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      Facing Tough Senate Race, Montana G.O.P. Looks to Change the Rules

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      An election bill moving through the Republican-led Legislature would rewrite the rules for a single race: the looming battle against Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat.HELENA, Mont. — Republicans typically cry foul when accused of rewriting election laws to benefit their candidates. But as the Montana Legislature debates a new voting bill, even some G.O.P. lawmakers concede that this one appears designed to help them win elections — more precisely, one very important election.The bill would rewrite the rules for the state’s next U.S. Senate race and only that race. The 2024 fight to oust Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, is expected to be one of the tightest in the country.The legislation would shift the contest from a traditional election into a “top two” primary system, making it exceedingly difficult for third parties to reach a general election ballot. Some believe the system would keep the state’s vibrant Libertarian Party from siphoning votes from the Republican nominee.The 2024 fight to oust Jon Tester, a Democratic senator from Montana, is expected to be one of the tightest in the country.Sarah Silbiger/ReutersWhile supporters of the bill say it makes elections fairer, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Helena have claimed that the bill reeks of political interference. Some have chafed at the involvement of Washington operatives, especially allies of Senator Steve Daines. A Montana Republican and head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Mr. Daines is leading the party’s campaign to win control of the Senate in 2024.Brad Molnar, a Republican state senator who opposes the bill, criticized Washington meddling in Montana politics, saying that if national Republicans get involved, “we will lose.” He predicted that the bill would backfire on Republicans if angry Libertarians flock to Democrats. “They will be angry. Why wouldn’t they be? I’m not a libertarian, and I’m angry.”The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Greg Hertz, said he was trying to ensure that Montana’s senator would win with more than 50 percent of the vote and to also tamp down on parties’ interference with third-party candidates.Mr. Hertz said he had designed the bill to apply only to the upcoming Senate race because he saw it as a test run. He expected the Legislature to examine expanding the system to congressional, state legislative and other statewide races in the future.The system would mirror California’s primaries, where all the candidates from all the parties appear on the same ballot, and the top two vote-getters face off in the general election.The bill passed the Montana Senate last week by a narrow margin, with seven Republican senators voting against it. A House committee will hold a hearing on the bill on Friday.State Senator Greg Hertz, the bill’s sponsor, says he was trying to tamp down on parties’ interference with third-party candidates.Janie Osborne for The New York TimesMultiple former Republican officials are expected to testify against it. The Libertarian Party has also been organizing opposition to the bill. The state’s Republican governor has not weighed in.But the forces crafting the bill and pushing it through are powerful.Chuck Denowh, a lobbyist who worked for Mr. Daines’s 2020 campaign and has ties to the Montana Republican Party, has been working closely with Mr. Hertz. At one point he suggested critical changes that focused the bill on Mr. Tester’s race, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.“We would like it to apply only to United States Senate races,” Mr. Denowh said in an email sent on March 26 to multiple lawmakers, including Mr. Hertz. “We’d like a sunset in 2025,” he added. It was not clear whom “we” was referring to, and Mr. Denowh declined to answer questions.Mr. Hertz quickly agreed with the changes and asked State Senator Steven J. Fitzpatrick, the House majority leader, who was copied on the email chain, to make the newly reworked proposal “a priority bill.”The sudden changes and swift reintroduction after an initial failure in committee caught Republican lawmakers by surprise.In a text message chain among eight Republican senators, Mr. Fitzpatrick answered lawmakers’ concerns by telling them the bill “came from Daines” and that it was the “brainchild of the Jason Thielman,” according to screenshots of the texts obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Thielman is a longtime Daines aide who is now the executive director of the N.R.S.C.“No wonder I don’t like it,” responded Senator Dan Salomon, a Republican state senator who voted against the bill.When asked about the text messages, Mr. Fitzpatrick said that he had never spoken directly with Mr. Daines about the bill, but that he believed the effort originated with national Republicans.Mr. Daines has not weighed in publicly. Rachel Dumke, a spokeswoman for Mr. Daines’s office, declined to comment.At least two Republican lawmakers in Montana said they had been pressured by Mr. Daines’s office to support the bill. And one Republican state senator received a text message from state Republican Party officials explicitly saying the bill was needed to defeat Mr. Tester. The lawmakers asked for anonymity to disclose private discussions.In an interview, Mr. Hertz said he had been working on election issues since last September, initially exploring adding a runoff election. But he acknowledged that his efforts seemed to gain national interest when he zeroed in on the Senate race.“Yeah, I heard from a lot of people in D.C. at that point in time,” Mr. Hertz said. He added that he hadn’t spoken with Mr. Daines personally but had spoken with Mr. Thielman repeatedly about the status of the bill.A spokesman for the N.R.S.C., Mike Berg, declined to comment on Mr. Thielman’s involvement.“The optics of the situation, I felt, were bad … I want to do it across the board,” said Jason Small, a Republican state senator who voted against the bill.Janie Osborne for The New York TimesMr. Hertz said that he thought the changes would help third parties. “This gives them an opportunity in the primary to win more votes. And if you have enough support, you will end up on the general ballot, and that will give you an opportunity to make your case to the voters of Montana.”A spokeswoman for Gov. Greg Gianforte declined to respond to questions, pointing to the governor’s brief statement at a news conference on Thursday.“A number of other states have tried things like this,” Mr. Gianforte said. “I think it’s kind of an interesting idea, but we won’t take a firm position until we actually see the final legislation.”Some Republican lawmakers who were supportive of the idea of a top-two election system balked when they saw that the proposal had been amended to apply only to the 2024 Senate election.“If we’re going to do a top-two primary, I’m all for it. I think it’s wonderful,” said Jason Small, a Republican state senator who voted against the bill. “The optics of the situation, I felt, were bad if we’re going to just single out one particular race and try it there. I want to do it across the board.”Some Republicans in the statehouse noted that the bill might not have much of an impact on the outcome. They cited a recent study by the election website FiveThirtyEight that found that Mr. Tester was likely to have prevailed in all of his elections even if the Libertarian candidate hadn’t run.The Tester campaign accused Montana Republicans of attempting a power grab.Republicans are “trying to change local election laws to look more like California’s in an attempt to gain political power for themselves,” said Shelbi Dantic, a spokeswoman for Mr. Tester’s re-election campaign.So far, no front-runner has emerged to challenge Mr. Tester in November. Republicans in Helena expect Representative Matt Rosendale, a conservative who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, to explore a run. Tim Sheehy, a wealthy businessman and military veteran, is being recruited by some Republicans in Washington to run, as first reported by Axios, though he has not made any formal announcement.As news about the bill spread around the state, Republican lawmakers said they were receiving calls and texts from constituents claiming an unease with the bill. Senator Jeff Welborn, a Republican state senator, noted that the complaints weren’t coming from just Democrats.Mr. Welborn said that he had received multiple text messages, including one from a constituent who said the bill amounted to election interference. “This guy also has Republican candidate signs in his yard,” Mr. Welborn said. “He saw this as a really, really bad look on Montana as a state for trying this one on.”Former Republican leaders in the state have also been vocal in their opposition.“It’s a horrible commentary about how you value the votes of your fellow citizens,” said Marc Racicot, a former Republican governor and former chair of the R.N.C. “They didn’t sign up as guinea pigs.”Republicans in favor of the bill said that they believed it would cut down on the interference by major parties with third-party candidates. In the past, Democrats have attempted to promote Libertarian candidates to try and divert votes from Republicans, and Republicans have fought to get Green Party candidates on the ballot to try and draw support away from Democrats.“I think at least with the top-two primary you eliminate some of that nonsense,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said, adding, “It’s dirty politics at its worst.” More

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      DeSantis Allies Pressure Florida Lawmakers Against Endorsing Trump

