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      Senior Republican who called Trump ‘inexcusable’ endorses him for president

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      The No2 Republican in the US Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, endorsed for president Donald Trump – the man he previously called “inexcusable” for seeking to overturn the 2020 election and inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.Multiple media outlets reported Thune’s endorsement. They also swiftly pointed out statements made by Thune after the 2021 US Capitol attack, now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions, some for seditious conspiracy.“The impeachment trial is over and former President Trump has been acquitted,” Thune said on 13 February 2021, after only seven Republicans voted to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection and thereby bar him from office.“My vote to acquit should not be viewed as exoneration for his conduct on January 6 … or in the days and weeks leading up to it. What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”Saying he voted to acquit because Trump had left office, and following his Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, who excoriated Trump after voting to acquit, Thune added: “I have faith in the American people and the strength of our democracy.”Many observers now hold democracy to be under serious threat as Trump homes in on the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden in November.Trump has won each primary vote, most recently in South Carolina on Saturday where he easily beat Nikki Haley, a former governor of the southern state and his only remaining opponent.Haley suffered a further blow on Sunday when the influential Koch network withdrew financial support, saying it would focus on Congress instead.“We don’t believe any outside group can make a material difference to widen her path to victory,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed advocacy group, told staff in a note reported by Politico.Trump’s dominance persists despite his facing 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion, 40 for retention of classified information and 34 for hush-money payments to an adult film star) and civil judgments including multimillion-dollar penalties in suits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape accusation a judge called substantially true.Such legal troubles have fueled doubts about Trump’s electability, shared by senior Republicans.Thune first endorsed Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator now pursuing selection as Trump’s nominee for vice-president. Trump often attacked Thune in return.Fox News first reported Thune’s Trump endorsement.Thune said: “The primary results in South Carolina make clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in this year’s pivotal presidential election. The choice before the American people is crystal clear: it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden.“I support former President Trump’s campaign to win the presidency, and I intend to do everything I can to see that he has a Republican majority in the Senate working with him to restore American strength at home and abroad.”Of three senior Republicans thought to be possible successors to McConnell as leader in the Senate, Thune was the last to back Trump. John Barrasso of Wyoming and John Cornyn of Texas had already bent the knee.McConnell has not endorsed Trump, who has regularly attacked him – including calling him a “piece of shit” – and made racist remarks about his wife, Elaine Chao, who was US transportation secretary in the Trump administration until January 6, after which she resigned.Despite it all, the New York Times reported on Monday that aides to McConnell and Trump were pursuing “back channel” talks aimed at producing an endorsement. More

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      The Michigan Republican party is already in chaos. What will the week bring?

