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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himself | Moira Donegan

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himselfMoira DoneganWhen conservative men like Rittenhouse and Brett Kavanaugh express their feelings, it is an act of thwarted entitlement – or a threat His voice choked up and his face went red. The young man squinted and panted, his mouth pulled up plaintively towards his nose, his answers to the questions coming out in gasping little bursts. Kyle Rittenhouse, on the stand testifying at his trial for killing two people and wounding a third last summer at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was not crying for the men he killed, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was crying for himself, describing what he said was his mortal fear that night in August 2020, when he opened fire on the protesters using an AR-15. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rittenhouse gasped, describing how he had confronted and ultimately killed the two men while he was guarding the lot of a car dealership. “I defended myself.”Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the shooting; he is 18 now. The young man’s emotional testimony had a practical purpose: it was a performance meant to make him seem helpless and childlike, and to convince the jury in his homicide trial that there was a reasonable possibility that he was in fear for his life when he shot the three men. But to many, the emotion of Rittenhouse’s testimony seemed to stem not from his memories of the incident, but from the indignant entitlement of a white man thwarted in the enforcement of his own privilege.Many compared Rittenhouse’s tears during his testimony to those of Brett Kavanaugh, who shouted, red-faced and spitting, during his confirmation hearings, when he was asked questions about his alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford, back when he was Rittenhouse’s age. Both of the displays prompted questions about their sincerity and opportunism. Was Rittenhouse really crying? Was Kavanaugh just putting on a show for Donald Trump to watch on TV? But they both also pointed to a peculiar phenomenon that remains little understood: the rightwing use of public displays of white male emotionalism as a political tool.In one sense, the two men’s conduct under oath was quite strange. Both of them appear to be self-conscious avatars of white conservative masculinity, and their ideology would seem to preclude male emotionalism, as traditional gender norms have historically justified male dominance precisely because of men’s supposed stoicism and self-control. As Vox’s Jamil Smith put it: “We’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit their emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.”And yet conservative white men’s emotions are increasingly coming to the forefront of political life, and they seem to animate much of the Trumpist right. In practice, such men express their emotions all the time. They express them at Trump rallies, when they jeer at the mention of perceived enemies and cheer for lines of chauvinism and anger. They express their feelings when they picket abortion clinics, screaming at women walking inside and threatening the staff. They express their feelings when they fly Confederate and “Blue Lives Matter” flags; they express their feelings when they vote, and when they pick petulant fights with the service workers who ask them to wear their masks inside stores and restaurants. The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.Kyle Rittenhouse judge in spotlight after angry reprimand of prosecutionRead moreArguably, both Rittenhouse and Kavanaugh were expressing their emotions when they committed their famous acts of alleged violence. It’s impossible to know what was in his mind, but Rittenhouse’s actions leading up to that night in Kenosha indicate that what brought him there was anger, or maybe a desire for glory. Rittenhouse says that he came to Kenosha to protect local businesses from demonstrators; he had appointed himself a vigilante, out avenging the interests of property and police against the protests. It’s hard not to suspect that he daydreamed about himself as a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules, like an action movie hero who wears a bandana as a headband and a cutoff denim vest. The rifle that Rittenhouse used to kill Rosenbaum and Huber was illegal for him to possess. Asked why he didn’t use a handgun, he told the court that he had chosen the semiautomatic rifle because “it looked cool”.For Kavanaugh, the project of decoding his emotions the night he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford is also speculative, but Ford’s testimony, along with documents made public during the hearings, paints a portrait of Kavanaugh as a young man with a vivid, if not especially varied, emotional life. His calendar from what was probably the month of the party shows him working out and calling his football friends by nicknames; he goes to their houses for “’skis” (“brewskis”: beers). In Ford’s account, he sounded satisfied with himself. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. “The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” Kavanaugh was a boy, like Rittenhouse, with an inflated sense of his own importance. The emotion he seemed to have expressed most clearly in those years was a consuming and profoundly unearned sense of his own superiority.The fact of the matter is that for Rittenhouse, the question of emotion will be central to his case. The question of his legal guilt or innocence hangs on whether he felt endangered at the time of the shootings – a subjective experience that, conveniently, only Rittenhouse himself can speak to. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh now sits in a position of superlative power. Maybe the problem is not that these white men don’t express their feelings enough. Maybe the problem is that their feelings have too much power.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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      The people Kyle Rittenhouse shot can’t be called ‘victims’, a judge says. Surprised? | Akin Olla