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      After four members of Congress backed Donald J. Trump, Republicans close to the Florida governor are trying to keep others from wading into the brewing fight for the G.O.P. presidential nomination.Supporters of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who is considering a run for president, have begun pressing members of the state’s Republican congressional delegation to hold off on any endorsements in the brewing presidential primary after four House members from Florida publicly backed Donald J. Trump.The effort, first reported by NBC News, was indicative of the growing concern in Mr. DeSantis’s orbit that the former president was building a significant structural advantage as the governor considers jumping in. One Republican familiar with the calls, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, said that Mr. DeSantis had been “blindsided” by the Trump endorsements from Representatives Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna and Cory Mills, all staunch supporters of the former president who also backed Mr. DeSantis’s re-election last year.It also shows how important the megastate of Florida will be in 2024. Once a general election battleground, Florida has drifted out of reach for Democrats. But with Florida’s governor and arguably its most famous resident, Mr. Trump of Palm Beach, battling for endorsements, donors and voters, the Republican primary will be a local brawl, assuming Mr. DeSantis jumps in.The calls, led by Ryan Tyson, a Florida pollster, and his political team based in Tallahassee, have reached Representatives Kat Cammack, Vern Buchanan, Mario Diaz-Balart, Greg Steube, Aaron Bean and Laurel Lee. Others in the 20-member Republican delegation from Florida are almost certainly on the call list, another Republican official familiar with the effort said on Thursday.“Yeah, they have reached out,” Mr. Steube confirmed to The Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “When we are ready to endorse a candidate for president, we will.”The endorsement of Mr. Trump by Mr. Donalds was especially stinging, coming from one of the few Black Republicans in the U.S. House and a former member of the Florida House of Representatives. Mr. Donalds introduced the governor at his victory party on election night in November.Mr. Donalds wrote in his endorsement on Monday that “2024 isn’t simply an election.” He continued: “It is an inflection point in our nation’s history, and it is an inflection point in world history. There is only one leader at this time in our nation’s history who can seize this moment and deliver what we need.”The calls may be having an impact, according to the sources familiar with them. Mr. Tyson’s team was told by some members that no more endorsements were imminent.Neil Vigdor More

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      The Republican Strategists Who Have Carefully Planned All of This

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      Republican leaders are now adopting increasingly autocratic measures, using the police powers of government to impose moralized regulations, turning private citizens into enforcement officers and expelling defiant elected Democrats just as county Republican parties, particularly in western states, are electing militia members, Christian nationalists and QAnon believers to key posts.Here’s one example. Last November, the Republican Party of Clackamas County in Oregon chose a new vice chairman, Daniel Tooze, a Proud Boy from Oregon City, and Rick Riley, head of the county chapter of Take Back America, which denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, as chairman. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that in central Oregon’s Deschutes County, the local Republican Party chose Scott Stuart, “a member of the county chapter of People’s Rights, a nationwide network of militia groups and anti-government activists founded by conservative firebrand Ammon Bundy.”In June 2022, two of my Times colleagues, Patricia Mazzei and Alan Feuer, reported that “at least a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys” had secured seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, including two facing criminal charges for participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:The concerted effort by the Proud Boys to join the leadership of the party — and, in some cases, run for local office — has destabilized and dramatically reshaped the Miami-Dade Republican Party that former Gov. Jeb Bush and others built into a powerhouse nearly four decades ago, transforming it from an archetype of the strait-laced establishment to an organization roiled by internal conflict as it wrestles with forces pulling it to the hard right.“On the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a November 2022 Politico essay, “How Political Violence Went Mainstream on the Right.”Those joining violent political events like the Jan. 6 insurrection, Kleinfeld continued,are more likely to be married middle-aged men with jobs and kids. Those most likely to support violence on the right feel most connected to the Republican Party. This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.Democrats are not driving today’s political violence, Kleinfeld argued,but they are at least partly responsible for driving many people into the arms of the far right. Fear is a major cause of violence. As America undergoes immense change, from a fourth industrial revolution to remaking the concept of gender, many Americans are struggling to understand why they feel unmoored, anxious and behind. Snake-oil salesmen like Tucker Carlson offer the racist Great Replacement Theory as an explanation. Rather than provide a better story, the progressive left calls people names if they can’t march to a radically new tune fast enough. No wonder that even people of color moved in 2020 toward a right that offers understanding and a sense of community.At the same time, Republican leaders are showing a growing willingness to disempower both Democratic officials and cities run by Democrats if they defy Republican-endorsed policies on matters as diverse as immigration, abortion and gun control.The expulsion of two Black state representatives by the Republican majority in Tennessee received widespread publicity this past week (one has already been reinstated by local officials and the other may be soon). But their expulsion, as spectacular as it was, is just the most recent development in a pattern of attempts by Republicans to fire or limit the powers of elected Democrats in Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and elsewhere. This includes Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision in August 2022 to suspend Andrew H. Warren, the elected Democratic state attorney of Hillsborough County, who had signed a statement saying he would not prosecute those who seek or provide abortions.In defiance of public opinion, 22 Republican attorneys general and 67 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives filed amicus briefs that called on Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Federal District Court judge in Amarillo, Texas, to invalidate the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which Kacsmaryk promptly went ahead and did last week. A February Ispos poll found that by a 3 to 1 margin (65-21), American adults agree that “medication abortion should remain legal in the United States,” including a healthy plurality (49-35) of Republicans.Republicans in states across the country are defiantly pushing for the criminalization of abortion — of the procedure, of abortifacient drugs and of those who travel out of state to terminate pregnancy — despite clear evidence, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, that public opinion had shifted in favor of abortion rights.According to research provided to The Times by the Kaiser Family Foundation, states that have abortion bans at various early stages of pregnancy with no exception for rape or incest include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.An overwhelming majority of Americans of all political persuasions believe there should be exceptions for rape and incest. An October 2022 survey of 21,730 people by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies found overall support for these exceptions at 86-14; among Democrats at 94-6; among independents at 89-12; and among Republicans at 76-24.At least three states with Republican governors — Florida, Virginia and Texas — have adopted laws or regulations empowering private citizens to enforce restrictive policies governing abortion, sex education or the teaching of critical race theory, in some cases providing bounties for those reporting abortions.Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, argues in his 2022 book, “Laboratories Against Democracy”:When it comes to democratic backsliding in the states, the results couldn’t be clearer: over the past two decades, the Republican Party has eroded democracy in states under its control. Republican governments have gerrymandered districts, made it more difficult to vote and restricted civil liberties to a degree unprecedented since the civil rights era. It is not local changes in state-level polarization, competition or demographics driving these major changes in the rules of American democracy. Instead, it is the groups that make up the national coalition of the modern G.O.P. — the very wealthy on the one hand and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural resentment on the other.When I asked him why the Republican Party had moved in this direction over the past generation, Grumbach elaborated in an email, observing that the two major elements of the Republican Party — “extremely wealthy individuals in an era of high economic inequality” and “a voter base motivated by cultural and demographic threat” — have a “hard time winning electoral majorities on the basis of their policy agendas (a high-end tax cut agenda for the elite base and a culturally reactionary agenda for the electoral base), which increases their incentive to tweak the rules of the game to their advantage.”Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, argued in an email that contemporary cultural conservatism depends on support from declining constituencies — non-college whites (as pollsters put it), evangelical Christians and other ideologues on the right — which places these groups in an increasingly threatened position, especially in the American two-party system.“At a certain point, the arc of history, which bends toward liberalism, means that traditional values among social conservatives lose their hegemonic status,” Norris wrote, which “is eventually reflected in progressive changes in the public policy agenda evident in many postindustrial societies during the late twentieth century, from the spread of reproductive rights, equal pay for women and men, anti-sex discrimination laws, passage of same-sex marriage laws, support for the international rules-based world order based on liberal democracy, free trade, and human rights, and concern about protection against environmental and climate change.”The consequences of this long-term cultural development for the losers, Norris continued, is a buildup of “resentment at the loss of the hegemony of traditional values and identities.” The problem for the Republican Party, she observed, lies in the fact that “by appealing to their shrinking socially conservative base, the Republican Party has been unable to gain a majority of the popular vote in their bid for the White House in eight of the last nine presidential elections.”The reality, Norris wrote, is:Since the early 1980s, on issue after issue, from abortion, secular values, civil rights, racial, homosexual, and gender equality, gun control, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism, the pool of social conservatives adopting traditional views on these moral and social identity issues has been shrinking in size within the U.S. national electorate, from majority to minority status. They are running down an up escalator.With their backs to the wall, Norris argued, conservatives have capitalized oninstitutional features of U.S. elections that allow Republicans to seek to dismantle checks on executive power — including the extreme decentralization of electoral administration to partisan officials with minimal federal regulation, partisan gerrymandering of districts, overrepresentation of rural states in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College, partisan appointments in the judiciary, primary elections rallying the faithful in the base but excluding the less mobilized moderate independents, the role of money from rich donors in elections and campaigns, and so on and so forth. The Trump presidency exacerbated these developments, but their roots are far deeper and more enduring.Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, noted in an email “that state policy outcomes are becoming more bimodal” — liberal or conservative, rather than centrist — “than in previous eras” and that the “misalignment between public policy and public opinion is pervasive in modern American politics,” particularly in red states “where public policy is far more extreme and conservative than the public wants.”In theory, the hostility of average voters to extreme issue stances can pressure politicians to move toward the center, Stephanopoulos contended, “but this aligning impact of general elections can be reduced through tactics like gerrymandering, which make it unlikely that even large swings in public opinion will much alter the composition of the legislature.”In addition, in Stephanopoulos’s view, in a highly polarized era, the pressure to moderate in order to win general elections faces growing counter-pressure to take immoderate positions in order to win primaries:There’s little that could persuade many voters to ever support the other side. And while general elections might be aligning, they’re pitted against many misaligning forces: the views of activists and donors, the need to win the primary election to be re-elected, pressure from legislative leadership, politicians’ own often extreme ideologies, and so on. It’s no surprise that the misaligning forces are often stronger.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, made the argument by email that “Given the clustering of communities along political, cultural, and social lines in the United States presently and the dispersion of powers in American federalism, we should expect our state and local laboratories to yield a wide dispersion of products, especially when they are given more freedom to experiment.”So why don’t all states converge on the national median, as revealed by the polls? Cain asked, and answered that “There are real public opinion differences across states and local communities, especially on hot button social issues.”Ultimately, Cain continued, “If elected officials and judges get too far out of alignment with voters, they will get the message in the form of surprising electoral outcomes, as recently occurred in Wisconsin. Democrats in the seventies and eighties experienced the same on busing, crime and welfare.”Of course, Cain cautioned, “my optimism about this assumes the Republicans do not give up on elections altogether, which is more in doubt than I ever anticipated a decade ago.”Other observers of American politics are more pessimistic. Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard, contends that many of the developments in states controlled by Republicans are a result of careful, long-term planning by conservative strategists, particularly those in the Federalist Society, who are developing tools to build what she calls “minority authoritarianism” within the context of a nominally democratic system of government.Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email:The first-movers who figured out how to configure this new “laboratory of democratic constriction” were legal eagles in the Federalist Society and beyond, because the key structural dynamic in the current G.O.P. gallop toward minority authoritarianism is the mutual interlock between post-2010 Republican control, often supermajority control, of dozens of state legislatures and the Scotus decision in 2019 to allow even the most extreme and bizarre forms of partisan gerrymandering.These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote,have figured out how to rig the current U.S. system of federalism and divided branches, given generational and geographic realities on the ground, and the in many ways fluky 2016 presidential election gave them what they needed to put the interlock in place. They are stoking and using the fears and resentments of about half or so of the G.O.P. popular base to undo American democracy and enhance their own power and privileges. They are doing it because they can, and they believe in what they are doing. They are America’s G.O.P. Leninists.Skocpol does not pull her punches:This situation, locked in place by a corruptly installed Supreme Court majority and by many rotten-borough judicial districts like the one in Amarillo, means that minority authoritarians, behind a bare facade of “constitutionalism,” can render majority-elected officials, including the president and many governors, officials in name only. The great thing from the minority authoritarian point of view is that those visible chief executives (and urban mayors and district attorneys) can still be blamed for government non-function and societal problems, but they cannot address them with even broadly supported measures (such as simple background checks for having military assault weapons).There are a number of factors that confirm Skocpol’s analysis.First and foremost, the Republican Party’s commitment to democratic values and procedures has been steadily eroding over the past two decades — and the momentum has accelerated. The brakes on extremism are failing, with Donald Trump gaining strength in his bid for renomination and the continuing shift to the right in states like Tennessee and Ohio.Second, in bright-red states, the embrace of far-right positions on such issues as abortion, guns, immigration and election denial is now a requirement rather than a choice for candidates seeking office. At the same time, in purple states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, a hard-right posture may be a liability in the general election, even as it is often mandatory in a primary contest.The 2024 presidential election, if it is close, will test the viability of a mainstay of Republicans’ current anti-democratic strategy: a drive to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. In August 2021, ABC News reported that eight states have enacted legislation shifting power over determining election results to legislatures or partisan boards: Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and Kentucky.The ability of state legislatures to determine the winners and losers of elections now hangs on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper, which will determine the constitutionality of a fringe legal theory promulgated by the right, the so-called independent state legislature doctrine.What’s at stake?In a 2021 essay, “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time,” Richard Hasen, an election expert who is a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote:A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.Put another way, according to Hasen:The Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s actions trying to change the Electoral College votes in five states, was an attempted coup built on the Big Lie of voter fraud. But the potential coup next time will come in neatly filed legal briefs and arguments quoting Thomas Jefferson and wrapped in ancient precedents and purported constitutional textualism. It will be no less pernicious.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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      A Week of Youthful Activism Sends Out Political Shockwaves

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      After Donald Trump’s indictment on Tuesday, progressives cemented two crucial victories in Wisconsin and Chicago, and, in Nashville, a firestorm erupted after the expulsion of two liberal lawmakers.A surge of youthful activism powered major liberal victories in Wisconsin and Chicago and a boisterous legislative uprising in Tennessee this week, as Republicans absorbed a string of damaging political blows, beginning with the arraignment of their leading presidential contender on criminal charges in Manhattan.The drumbeat of news seemed to batter the G.O.P.’s brand by the hour: Donald J. Trump became the first American president to be led into a courtroom to hear his indictment. Voters in Wisconsin handed Democrats a landslide victory and a one-seat majority on the state’s Supreme Court, with the fate of abortion and Wisconsin’s heavily gerrymandered political map at stake.And liberal activists helped one of their own rise to mayor of Chicago, defeating a more moderate Democrat who had the backing of Republicans in and around the nation’s third-largest city, and overcoming conservative-tinged arguments about crime and policing.A coda, or perhaps an own-goal, came on Thursday in red-state Tennessee, when the overwhelmingly Republican Legislature voted to expel two young, Black male representatives for their roles in leading youthful protests calling for gun control, after a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, but narrowly allowed a white female lawmaker who had stood with them to remain.The three Tennessee state representatives who were subject to expulsion votes on Thursday, Mr. Pearson, Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson. Ms. Johnson was the only one not expelled.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesIn so doing, Tennessee Republicans achieved little besides catapulting the representatives, Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, as well as Gloria Johnson, onto the national stage: Both men could be reappointed to their seats by officials in their Nashville and Memphis districts as soon as next week, as they await special elections in which they are favored to win.“If my job, along with other members of the R.N.C., is to protect the brand of the Republican Party, this didn’t help,” said Oscar Brock, a Republican National Committeeman from Tennessee. “You’ve energized young voters against us. Worse than squandering support, you’ve made enemies where we didn’t need them.”To be sure, there were bright spots for Republicans: They won a special election giving them a supermajority in the Wisconsin Senate, which entails broad impeachment powers. And a Democrat’s switch to the G.O.P. in the North Carolina House of Representatives handed Republicans a two-chamber legislative supermajority in the only Southern state where abortion is broadly legal, granting Republicans in Raleigh the ability to override the vetoes of Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.But in an odd-numbered year and a season when Americans are more taken with daffodils than with politics, the clamor of youthful activism and anger may have left the more lasting impression.