United States Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Casey DeSantis Invited Outsiders to Caucus in Iowa. The State Party Said No.

      by

      The Iowa Republican Party reminded supporters that only residents can vote in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15.Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, drew criticism on Saturday from the rival campaign of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to recruit out-of-state supporters to participate in the nation’s first Republican nominating contest.The backlash came a day after Ms. DeSantis, during a Fox News appearance with her husband, urged supporters from elsewhere to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” said Ms. DeSantis, who has been a key player in her husband’s campaign and was specifically addressing mothers and grandmothers who support him.But the call to action is at odds with caucus rules, according to the Republican Party of Iowa, which hours later said that nonresidents were barred from caucusing.“Remember: you must be a legal resident of Iowa and the precinct you live in and bring photo ID with you to participate in the #iacaucus!” the party wrote on the social media platform X.Mr. Trump’s campaign on Saturday accused the DeSantis campaign of spreading misinformation about the caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15. It suggested that the move was part of a broader scheme to change the outcome in the state, where polls show that Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has a significant lead.“The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the caucus through fraud,” the campaign said in a statement.In an email on Saturday, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, drew attention to comments made later on Friday by Ms. DeSantis on X, attempting to clarify her earlier remarks.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” Ms. DeSantis wrote.Mr. DeSantis also addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters on Friday in Iowa.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”The Trump campaign continued to seize upon Ms. DeSantis’s remarks on Saturday, calling on Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and snubbed Mr. Trump, to clarify the caucus eligibility rules. It also demanded that Ms. Reynolds disavow the tactics promoted by Ms. DeSantis as “flagrantly wrong that could further disenfranchise caucusgoers.”A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Kellen Browning More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions.When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to “come after” the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “vermin” echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new Trump administration.Mr. Trump himself did little to assuage Americans when his friend Sean Hannity tried to help him out on Fox News this past week. During a town hall-style meeting, Mr. Hannity tossed a seeming softball by asking Mr. Trump to reaffirm that of course he did not intend to abuse his power and use the government to punish enemies. Instead of simply agreeing, Mr. Trump said he would only be a dictator on “Day 1” of a new term.“Trump has made it crystal clear through all his actions and rhetoric that he admires leaders who have forms of authoritarian power, from Putin to Orban to Xi, and that he wants to exercise that kind of power at home,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” referring to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Xi Jinping of China. “History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do,” she added. “We just don’t listen until it is too late.”Despite his public sparring with China’s leaders, President Trump has praised President Xi Jinping for his strongman policies.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTalk about the possible authoritarian quality of a new Trump presidency has suffused the political conversation in the nation’s capital in recent days. A series of reports in The New York Times outlined various plans developed by Mr. Trump’s allies to assert vast power in a new term and detailed how he would be less constrained by constitutional guardrails. The Atlantic published a special issue with 24 contributors forecasting what a second Trump presidency would look like, many of them depicting an autocratic regime.Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who was vice chairwoman of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, published a new book warning that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy. And of course, there was the essay by the historian, Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post that prompted Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, to press the Justice Department to investigate.To be sure, American presidents have stretched their power and been called dictators going back to the early days of the republic. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, were all accused of despotism. Richard M. Nixon was said to have consolidated power in the “imperial presidency.” George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both compared to Hitler.But there is something different about the debate now, more than overheated rhetoric or legitimate disagreements over the boundaries of executive power, something that suggests a fundamental moment of decision in the American experiment. Perhaps it is a manifestation of popular disenchantment with American institutions; only 10 percent of Americans think democracy is working very well, according to a poll in June by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.Perhaps it is a reflection of the extremism and demagoguery that has grown more prevalent in politics in many places around the world. And perhaps it stems from a former president seeking to reclaim his old office who evinces such perplexing affinity for and even envy of autocrats.Mr. Trump once expressed no regret that a quote he shared on social media came from Mussolini and adopted the language of Stalin in calling journalists the “enemies of the people.” He told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things” and later said he wished American generals were like Hitler’s generals.Last December, shortly after opening his comeback campaign, Mr. Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution to remove Mr. Biden immediately and reinstall himself in the White House without waiting for another election. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as whining by liberals who do not like him or his policies and are disingenuously trying to scare voters. They argue that President Biden is the real dictator because his Justice Department is prosecuting his likeliest challenger next year for various alleged crimes, although there is no evidence that Mr. Biden has been personally involved in those decisions and even some former Trump advisers call the indictments legitimate.“The dictator talk by Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans not just to distract them from the failures and weakness of the Biden administration but because of something they are even more afraid of: that a second Trump administration will be far more successful in implementing its agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first,” Fred Fleitz, who served briefly in Mr. Trump’s White House, wrote on the American Greatness website on Friday.Mr. Kagan, a widely respected Brookings Institution scholar and author of numerous books of history, has a long record of support for a muscular foreign policy that hardly strikes many on the left as liberal. But he has been a strong and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump for years. In May 2016, when other Republicans were reconciling themselves to Mr. Trump’s first nomination for president, Mr. Kagan warned that “this is how fascism comes to America.”His essay on Nov. 30 sounded the alarm again. Mr. Trump may have been thwarted in his first term from enacting some of his more radical ideas by more conventional Republican advisers and military officers, Mr. Kagan argued, but he will not surround himself with such figures again and will encounter fewer of the checks and balances that constrained him last time. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as complaints by liberals who are trying to scare voters.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAmong other things, Mr. Kagan cited Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn an election that he had lost, disregarding the will of the voters. And he noted Mr. Trump’s overt discussion of prosecuting opponents and sending the military into the streets to quell protests. “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship,” Mr. Kagan wrote.Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who has courted Mr. Trump’s support and was listed by Axios this past week as a possible vice-presidential running mate next year, took umbrage on behalf of the former president. He dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open rebellion,” seizing on a point in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that Democratic-run states might defy a President Trump.Mr. Vance wrote that “according to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is terrible enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would invariably follow.”Mr. Kagan’s piece did not actually advocate rebellion, but simply forecast the possibility that Democratic governors would stand against Mr. Trump “through a form of nullification” of federal authority. Indeed, he went on to suggest that Republican governors might do the same with Mr. Biden, which he was not advocating either.But Mr. Vance was trying to draw a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. By the Justice Department’s logic in pursuing Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article could be interpreted as “an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.” To make his point clear, he insisted on answers by Jan. 6.Mr. Kagan, who followed his essay with another on Thursday about how to stop the slide to dictatorship that he sees, said the intervention by the senator validated his point. “It is revealing that their first instinct when attacked by a journalist is to suggest that they be locked up,” Mr. Kagan noted in an interview.Aides to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance did not respond to requests for comment. David Shipley, the opinion editor of The Post, defended Mr. Kagan’s work. “We are proud to publish Robert Kagan’s thoughtful essays and we encourage audiences to read both his Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 pieces together — and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “These essays are part of a long Kagan tradition of starting important conversations.”It is a conversation that has months to go with an uncertain ending. In the meantime, no one expects Mr. Garland to take Mr. Vance seriously, including almost certainly Mr. Vance. His letter was a political statement. But it says something about the era that proposing the prosecution of a critic would be seen as a political winner. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans

