Subterms
Tennessee Seventh Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022 – The New York Times
Elections|Tennessee Seventh Congressional District Primary Election Resultshttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/04/us/elections/results-tennessee-us-house-district-7.html More
Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More
Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More
Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Maya King; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More
Tennessee is the only state hosting a primary contest on Thursday.All polling places in the state close simultaneously: 8 p.m. in the Eastern time zone and 7 p.m. in the Central time zone. Look up polling locations and sample ballots here.Two of the notable races on the ballot:GovernorGov. Bill Lee, a Republican, is seeking re-election and more than half of all voters approve of the job he’s doing, according to recent polling. Democrats, however, are trying to make the case that he can be toppled in a general election. The Democratic primary features three candidates: Jason Martin, a Nashville physician; J.B. Smiley, a Memphis lawyer and city councilman; and Carnita Atwater, a Memphis community activist.Fifth Congressional DistrictRedistricting diluted Democrats’ power in this Nashville-area district, making it more favorable for Republicans and prompting Jim Cooper, the 16-term Democratic congressman representing it, to retire. The Republican primary is crowded with 10 candidates, including Kurt Winstead, a businessman who has raised hefty sums for his campaign, and the former Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell. State Senator Heidi Campbell is unopposed on the Democratic side.Looking ahead to NovemberWhile not competitive on Thursday, the fall matchup is already set in the newly drawn Seventh District, which includes blue downtown Nashville in addition to redder rural areas of Tennessee — keeping it favorable to Republicans. Representative Mark Green is running unopposed for the Republican nomination and hopes to secure a second term. Odessa Kelly, a community organizer, is the Democratic candidate and is running with the backing of the Justice Democrats, a progressive political action committee. More
“President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”Those were the words of Representative Liz Cheney on Tuesday in her opening statement at the Jan. 6 House select committee’s seventh hearing, as she swatted away what she said was a new strategy among Donald Trump’s defenders: claiming that he was manipulated by outside advisers and therefore “incapable of telling right from wrong.”Basically, Trump lied about the election because he was lied to about the election.But, as Cheney pointed out, Trump actively chose the counsel of “the crazies” over that of authorities, and therefore cannot, or at least should not, “escape responsibility by being willfully blind.”Willful blindness is a self-imposed ignorance, but as Thomas Jefferson put it: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect because it can always be pretended.”If Trump is a pro at anything, it is pretending. He is a brat, but he’s not a child.Cheney’s argument immediately recalled for me the case of Pamela Moses, a Black woman and activist in Memphis.In 2019, Moses wanted to register to vote. A judge told her that she couldn’t because she was still on felony probation.So Moses turned to another, lower authority — a probation officer — for a second opinion. The probation officer calculated (incorrectly, as it turns out) that her probation had ended and signed a certificate to that effect. Moses submitted the certificate with her voter registration form.The local district attorney later pressed criminal charges against Moses, arguing that she should have known she was ineligible to vote because the judge, the person with the most authority in the equation, had told her so.Moses was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to six years and a day in prison, with the judge saying, “You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation.”How is this materially different from what Trump did as he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election? All the authorities — Bill Barr, head of the Department of Justice; White House lawyers; and state election officials — told him he had lost the election, but he sought other opinions, ones that confirmed his own view.This is not to say that the prosecution and conviction of Moses were justified, but rather to illustrate that we live in two different criminal justice realities: People without power, particularly minorities and those unable to pay expensive lawyers, are trapped in a ruthless and unyielding system, while the rich and powerful encounter an entirely different system, one cautious to the point of cowardice.Earlier this year, Moses’ conviction was thrown out because a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction had withheld evidence, and the prosecutor dropped all criminal charges against her.Still, by the time the ordeal was over, Moses had spent 82 days in custody, time she couldn’t get back, and she is now permanently barred from registering to vote or voting in the state.This is the least of the consequences Trump ought to face: He should be prohibited from participating in the electoral process henceforth.Some of the laws Trump may have broken in his crusade to overturn the election — like conspiracy to defraud the government — are more complicated than an illegal voter registration, but that is par for the course in a system that