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      OpinionRaceThe people Kyle Rittenhouse shot can’t be called ‘victims’, a judge says. Surprised?Akin OllaThough he crossed state lines with a semi-automatic rifle and shot three people, Rittenhouse has been treated with an alarming degree of grace Sun 31 Oct 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 06.26 EDTIn the midst of the unrest following a police officer’s shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old boy from Illinois, shot and killed two anti-police brutality protesters and wounded a third. This week the presiding judge in Rittenhouse’s trial has decided that the men that Rittenhouse shot cannot be called “victims” during the trial.Despite purposefully crossing state lines armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Rittenhouse has been treated, before and after the act, with an alarming degree of grace. Rittenhouse’s case is about a lot more than just one armed vigilante seeking to protect the status quo at the expense of human lives: it is about an entire system that pushed him to violence.In August 2020, Rittenhouse and other white men answered a call to action by a former Kenosha city alderman for the formation of a militia to “take up arms” to defend Kenosha “from the evil thugs”. During the evening of the shooting, the presence of this militia was supported by local police officers who offered them water and affirmations, saying, “We appreciate you guys, we really do.”According to the militia member Ryan Balch, a police officer told him that officers would be pushing protesters back towards the armed men, claiming that police believed the militia would “deal with” the protesters. After Rittenhouse shot the three men, witnesses shouted for his arrest but nearby officers appeared to let him disappear into the night and return to his home state of Illinois.After the shooting, Rittenhouse was celebrated by conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter and, of course, President Donald Trump. A rally was held in his honor and hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised in support of his legal defense. At least one police officer donated to the fundraising effort, commenting, “God bless. Thank you for your courage … You’ve done nothing wrong.”Erin Decker, the Kenosha county Republican party chair, suggested that Rittenhouse was innocent and that “about 80% [of people in the area] support what Kyle did”. The Department of Homeland Security prepared talking points sympathetic to the shooter, prepping officials to say that he arrived in Kenosha to defend small business owners. As his case begins, it is clear that he will continue to receive support from many of those embedded in American institutions.Kenosha county circuit judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the controversial case, had already made some questionable decisions while setting the parameters of the trial. Schroeder has ruled that the men shot by Rittenhouse cannot be described as “victims’’ in court because the phrase is too “loaded” and may sway the opinions of the jury. Schroeder also advised against Rittenhouse’s legal team referring to the men he killed as “looters” and “arsonists” but did not forbid them from doing so – a double standard that props up rightwing talking points about protesters during last year’s summer uprisings against police brutality.Gaige Grosskreutz, the survivor of the attack, has not been charged with any crimes related to the protests, and the vast majority of 2020’s protesters engaged in peaceful action. Though those killed by Rittenhouse were white, the victim-blaming rings of the comments that often follow the murder of Black Americans at the hands of police and vigilantes. In 2014, more money was raised in support of the police officer who killed 18-year-old Michael Brown than was raised for Brown’s memorial service.The judge has given Rittenhouse’s defense more room to maneuver, while blocking some damning evidence against Rittenhouse from entering the case. This evidence includes a video of him expressing a desire to shoot people that he thought were looters and photos of him posing with members of the far-right organization the Proud Boys – who used Rittenhouse’s name to promote a rally in Portland.While Judge Schroeder may see his decisions as justified, he is still feeding into a larger pattern that surrounds Rittenhouse and the criminal justice system at large. The reality is that Rittenhouse was, compared with a Black man, less likely to be arrested for his crime, more likely to be bailed, less likely to be convicted and less likely to receive a prison sentence. It isn’t hard to imagine that a Black man in his position wouldn’t even be alive today – much like Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer for simply disclosing that he had a firearm in his possession during a traffic stop.Rittenhouse may have pulled the trigger, but there is a larger system at play, a system that sent him to Kenosha and will probably send him back home after the trial.
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
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      How Republicans Are Weaponizing Critical Race Theory Ahead of Midterms