      by

      Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.Border control in an age of easy global movement is not a simple policy problem, even for conservative governments. But policy does matter, and while the measures that the White House is reportedly floating as potential concessions to Republicans — raising the standard for asylum claims, fast-tracking deportation procedures — aren’t quite a pledge to finish the border wall (maybe that’s next summer’s pivot), they should have some effect on the flow of migrants north.Which makes them a distinctive sort of policy concession: A “sacrifice” that this White House has every political reason to offer, because Biden’s re-election becomes more likely if Republicans accept.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      ¿Cómo cubrir a Trump? Univision, como otros medios, busca una respuesta

      by

      Los reclamos contra Univision comenzaron en cuanto se emitió su entrevista con Donald Trump. Un mes después, aún no han cesado.Para los críticos de Univision, la entrevista del 9 de noviembre —con sus preguntas fáciles y pocas preguntas de seguimiento del entrevistador, Enrique Acevedo— ha confirmado sus temores desde que la cadena, tradicionalmente de tendencia de izquierda, se fusionó con la cadena mexicana Televisa a principios del año pasado en un acuerdo de 4.800 millones de dólares. La cadena, argumentan ellos, estaba dando un preocupante giro a la derecha con sus nuevos propietarios, que tienen fama de cultivar relaciones con los principales políticos de México, donde Televisa ha sido un temido artífice de figuras de influencia durante más de 50 años.Las maniobras de última hora de Univision levantaron aún más sospechas. Pocas horas antes de la emisión de la entrevista, la cadena retiró su invitación a la campaña de Biden para emitir anuncios durante el especial de una hora con Trump, citando lo que parecía ser una nueva política de la empresa. Apenas una hora después, Univision canceló abruptamente una entrevista con el director de medios hispanos de la campaña de Biden.Pero la razón de los cambios en la cadena no puede explicarse solo por consideraciones políticas, según las entrevistas con más de una decena de periodistas y ejecutivos actuales y retirados de Univision, entre ellos Acevedo y Daniel Coronell, presidente de noticias de la cadena.Los medios de comunicación hispanos son susceptibles a la misma inquietud que afecta a otras redacciones estadounidenses. Las audiencias de las noticias de televisión en español están en declive, lo que se suma a la presión de una economía desigual. Y el dilema sobre cómo cubrir a Trump —¿debe tener una cobertura exhaustiva, mínima o incluso alguna?— preocupa a Univision tanto como a sus homólogos en inglés.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Kenneth Chesebro Is a Key Witness as ‘Fake Electors’ Face Charges

