speak truth to their voters, this lane wouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Turner said.Ms. Schulz had raised about $2.5 million through early July — about five times as much as Mr. Cox took in.But unlike Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, who imported a host of ambitious Republicans looking to create some daylight between themselves and Mr. Trump with voters, Ms. Schulz never sought to make her contest a referendum on Trumpism.Campaigning with national Republican figures would have made an already difficult general election much harder, said Doug Mayer, Ms. Schulz’s senior adviser.“You don’t play to win the primary, you play to win the general,” Mr. Mayer said. “In Maryland, that is a very, very, very difficult line to walk.”Mr. Cox’s Democratic opponent is likely to be Mr. Moore, a best-selling author and former nonprofit executive. Mr. Moore holds a 35,000-vote lead over Tom Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chairman. At least 169,000 Democratic absentee votes remain to be counted, but the number could be more than 300,000: Ballots postmarked by Tuesday will count as long as they are received by July 29.On Thursday morning, election officials across Maryland will begin processing the absentee ballots received in the mail and in drop boxes. The counting is expected to take several days.Elizabeth Dias More

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      Videos Vanish From Doug Mastriano’s Social Media, on Climate, Abortion and More

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      The videos were a sort-of virtual ride-along with Doug Mastriano as he crisscrossed Pennsylvania in the governor’s race, regaling viewers with his far-right musings about climate change, abortion and critics within his own party.In one live broadcast on Facebook in April, Mr. Mastriano, a Republican state senator, referred to climate change as “pop science.”In a separate video on his social media from a radio interview, three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, he dismissed the issue of abortion rights as a distraction. And when trying to explain in April why some Republicans would not support him, Mr. Mastriano, a retired Army colonel, attributed it to their “disdain for veterans.”But now that Mr. Mastriano is the G.O.P. nominee for governor, having been helped by the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump in the primary, he is shifting to the general election — and those videos have vanished.The removal of the videos from his campaign’s Facebook page was reported earlier on Monday by The Philadelphia Inquirer, which listed 14 videos featuring Mr. Mastriano, one of Pennsylvania’s pre-eminent election deniers, that had disappeared since April.It was not the first time that Mr. Mastriano had drawn scrutiny for what critics say is an effort to tone down his profile on social media. Last year, the group Media Matters for America reported that Mr. Mastriano had deleted more than 50 tweets promoting the conspiracy theory QAnon after Media Matters, a journalism watchdog, highlighted his role in an illegitimate election audit in Pennsylvania.But the video footage that once resided on Mr. Mastriano’s campaign Facebook page has not vanished entirely. The New York Times obtained the clips on Monday from American Bridge, a liberal group specializing in opposition research that archived them.A campaign spokesman for Mr. Mastriano denied in a statement on Monday that he had scrubbed his social media accounts of the videos.“The biased mainstream media is trying to manufacture a scandal, but they haven’t done their homework,” said the spokesman, who declined to provide his name but was responding from a campaign email address. “The videos in question were automatically deleted by Facebook after 30 days because of a default Facebook setting.”One of the videos that disappeared was less than 30 days old and was recorded on June 27. And a review of Mr. Mastriano’s Facebook page on Monday showed dozens of Facebook Live videos older than 30 days. The campaign did not respond to a follow-up question about why those videos still appeared.At the end of every Facebook Live broadcast, an automatic prompt asks account holders whether they want their video to be deleted after 30 days or remain on their page, according to the social media company.Critics accused Mr. Mastriano on Monday of trying to distance himself from his extreme views, which they said could alienate voters beyond his far-right political base in the general election against Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor and Pennsylvania’s attorney general.“Doug Mastriano spends every day trafficking conspiracy theories and reminding voters his top priority is banning abortion with no exceptions,” said Manuel Bonder, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Shapiro. “No amount of clicking the delete button can change the fact that Mastriano is the most extreme, dangerous candidate in Pennsylvania history.”David Turner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association, said on Monday that Mr. Mastriano “can’t delete his extreme positions.”“He’s completely out of touch with most Pennsylvanians, calling to ban abortions, trafficking insane election conspiracy theories, and denying climate change,” Mr. Turner said.The Republican Governors Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.In the Facebook Live broadcast on April 6, Mr. Mastriano criticized Gov. Tom Wolf, a term-limited Democrat, for entering Pennsylvania into a regional, multistate compact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector that Mr. Mastriano said could cost the state billions.