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      Republicans hope that concerns about critical race theory can help them in the midterm elections. The issue has torn apart one Wisconsin suburb.Little more than a year ago, Scarlett Johnson was a stay-at-home mother, devoted to chauffeuring her children to school and supervising their homework.That was before the school system in her affluent Milwaukee suburb posted a video about privilege and race that “jarred me to my core,” she said.“There was this pyramid — where are you on the scale of being a racist,” Ms. Johnson said. “I couldn’t understand why this was recommended to parents and stakeholders.”The video solidified Ms. Johnson’s concerns, she said, that the district, Mequon-Thiensville, was “prioritizing race and identity” and introducing critical race theory, an academic framework used in higher education that views racism as ingrained in law and other modern institutions.Since then, Ms. Johnson’s life has taken a dramatic turn — a “180,” she calls it. She became an activist, orchestrating a recall of her local school board. Then, she became a board candidate herself.Republicans in Wisconsin have embraced her. She’s appeared on panels and podcasts, and attracted help from representatives of two well-funded conservative groups. When Rebecca Kleefisch, the former Republican lieutenant governor, announced her campaign for governor, Ms. Johnson joined her onstage.Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign has since helped organize door-to-door outreach for Ms. Johnson and three other school board candidates.Ms. Johnson’s rapid transformation into a sought-after activist illustrates how Republicans are using fears of critical race theory to drive school board recalls and energize conservatives, hoping to lay groundwork for the 2022 midterm elections.“Midterm elections everywhere, but particularly in Wisconsin, are pretty dependent on voter turnout as opposed to persuasion,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic political consultant based in Milwaukee. “This is one of the issues that could do it.”Scarlett Johnson in Mequon, Wis., in September. Ms. Johnson is an activist against teaching critical race theory in schools, orchestrating a recall of her local school board.Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesBallotpedia, a nonpartisan political encyclopedia, said it had tracked 80 school board recall efforts against 207 board members in 2021 — the highest number since it began tracking in 2010.Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, deny that there is any critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools.“Critical race theory is not taught in our district, period,” said Wendy Francour, a school board member in Ms. Johnson’s district now facing recall.Teachers’ unions and some educators say that some of the efforts being labeled critical race theory by critics are simply efforts to teach history and civics.“We should call this controversy what it is — a scare campaign cooked up by G.O.P. operatives” and others to “limit our students’ education and understanding of historical and current events,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.But Republicans say critical race theory has invaded classrooms and erroneously casts all white people as oppressors and all Black people as victims. The issue has become a major rallying point for Republicans from Florida to Idaho, where state lawmakers have moved to ban it.In July, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, promised to abolish critical race theory on “Day 1” in office. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, facing re-election next year, said recently, “I want to make sure people are not supporting critical race theory.” And in Arizona, Blake Masters, a Republican hoping to unseat Senator Mark Kelly in 2022, has repeatedly slammed critical race theory as “anti-white racism.”In some places, the tone of school board opponents has become angry and threatening, so much so that the National School Boards Association asked President Biden for federal law enforcement protection.Few places will be more closely watched in the midterm elections than Wisconsin, a swing state that Mr. Biden won by just over 20,600 votes and where Republicans would like to retain control of the Senate seat currently held by Ron Johnson, as well as to defeat Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.To succeed, Republicans must solidify support in suburban Milwaukee, an area of historical strength for the party. Recently, though, Democrats have made inroads in Ozaukee County, and particularly its largest city, Mequon, a mostly white enclave north of Milwaukee. President Donald J. Trump won the city last year with only 50.2 percent of the vote — a poor showing that contributed to his Wisconsin defeat.Now, with midterms on the horizon, prospective statewide candidates — including Ms. Kleefisch, Senator Johnson and the relative political newcomer Kevin Nicholson — have emphasized their opposition to critical race theory.Senator Johnson, who has not announced whether he will seek re-election, has talked about the importance of local elections as a prelude to next year’s midterms. He recently urged constituents to “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”Traditionally, school board elections in Wisconsin have been nonpartisan, but a political action committee associated with Ms. Kleefisch — Rebecca Kleefisch PAC — recently contributed to about 30 school board candidates around the state, including one elected last spring in Mequon.“The fact that this is being politically driven is heartbreaking,” said Chris Schultz, a retired teacher in Mequon and one of the four board members facing recall.Ms. Schultz relinquished her Republican Party membership when she joined the board. “I believe school boards need to be nonpolitical,” she said. “Our student welfare cannot be a political football.”Now, she thinks, that’s over. “The Republican Party has kind of decided that they want to not just have their say on the school board but determine the direction of school districts,” she said.Rebecca Kleefisch, Wisconsin’s former lieutenant governor, announces her candidacy for governor in September. Last week, volunteers from Ms. Kleefisch’s campaign organized outreach for Ms. Johnson’s school board candidacy.John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAgainst this political backdrop, Ms. Johnson, who calls herself a lifelong conservative, is waging her own battle in the district that serves 3,700 students. Ms. Johnson, 47, has five children, ranging in age from 10 to 22. Her two oldest children graduated from Mequon-Thiensville’s vaunted Homestead High School. Complaining about a decline in the system’s quality, she said she chose to send her younger children to private schools.Ms. Johnson first got interested in school board politics in August 2020, after a decision to delay in-person classes because of an increase in Covid-19 cases. Angered over the delay, Ms. Johnson protested with more than 100 people outside school district headquarters.“Virtual learning is not possible for the majority of parents that work,” Ms. Johnson told a reporter.The next day, protesters gathered outside the business of Akram Khan, a school board member who runs a private tutoring center.“There was this narrative that I, as a board member, elected to close the schools down because it would directly benefit my pocketbook, which is the farthest thing from the truth,” Mr. Khan said.He shut down his business temporarily as a result of the protests and is now facing recall.Things got worse. Protesters showed up outside the home of the district superintendent; relationships among neighbors began to fray. School board meetings, formerly dull affairs, dragged on for hours, with comments taking on a nasty and divisive tone.“We’ve been called Marxist flunkies,” Ms. Francour said. “We have police attending the meetings now.”Akram Khan is facing a school board recall.Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesWendy Francour, who is facing a recall, said school board meetings have gotten divisive: “We have police attending the meetings now.”Carlos Javier Ortiz for The New York TimesAnger grew over masks, test scores and the hourlong video the school system posted about race, one of two that Ms. Francour said were offered because parents had asked what to tell their children about George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.Led by two consultants, the optional online seminar for parents included a discussion of the spectrum of racism — from lynching to indifference to abolitionism — and tips on how to become “anti-racist” through acts such as speaking up against bias and socializing with people of color. It ended with news clips about Mr. Floyd’s death.Ms. Johnson, who grew up poor in Milwaukee, the daughter of a Puerto Rican teenage mother and a father who had brushes with the law, said the video ran counter to her belief that people were not limited by their background or skin color.“For me the sky was the limit,” Ms. Johnson said in July on “Fact Check,” a podcast hosted by Bill Feehan, a staunch Trump supporter and the La Crosse County Republican Party chairman.The Wisconsin Democratic Party recently provided The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with deleted tweets by Ms. Johnson expressing nonchalance about the threat of white supremacy and accusing Planned Parenthood of racism.Spurred partly by the video, Ms. Johnson began leading an effort, Recall MTSD.com, to recall four of seven board members. Petitions were available at local businesses, including a shooting range owned by a Republican activist, Cheryle Rebholz.While the recall group insists theirs is a grass-roots effort, representatives of two conservative nonprofit organizations turned up to help.Amber Schroeder, left, and Ms. Johnson dropping off recall petitions in Mequon in August.Morry Gash/Associated PressOne of them, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, is funded by the Bradley Foundation, known for promoting school choice and challenging election rules across the country.The organization stepped in to help Ms. Johnson’s group by threatening legal action against the city of Mequon when it tried to remove banners, placed on public property, that promoted the recall.Another volunteer with a high profile in conservative circles was Matt Batzel, executive director of American Majority, a national group that trains political candidates. Mr. Batzel’s organization once published a primer on how to “flip” your school board, citing its role overturning a liberal board in Kenosha, Wis.Mequon’s recall election is Nov. 2. One candidate is Ms. Rebholz, the shooting range owner, who wrote an essay arguing that, “If the Biden-Harris team wins in November, Americans won’t be safe.”Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson is branching out.She serves as a state leader for No Left Turn in Education, an organization against critical race theory, and has recently been named to a campaign advisory board for Ms. Kleefisch.She spoke at a Milwaukee event last month. The topic: “What is Critical Race Theory and How to Fight It.” More