      by

      Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to deploy people claiming to be Trump electors in states won by President Biden, is cooperating with inquiries in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump electors now face criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the plan to deploy them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all of the cases.Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, helped develop the plan to have Republicans in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 present themselves as Trump electors. The scheme was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021.Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump electors, including top leaders of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents.In August, a grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake electors in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought charges against all 16 Republicans who acted as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)Interest in Mr. Chesebro intensified after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony charge of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He had originally been charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state racketeering law.“Everything happened after the plea in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”The lawyer was referring to memos written by Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election that outlined what he himself called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his plea agreement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro was interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office, and he was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.Asked if Mr. Chesebro had agreements in place to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another one of his lawyers, Robert Langford, said “that would be a prudent criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he did not “want to comment on anything happening in any of the states.”Mr. Chesebro is also expected in Arizona next week, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own inquiry into the electors plot for several months, people with knowledge of that inquiry said. (Mr. Chesebro’s Michigan and Arizona appearances were reported earlier by CNN and The Washington Post.)Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the presidential election recount battle of 2000 but later came to back Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the key legal architects of the plan to use bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.“When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, who was Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel and a Chesebro mentor, recently said.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to generally defend his conduct, saying he was simply an attorney offering legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said that the legal team in Georgia decided to take a plea agreement because the document that was signed by the fake electors in Georgia did not include language explaining that what they were signing was a contingency plan, pending litigation.“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved in it and that language wasn’t in there, we decided to plead to that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”The three state electors investigations have taken very different approaches.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a broad racketeering case that includes Mr. Trump and top aides like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake electors before charges were brought.The Michigan and Nevada cases center on the electors themselves, rather than those who aided their actions, though Ms. Nessel has said that her inquiry remains open.Underlying claims of widespread election fraud that propelled the alleged fake electors scheme have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Justice Department who has charged Mr. Trump in his own federal election inquiry, underscore the illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s chronic claims of election fraud, highlighting that as far back as 2012 he was making baseless contentions about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 loss in the Iowa caucus, when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote in the general election to Hillary Clinton, which he said he won “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      ‘What the Heck?’ CNN’s Debate Plans Leave New Hampshire Officials Confused.

      by

      The news network said it would host a Republican primary debate in New Hampshire at Saint Anselm College. That was news to Saint Anselm.With great fanfare this week, CNN announced it would host the network’s first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, gathering the Republican candidates for a marquee event on Jan. 21 at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.There was only one problem: Saint Anselm had no idea what CNN was talking about.“We were surprised to be included on a press release by a network about a debate which we had not planned or booked,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm, said in a statement on Friday.The chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican Party, Chris Ager, went a little further.“The CNN thing came out and everybody’s like, ‘What the heck?’” Mr. Ager said in an interview. “I’m still scratching my head. And I still haven’t been contacted by CNN at all.”There is, however, a competing debate scheduled to take place three days earlier, hosted by CNN’s rivals at ABC News. The ABC debate, on Jan. 18, is set to be held at Saint Anselm, and it has the approval of both the college and state Republican officials. “We’ve been working for months planning with ABC,” Mr. Ager said. “We’ve already done a run-through of the facility. We’ve agreed on a lot of the details.”The CNN announcement, Mr. Ager said, caught his team off guard. “For a big, professional organization like that, putting out a location on this date and the location doesn’t know — something’s not quite right,” he said.A CNN spokeswoman said on Friday: “We can’t speak to any miscommunication within Saint Anselm, but we are moving forward with our plans to host a debate in New Hampshire on Jan. 21.”ABC is the traditional host of presidential debates in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary. Its local station, WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., which is a co-host of the Jan. 18 debate, is New Hampshire’s only affiliate of the Big Three broadcast networks.Mr. Ager said he also had concerns about CNN holding a debate just two days before the Jan. 23 primary, which he said would leave candidates little time to respond to any major moments onstage.“In New Hampshire, we like to give everybody a fair shot as much as possible,” he said.The apparent debate snafu came as the Republican National Committee announced that candidates were free to appear at any debate, eliminating a previous requirement that the candidates could participate only in debates formally approved by the party. The rule change, announced Friday, will potentially offer more national exposure to the remaining candidates, as they try to make inroads against the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump has so far refused to appear at any of the four televised Republican primary debates. He has not signaled if he will appear at the ABC event in New Hampshire on Jan. 18.CNN also said this week that it would host a televised debate in Des Moines on Jan. 10 at Drake University, ahead of the Iowa caucuses.Drake University issued a news release promoting that event, so it appears the institution was aware of the network’s plans.Shane Goldmacher More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Finding George Santos’s Replacement Is Proving Difficult for Republicans