“The right wing understands that time is not on their side,” said Representative Maxwell Frost, 26, a Florida Democrat who last year became the first member of Generation Z to be elected to the House. “What we saw in Chicago and Wisconsin, and what we saw in the backlash in Tennessee, is young people rising, and all of this played out in one week.”A “die-in” at the Tennessee State Capitol on Thursday. “It was a shameful day, but it will also wake people up, especially young people,” said Steve Cohen, a Tennessee congressman.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesFew Republicans defended the decision by their compatriots in Tennessee to try to silence elected Democrats by chucking them from the state house. Democrats, for their part, seized the moment.Representative Steve Cohen, the lone Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation after the gerrymandering of district lines before last November’s election, recalled the one and only time he got any attention from the national press as a member of the State Legislature: with a vote against displaying the Ten Commandments. Even so, he said, it amounted to just a quote in Time magazine. Mr. Pearson and Mr. Jones became national celebrities over the course of 24 hours.“It was a shameful day, but it will also wake people up, especially young people,” Mr. Cohen said.Worrywarts in either party looking for ill omens could find plenty.Mr. Trump’s arraignment on felony charges that he falsified business records to hide hush money to a porn star in the final days of the 2016 election set off a bonanza of fund-raising for his campaign and rallied many Republicans around his third run for the presidency. And a spate of new polling pointed to Mr. Trump’s improving competitiveness against President Biden in 2024.Not even his rivals for the Republican nomination dared question the indictment’s underlying allegations that Mr. Trump engaged in extramarital dalliances with a pornographic film actress and a Playboy Playmate.“No matter how tawdry the charges and whether true or false, making a sexual encounter between two consenting adults the focal point of a criminal indictment or an impeachment strikes most Americans as an abuse of power and a distraction,” said Ralph Reed, a veteran political strategist and voice of Christian conservatives.Janet Protasiewicz at her election night party in Wisconsin after an easy victory for a Supreme Court seat.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesOne of the week’s through-lines was the awakening of the young, who are often neglected because, for all their activism, they often fail to vote. Young voters were not only crucial to the easy victory of Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s open Supreme Court seat, they also powered the liberal candidate for mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, to an upset victory over the more moderate law-and-order candidate, Paul Vallas.And in the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, the chants of young protesters boomed through the hallways before, during and after the votes to oust the two state representatives, Mr. Jones, 27, and Mr. Pearson, 29.The drama in Nashville on Thursday was incendiary on multiple levels, a political cauldron of young versus old, Black versus white, a marginalized minority against an overwhelming majority — all playing out against the backdrop of gun violence in schools.Then there were the issues: guns and abortion.Addressing her party’s defeat in Wisconsin a day later on Fox News, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, conceded, “Where you’re losing by 10 points, there is a messaging issue. Abortion is still an issue, and we can’t allow the Democrats to define Republicans on it.”Her comments, however, elicited a storm of protest from anti-abortion voices in her party, which has showed no letup in its push for abortion curbs. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a potential rival of Mr. Trump’s for the presidential nomination, appears intent on signing a bill in Tallahassee to ban abortions after six weeks. Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed legislation this week prohibiting minors from traveling outside the state for an abortion without parental consent.Still, Ms. McDaniel stood by her comments: “We can’t put our heads in the sand going into 2024,” she said on Fox News.Mr. Brock, the national committeeman from Tennessee, similarly warned his party on its response to gun violence after the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville left six dead, including three children. Republicans, he said, can stay true to the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and still respectfully listen to the arguments for more gun-safety regulation.“Even in Tennessee, we have swing districts in the State House and Senate,” he said, “and if you’ve angered tens of thousands of students and presumably their parents, you could theoretically expose yourself to a united front.” More

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      The Response to Crime

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      Republican lawmakers are putting limits on progressive prosecutors.A fight has erupted in several states between Republican lawmakers and locally elected Democrats over how to respond to crime.Democratic district attorneys (often serving cities with many Black and Latino voters) say they are prioritizing serious crimes. In response, Republicans (often representing mostly white and rural areas) have accused them of ignoring criminal law and are making it easier to remove them from office.Today, I’ll explain what’s happening and why it matters.The policy fightSince 2015, dozens of prosecutors promising progressive reforms have taken office across the country. They vowed to send fewer people to prison and reduce the harms to low-income communities that are associated with high incarceration rates.To achieve that goal, many of these prosecutors said they would use the discretion the law generally allows them to decline to charge categories of crimes, like low-level marijuana offenses. About 90 prosecutors, out of more than 2,000 nationwide, also pledged not to prosecute violations of abortion bans. Many of these prosecutors have been re-elected, a sign of sustained voter support.Still, conservatives argue that the district attorneys are shirking their duty. Declining to prosecute a particular case is legitimate, they say; ruling out charges for a category of offenses is not. As a Republican legislator in Tennessee put it, “A district attorney does not have the authority to decide what law is good and what law isn’t good.” The conservative Heritage Foundation devotes a section of its website to attacking “rogue prosecutors.”Challenging local controlIn Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and elsewhere, Republican lawmakers have moved to oust or constrain prosecutors and officials who oversee the court system. The Republicans, who largely represent rural areas, are often aiming to thwart voters in cities, including many Black and Latino residents, who elected candidates on platforms of locking up fewer people.Examples include:In February, the Mississippi House passed a bill that establishes a new court system in part of the state capital, Jackson, a majority Black city run mostly by Black officials. In the neighborhoods where most of Jackson’s white residents live, the legislation would effectively replace locally elected judges with state-appointed ones and city police with a state-run force.Tennessee lawmakers in 2021 gave the state attorney general the authority to ask a judge to replace local prosecutors in cases in which they refuse to bring charges. Republican lawmakers criticized the district attorney in Nashville, Glenn Funk, who said he would no longer prosecute simple marijuana possession. Funk also said he would not charge businesses that ignored a state law requiring them to post signs saying transgender people could be using single-gender bathrooms.When Deborah Gonzalez, a progressive, ran for district attorney in Athens, Ga., in 2020, Gov. Brian Kemp tried to cancel the election. Kemp lost in court, and Gonzalez won the seat.In Florida last August, Gov. Ron DeSantis ousted Andrew Warren, the elected Democratic prosecutor in the district that includes Tampa, who had pledged not to prosecute offenses related to abortion or transgender health care.Changing the rulesThese actions upend a longstanding tradition of local control over criminal justice. In the 19th century, many states embraced local elections of prosecutors to ensure that they “reflect the priorities of local communities, rather than officials in the state capital,” according to one history. Criminal laws are largely enacted at the state level, and prosecutors, meant to be accountable to their communities, decide how to enforce them.Since prosecutors lack the resources to bring charges for every arrest, their discretion is a feature of the system. In the past, prosecutors usually used their discretion to act tough on crime. “Now you’re seeing a state effort to subvert the will of local voters who have elected prosecutors who use their discretion for a more compassionate and equitable system,” Marissa Roy, a lawyer for the Local Solutions Support Center, said. “It’s inherently undemocratic.”The new state billsIn a few states, Republicans are considering legislation that would give them power to remove local prosecutors. Georgia legislators recently passed a bill that would create a commission with the power to remove prosecutors. It awaits Kemp’s signature.The Missouri House passed a bill to allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor for violent crimes for five years. The bill was originally written to target St. Louis, where the elected city prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, is a progressive Black Democrat.In Texas, dozens of such bills are in play. One, which passed the Texas Senate this week, would bar prosecutors from adopting policies that refrain from prosecuting a type of offense. Another would create a council dominated by political appointees that could refer prosecutors to a trial court to be dismissed for incompetence. Republican supporters of the legislation targeted five district attorneys, from large metropolitan areas, who said they would not prosecute certain offenses, including some related to abortion or transgender medical treatments for minors.When a new type of legislation pops up in different states, a national policy organization sometimes promotes it. That may be happening with these bills. Last July, a Heritage Foundation staff member met by video with Republican lawmakers about curbing prosecutors’ authority, according to a person familiar with the Texas bills. The legislation became a priority of the Texas House speaker and lieutenant governor. “The Heritage Foundation meets with a variety of people and organizations about public policy topics,” a spokeswoman said.Given the conservative momentum behind the bills, Roy expects to see more. “All of this is connected to the backlash to the movement for racial justice and criminal justice reform,” she said.THE LATEST NEWSPoliticsThe Tennessee representatives Justin Jones, left, and Justin Pearson before a vote to expel them.