“For what?” Mr. Mastriano asked rhetorically in the video, assailing Democrats. “For pop science. Let’s talk about climate change. So they’re hellbent on this theory. It’s a theory. It’s not a fact. Heck, the weatherman can’t get the weather right, you know, 24 hours out.”A link to a video on Mr. Mastriano’s campaign Facebook page said on Monday that the content was no longer available “because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.”In a Facebook Live video from June 27, Mr. Mastriano recorded himself giving a radio interview in which he accused Democrats of trying to turn attention away from the troubled economy to issues like abortion rights and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (He funded buses to shuttle supporters to the rally before the riot.)“They want us to focus on this and now on the Roe v. Wade decision instead of dealing with life,” he said in the video, which was also no longer visible on his Facebook page.Mr. Mastriano’s claim that the issue of reproductive rights was a distraction echoed remarks he made three days earlier in Binghamton, N.Y., where he appeared with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his son, Andrew Giuliani, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for New York governor. More

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      Jan. 6 and the Search for Direct Trump Links

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      The House panel investigating the Capitol riot has yet to find a proverbial smoking gun directly connecting the former president to the extremist groups that led the storming of the building. Is there one?The House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol held another blockbuster hearing on Tuesday, which featured previously unseen texts and draft social media posts suggesting that Donald Trump and his aides tried to make the march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even though they knew they were guiding a mob that was likely to turn violent.To better understand the state of the House inquiry and the related Justice Department investigations, I spoke with Alan Feuer, who has been leading The New York Times’s coverage of the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters and has reported extensively on extremist groups and movements. Few journalists know this world better, or have spent more time delving into obscure figures and rank-and-file members of organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.Alan wrote most recently about Ray Epps, a lifelong Arizonan who recently left the state, and whose participation in the protest outside the Capitol helped spark a conspiracy theory arguing that the entire day’s events were a black operation by the F.B.I.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Have we learned anything significant or new about extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot in these hearings?The short answer is: Not really.In the run-up to Tuesday’s hearing, the committee teased the fact that it was going to show links between extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and people in Donald Trump’s orbit.But what actually emerged at the hearings was something a little different.The committee didn’t break new ground but instead used public court filings and news articles to trace connections between far-right groups and Trump-adjacent figures like Roger Stone, the political adviser, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. The fact that Stone and Flynn have maintained those connections is fairly well known.Moreover, there is no direct evidence — at least not yet — that their ties to extremist groups were put to use in any planning for the violence on Jan. 6.And what are we learning about ties between extremists and Trump or his aides?Well, see above for the committee’s answer to that question — with a single caveat.At a previous committee hearing, there was a brief reference made by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. According to her, on the night before the Capitol attack, Trump asked Meadows to reach out to Stone and Flynn.We don’t know if that outreach ever occurred or, if it did, what was communicated. But it remains a tantalizing question: Why, apparently, did the president seek to open a channel to two people with ties to far-right groups on the eve of the Capitol attack?Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony drew the attention of the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesHutchinson’s testimony seems to have been a turning point in the investigation, and our colleagues have reported that it got the attention of Justice Department prosecutors. Can you help us understand why they might have been taken by surprise? I think most readers would assume that the Justice Department has more resources and a greater ability to compel cooperation than this committee does.While the House committee’s investigation into the events surrounding Jan. 6 and the Justice Department’s inquiry are covering much of the same ground, they operate by different rules.The committee has the power to issue subpoenas to pretty much anyone it wants. Federal prosecutors, however, are bound by rules of evidence that require pointing to some signs that a crime may have been committed before they use invasive techniques to gather evidence.Prosecutors may not have known that Hutchinson had valuable information before she testified in front of the committee because they did not necessarily have a way to compel those around her to give them a sense of what she knew. After her testimony, however, things look significantly different.Based on what we know now, how much can we say that the riot at the Capitol was planned, versus spontaneous?I’ll quibble slightly with the idea of planned vs. spontaneous