      by

      Party leaders have vowed not to repeat the vetting mistakes they made with the expelled congressman. But getting to yes is proving messy.If New York Republicans had hoped to quickly and cleanly turn the page on the embarrassing saga of George Santos, the week since his expulsion from Congress has not exactly gone as planned.While party leaders hunkered down in the Long Island suburbs to game out the critical special election to replace him, it emerged that one of their top candidates for the nomination, Mazi Melesa Pilip, was not technically a Republican at all, but a registered Democrat.Another Republican who had entered the race earlier this year was convicted of taking part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.Word leaked that party officials were interviewing a more serious contender: a former state assemblyman known to have potentially damaging ties to Mr. Santos through a bizarre business proposition that one person involved said resembled the classic email scheme with a Nigerian prince.And records were unearthed in news reports showing that another front-runner, Mike Sapraicone, had not only been sued for suppressing evidence in a murder case as a New York City police officer but later made political contributions totaling $40,000 to an unexpected recipient: the race’s Democratic nominee, Tom Suozzi.The torrent of revelations washed away the message of order and unity that top Republicans sought to project in the wake of Mr. Santos’s hurricane. And suspicions that many of the unsavory disclosures about the candidates had been seeded in the press by rival Republican camps left some fretting that the party was playing straight into Democrats’ hands.“It definitely looks messy,” said Chapin Fay, a Republican political consultant advising some of the candidates. “Just let the Republicans kill themselves even before a candidate is chosen.”In many ways, the Republicans’ predicament is the result of their determination to avoid a repeat of Mr. Santos. The federally indicted serial fabulist slipped past Republican and Democratic vetters in 2020 and 2022, winning the seat connecting Queens and Nassau County last fall before his entire life story began to unravel as a series of fictions and outright frauds.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman leading the selection process, views Mr. Santos as a stain on his personal record. He said he would likely only select a candidate already well known to the party and has also retained outside help from research firms to identify major vulnerabilities before making the nomination.“There’s a personal thing to some people that, Hey, a mistake was made, this guy has blemished our party, this is our chance to correct it,” Mr. Cairo said in a recent interview, expressing confidence that the party would unite behind the best candidate.But that takes time, and as Mr. Cairo’s deliberations stretch into another week, candidates and their allies appear to have taken matters into their own hands, as they hunt for damaging information to boost their cause or hurt a rival’s. Property records have been checked. Old podcasts dug up. Voting records scrutinized.Even Mr. Santos took a break from recording lucrative videos on Cameo to stir the pot, urging his followers to call Mr. Cairo to insist that he not select “a Democrat in Republican skin” like Ms. Pilip or Mr. Sapraicone.Democrats have had their own awkwardness. On Monday, Gov. Kathy Hochul made Mr. Suozzi drive to Albany to all but grovel for her support. But there was never really any doubt that the well-known former congressman would be his party’s pick, and Democrats quickly united around his nomination.Mr. Fay, who began his career as an opposition researcher, argued that “mudslinging” now could actually help inoculate the eventual Republican nominee against key weaknesses by the time the Feb. 13 special election heated up.For Ms. Pilip in particular, who has become a top contender on the strength of a remarkable political biography, being outed as a registered Democrat may not be such a bad thing in a district that leans slightly left. In fact, crossover appeal has helped before: Ms. Pilip, a Black former member of the Israel Defense Forces, flipped a local legislative district in 2021 while running on the Republican Party ballot line.In a statement, Mr. Cairo indicated that Ms. Pilip’s registration, which was first reported by Politico, was known to party leaders. He said they had long supported her because she was “philosophically in sync with the Republican team.”In another reflection of her status as a formidable candidate, an unsigned, untraceable email was sent to multiple reporters Friday morning seeking to tarnish her name by including a link to a photograph on social media of Ms. Pilip embracing Mr. Santos.The hits on other Republican hopefuls may be more problematic.Take Mr. Sapraicone. On Monday, Politico reported on a 2021 lawsuit accusing him and other former New York Police Department detectives of having coerced a false confession and suppressed exonerating evidence that kept a man behind bars for two decades. (He denied knowing about the suit.)On Wednesday, an old news report resurfaced about his donations to Mr. Suozzi. And on Thursday, Politico ran another item reporting how on a podcast earlier this year, the Republican described once being afraid of a police officer because he was Black. The Sapraicone campaign said he had shared the story to show how he had grown to embrace “diverse communities” as a police officer.In an interview, Mr. Sapraicone said he was determined not to get rattled.“This is all new water to me,” he said. “I see these sharp elbows coming left and right here. I don’t think any of this stuff is productive no matter where it’s coming from.”Philip Sean Grillo, who declared his candidacy in May, certainly did not help the party’s cause when he was convicted in the Jan. 6 case. A wave of headlines tied him to Mr. Santos and the special election, though his candidacy has never been taken seriously.Party leaders also had to contend with sticky potential issues in private involving more serious candidates, like Michael LiPetri, the former Republican state assemblyman. Mr. LiPetri is well liked within Long Island Republican circles, but his nomination would almost certainly open the party to more Santos-tinged attacks.The New York Times reported last summer that Mr. LiPetri worked with Mr. Santos to approach a campaign donor with an unusual proposition. They asked the donor to create a limited liability company to help a wealthy unnamed Polish citizen buy cryptocurrency while his fortune was evidently frozen in a bank account. The deal never went through.Mr. LiPetri, who sought to play down his role when The Times initially disclosed his involvement, did not respond to requests for comment.Gleeful Democratic operatives said they could package any of the disclosures into general election ammunition if given the opportunity.“We wish the Grand Old Party the best in their flailing endeavors,” said Ellie Dougherty, a spokeswoman for House Democrats’ campaign arm, calling the other side “dysfunctional.”But not every Republican was worrying. One veteran of hard-fought campaigns on Long Island said his fellow Republicans should quit the hand-wringing.“All the sniping between the people who support X and Y and Z?” said the Republican, former Senator Alfonse D’Amato. “Doesn’t mean anything in the finals.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Conundrum of Covering Trump Lands at Univision’s Doorstep

