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      Trump Rally Underscores GOP Tension Over How to Win in 2022

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

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

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

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      4 Takeaways From the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack Commemoration

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      WASHINGTON — This anniversary of Jan. 6 marked a turning point for President Biden, who for much of his first year in office avoided direct confrontation with his predecessor, Donald J. Trump.On Thursday, Mr. Biden took deliberate aim at Mr. Trump, assailing him for watching television as the attacks unfolded, spreading a lie that the 2020 election was rigged, and holding “a dagger at the throat of America” when he encouraged his supporters to attack the United States Capitol.But Mr. Biden held on to one vestige from the past year: He still refused to call Mr. Trump by name.Here are four takeaways from the day.Biden takes a new, confrontational approach to Trump.As president-elect in November 2020, Mr. Biden and his staff proceeded with the transition process by treating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election as little more than histrionics.The calculation made back then by Mr. Biden and his advisers was that America was simply ready to move on, but on Thursday, the president was more willing than usual to address Mr. Trump’s claims, calling him a loser in the process.“He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president — defeated by a margin of over 7 million of your votes in a full and free and fair election,” Mr. Biden said. “There is simply zero proof the election results were inaccurate.”His remarks set him down a more confrontational path with Mr. Trump, who holds a firm grip on his party and shows no sign of backing down from continuing to perpetrate a false narrative about the 2020 election. It is a development Mr. Biden spent his first year in office avoiding, but one that he seemed to embrace as a matter of necessity on Thursday.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Biden rejects working with Republicans who support ‘the rule of a single man.’On his Inauguration Day just under a year ago, Mr. Biden promised to be “a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” On Thursday, he appeared not as the peacemaker president but as a leader who had a warning for Americans who attacked the Capitol in service of Mr. Trump.“I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either,” Mr. Biden said. “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”Mr. Biden also reserved some of his ire for elected officials. For a leader who came into office speaking poetically about the art of bipartisanship — “politics is the art of the possible,” he said early on — and about the need to heal a fractured nation, Mr. Biden suggested that he was only interested in working with Republicans who have not tied their political fortunes to the falsehoods spread by Mr. Trump.“While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against it, trying to uphold the principles of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else,” Mr. Biden said. “But whatever my other disagreements are with Republicans who support the rule of law and not the rule of a single man, I will always seek to work together with them to find shared solutions where possible.”Trump — and Trumpism — is not going away.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, center left, and Representative Matt Gaetz, center right, during a news conference in Washington on Thursday.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe president’s remarks presented a stark choice: “Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but in the shadow of lies?” In corners of the internet governed by Mr. Trump and his supporters, the answer seemed clear.On a podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump aide who was indicted in November for failing to comply with congressional investigators, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia deflected blame for the attack and suggested it was part of a government conspiracy.In his own cascade of statements, Mr. Trump showed no sign that he was going to shrink from a fight. He assailed Mr. Biden for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, and even the way he delivered his Thursday remarks.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      ¿Qué significa el 6 de enero para Estados Unidos?