tilts in favor of the rich and powerful. Petty crime is always easier to prosecute than white-collar crime.This is a country in which the Internal Revenue Service audits poor families — households with less than $25,000 in annual income — at a rate five times higher than it audits everybody else, a Syracuse University analysis found.The way we target people for punishment in this country is rarely about a pursuit of justice and fairness; it simply reflects the reality that the vise squeezes hardest at the points of least resistance.The fact that Trump has thus far faced few legal repercussions for his many transgressions eats away at people’s faith.I believe this has contributed to our cratering confidence in American institutions, as measured by a recent Gallup poll. There are many factors undermining the faith Americans once had in their institutions, to be sure, but I believe a justice system rife with injustice is one of the main ones. In the poll, only 4 percent of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the criminal justice system.The only institution that did worse on that metric was Congress, with just 2 percent.We have a criminal justice crisis in this country, and people are portraying Trump’s behavior like that of a child in hopes of keeping him from facing consequences in a country that jails actual children.According to the Child Crime Prevention and Safety Center, “Approximately 10,000 minors under the age of 18 are housed in jails and prisons intended for adult offenders, and juveniles make up 1,200 of the 1.5 million people imprisoned in state and federal detention facilities.”There is no excuse for what Trump has done, and if he is not held accountable for it, even more faith in the United States as a “country of laws” will be lost.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More
Republicans exude confidence at Nashville event as midterms loom Party officials, prominent supporters, lawmakers and Trump took the stage at the ‘Road to Majority’ conference, but were vague on how they would ‘rescue America’“It’s the time to take this country back,” proclaimed Senator Rick Scott. “I’m here to tell you the American people are going to give a complete butt kicking to the Democrats this November!”The audience of religious conservatives clapped and whooped. No one felt that the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee was making an empty boast. Going into the midterm elections, the party has opinion polls, economic worries and history on its side.The ‘big rip-off’: how Trump exploited his fans with ‘election defense’ fund Read moreRepublicans exuded confidence this week at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville, Tennessee, eager to regain power after a punishing few years that saw them shut out of the House of Representatives, Senate and White House.Party officials, prominent supporters, senators, representatives and former president Donald Trump took the stage – set in a faux classical temple – in triumphal mood, denouncing Joe Biden for presiding over inflation and rising gas prices, though they were more vague on how they would fix it.Addressing the faithful on Friday, Scott declared: “Now, the Biden presidency has brought us one new thing. They’ve figured out how to merge radical leftwing policies with absolute gross incompetence.”The Florida senator highlighted a 12-point plan to “rescue America” that appears designed to “trigger” liberals and has proved controversial even in his own party. But it offers an insight into likely rightwing priorities for Republicans if they gain majorities in the House and Senate.Point one states: “Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them.” Point three: “The soft-on-crime days of coddling criminal behavior will end. We will re-fund and respect the police because, they, not the criminals, are the good guys.”Point four: “We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump.” Point seven: “We will protect the integrity of American Democracy and stop leftwing efforts to rig elections.” Point nine: “Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies.”Scott had good reason to scent opportunity. History shows that the party that controls the White House tends to lose seats to energised opposition in midterm elections. This November Democrats face an added sense of malaise, with gas prices at $5 a gallon, a shortage of baby formula and some business leaders predicting recession.Republicans are ready to pounce. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told the conference: “Inflation is crushing American families and the White House tells us that inflation could be good for our economy. Excuse me? … Gas prices, inflation, economic instability. We have to be the party that saves our economy by looking back to 2016 to 2020 when we were in charge.”Scott predicted: “I believe that we’re going to win the House and bring it back to the right. I believe that we’re going to win the Senate and bring back it back to the majority. I have a dream that with the House on our side and the Senate on our side and the White House back on our side, we will show America what leadership looks like.”Ronna McDaniel, chairperson of the Republican National Committee, added: “I can’t think of an election where we will have economic issues play such a big role, which we know they will with the gas prices and inflation. And also our values and our cultural issues will be on the ballot.”The gathering, held at a sprawling resort near the Grand Ole Opry House in the home of country music, also heard from former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, Senator Lindsey Graham and Congressmen Dan Crenshaw and Jim Jordan. But former vice-president Mike Pence, a devout Christian, did not attend after falling out with Trump over the 2020 election and being booed at last year’s event.Attendees agreed that economic concerns are paramount. Tommy Crosslin, 54, a singer-songwriter, said: “Look at America right now. Inflation is high. Gas prices is high.