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      Michigan is holding its presidential primaries on Tuesday, with campaigns by pro-Palestine activists to abandon Joe Biden and factional chaos in the state Republican party defining an otherwise sleepy election day.There’s little drama in predicting the winners: Biden and Donald Trump are expected to romp in their respective races. But the dynamics of the contests hint at the deep divisions within the Democratic and Republican camps as the nationally unpopular candidates prepare to square off in a presidential general election rematch this fall.Neither candidate is popular statewide. Only 17% of respondents in a January poll commissioned by the Detroit News said they believed Biden deserved a second term in office, while 33% said the same about Trump. When asked whether they would support Trump or Biden in the general, respondents favored Trump by 8 points.Neither candidate faces much opposition in their respective primaries. Trump’s only serious foe is the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whom he just beat by a wide margin in her home-state primary on Saturday.Biden’s greatest threat isn’t a candidate, but a movement: activists have launched a coordinated campaign to withhold votes from Biden to protest against his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. If they are successful, their efforts could embarrass him in the critical swing state – which has one of the largest Arab American communities in the country.They are furious at Biden for his unwavering support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 people.Eyeing this primary as an opportunity to pressure the president to revise his position on the war, a coalition of activists are calling on Democratic voters to select “uncommitted” on their ballot. The Listen to Michigan campaign, which activists launched in early February, has gained traction among some prominent political figures on the left, including the progressive former state representative Andy Levin and the US representative Rashida Tlaib, whose sister is spearheading the campaign.“President Biden needs every vote he can get if he’s going to prevent Donald Trump and his white supremacist buddies from taking the White House again,” said Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for the Listen to Michigan campaign and the former chief of staff for the Missouri congresswoman Cori Bush. “Our votes on February 27 for ‘uncommitted’ hopefully will be a reminder of that.”It’s not the first time Michigan Democrats have rallied around the “uncommitted” vote. In 2008, the Michigan Democratic party generated outrage by moving their primary to 15 January, shaking up the presidential primary order and prompting most candidates to drop out in protest. With Hillary Clinton as the only real contender on the ballot, a movement to vote “uncommitted” took hold. Nearly 40% of voters chose “uncommitted”, an embarrassment for Clinton and an early win for former president Barack Obama’s campaign.In the 2012 Michigan Democratic primary, nearly 21,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of for Obama – more than 10% of the total votes cast.Alawieh argued that one metric for measuring the campaign’s success would be 10,000 people casting their votes as “uncommitted”, given that Trump won the state by roughly that margin in 2016.“If we see that at least that many people vote for ‘uncommitted’, I think that sends a very, very strong message,” said Alawieh.On the Republican side, a very different kind of split has driven the state party into feuding factions – making an already logistically complicated election even more confusing.Trump is expected to beat Haley definitively in Tuesday’s primary. The primary margins and turnout will be telling, however – especially in traditionally Republican areas that have shifted away from the GOP during the Trump era, like parts of western Michigan and Detroit’s more upscale suburbs.But the real chaos isn’t for the primary – it’s for the state convention that is scheduled a few days later. Or, to be more precise, the state party conventions: right now, two warring factions have scheduled their own meetings, and it’s not totally clear which meeting’s delegates will count towards the presidential nomination.The Michigan Republican party is holding a separate caucus on 2 March to comply with Republican National Committee rules after Michigan’s Democrat-controlled state legislature moved the state’s primary date earlier than the RNC permitted. The winner of Tuesday’s primary will earn only 30% of the state’s delegates – party activists who vote at the Republican national convention to nominate the presidential candidate – while 70% will be chosen at a state party convention on Saturday.Chaos within the state party has further complicated that plan.In early January, a group of party activists held an election to oust the former Michigan GOP chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, accusing the fervent conspiracy theorist of mismanaging the state party’s finances. They later voted to replace her with Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman and Trump’s former US ambassador to the Netherlands. On 14 February, the Republican National Committee declared their support for Hoekstra, recognizing him as the official state party chair.Karamo has continued to claim she is the rightful chair of the party despite what the RNC says, and is forging ahead with her own plans for a party convention on Saturday near Detroit even as Hoekstra plans one in Grand Rapids, a few hours away.“The political oligarchy within the Republican party has done everything possible to destroy me,” Karamo said in a podcast released just days after the RNC officially recognized Hoekstra’s leadership on 14 February.Given the national party’s support for Hoekstra, it’s unlikely Karamo’s convention will carry any official weight. But the courts may have something to say about that.On the same day voters head to the polls on Tuesday, the dueling factions will see each other in Kent county district court. Karamo’s opponents are asking a judge to determine whether she was properly removed from office, in hopes that a legal finding will push her to step down, allow them to seize control of the party’s finances and confirm that Hoekstra’s convention is the official one.All that drama is overshadowing the primary.“A good strong showing for Trump with a high turnout in key areas will bolster the Republican party if they can pull it off,” said Ken Kollman, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. “But they’re riven by pretty deep splits right now.” More

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      ‘Disinformation on steroids’: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?