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      Un año después del humo y los vidrios rotos, de la horca simulada y la violencia demasiado real de ese día atroz, es tentador hacer una retrospectiva e imaginar que, de hecho, podemos simplemente hacer una retrospectiva. Es tentador imaginar que lo que sucedió el 6 de enero de 2021 —un asalto mortal en la sede del gobierno de Estados Unidos incitado por un presidente derrotado en medio de una campaña desesperada por frustrar la transferencia de poder a su sucesor— fue terrible pero que ahora está en el pasado y que nosotros, como nación, hemos podido avanzar.Es un impulso comprensible. Después de cuatro años de caos, crueldad e incompetencia, que culminaron en una pandemia y con el trauma antes impensable del 6 de enero, la mayoría de los estadounidenses estaban impacientes por tener algo de paz y tranquilidad.Hemos conseguido eso, en la superficie. Nuestra vida política parece más o menos normal en estos días: el presidente perdona pavos y el Congreso se pelea por la legislación de presupuesto. Pero si escarbamos un poco, las cosas están lejos de ser normales. El 6 de enero no está en el pasado: está presente todos los días.Está en los ciudadanos de a pie que amenazan a funcionarios electorales y otros servidores públicos, está en quienes preguntan “¿Cuándo podemos usar las armas?” y prometen asesinar a los políticos que se atrevan a votar con conciencia. Son los legisladores republicanos que luchan por hacer que el voto sea más difícil para las personas y, si votan, que sea más fácil subvertir su voluntad. Está en Donald Trump, quien continúa avivando las llamas del conflicto con sus mentiras desenfrenadas y resentimientos ilimitados y cuya versión distorsionada de la realidad todavía domina a uno de los dos principales partidos políticos de la nación.En pocas palabras, la república enfrenta una amenaza existencial por parte de un movimiento que desdeña de manera abierta la democracia y que ha demostrado su disposición a usar la violencia para conseguir sus propósitos. Ninguna sociedad autónoma puede sobrevivir a una amenaza así negando que esta existe. Más bien, la supervivencia depende de mirar al pasado y hacia el futuro al mismo tiempo.Encarar de verdad la amenaza que se avecina significa entender plenamente el terror de ese día hace un año. Gracias en gran medida a la labor tenaz de un comité bipartidista en la Cámara de Representantes, una toma de conciencia está en proceso. Ahora sabemos que la violencia y el caos transmitidos en vivo a todo el mundo fue solo la parte más visible y visceral de un esfuerzo por revertir las elecciones. Ese esfuerzo llegaba hasta el Despacho Oval, donde Trump y sus aliados planearon un autogolpe constitucional.Ahora sabemos que los principales legisladores republicanos y figuras de los medios de comunicación de derecha entendieron en privado lo peligroso que era el asalto y le pidieron a Trump que lo detuviera, incluso cuando públicamente decían lo contrario. Ahora sabemos que quienes pueden tener información crítica sobre la planificación y ejecución del ataque se niegan a cooperar con el Congreso, incluso si eso significa ser acusado de desacato criminal.Por ahora, el trabajo del comité continúa. Ha programado una serie de audiencias públicas para exponer estos y otros detalles, y planea publicar un informe completo de sus hallazgos antes de las elecciones intermedias de este año. Después de los comicios, si los republicanos recuperan el control de la Cámara, como se espera, indudablemente el comité será disuelto.Aquí es donde entra la mirada hacia el futuro. A lo largo del año pasado, legisladores republicanos en 41 estados han intentado promover los objetivos de los alborotadores del 6 de enero, y lo han hecho no rompiendo leyes, sino promulgándolas. Se han propuesto cientos de proyectos de ley y se han aprobado casi tres decenas de leyes que facultan a las legislaturas estatales para sabotear sus propios comicios y anular la voluntad de sus votantes, según el recuento activo de un consorcio no partidista de organizaciones a favor de la democracia.Algunos proyectos de ley cambiarían las reglas para hacer más fácil que los legisladores rechacen los votos de sus ciudadanos si no les gusta el resultado. Otros proyectos legislativos reemplazan a los funcionarios electorales profesionales con figuras partidistas que podrían tener un interés claro en que gane su candidato predilecto. Y, otros más intentan criminalizar los errores humanos de funcionarios electorales, en algunos casos incluso con amenaza de cárcel.Muchas de estas leyes se están proponiendo y aprobando en estados que suele ser cruciales en las elecciones, como Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia y Pensilvania. A raíz de la votación de 2020, la campaña de Trump se enfocó en los resultados electorales en estos estados: demandó para reclamar un recuento o trataba de intimidar a los funcionarios para que encontraran votos “faltantes”. El esfuerzo fracasó, en buena medida debido al profesionalismo y la integridad de los funcionarios electorales. Desde entonces, muchos de esos funcionarios han sido despojados de su poder o expulsados de sus cargos y reemplazados por personas que dicen abiertamente que las últimas elecciones fueron fraudulentas.De este modo, los disturbios del Capitolio continúan presentes en los congresos estatales de todo Estados Unidos, en una forma legalizada y sin derramamiento de sangre y que ningún oficial de policía puede detener y que ningún fiscal puede juzgar en un tribunal.Esta no es la primera vez que las legislaturas estatales intentan arrebatarle el control de los votos electorales a sus ciudadanos, ni es la primera vez que se advierte de los peligros que entraña esa estrategia. En 1891, el presidente Benjamin Harrison advirtió al Congreso del riesgo de que ese “truco” pudiera determinar el resultado de una elección presidencial.La Constitución garantiza a todos los estadounidenses una forma republicana de gobierno, dijo Harrison. “Las características esenciales de tal gobierno son el derecho del pueblo a elegir a sus propios funcionarios” y que sus votos se cuenten por igual al tomar esa decisión. “Nuestro principal peligro nacional”, agregó, es “el derrocamiento del control de la mayoría mediante la supresión o distorsión del sufragio popular”. Si una legislatura estatal lograra sustituir la voluntad de sus votantes por la suya, “no es exagerado decir que la paz pública podría estar en peligro serio y generalizado”.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