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesTennessee House Republicans voted to expel two Democrats who protested in the legislative chamber for stricter gun laws.For decades, Justice Clarence Thomas has taken luxury vacations funded by a Republican megadonor, ProPublica reported.The U.S. should have evacuated Americans and others from Afghanistan earlier at the end of the war in 2021, the Biden administration acknowledged.The Supreme Court ruled that a transgender girl in West Virginia could compete on girls’ sports teams at her middle school while her appeal moved forward.Separately, the Biden administration proposed a rule that would bar schools from categorically banning transgender athletes but that would leave room for individual exclusions.The I.R.S. is planning to improve its customer service and to crack down on wealthy tax evaders.Trump IndictmentThe judge in Donald Trump’s case asked him to refrain from making incendiary comments. Trump responded by going after the judge’s family.The new publisher of the National Enquirer says the tabloid no longer buys stories to bury them. The practice put the company at the center of Trump’s indictment.Other Big StoriesGaza City last night.Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIsraeli jets struck southern Lebanon and Gaza overnight in response to an unusually heavy rocket barrage from militias in Lebanon. The violence ebbed after sunrise.New textbooks in India have purged parts of the country’s Muslim history that conflict with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist vision.Secret documents detailing American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military have appeared on Twitter and Telegram.A French minister has posed (with her clothes on) in Playboy. Critics are questioning her choice of publication.“Refilled with love and titanium”: The actor Jeremy Renner described his recovery from a snow plow accident that broke 30 of his bones.OpinionsMath and literature often seem like opposites. But whether it’s needing structure or searching for truth, they have a lot in common, Sarah Hart says.Economic competition, protectionism and even trade wars aren’t barriers to solving climate change; they’re assets, Robinson Meyer argues.The deaths of children — from guns, suicide and car crashes — are fueling America’s falling life expectancy, David Wallace-Wells writes.MORNING READSThe classic Peeps.Christopher Payne for The New York TimesPeeps: Visit the factory that makes the fluffy marshmallow chicks.Sonny Angel: These tiny dolls offer stress relief.Modern Love: Seduced by a charming chatbot.Advice from Wirecutter: Clean your phone. (It’s probably getting gross.)Lives Lived: Mimi Sheraton, the food writer and restaurant critic, was the first to wear a disguise to get a normal diner’s experience for her Times reviews and worked for many publications in a six-decade career. She died at 97.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICThe Masters: After shooting a 2-over-par 74 yesterday, Tiger Woods — who is struggling with leg issues — is in danger of missing the cut. It was part of an exhilarating first round in Augusta, Ga.N.B.A.’s regular season closes: The top of the Eastern Conference is set, as the Bucks, Celtics, 76ers, Cavaliers, Knicks and Nets have clinched postseason spots. The Western Conference, though, is wide open.ARTS AND IDEAS Mario and Princess Peach.Nintendo/Nintendo and Universal Studios, via Associated PressThe original ‘Mario’ movie“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” is now in theaters, and it faithfully recreates the colorful Mushroom Kingdom. Everything looks and sounds as it does in the games (except maybe Mario himself, who sounds an awful lot like Chris Pratt).Thirty years ago, the first big-screen adaptation of the video game series tossed aside the cartoonish setting in favor of a live-action, dystopian version of New York. The film was largely shot in an abandoned cement factory; sticky fungus was key to the plot. The movie was a flop.For The Times, Darryn King revisited that original film and the small but dedicated fan group who consider it a cult classic.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookLinda Xiao for The New York TimesRoasted radishes are juicy and sweet.What to WatchA new documentary about the director Alan Pakula has the feel of an A-list memorial service.TravelWhat to do for 36 hours in Tokyo.Late NightThe hosts discussed Marjorie Taylor Greene’s visit to New York.News QuizHow well did you keep up with the headlines this week? Test your knowledge.Now Time to PlayThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were diabolic and diabolical. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Useless stuff (four letters).And here’s today’s Wordle.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.P.S. The New York Times Presents is back on TV tonight with an episode about the hip-hop producer J Dilla, at 10 p.m. Eastern on FX and Hulu.Here’s today’s front page.“The Daily” is about migration.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. More

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      Virginia Rolls Back Voting Rights for Ex-Felons, Bucking Shaky Bipartisan Trend

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      State after state has eased restrictions on voting for former felons in recent years. But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s reversal suggests growing wariness on the right.WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, states around the country have steadily chipped away at one of the biggest roadblocks to voting in the United States — laws on the books that bar former felons from casting a ballot.But there are now signs that trend could be reversing.Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican who took office a year ago, revealed that he had rescinded a policy of automatically restoring voting rights to residents who have completed felony sentences.In a February hearing, North Carolina’s Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, appeared deeply skeptical that a lower court had constitutional authority when it restored voting rights last year to people who had completed their sentences. A ruling is expected soon.And then there’s Florida — whose Republican-dominated Legislature effectively nullified a citizen ballot initiative granting voting rights to a huge number of former felons in 2020. That left all three states on a path toward rolling back state policies on restoring voting rights for former felons close to where they were 50 and even 100 years ago.Experts say that Virginia’s reversal, which does not affect people who have had their rights already restored, is unlikely to represent a dramatic change in the long-term trend among states toward loosening restrictions on voting by people with felony records. Such restrictions still deny the vote to some 4.6 million voting-age Americans — one in 50 potential voters. But that number is down nearly 25 percent since 2016.Last month, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, signed legislation expanding voting rights for former felons in the state, and the New Mexico State Legislature, also Democratic, enacted a law doing the same.What is clear, though, is that a shaky bipartisan consensus — that those who have paid their debts to society should be able to cast a ballot — has eroded, as political polarization has risen. The action by Mr. Youngkin is especially notable because it leaves Virginia as the only state in the nation that disenfranchises everyone who commits a felony. Under the State Constitution, a former felon’s rights can be restored only with the governor’s authorization.“We’d reached a point for the first time in recent memory, maybe ever, where there was not a single state in the country that disenfranchised everyone,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It is disappointing that on an issue in Virginia that had gotten support from both sides of the aisle, they do seem to be taking a step backwards.”The backtracking spotlights the often-overlooked significance — legally and also politically — of a practice that has likely had a far greater impact on access to the ballot than more notorious voter suppression measures have.Voting rights battles are usually fought over cogs in the election machinery — ID requirements, drop boxes, absentee ballots — that can make it easy or hard to vote, depending on how much sand is tossed into them. The extent to which those battles shrink or expand the pool of voters is often impossible to measure.Not so with restoring the vote to former felons: Minnesota’s new law gives about 56,000 people access to the ballot; the North Carolina court ruling last year made another 56,000 eligible. The law awaiting the signature of New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, would add another 11,000 to the list.The rollbacks, however, are significant. In 2020, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law that effectively negated a 2018 citizen ballot initiative that restored voting rights to perhaps 934,000 residents, according to the latest estimate. The law limits the vote only to former felons who pay all court costs, restitution and other fees, a yearslong task for many, made surpassingly difficult by the state’s jumbled record-keeping on court cases.That legislative change not only halted the nation’s largest rights-restoration effort but also led to the arrest — in what Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, billed as a crackdown on fraud — of 20 former felons who had registered or voted illegally — many, if not all, out of confusion over their eligibility.In Virginia, governors have used their constitutional powers to restore the vote to more than 300,000 former felons since Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, first made restoration automatic for some in 2013. Two Democratic governors, Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, expanded that policy to include anyone freed from prison.By the time Mr. Northam left office in January 2022, a huge backlog of people eligible for restoration had been wiped out, said Kelly Thomasson, the official who handled rights restoration during Mr. Northam’s tenure as governor, in an interview. She said that roughly 1,000 to 2,000 newly eligible felons were being released from prison each month.After succeeding Mr. Northam, Mr. Youngkin initially restored voting rights to nearly 3,500 people in just his first four months in office. But that pace slowed dramatically to just 800 others in the next five months.A spokeswoman for Mr. Youngkin, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement that the governor “firmly believes in the importance of second chances for Virginians who have made mistakes,” and that he judges individual cases based on the law and the “unique elements of each situation.”She did not respond to requests to explain why new grants dropped sharply, or whether Republican resistance to restoring voting played a role in that decline.Although a Republican state legislator had once led Minnesota’s effort to give the vote to former felons, the policy became law this year with only a handful of Republican votes. In 2020, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, used her executive power to implement an automatic restoration policy much like the one Virginia had in place before Mr. Youngkin changed it.