and substitute a different pair of words: organized vs. spontaneous.What I mean is this: We know through the grueling work of open-source intelligence researchers and members of The New York Times’s stellar visual investigations team — who have pored over thousands and thousands of hours of video from Jan. 6 — that the Proud Boys, for example, were clearly moving in an organized and tactical manner on the ground that day.It’s clear that leaders and members of the group were instrumental in several advances on, and breaches of, the Capitol that were seemingly conducted in a way to make it appear as if other, more ordinary rioters took the lead.That said, we don’t know much about the planning surrounding the use of these tactics yet — or if anyone other than the Proud Boys helped contribute to any plans.We know that the group’s members arranged in advance to avoid wearing their typical uniforms in order to blend into the crowd, and we know that as late as Dec. 30, 2020, dozens of members took part in a virtual meeting where leaders ordered them to avoid antagonizing the police.But at least so far, there is no smoking gun laying out a detailed plot to storm the Capitol.The Justice Department has focused its prosecutions on those who committed violence or vandalism as they breached the Capitol. The narrative of critics of the investigations, including the Republican National Committee, is that the administration is pursuing a “witch hunt” of ordinary citizens who were just swept up in the moment. Is there anything to that critique?While it’s certainly true that the Justice Department’s most prominent cases concern those who had some role in violence or vandalism, many, many, many of the 850 or so people charged so far have been accused solely of petty offenses like trespassing and disorderly conduct.Those, of course, are federal crimes, and the evidence against even these low-level offenders is quite strong, given the incredible amount of video that was taken that day.So is it a “witch hunt” to charge people with clearly definable crimes for which there is abundant evidence?I’ll say this: The large majority of cases in which people merely walked into the Capitol, took a selfie and walked out — and did not brag about their conduct on social media or lie to investigators when they were being interviewed — have not resulted in any jail time whatsoever.What to readFifty-eight percent of American voters — cutting across nearly all demographics and ideologies — believe their system of government needs major reforms or a complete overhaul, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Reid Epstein explores the findings.David Sanger and Peter Baker preview President Biden’s trip to the Middle East, a journey freighted with both policy import and political peril for the White House. Follow our live coverage here.Prices rose 9.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Jeanna Smialek breaks down what it means.For Opinion, Jesse Wegman, a writer, and Damon Winter, a photographer, teamed up to produce “Gerrymander U.S.A.,” a stunning look at how partisan redistricting has shaped and, they would argue, distorted Texas politics. They visited the 13th Congressional District, which is represented by Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who has campaigned and governed as a hard-line Republican.In case you missed it: Read Jason Zengerle’s New York Times Magazine article on “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat.”— BlakeIs 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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      Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The Democrat from Maryland has been delving into the rising threat of white nationalism and white supremacy for five years. He will lead the inquiry’s hearing on the subject on Tuesday.WASHINGTON — When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.“Charlottesville was a rude awakening for the country,” Mr. Raskin, 59, said in an interview, rattling off a list of deadly hate crimes that had taken place in the years before the siege on the Capitol. “There is a real pattern of young, white men getting hyped up on racist provocation and incitement.”Tuesday’s session, set for 1 p.m., is expected to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies turned to violent far-right extremist groups whose support Mr. Trump had long cultivated, who in turn began assembling a mob to pressure Congress to reject the will of the voters.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, Boogaloo Boys, militia men and other assorted extremist and religious cults that assembled under the banner of ‘Stop The Steal,’ ” Mr. Raskin said, referring to the movement that spread Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. “This was quite a coming-out party for a lot of extremist, antigovernment groups and white nationalist groups that had never worked together before.”It has long been known that the mob was energized by Mr. Trump’s Twitter post on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he called for his supporters to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that would “be wild.” Mr. Raskin and Ms. Murphy plan to detail a clear “call and response” between the president and his extreme supporters.“There’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s tweet urging everyone to descend upon Washington for a wild protest on Jan. 6 succeeded in galvanizing and unifying the dangerous extremists of the country,” Mr. Raskin said.Mr. Raskin has hinted at disclosing evidence of more direct ties between Mr. Trump and far-right groups, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the extremist groups.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More