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      One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.We know now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with Mr. Trump to call a halt to it, even as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.For now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will undoubtedly be dissolved.This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.Many of these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing for recounts or intimidating officials into finding “missing” votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last election was fraudulent.Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.This isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison warned Congress of the risk that such a “trick” could determine the outcome of a presidential election.The Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government, Harrison said. “The essential features of such a government are the right of the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted equally in making that choice. “Our chief national danger,” he continued, is “the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of popular suffrage.” If a state legislature were to succeed in substituting its own will for that of its voters, “it is not too much to say that the public peace might be seriously and widely endangered.”A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain committed to empirical reality and representative democracy. “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”The answer, for now, appears to be no. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.Political violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst. Throughout American history, party leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Chase Smith to John McCain, have stood up for the union and democracy first, to their everlasting credit.Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      McConnell to Manchin: We’d Love to Have You, Joe

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      Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, says Democratic outrage over Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition to sweeping policy bills shows he is not welcome in his party any longer.WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell is extending an open invitation to Senator Joe Manchin III — come on over to our side.Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said on Tuesday that he was astonished by the angry response that Mr. Manchin of West Virginia elicited from the White House and his fellow Democrats with his Sunday bombshell that he would oppose President Biden’s signature domestic policy bill.The Senate, Mr. McConnell noted, is an institution where the most important vote is the next one, leaving the Republican leader perplexed as to what drove Democrats to impugn Mr. Manchin’s integrity by accusing him of reneging on commitments to the president.“Why in the world would they want to call him a liar and try to hotbox him and embarrass him?” Mr. McConnell, who is just one Senate seat away from regaining the majority leader title, asked in an interview. “I think the message is, ‘We don’t want you around.’ Obviously that is up to Joe Manchin, but he is clearly not welcome on that side of the aisle.”It is hardly a secret, Mr. McConnell said, that he has wooed Mr. Manchin for years, only to have Mr. Manchin, a lifelong Democrat, resist. And Mr. Manchin this week said he “hoped” there was still a place for him in the party.Despite his break with Mr. Biden over the sprawling safety net and climate change bill, Mr. Manchin would not be an exact fit for the Republican Party. He is closer to Republicans than Democrats on some flashpoint cultural issues like guns and abortion. But he has a more expansive view than most Republicans of the role of government in social and economic policy. And in both of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trials, Mr. Manchin voted to convict.But Mr. McConnell seemed to see the clash over the spending measure as potentially providing a new opening for a party switch that would both restore him as majority leader and shift the ground in Washington. And he is also not against stirring up trouble for Democrats however and whenever he can.