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa reacts after signing an executive order granting former felons the right to vote in August 2020.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressBut Iowa, Virginia and Kentucky, another Republican state whose governors’ executive orders have loosened restrictive restoration policies temporarily, have been unable to win legislators’ support for amendments to state constitutions that would make those orders permanent.Some experts say that the resistance stems in part from the common but questionable belief among Republican partisans that allowing former felons to vote would boost Democratic turnout.Although an outsize share of those who complete felony sentences are members of minority groups that broadly tend to vote Democratic, most felons are white, and those with their demographic characteristics — below-average income and education, to name two — increasingly skew Republican.Disenfranchisement has complex legal roots, including the 14th Amendment, which, in addition to granting citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to formerly enslaved people, forbids withholding the right to vote “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.”In Virginia, there are also antecedents that reflect the state’s history of suppressing the African American vote. The policy on rights restoration that Mr. Youngkin revived is rooted in a 1902 Virginia constitutional convention in which keeping Black residents from voting was an overriding priority.Experts say the potentially fleeting nature of executive actions like those in Kentucky — where Gov. Andy Beshear now automatically restores voting rights to former felons who had committed nonviolent crimes — and in Virginia sows confusion about voting rights. Critics say that bestowing a basic civic privilege becomes subject to the political whim of whoever is governor.Virginians who complete their prison sentences this year may wonder why those who left prison in 2021 are more entitled to cast a ballot than they are, said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota sociologist and an expert on the disenfranchisement of former felons.“It harkens to an era when the king can give a thumbs up or thumbs down,” he said. “We wouldn’t necessarily accept this if it were happening in another area.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Wisconsin’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Race: What to Watch

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      The election for a swing seat on the court is likely to determine whether abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps.WAUKESHA, Wis. — American political candidates routinely drum up support by warning voters that this election, really, is the most important of their lifetimes.It’s almost always an exaggeration, but the description might just fit for Wisconsin’s deeply polarized voters, who on Tuesday will choose a justice to fill a swing seat on the state’s Supreme Court.The winner — either Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, or Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice — will have the deciding vote on a host of major issues, including abortion rights, gerrymandered political maps, and voting and election cases surrounding the 2024 presidential contest.Officials on both sides have described the stakes of the officially nonpartisan race in existential terms — either they win and democracy survives, or they lose and it perishes.Wisconsin Democrats, who have been lost in the political wilderness for a dozen years, cast Judge Protasiewicz as their path to a promised land of abortion rights and fair maps. The state’s Republicans say Justice Kelly is their last hope to ward off liberal tyranny by fiat.Here are four themes animating Tuesday’s election:Wisconsin could turn sharply back to the left — or not.Wisconsin Republicans tend to talk about the election as if Judge Protasiewicz would roll onto the Supreme Court with a giant eraser to wipe out all of the legislative policies and structural advantages the G.O.P. has built for itself since Scott Walker became governor in 2011.They’re not entirely wrong.“A lot of the duly passed laws by the elected representatives of the state of Wisconsin would be deemed invalid,” Duey Stroebel, a Republican state senator from Cedarburg, said last week. “It wouldn’t be the people electing their representatives that would be making decisions, it would be her, based on her personal beliefs.”Indeed, Judge Protasiewicz has been clear about her views. She has signaled her opposition to Wisconsin’s 1849 law banning abortion in nearly all cases, which went back into effect when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, and she has called the legislative maps Republicans drew to give themselves a durable near-supermajority in the State Legislature “rigged” and “unfair.”But the state’s Democrats sound similarly apocalyptic about the prospect of Justice Kelly, who lost a 2020 bid to retain his seat on the court, returning to deliver conservatives a majority. He is aligned with the state’s anti-abortion groups and has said there is no legal problem with the maps.He also worked as a legal adviser for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Wisconsin when they sought to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. That Republican effort to undo Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin was only narrowly rejected by the State Supreme Court, which voted 4 to 3 to uphold the results.“Dan Kelly advised fake electors in 2020,” said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly, referring to a brazen plan by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn results in several states. “I absolutely fear what he would do in 2024 if a challenge to the popular vote and the election results came in front of him.”Abortion and crime are the two main issues.From the beginning of her campaign, Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) has sought to make the race a referendum on abortion rights in Wisconsin. Her campaign has spent $12 million on television ads in the last six weeks reminding voters that she supports them and Justice Kelly does not.“Judge Janet Protasiewicz believes in women’s freedom to make their own decisions when it comes to abortion,” her closing television ad states.It is a bet on the power of the most potent issue for Democrats since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court left the issue to the states.Even Republicans acknowledge privately that if the election is about abortion, Judge Protasiewicz has the advantage. Justice Kelly has not been as explicit, but he has implied that because legislators enacted the state’s abortion ban 174 years ago, they would need to rescind the law — something the current Republican majorities are unlikely to do.Hundreds of abortion rights supporters marched to the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., in January. Nearly all abortions became illegal in Wisconsin when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“He’s running a bit of a traditional campaign talking about larger issues of judicial restraint and things of that nature,” said Mr. Walker, the former governor who appointed Justice Kelly to the State Supreme Court in 2016. “She just spelled it out, and that very well may be the case for the left and the right in the future, just people saying, ‘Here’s how I’m going to vote.’”Republicans, as usually happens in Wisconsin, have tried to make the election about crime. Outside groups backing Justice Kelly have bombarded Judge Protasiewicz with ads attacking her as soft on violent criminals.Last week, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s business lobby, removed from the television airwaves an ad claiming that Judge Protasiewicz had issued a soft sentence to a convicted rapist. The victim in that case had told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the ad had caused her new trauma and that she had no problem with the length of the sentence.In another episode, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, while southern Wisconsin was under a tornado watch last week, texted to voters a replica of an emergency weather alert warning that Judge Protasiewicz was “a soft-on-crime politician with a long history of letting dangerous criminals go free.”The cash-filled contest is all over Wisconsin TV screens.All indications are that more people will vote in this Supreme Court election than any other in Wisconsin history.More people voted in the Feb. 21 primary contest than participated in the state’s primaries in August, when there were races for governor and Senate. According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the early-vote total as of Monday amounted to about a third of the total turnout of the 2019 State Supreme Court race, the last one that did not fall on the same day as a presidential primary.The record-smashing spending in the race — $39 million on television alone, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm — has ensured that just about every Wisconsinite is at least aware of the race, a key hurdle in typically low-turnout spring elections.The ultimate cost is expected to triple the previous high-water mark for spending on an American judicial election, which was $15 million for a 2004 Illinois Supreme Court race.Weeks ago, Wisconsin Democrats switched their strategy. Instead of sending door-to-door canvassers to visit voters who typically cast ballots in spring elections, they focused on reaching out to a broader group of people who tend to vote in November general elections.