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      The AI election is here.Already this year, a robocall generated using artificial intelligence targeted New Hampshire voters in the January primary, purporting to be President Joe Biden and telling them to stay home in what officials said could be the first attempt at using AI to interfere with a US election. The “deepfake” calls were linked to two Texas companies, Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom.It’s not clear if the deepfake calls actually prevented voters from turning out, but that doesn’t really matter, said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice-president of Public Citizen, a group that’s been pushing for federal and state regulation of AI’s use in politics.“I don’t think we need to wait to see how many people got deceived to understand that that was the point,” Gilbert said.Examples of what could be ahead for the US are happening all over the world. In Slovakia, fake audio recordings might have swayed an election in what serves as a “frightening harbinger of the sort of interference the United States will likely experience during the 2024 presidential election”, CNN reported. In Indonesia, an AI-generated avatar of a military commander helped rebrand the country’s defense minister as a “chubby-cheeked” man who “makes Korean-style finger hearts and cradles his beloved cat, Bobby, to the delight of Gen Z voters”, Reuters reported. In India, AI versions of dead politicians have been brought back to compliment elected officials, according to Al Jazeera.But US regulations aren’t ready for the boom in fast-paced AI technology and how it could influence voters. Soon after the fake call in New Hampshire, the Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on robocalls that use AI audio. The FEC has yet to put rules in place to govern the use of AI in political ads, though states are moving quickly to fill the gap in regulation.The US House launched a bipartisan taskforce on 20 February that will research ways AI could be regulated and issue a report with recommendations. But with partisan gridlock ruling Congress, and US regulation trailing the pace of AI’s rapid advance, it’s unclear what, if anything, could be in place in time for this year’s elections.Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real. AI – in the form of text, bots, audio, photo or video – can be used to make it look like candidates are saying or doing things they didn’t do, either to damage their reputations or mislead voters. It can be used to beef up disinformation campaigns, making imagery that looks real enough to create confusion for voters.Audio content, in particular, can be even more manipulative because the technology for video isn’t as advanced yet and recipients of AI-generated calls lose some of the contextual clues that something is fake that they might find in a deepfake video. Experts also fear that AI-generated calls will mimic the voices of people a caller knows in real life, which has the potential for a bigger influence on the recipient because the caller would seem like someone they know and trust. Commonly called the “grandparent” scam, callers can now use AI to clone a loved one’s voice to trick the target into sending money. That could theoretically be applied to politics and elections.“It could come from your family member or your neighbor and it would sound exactly like them,” Gilbert said. “The ability to deceive from AI has put the problem of mis- and disinformation on steroids.”There are less misleading uses of the technology to underscore a message, like the recent creation of AI audio calls using the voices of kids killed in mass shootings aimed at swaying lawmakers to act on gun violence. Some political campaigns even use AI to show alternate realities to make their points, like a Republican National Committee ad that used AI to create a fake future if Biden is re-elected. But some AI-generated imagery can seem innocuous at first, like the rampant faked images of people next to carved wooden dog sculptures popping up on Facebook, but then be used to dispatch nefarious content later on.People wanting to influence elections no longer need to “handcraft artisanal election disinformation”, said Chester Wisniewski, a cybersecurity expert at Sophos. Now, AI tools help dispatch bots that sound like real people more quickly, “with one bot master behind the controls like the guy on the Wizard of Oz”.Perhaps most concerning, though, is that the advent of AI can make people question whether anything they’re seeing is real or not, introducing a heavy dose of doubt at a time when the technologies themselves are still learning how to best mimic reality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There’s a difference between what AI might do and what AI is actually doing,” said Katie Harbath, who formerly worked in policy at Facebook and now writes about the intersection between technology and democracy. People will start to wonder, she said, “what if AI could do all this? Then maybe I shouldn’t be trusting everything that I’m seeing.”Even without government regulation, companies that manage AI tools have announced and launched plans to limit its potential influence on elections, such as having their chatbots direct people to trusted sources on where to vote and not allowing chatbots that imitate candidates. A recent pact among companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI includes “reasonable precautions” such as additional labeling of and education about AI-generated political content, though it wouldn’t ban the practice.But bad actors often flout or skirt around government regulations and limitations put in place by platforms. Think of the “do not call” list: even if you’re on it, you still probably get some spam calls.At the national level, or with major public figures, debunking a deepfake happens fairly quickly, with outside groups and journalists jumping in to spot a spoof and spread the word that it’s not real. When the scale is smaller, though, there are fewer people working to debunk something that could be AI-generated. Narratives begin to set in. In Baltimore, for example, recordings posted in January of a local principal allegedly making offensive comments could be AI-generated – it’s still under investigation.In the absence of regulations from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a handful of states have instituted laws over the use of AI in political ads, and dozens more states have filed bills on the subject. At the state level, regulating AI in elections is a bipartisan issue, Gilbert said. The bills often call for clear disclosures or disclaimers in political ads that make sure voters understand content was AI-generated; without such disclosure, the use of AI is then banned in many of the bills, she said.The FEC opened a rule-making process for AI last summer, and the agency said it expects to resolve it sometime this summer, the Washington Post has reported. Until then, political ads with AI may have some state regulations to follow, but otherwise aren’t restricted by any AI-specific FEC rules.“Hopefully we will be able to get something in place in time, so it’s not kind of a wild west,” Gilbert said. “But it’s closing in on that point, and we need to move really fast.” More

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      Six out of 10 South Carolina Republican primary voters think Biden wasn’t legitimately elected