“Obviously we would love to have him on our team,” said Mr. McConnell. “I think he’d be more comfortable.”Mr. McConnell’s appeal to Mr. Manchin came as the Republican leader celebrated the year coming to a close without Democrats advancing two of their most ambitious priorities: legislation to bolster voting rights and the sprawling domestic policy bill that Mr. McConnell characterized as part of a “socialist surge that has captured the other side.”Considering how Republicans began 2021 — in the minority in Congress, a newly elected Democrat poised to move into the White House and a public worn down by a pandemic and alarmed by an assault on the Capitol — Mr. McConnell and his colleagues say they have had a successful year. In some respects, it was all the things they did not do that may have served them best.They did not maneuver themselves into shutting down the government as they have in the past — despite demands from the right that they never work with Mr. Biden. And they did not allow the government to default, with Mr. McConnell providing Democrats a circuitous path to raising the debt ceiling. Either could have created a backlash for Republicans.“We had a good deal of drama,” Mr. McConnell said about the high-wire act over the debt ceiling, “but in the end, we got the job done.”As Democrats spent months trying to hammer out the huge policy bill among themselves, Republicans were relegated to the sidelines. Mr. McConnell said Democrats’ inability to come together on it so far reflected a misreading of the 2020 elections, when voters gave them the White House but bare majorities in both the Senate and the House.“They did not have a mandate to do anything close to what they tried to do,” said Mr. McConnell, suggesting that progressive “ideology overcame their judgment.”The decision by Mr. McConnell and other Republicans to help Democrats write and pass a separate, $1 trillion public works bill was, Mr. McConnell said, a smart one, even though Republican supporters of the measure took heat from others in the party, notably Mr. Trump.Mr. McConnell said that applying pressure to keep the policy bill separate from the infrastructure measure denied Democratic leaders leverage over Mr. Manchin, who helped negotiate the infrastructure measure, while delivering a bipartisan bill that met legitimate needs. He said that Mr. Trump and other Republican critics had been proven wrong.“I think it was a much smarter play to support the infrastructure bill,” he said. “I think it was, A, good for the country, and B, smart for us politically.”Democrats have not given up on either the social policy bill or winning over Mr. Manchin, meaning Mr. McConnell and Senate Republicans will have to maintain their campaign against the legislation into the new year. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, also intends to press forward with voting rights measures fiercely opposed by Mr. McConnell and is threatening to try to change Senate rules if Republicans try to filibuster it again.Democrats say Mr. McConnell is being complicit in allowing some states to impose new voting restrictions meant to target voters of color, a charge he rejects, saying that the impact of the new laws is being exaggerated. He said he was relying on Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who recently reaffirmed her opposition to changing filibuster rules, to hold steady.“Kyrsten Sinema has been quite unequivocal that she is not going to break the Senate and eliminate the legislative filibuster,” he said. “Thank goodness for that.”One area where Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats have posted some victories is on judicial confirmations, with 40 judges being seated in the president’s first year, a number well in excess of other recent presidents. It is a subject of special interest to Mr. McConnell, since he spent the Trump era pushing conservative judges through the Senate.“Look, there’s some advantages to having the White House,” he said. “I’m not surprised, but the three Supreme Court justices and the 54 circuit judges we did are still there and I think will be good for the country for a long time to come.”Mr. McConnell said he believed his party’s performance this year and the struggles of the Democrats were setting Republicans up for a strong midterm election next year and his potential return to running the Senate no matter what party Mr. Manchin is in. Despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to encourage candidates he favors in key Senate races, Mr. McConnell said he was intent on avoiding the type of primary contests that in the past have hurt Republicans by saddling them with primary winners who falter in general elections.“I feel good about how we handled ourselves this year and I feel good about how the American public is reacting to what they are trying to do,” he said of the Democrats. “I believe it will be an excellent environment for us.” More

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      John Thune, a Likely Successor to Mitch McConnell, Weighs Retirement