“When I was out knocking on doors a month or two months ago, people were aware that this election was coming, because they were seeing YouTube ads with their kids,” Ms. Neubauer said. “They were being bombarded with information about this election.”A key State Senate race is also unfolding.Wisconsin is also holding a special election on Tuesday for a vacant State Senate seat that covers parts of four counties in the suburbs north of Milwaukee.The district has long been held by Republicans but is trending away from the party. Mr. Trump carried it by 12 percentage points in 2016 but by only 5 in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, is contesting it with a heavy emphasis on abortion rights.Jodi Habush Sinykin, a Democrat, is running for a State Senate seat in suburbs north of Milwaukee. Morry Gash/Associated PressIf the Republican candidate, State Representative Dan Knodl, wins, his party will have a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate, which would allow the G.O.P. to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mr. Knodl, in an interview with PBS Wisconsin, said the impeachment powers granted to State Senate Republicans with his election “certainly would be tested.”Mr. Stroebel, the Republican state senator from Cedarburg, called impeaching Judge Protasiewicz over expected rulings on abortion and gerrymandering unlikely “but certainly not impossible.”If Dan Knodl wins his race for State Senate, Republicans will have a two-thirds supermajority, which would allow them to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Associated Press“If she truly acts in terms of ignoring our laws and applying her own personal beliefs, then maybe that’s something people will talk about,” he said. “If the rulings are contrary to what our state laws and Constitution say, I think there could be an issue.”Even if Republicans do not seek to impeach Democratic officials, the mere possibility could limit Democrats’ ambitions.“Just the threat of it obviously changes the way that public officials will act,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Madison. “It will make agency heads and civil servants be extremely timid and feel like they can’t carry out their job responsibilities.” More

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      The Most Important Election of 2023 Is Taking Place in Wisconsin

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      In 2011, as tens of thousands of left-leaning demonstrators occupied the Wisconsin state capitol to protest a new bill gutting public employee unions, a prank caller posing as the right-wing billionaire David Koch got the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, on the phone. Just two years after Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, Walker had been swept into office by the Tea Party wave. He saw the anti-union law, Act 10, as his chance to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Ronald Reagan, who’d fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, a devastating blow to the labor movement. Republican governors nationwide, Walker boasted, would follow his lead. “This is our moment,” he told the man he thought was Koch.In addition to eviscerating unions, Act 10 was designed to undermine the Democratic Party that depended on them. If similar bills were “enacted in a dozen more states,” wrote the right-wing activist Grover Norquist, “the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” Pro-union forces in Wisconsin tried hard to fight back. Democratic legislators fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum. Students walked out of schools and teachers held sickouts. People camped at the capitol for almost three weeks, with sympathizers around the world sending them pizzas. As demonstrations spread to other states, The New York Times drew comparisons to the Arab Spring, asking if Wisconsin was “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.” But Republicans jammed the law through, and Wisconsin’s hard right turn was underway.Walker and his party would go on to lock in G.O.P. rule, enacting shockingly lopsided electoral maps and assuring continuing Republican control of the state legislature, as well as dominance of Wisconsin’s national congressional delegation. Nothing since, not even the election of a Democratic governor, has been able to loosen Republicans’ gerrymandered grip on the state. That grip has been used to restrict voting rights, pass an anti-union right-to-work law, cut funding to education, dismantle environmental protections and make Wisconsin one of the hardest states in the country in which to cast a ballot.Democrats, on the other hand, are powerless to pass laws of their own. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the state must adopt new, even more gerrymandered maps passed by the legislature. As Craig Gilbert wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, under those maps, to win a bare majority in the Assembly, Democrats would have to win the statewide popular vote by double digits. The Wisconsin Democratic representative Mark Pocan put it this way: For Democrats to win a majority in the legislature, “The Republican Party would have to come out and say we’re now the party of the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings.”Impervious to voter sentiment, the Republican edifice of power has appeared unbreakable. But a contentious state Supreme Court election on April 4 could finally put a crack in it.A judicial election in a state you probably don’t live in — it might be hard to get excited about. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, pitting the mild-mannered, liberal-leaning family court judge Janet Protasiewicz against the Trumpist former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly, is by far the most important political contest of the year.Janet Protasiewicz won’t say how she’d rule on specific abortion cases, but she’s made her view on the issue clear. The race, which has gotten quite vicious, is ostensibly nonpartisan; candidates are not affiliated with a party on the ballot. But its political stakes are clear. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court currently has a 4-3 conservative majority, and one of the conservatives is retiring. If elected, Protasiewicz hopes to take a fresh look at the maps. She wants to revisit Act 10, which the state Supreme Court upheld in 2014. “Since 2011,” she told me in Madison last week, “it’s just been a spiral downward to a place where our democracy is really at peril.” This election is a singular chance to reverse that spiral.It could also determine whether the next presidential election is free and fair, shaking up a swing state court that came frighteningly close to overturning the 2020 vote. And if that isn’t enough, this election will also be a referendum on abortion rights, which is turning out to be the key issue in the race. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, an 1849 Wisconsin law banning almost all abortions went into effect. The state’s Democratic attorney general has filed a lawsuit challenging the ban, and the case will almost certainly make its way to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.“The state Supreme Court has always been the trump card for Republicans,” Charlie Sykes, once an influential right-wing radio host in Wisconsin and now the co-founder of the Never Trump conservative publication The Bulwark, told me. “You flip that and it changes the rules and dynamics of Wisconsin politics pretty fundamentally.”Like anyone auditioning for a judicial role, Protasiewicz, a former prosecutor who likes to tout her “common sense,” won’t say explicitly how she’d rule on the state’s abortion ban. But she offers strong hints. “You’ve had women and families counting on the protections of Roe for 50 years, right?” she told me. “Three generations of women, probably, counting on those protections, and now they’re gone.”Abortion is the primary reason that Protasiewicz’s race is garnering both national attention and, more importantly, national money, becoming the most expensive state Supreme Court contest in American history. After all, in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision scrapping Roe, state courts have emerged as crucial backstops for abortion rights, blocking abortion bans in states including South Carolina and North Dakota. “We’ve got this 1849 ban, and I think it is certainly motivating people to get out and vote,” said Protasiewicz.Democrats are hoping Wisconsin’s abortion ban will motivate the pro-choice vote. This protester is dressed as a uterus outside of the State Bar Center before last week’s debate. When a group of obstetrician-gynecologists held an event for her earlier this month, Protasiewicz said they told her they feared that doctors would no longer want to practice in Wisconsin, worried that routine medical care would run afoul of the law.These fears are well-grounded. One doctor told The New York Times about a patient who was denied standard care for a miscarriage and left bleeding for days. NBC News reported on a Wisconsin doctor who had to jump through hoops to care for a woman whose water had broken at 18 weeks, giving her baby almost no chance for survival and putting her at risk for sepsis. Protasiewicz recounted that the ob-gyns told her, “We don’t want to practice someplace where we can’t provide the necessary services that we feel we need to provide.”“I can’t tell you what I would do in a particular case,” Protasiewicz told me. But, she added, her “personal value” is that “those reproductive health choices should be able to be made by a woman who’s carrying a fetus.”Protasiewicz’s frankness about her views, and the policy implications of this election, seem to infuriate her opponent. In a contentious debate in Madison last week, in front of a standing-room-only crowd, the mutual contempt between candidates was palpable. Kelly kept pointing at Protasiewicz and calling her a liar as she looked straight ahead; the event had a bit of the same vibe as the infamous second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Kelly inveighed against Protasiewicz for speaking in terms of policy outcomes rather than legal doctrine, calling her “a candidate who does nothing but talk about her personal politics.”