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      More than 60% of South Carolina Republican primary voters said they don’t believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected, according to exit polls, the latest data point that underscores how election denialism has become a mainstream belief in the Republican party.Eighty-seven percent of those who don’t believe the US president was legitimately elected supported Donald Trump, according to a CNN exit poll of South Carolina primary voters. Just 12% supported Nikki Haley. Among those who believe Biden legitimately won in 2020, the results were nearly flipped 81% supported Haley, while 19% supported the former president.Several studies, investigations and audits have found no widespread fraud that affected the outcome of the 2020 election.The results are consistent with exit polls of the Republican primary electorate in other states. A total of 51% of New Hampshire primary voters said Biden was not legitimately elected, according to a CNN exit poll during the primary last month. In Iowa, two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said Biden’s election was not legitimate.A national January poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found two-thirds of those supporting Trump didn’t believe Biden was legitimately elected.The polling comes as Trump has not backed an inch away from the lie that he won in 2020. Even though several studies and investigations have debunked Trump’s baseless claims of fraud, he has continued to warn about the possibility of fraud, laying the possible groundwork to claim another stolen election in 2024. All of that rhetoric has helped somewhat normalize the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Carolina exit polls also further illustrate Trump’s continued political appeal despite the mounting criminal charges he has wracked up. Sixty-one percent of primary voters said he was fit to serve as president, even if he was convicted of a crime. Ninety percent of those who said he was fit supported Trump. More

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      Michigan governor says not voting for Biden over Gaza war ‘supports second Trump term’

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, pushed back on calls to not vote for Joe Biden over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict, saying on Sunday that could help Trump get re-elected.“It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that any vote that’s not cast for Joe Biden supports a second Trump term,” she said on Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “A second Trump term would be devastating. Not just on fundamental rights, not just on our democracy here at home, but also when it comes to foreign policy. This was a man who promoted a Muslim ban.”Whitmer, who is a co-chair of Biden’s 2024 campaign, also said she wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to the protest vote.Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, urged Democrats last week to vote “uncommitted” in Michigan’s 27 February primary.“We don’t want a country that supports war and bombs and destruction. We want to support life. We want to stand up for every single life killed in Gaza … This is the way you can raise our voices. Don’t make us even more invisible. Right now, we feel completely neglected and just unseen by our government,” she said in a video posted to her Twitter account. “If you want us to be louder, then come here and vote uncommitted.”Tlaib’s sister, Layla Elabed, is the campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, the group that has been leading the effort to get people to vote uncommitted. The group has the support of 30 elected officials across south-east Michigan, including Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, which has a large Arab American population.“Biden must earn our vote through a dramatic change in policy,” the group says on its website. “President Biden has been a successful candidate in the past by representing a broad coalition, but right now he’s not representing the vast majority of Democrats who want a ceasefire and an end to his funding of Israel’s war in Gaza.”While Biden will easily win the Democratic primary there, Michigan is a key swing state in the November general election. Biden will need strong support of voters who are a part of his Democratic base in addition to support from more moderate voters to win.Acknowledging that reality, Biden dispatched top aides to Dearborn to meet with leaders there earlier this month. During that meeting, Jon Finer, a deputy national security adviser, acknowledged errors in how the administration had responded.“We are very well aware that we have missteps in the course of responding to this crisis since October 7,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the New York Times. “We have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration and the country values the lives of Palestinians. And that began, frankly, pretty early in the conflict.” More

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      John Avlon targets New York Republicans in US House campaign: ‘They’re scared’