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      Mr. Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is considering giving up his South Dakota seat because of both family concerns and Donald Trump’s enduring hold on the G.O.P.WASHINGTON — Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Senate Republican and a potential future leader, is seriously considering retiring after next year, a prospect that has set off an intensifying private campaign from other Republicans urging him to seek re-election.Mr. Thune is only 60, but a combination of family concerns and former President Donald J. Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican Party have prompted the senator, who is in his third term, to tell associates and reporters in his home state that 2022 could be his last year in Congress.His departure would be a blow to South Dakota, which has enjoyed outsize influence in Washington, and could upend Senate Republicans’ line of succession. Mr. Thune has been open about his ambition to lead his party’s caucus after Senator Mitch McConnell makes way, and quiet but unmistakable jockeying is already underway between him and Senators John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming.“John is the logical successor should Mitch decide to not run again for leader,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine said of Mr. Thune, while noting that Mr. McConnell’s hold on their caucus remained “very secure.”That Mr. Thune would even entertain retirement with the chance to ascend to Senate Republican leader illustrates both the strain of today’s Congress and the shadow Mr. Trump casts over the party. The senator’s departure would represent yet another exit, perhaps the most revealing one yet, by a mainstream Senate Republican who has grown frustrated with the capital’s political environment and the former president’s loyalty demands. The exodus began in 2018 with Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker retiring rather than facing primaries, and has accelerated this year.Part of Mr. Thune’s hesitation owes to Mr. Trump and the potential for the former president — who lashed out at Mr. Thune early this year when the senator rejected his attempts to overturn the election — to intervene in South Dakota’s Senate primary race. But the larger factor may be the longer-range prospect of taking over the Senate Republican caucus with Mr. Trump still in the wings or as the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.Mr. Thune has said he will decide his intentions over the holidays. Yet a number of his friends and colleagues have become convinced that he is serious about leaving public life.Among those alarmed is Mr. McConnell himself, who one adviser said had “leaned in” on pushing Mr. Thune to run again.“I certainly hope that he will run for re-election, and that’s certainly what I and others have been encouraging him to do all year long,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview.He is hardly alone.A range of Senate Republicans — from moderates and Trump targets like Ms. Collins to Trump allies like Kevin Cramer of North Dakota — have lobbied Mr. Thune over dinner, on the Senate floor and, since lawmakers went home for Christmas recess, via text messages.“I let him know how much I appreciate him,” said Mr. Cramer, who has known Mr. Thune since they were young executive directors of their state parties. “He knows both Dakotas really need him.”Mr. Thune first angered Mr. Trump during the former president’s final days in office, when Mr. Thune said any challenge to the election results “would go down like a shot dog.” Mr. Trump derided the senator as “Mitch’s boy” and urged Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run against him in the state’s primary.Since then, though, Mr. Trump has trained his fire on Mr. McConnell, whom he has labeled “Old Crow,” and largely ignored Mr. Thune.Two top Senate Republican allies of Mr. Trump said he would probably refrain from targeting Mr. Thune simply because the senator, who is popular at home and has a well-stocked campaign war chest, is unlikely to lose a primary in the state that first elected him to Congress in 1996.“He likes winners, and John Thune is a winner,” said Mr. Cramer, predicting that Mr. Trump would at most be “a nuisance” to Mr. Thune.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was similarly blunt about why Mr. Thune need not sweat a competitive primary. “Trump worries about his win-loss record,” said Mr. Graham, who is the de facto liaison between the former president and Senate Republicans.Mr. Graham, who along with Mr. Thune and Ms. Collins is part of a small group of senators who often dine together in Washington, said that before they left for the holidays, he had reassured Mr. Thune about any Trumpian intervention.“I told John that’ll be fine,” Mr. Graham recalled. “John will be fine.”Asked if he thought the threat of a Trump-inspired primary bothered Mr. Thune, Mr. McConnell said, “No. No, I don’t.”But if Mr. Thune ascended to Republican Senate leadership, Mr. Trump could still prove a headache.The former president does not have the influence in the Senate, where 19 Republicans defied him to support the infrastructure bill, that he does in the House. Yet Mr. Trump’s regular attacks on Mr. McConnell and on anything that has the air of cooperation with President Biden are not lost on Senate Republicans.The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More

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      10 Senate Races to Watch in 2022