“See, this is a judicial election,” Kelly said, his voice oozing with condescension. “You should be talking about things that the courts do.” On the trail, Kelly refers to his opponent as “Politician Protasiewicz” and claims that she’ll replace the rule of law with the “Rule of Janet.”Yet there’s little doubt that Kelly, who was appointed to the bench in 2016 by Walker when another justice retired, will be a reliable vote for the right. That’s why Wisconsin Right to Life has endorsed him and the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List is running ads on his behalf. It’s why a well-known MAGA influencer and a hard-core Christian nationalist have been campaigning for him. As a former Republican, Sykes was bombarded with pro-Kelly mailings before the February primary. Two-thirds of them, he said, were about Kelly’s anti-abortion bona fides. (Kelly’s campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.)A crowd gathered in Sheboygan to hear Scott Presler, a right-wing influencer who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, campaign for Daniel Kelly.The current Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Jill Karofsky, who beat Kelly when he ran to retain his seat in 2020, was in the audience at the debate, and found his pretensions to neutrality risible. “Kelly always ruled in favor of the right-wing special interests,” Karofsky told me. “He was put on the court to carry the water of the right wing, and he did that job phenomenally.”The combination of strenuous claims of neutrality and consistently partisan rulings is, of course, a familiar one in judges who come out of the right-wing legal movement, including those who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Again and again, conservative justices have insisted that the ideological beliefs that fueled their careers will have no bearing on their jurisprudence, then used the bench to shore up Republican power. One result is that, for Democrats, the courts have become utterly demystified. They are done pretending that judges are merely legal umpires.Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, pointed out that in 2019, Lisa Neubauer, the Democratic-leaning Supreme Court candidate, ran a largely nonpartisan race focused on her experience and qualifications. “In the final stretch of that campaign, the Republican apparatus came in with the singular goal of getting every Republican to vote for the conservative candidate,” said Wikler, knowing that Neubauer “hadn’t made a partisan appeal to Democrats to counterbalance that.” Though Neubauer had been ahead in internal polls, she lost by 5,981 votes. “That was probably the last election in which someone tries to run a campaign that isn’t explicit about the values of the candidate,” Wikler said.In 2018, a Democrat, Tony Evers, defeated Walker in the governor’s race. Another Democrat, Josh Kaul, won the race for attorney general. Republicans in the Legislature responded by weakening the powers of both offices. Among other things, they passed laws, signed by a lame-duck Walker, giving themselves more authority over key appointments, blocking Evers and Kaul from withdrawing from a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act and ensuring that Evers would be unable to get rid of work requirements for some Medicaid recipients. (They also cut early voting in Democratic strongholds from six weeks to two.) The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the laws along ideological lines.An even bigger challenge to democracy came in 2020. Had Karofsky not replaced Kelly, it’s likely that the court would have overturned Wisconsin’s presidential vote, plunging the country into chaos. As it was, the state Supreme Court decided by a single vote to toss out the Trump campaign’s suit seeking to reverse his Wisconsin loss. Even though there was no evidence of fraud, the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice ​​Rebecca Frank Dallet told me, “there were still three people who were willing to throw out people’s ballots.”Daniel Kelly calls his opponent “Politician Protasiewicz.”After Kelly left the court, he was paid by the Wisconsin Republican Party and the Republican National Committee to work on “election integrity.” His name surfaced in Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation, with the former Wisconsin Republican chair Andrew Hitt saying that Kelly had been part of “pretty extensive conversations” on the scheme to create a slate of fake Republican electors who would attempt to cast votes for Trump.The one right-leaning judge who voted against the Trump campaign in 2020 was Brian Hagedorn. Kelly has blasted him for it, calling him “supremely unreliable.” Even if Kelly wins in April, Hagedorn will still be on the court, so Republicans can’t count on a majority if they contest the state’s election results in 2024. Nevertheless, several people I spoke to said they think Hagedorn might sign on to a less preposterous challenge than the one brought by the Trump team. “I don’t take him for granted at all,” said Sykes, whose ex-wife is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. “Because the pressures are so intense here on these kinds of things. So I’d be very worried.”As of this writing, there’s been no public polling on the Supreme Court race. Protasiewicz’s internal polling shows her ahead by the mid-to-high single digits. A poll by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a right-wing group supporting Kelly, also had Protasiewicz ahead, but only by two points, within the margin of error.Last week, Kelly campaigned with Matthew Trewhella, a fundamentalist pastor who has defended the murder of abortion providers, and Scott Presler, a right-wing influencer who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “What that tells me is that Kelly has gotten so deep into swimming in that really hard-right cesspool, that I’m not sure he’s really reaching out to the swing voters,” said Sykes.Still, given that April elections historically have low turnout, getting out the base can be enough to win. “The fact that both sides are spending heavily at the end certainly suggests that both sides believe the race may still be within reach,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist and the director of the Marquette Law School Poll.Early voting in Wisconsin has begun. With so much riding on the outcome, the contest has turned extraordinarily ugly. During the primary election that whittled the field to Kelly and Protasiewicz, the right-wing radio host Dan O’Donnell boasted of his readiness to play dirty. “I can do dirty tricks too,” O’Donnell said, suggesting he’d put out ads claiming that Protasiewicz opposed abortion. He added: “We can fool them. We can trick them.” In a Twitter group chat about plans for anti-Protasiewicz disinformation, later leaked online, one right-wing troll wrote, “I could doctor a couple videos or articles about how she said the N-word or something.”In what may or may not be a coincidence, earlier this month a conservative website, Wisconsin Right Now, published allegations that, in the 1990s, Protasiewicz used the N-word, and that she’d abused her ex-husband, Patrick Madden, who is deceased.Protasiewicz was married to Madden, a much older conservative judge, for 10 months when she was in her 30s, and their divorce was acrimonious. The sources named by Wisconsin Right Now were an old friend of her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s son, with whom Protasiewicz had a hostile relationship. According to divorce records, one reason Protasiewicz and her ex split up was that Prostasiewicz was unhappy that Michael Madden, who was on probation after serving a prison term for marijuana trafficking, was living with them. The divorce records make no mention of abuse, though O’Donnell, who has amplified the story, argued on his radio show that Patrick Madden must have been too ashamed to admit it.The Wisconsin Republican Party has repeatedly tweeted about the Wisconsin Right Now stories. In a press release, Kelly said that the allegations “are troubling to say the least,” calling for a “swift and full explanation.” At first, it seemed the issue might remain confined to the fever swamps. Last week, though, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Protasiewicz about the claims during a videotaped editorial board meeting.“It’s an absolute lie, 100 percent. To me it smacks of some type of level of desperation,” she said. (The Journal Sentinel later reported, of Madden, “Some details of the stepson’s story have changed, and his siblings did not confirm either allegation.”)These accusations now seem set to become part of the right’s closing pitch. “Like everybody around politics, I get a ton of emails from both sides,” said Franklin, the political scientist from Marquette. “And those claims are being pushed very heavily in the Republican and allied group emails I get.”Still, said Franklin, this is an election that is overwhelmingly about abortion and redistricting. These are issues that affect people’s real lives, and they’re deeply intertwined. In a decade of polling, Franklin said, roughly 60 percent to 65 percent of Wisconsin voters have consistently said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Gerrymandering means that the majority cannot enact its beliefs into law.“If I had one big thing that I want to get across to you, it’s that the deadlock between the political branches, which is related to districting, is one of the reasons why the Supreme Court has become such a hot race,” said Franklin. “Because it’s become the arbiter of that deadlock.”If Democrats can flip the Supreme Court, that “changes the rules and dynamics of Wisconsin politics pretty fundamentally,” said Charlie Sykes. There’s a certain irony here. For decades, conservatives have crusaded to overturn Roe v. Wade, nurturing a bench of right-wing judges and building the political power needed to confirm them. In Wisconsin as elsewhere, opposition to abortion motivated the grass roots and united most of the right’s factions. As BuzzFeed News reported, it was probably the central issue fueling the political rise of Scott Walker, who served as president of the Students for Life chapter at Marquette University. “Support of abortion opponents is credited in Walker’s victory,” a 1993 Milwaukee Journal headline said when he won the primary for an assembly seat.But in finally triumphing, the right created a backlash that threatens their durable hold on power in a crucial swing state. “Now that Roe v. Wade is gone, we move from the court of law to the court of public opinion,” Walker tweeted after the Dobbs decision. Inasmuch as that’s true in Wisconsin, it could mean the beginning of the end of what Walker built there. And because Wisconsin has been a pioneer in minority rule, the restoration of democracy there would resonate nationally.“In my election in 2020 we worked really, really hard to try to explain to people why the court matters. How it’s relevant to their everyday life,” said Karofsky. “And I think that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dobbs decision, made that crystal clear for everyone.”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