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      To John Avlon’s knowledge, “the National Republican Congressional Committee didn’t feel compelled to weigh in when any of the other candidates in the Democratic primary got in the race. But they did for me. And I think that’s because they’re scared.”The race is in New York’s first congressional district, a US House seat represented by a Republican, Nick LaLota, in an area that trended towards Joe Biden in 2020 and is thus one of many Democratic targets in the state this year. Avlon announced his run on Wednesday.“I think they thought they were going to have a relatively easy race, maybe facing the candidate who had been defeated before. But I think when they saw me getting in the race, they recognised that changes the calculus.”Avlon, 51, is no unknown quantity: he has written four books on politics and history, was for five years editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast and, until this month, was a contributor and anchor at CNN.The primary comes first. Nancy Goroff contested the seat on the eastern end of Long Island in 2020 and is in again. So is James Gaughran, a former state senator. There’s plenty of time for things to get testy but Gaughran welcomed Avlon to the race, telling Politico: “I’ve watched him a lot on CNN, and I’ve actually become a big fan. His advocacy – particularly pointing to the issues we have in this country of trying to save this country from Donald Trump, is spot on.”Avlon laughs. “That was very kind of Jimmy. And by the way … don’t we want to see more of that? Don’t we want to see more, ‘Let’s have a civil conversation, disagree where we disagree, find the areas where we agree, and be civil and constructive and not tear each other down in primaries, because it distracts the focus from the real work to be done, which is winning a general election.’”Republicans have not been quite so welcoming to Avlon. The NRCC said it looked forward “to litigating this smug, liberal hack’s past so voters can see just how left he and the rest of the modern Democrat [sic] party have become”.A LaLota spokesperson piled in, calling Avlon “a Manhattan elitist without any attachments to Long Island other than his summer home in the Hamptons” and claiming NY-1 “has a history of rejecting out-of-state and Manhattan elitists, from both sides of the aisle, who parachute into the district”.Avlon has homes in Sag Harbor and Manhattan. LaLota, a graduate of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, lives in Amityville – outside his district.Avlon says: “I don’t think it’s remotely credible to attack me as radical far left. That’s the kind of cut-and-paste political attack that people realise is just fundamentally false. And I think the reality is that Nick LaLota has been a Donald Trump flunky, doing whatever he says rather than solving problems on behalf of people in Suffolk county. You know, he’s far too far right for this swing district.”Twice, Avlon mentions as a model the centrist Tom Suozzi’s Democratic win this month in NY-3, the seat formerly held by the notorious George Santos, the sixth House member ever expelled. Twice, Avlon cites as motivation farcical scenes in Washington DC in which Senate Republicans sank their own border and immigration deal, Trump having made clear he wants to campaign for president against the backdrop of a “border crisis”, real or confected.House Republicans have since refused to consider a foreign aid package without attendant border reform.Avlon says: “When LaLota attacked Senator James Lankford [of Oklahoma, the Republican negotiator] for trying to solve the border crisis with a bipartisan solution, he just revealed himself as part of the problem, not part of the solution of our politics. I want to be part of the solution.”To some Democrats, “centrist” has become a dirty word. Not to Avlon. He has distanced himself from No Labels, the group he co-founded in 2010, left a decade ago and now accuses of a “reckless gamble with democracy” in its flirtation with a presidential campaign. But the political centre is still where he wants to be, “particularly in swing districts [like NY-01] as a matter of practicality but I think also on principle.“If the larger goal is to win elections, we still need to find a way to reunite America. That’s a lofty goal. I’m not saying that’s why I’m running. But once we break this fever, we need to find a way to come together again. I do believe in the power of unifying leaders in divided times and the best American politics is that which focuses on what unites us, not what divides us.”Avlon’s third book, from 2017, was Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations. The historian Richard Norton Smith called it “a stake through the heart of political extremism”, a subject Avlon knows well, also having written Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America (2010) and presented Reality Check with John Avlon: Extremist Beat for CNN.“There’s a fundamental importance in building broader community and building a big tent,” he says. “The Democratic party is the last big tent party. The Democratic party, unfortunately, is the only functioning political party in America, because the other party is set to re-nominate a guy who tried to destroy our democracy, and is using election lies as a litmus test for loyalty. I don’t think you can underscore that enough.“But in the larger sense, democracy depends upon reasoning together. That requires common facts and identifying common ground and focusing on how you solve common problems. And that’s about putting country over party.”Avlon’s own marriage is bipartisan. His wife, Margaret Hoover, is a TV host and political commentator whose great-grandfather, Herbert Hoover, was the unlucky president hit by the Great Depression.Avlon is “proud of her and her family and the work she does to defend and extend his legacy. When Margaret and I are on air together or doing something onstage together, I hope it serves as a reminder that people can disagree agreeably – again, that partisan politics shouldn’t define every aspect of our lives, especially our personal lives. We can have honest disagreements, as long as it’s accompanied by an assumption of goodwill.”Avlon also started out working for a Republican: Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, long before he became Trump’s attack dog. As speechwriter and policy director, Avlon was there on 11 September 2001, when the towers fell.“September 11 is one of the defining moments in my life,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s unusual. I think New Yorkers understand how it defined our collective character. And I think some folks have slipped into a certain 9/11 amnesia. And I’ve warned against the wisdom of that, in a lot of segments, on air and written.“I’ll always be proud of the work we did in those days. My team and I were responsible for writing the eulogies for 343 firefighters, for police officers and Port Authority workers. And I think that memory, and the example they set by running into the fire, and the way we were briefly able to unite as a nation, in the aftermath, those are all core parts of my character and my experience.“And I think folks in Suffolk county will understand that, because they’ve experienced it themselves or they’ve been touched by it themselves. You don’t have to be retired police officer or firefighter to understand the importance of that day and its aftermath to our communities. It’s just part of who I am.” More