      by

      The howls of protest against Univision began as soon as its interview with Donald J. Trump aired. A month later, they still haven’t stopped.To critics of Univision, the Nov. 9 interview — with its gentle questioning and limited follow-ups from the interviewer, Enrique Acevedo — has confirmed their fears since the traditionally left-leaning network merged with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa early last year in a $4.8 billion deal. The network, they said, was taking a troubling turn to the right under its new owners, who have a reputation for cultivating relationships with leading politicians in Mexico, where Televisa has been a feared kingmaker for more than 50 years.Last-minute maneuvering at Univision raised further suspicions. Just hours before the interview aired, the network reversed its invitation to the Biden campaign to run ads during the hourlong special with Mr. Trump, citing what appeared to be a new company policy. Scarcely an hour later, Univision abruptly canceled an interview with the Biden campaign’s director of Hispanic media.But the reason for changes at the network can’t be explained by political considerations alone, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Univision journalists and executives, including Mr. Acevedo and Daniel Coronell, the network’s president of news.Hispanic media is proving susceptible to the same upheaval straining other American newsrooms. Spanish-language television news audiences are in decline, compounding pressure from an uneven economy. And the dilemma over how to report on Mr. Trump — should he get exhaustive, minimal or even no coverage? — is vexing Univision just as it is its English-language counterparts.Univision executives have said they are making a pivot toward the center — a strategy that reflects the split political preferences of the Hispanic electorate and the need to broaden their audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More