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      Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with the loss of a single seat.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.A single state could determine whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate after the midterm elections, a tenuous advantage that hinges on the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.Thirty-four Senate seats are at stake in 2022, but the list of races considered competitive is much smaller.Most are in states that were fiercely contested by President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The burden will be on Democrats to try to ward off the midterm losses that have historically bedeviled the party holding the presidency, said Donna Brazile, a former interim party head and veteran strategist.“Joe Biden has a lot riding on these states,” she said. “He doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room.”AlaskaOf the seven Republicans in the Senate who voted to convict Mr. Trump in the impeachment trial that followed the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Senator Lisa Murkowski is the only one facing re-election in 2022.Mr. Trump, who is seeking to exact revenge against his impeachment foes, endorsed Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, to run against Ms. Murkowski in the primary.ArizonaSenator Mark Kelly, a Democrat who won a special election in 2020 to fill the seat once held by John McCain, is now seeking a full term.Both parties are prioritizing the race.The Republican field includes Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s attorney general since 2015; Mick McGuire, a retired major general in the U.S. Air Force; Jim Lamon, a businessman; and Blake Masters, chief operating officer of an investment firm run by Trump’s tech pal Peter Thiel.GeorgiaStacey Abrams’s decision to run again for governor could boost the re-election prospects of Senator Raphael Warnock, a fellow Democrat, Ms. Brazile said.Mr. Warnock, the pastor at the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, is seeking a full term after defeating Kelly Loeffler last January in a runoff.His victory helped give Democrats control of both Senate seats in Georgia, where an expansion of the Democratic voter rolls in Atlanta’s suburbs has dented Republicans’ political advantage in the South and flipped the state for Biden.Now, Mr. Warnock is seeking a full term.“What he’ll get from Stacey is somebody who can stir up the electorate to get the results he needs to win in 2022,” Ms. Brazile said.Herschel Walker, the Georgia college football legend backed by Mr. Trump, is the favorite among seven Republicans who have filed to run so far. He has faced repeated accusations of threatening his ex-wife.FloridaIn Mr. Trump’s adopted home state, Senator Marco Rubio is seeking a third term.Mr. Rubio had raised more than $11.6 million in 2021 through September.He is facing Representative Val B. Demings, a Democrat with significant name recognition who out-raised him over the same period, with more than $13 million.NevadaCatherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina senator, faces her first re-election test since her milestone victory in 2016, a race that was flooded with nearly $90 million in outside spending.Opposing her is Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018.Mr. Laxalt has been endorsed by both Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader. Mr. Biden carried Nevada by fewer than 34,000 votes last year.New HampshireRepublicans have circled New Hampshire as a pickup opportunity, salivating over the dismal approval numbers of Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.But their enthusiasm was tempered when Gov. Chris Sununu said that he would run again for his current office instead of the Senate. Kelly Ayotte, whom Ms. Hassan unseated by about 1,000 votes in 2016, also opted out.Don Bolduc, a tough-talking Republican candidate and retired Army general, caused a stir recently when he called Mr. Sununu a “Chinese communist sympathizer.”North CarolinaSenator Richard Burr, another Republican who voted to convict Mr. Trump during his second impeachment trial, is retiring.Waiting in the wings is a crowded field of Republicans that includes Pat McCrory, a former governor; Representative Ted Budd, who has been endorsed by Trump; and Mark Walker, a former congressman.The Democrats include Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court and the first Black woman to serve in that role, and Jeff Jackson, a state senator and military veteran from the Charlotte area.OhioA large field of G.O.P. candidates will vie for the seat being vacated by the Republican senator Rob Portman, who is retiring.The leading Republican is Josh Mandel, Ohio’s former treasurer and an ardent Trump supporter. J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Republican venture capitalist who has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, is also running.Other G.O.P. candidates include Matt Dolan, a state senator; Jane Timkin, the state party’s former head; and the businessmen Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons.“You’ve got a lot of people fighting for the populist conservative lane,” said Beth Hansen, a Republican strategist and former manager of John Kasich’s campaigns for governor and president.Ms. Hansen downplayed the possibility of Republicans alienating moderate voters in a combative primary.“Honestly, I’m not sure these guys could pivot any further to the right,” she said.Representative Tim Ryan, supported by Ohio’s other senator, Sherrod Brown, is a prohibitive favorite among Democrats.PennsylvaniaAn open-seat race in Pennsylvania generated even more of a buzz when the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz recently jumped into fray.He joined a large group of candidates trying to succeed Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump who is retiring.Dr. Oz’s entrance came just days after Sean Parnell, a leading Republican endorsed by Mr. Trump, suspended his campaign amid allegations of spousal and child abuse.Kathy Barnette, a former financial executive, is also running as a Republican, and David McCormick, a hedge fund executive, has been exploring getting into the race as well.Democrats have several seasoned candidates that include Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Representative Conor Lamb. Also running are Dr. Val Arkoosh, a top elected official from the Philadelphia suburbs, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a state representative from Philadelphia.WisconsinA top target of Democrats is Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican whose approval rating has cratered amid an onslaught of television ads criticizing him for casting doubts about Mr. Biden’s election. Mr. Johnson has yet to announce his re-election plans.The top tier of Democrats includes Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor; Sarah Godlewski, the state treasurer; Alex Lasry, the Milwaukee Bucks executive ; and Tom Nelson, the top elected official in Outagamie County.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More