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      Wisconsin’s extreme gerrymandering era ends as new maps come into force

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      For more than a decade, an anti-democratic reality has loomed over Wisconsin: elections for the state legislature don’t matter.Since 2012, no matter how voters throughout one of America’s most competitive states cast their ballots, Republicans have been guaranteed to hold control of the state legislature. That’s because for more than a decade Republicans drew districts lines that are so distorted in their favor, they cemented their control. The dominance was underscored in 2022 when Tony Evers, a Democrat, won re-election with 51.2% of the vote. Republicans still held 65% of the seats in the 99-person state assembly.As of 19 February, that era is over.In a 4-3 decision in December, the Wisconsin supreme court struck down the state legislative maps, ruling that the many non-contiguous districts in the plan violated a state constitutional requirement for contiguity. It invited the legislature, governor and various other parties to submit proposals for a new map and warned it would draw its own if lawmakers and the governor could not agree on a plan.Last week, after a lot of wrangling, the Republican-led legislature passed new maps that were drawn by Evers. The new plan dramatically reshapes politics in Wisconsin, giving Democrats a chance to win control of the assembly this year. They could also possibly win control of the state senate in 2026, giving them complete control of state government. (State senate districts in Wisconsin are composed of three assembly districts).“In its simplest form it means we don’t know which party is gonna control the state assembly after the November election. That hasn’t been true for over a decade,” said John Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette law school in Milwaukee, who has closely studied the maps.The new assembly map undoes the severe gerrymandering of the last decade in a few ways. Republicans had cracked concentrations of Democratic votes in places such as Sheboygan into multiple districts, diluting their vote. The new map undoes that cracking, keeping all of Sheboygan in one district.Republicans took a similar approach in Green Bay. They attached Democratic-leaning areas on the outskirts of the city to more conservative areas, creating two solidly Republican districts. The new lines create two highly competitive districts there.The new map also dramatically reconfigures the south-central portion of the state, adding five additional safe Democratic districts. “It’s just to me a pretty remarkable change,” Johnson said.Democrats were skeptical when Republicans chose to enact the maps drawn by Evers at the last minute, with some wondering why lawmakers who had used every maneuever possible to stay in power would suddenly agree to adopt Democratic maps. But in choosing Evers’ maps, Republicans may have chosen the best of the available options for them. It pairs fewer incumbents in districts than did other proposals, Johnson noted. And unlike some of the other plans, it allows Republicans to keep a majority in the state senate this year, giving them the ability to hold on to control of a chamber until the end of Evers’ second term in 2026.The map is also still biased towards Republicans. In a hypothetical, perfectly tied election in the state assembly, Republicans would still be expected to gain 6% extra seats, according to Planscore, a website that uses mathematical metrics to evaluate electoral maps. Under the previous plan, Republicans would have received a 15% extra seat boost in a hypothetically tied election.And while the map puts control of the assembly up for grabs, it doesn’t create more individually competitive districts, Johnson noted.“It raises the Democratic floor, and lowers the Republican ceiling, but it’s not a map that was drawn to maximize the number of closely contested seats around the state,” Johnson said. “Now those competitive districts are far more consequential than they were under the old maps.“You can tell this is a map drawn by Democrats,” he added. More

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      Trump soundly defeats Nikki Haley in South Carolina Republican primary – video

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      Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina, a stinging setback that narrows her vanishingly thin path to the nomination. The Associated Press called the South Carolina primary for Trump when polls closed at 7pm, in a clear indication of his margin of victory. Trump locked in about 60% of the vote, with Haley hovering at about 40%. South Carolina voters have a long history of choosing the party’s eventual nominee, and Trump is on track to clinch the Republican nomination months before the party’s summer convention in Milwaukee. ‘I just want to say that I have never seen the Republican party so unified as it is right now,’ Trump told supporters at his victory party in Columbia, the state capital. ‘This is a fantastic evening. It’s an early evening, and fantastic.’ More