“Workers are hard to come by because of certain situations that we’ve been put in. I don’t think most Americans wanted the Keystone pipeline shut down and I think there was a trickle effect from the beginning of President Biden’s take over. The American people will voice their opinions in the midterms.”Few believed that the televised congressional hearings into the Trump-inspired insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 will provide much counterweight. Joseph Padilla, 42, a retired Marine who works for a non-profit, said: “Every time we go to a grocery store, every time we go to get gas, we’re not reminded of January 6, we’re reminded of what administration is in this country right now. It’s going to be a red wave.”The conference also underlined the important role that religious conservatives still play in Republican politics. Attacking abortion rights was a popular applause line, although an imminent supreme court decision on Roe v Wade received few mentions than might have been expected.Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told the Politico website: “In the Republican presidential nominating process, evangelical Christians today, in the Republican party, occupy a position of criticality and centrality that is analogous to the role that African Americans play in the Democratic party.”Several speakers made a point of quoting from scripture. Trump, who forged an unlikely alliance with evangelicals to win the presidency, told the audience: “This is going to be the biggest turnout in midterm history, we think without question, and it’s going to have conservative Christians all over the place.”The former president elicited one of the biggest cheers of the day when he said: “Above all else, we know this. In America we don’t worship government, we worship God.” Hearing the reaction, he joked: “I think this room loves God a lot.”The Senate is a close call in November but opinion polls suggest the question is not whether Republicans win a majority in the House but by how much. A 35-seat gain would give the party its biggest majority in more than 90 years. An 18-seat gain would eclipse the one it secured in 1995 when Newt Gingrich first became speaker.Such an outcome would enable Republicans to block Biden’s legislative agenda and aim to turn him into a lame duck president. They have also vowed to launch investigations into everyone from Biden’s son Hunter to infectious diseases expert Dr Anthony Fauci. And ominously the new intake is likely to include numerous election deniers who back Trump’s “big lie”.Such a prospect gave Trump loyalists at the Nashville event a renewed sense of swagger. Hogan Gidley, a former White House official, said: “The whiplash effect of all the prosperity that people were feeling just two years ago versus the the effect of the bad policies is what’s going to drive people out to the polls in the midterms.“It’s the juxtaposition of the success now with all the failures, and the braggadocio of the Biden administration saying, ‘Look, we’re doing everything opposite, we’re doing everything that Donald Trump didn’t do, we’re changing everything.’ Well, the effects of those policies matter to the American people and they’re hurting families in this country.”Gidley, now director of the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute thinktank, added: “They can try to shift blame all they want to. These aren’t things that are happening to Joe Biden; they’re happening because of Joe Biden. That’s why I think a lot of people show up to events like this. They’ve never been more excited. They’ve never been more engaged. They’ve never been more willing to put skin in the game.”Critics say there is some irony in the Republican party capitalising on economic woes to brand itself the party of competence, noting that George W Bush presided over the Great Recession and Trump left office with the worst labour market in modern American history.Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, observed: “The Republicans don’t have any answers to the economy or to inflation, It’s not as if oh, if we vote Republican, that’s going to solve it all. That’s ridiculous. But if you lose your democracy, you’re not getting it back. That’s infinitely more important than come and go inflation.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsDonald TrumpTennesseeNashvillefeaturesReuse this content More
Pamela Moses, who was sentenced in January to six years in a case that outraged voting rights supporters, will not face a new trial, a district attorney said.A Tennessee prosecutor dropped all criminal charges on Friday against Pamela Moses, a Memphis woman with a previous felony conviction who was sentenced to six years and one day in prison in January after she tried to restore her right to vote in 2019.The voter fraud conviction from her trial was thrown out in February after a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction had improperly withheld evidence that was later uncovered by The Guardian. Ms. Moses had been set to appear in court on Monday to find out whether prosecutors would pursue a retrial.But Ms. Moses will no longer face a second trial “in the interest of judicial economy,” Amy Weirich, the district attorney of Shelby County, said in a statement. Ms. Moses spent 82 days in custody on this case, “which is sufficient,” Ms. Weirich said. Ms. Moses is also permanently barred from registering to vote or voting in Tennessee. Ms. Weirich declined to comment further on the case.The sentencing of Ms. Moses, who is Black, had spurred outrage among voting rights supporters who said that the case highlighted racial disparities in the criminal prosecution of voting fraud cases and opaque voting restoration rights laws that sow confusion and leave many people with felony convictions unsure of their rights.In the summer of 2019, Ms. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist, decided she wanted to run for mayor of Memphis, or at the very least vote in the upcoming election.She knew that she couldn’t do either while she was on probation for prior felony convictions, including a 2015 conviction for tampering with evidence. But she believed her probation was over, according to her lawyer, Bede Anyanwu. Overall, Ms. Moses had 16 prior criminal convictions, including misdemeanor counts from 2015 of perjury, stalking and theft under $500, according to the district attorney’s office. In September 2019, a judge told Ms. Moses that she was still on probation. But when she went to the probation office to confirm, a probation officer told her she was actually done with her felony probation, records show. The probation officer signed off on her certificate of restoration to vote and Ms. Moses then submitted it to election officials.A day later, the Department of Correction sent a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission informing it that the probation officer had made a mistake and that Ms. Moses could not vote because she was in fact still on probation.Video from a January hearing shows Ms. Moses telling Judge W. Mark Ward of the Shelby County Criminal Court, “All I did was try to get my rights to vote back the way the people at the election commission told me.”Judge Ward responded, “You tricked the probation department into giving you a document saying that you were off probation.”Ms. Moses was charged with perjury on a registration form and consenting to a false entry on official election documents. The first charge was dropped, but she was convicted of the second charge in November and sentenced in January. Ultimately, Ms. Moses’ felony conviction in 2015 for tampering made her permanently ineligible to vote under Tennessee law regardless of her probation status.“The case should not have been prosecuted right from the beginning because there was no trickery,” Mr. Anyanwu said. Ms. Moses declined to comment on Saturday.In recent years, Republican officials have moved to crack down on voter fraud, despite the fact that the crime remains a very rare and often accidental occurrence. Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud.Still, legislators in some states have stiffened penalties for voting-related crimes, and district attorneys and state attorneys general have pursued aggressive felony prosecutions in cases that might have been deemed legitimate mistakes.Voting rights advocates interpret these actions as a voter suppression tactic.“These prosecutions are intended to scare people who have prior convictions from even trying to register to vote,” said Blair Bowie, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., who has been assisting Ms. Moses and Mr. Anyanwu with the case since October.These prosecutions also unfairly blame individuals for failing to navigate a voter restoration process that is unclear, she said, adding that state officials are responsible for putting adequate procedures in place for that process.Ms. Bowie is representing the Tennessee N.A.A.C.P. in a lawsuit against Gov. Bill Lee and other officials that accuses them of failing to establish clearer procedures for individuals with felony convictions, “leading to a rights restoration process that is unequal, inaccessible, opaque and inaccurate.”Nearly 80 percent of the disenfranchised people in the state have completed probation and parole and are potentially eligible to restore their voting rights, but fewer than 5 percent of potentially eligible Tennesseans have been able to acquire a completed certificate of restoration of voting rights and have tried to register to vote, according to the lawsuit.Voting rights advocates say that the case also highlights the racial disparity in the prosecution of voter fraud cases.“What we see consistently is honest mistakes made by returning citizens are penalized to the max, and true bad intentions are not being penalized to the same extent,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “And usually in those cases the defendants are white.”In October, Donald Kirk Hartle, a white Republican voter, was charged with two counts of voter fraud in Las Vegas after he forged his dead wife’s signature to vote with her ballot. He was sentenced in November to one year of probation, The Associated Press reported.Edward Snodgrass, a white Republican official in Ohio, forged his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot in 2020 and was charged with illegal voting, NBC News reported. As part of a plea agreement, he served three days in jail last year, The Delaware Gazette reported.Ms. Moses is still pursuing the restoration of her civil rights, which include voting rights, through a lawsuit in Shelby County Circuit Court, according to Ms. Bowie. That lawsuit presents a constitutional challenge to the state statute that permanently bars people convicted of tampering with evidence from voting in Tennessee. More