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      Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections

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      Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.Campaigning at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., Mr. Evers said that Wisconsin’s race for governor next year would be “about our democracy.”Lianne Milton for The New York TimesLast week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.) It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview. He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania who defended the results of the 2020 election in the state, is expected to announce his campaign for governor as soon as this month.Susan Walsh/Associated PressJames Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment. Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election in Michigan, where Republican election officials tried to stall the certification of the results of the state’s 2020 presidential race.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Whitmer, who has faced threats of an insurrection in her statehouse and a kidnapping plot, is now fighting a Republican attempt to work around her expected veto of a host of proposed voting restrictions.“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.Mr. Evers vetoed them all.“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.” More

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      Democrats Lost the Most in Midwestern ‘Factory Towns’, Report Says

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      The party’s struggles in communities that saw declines in manufacturing and union jobs, and health care, could more than offset its gains in metropolitan areas.WASHINGTON — The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month.The party’s worsening performance in the region’s midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns.Nationally and in the Midwest, Democratic gains in large metropolitan areas have offset their losses in rural areas. And while the party’s struggles in the industrial Midwest have been well-chronicled, the 82-page report explicitly links Democratic decline in the region that elected Donald J. Trump in 2016 to the sort of deindustrialization that has weakened liberal parties around the world.“We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don’t address those losses,” wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled “Factory Towns.”Mr. Martin wrote the report in conjunction with Mike Lux and David Wilhelm, fellow Democratic strategists who, like him, also have roots in the region and worked together on President Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign.For all the arresting data, vivid graphs and deepening red maps presented, Mr. Martin offers little guidance on how to reverse the trends. He does, however, offer a warning, one that Midwestern Democrats have been issuing since Mr. Trump’s victory five years ago.“If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” writes Mr. Martin.Surveying ten states — the Great Lakes region as well as Missouri and Iowa — Mr. Martin laid out a set of stark figures.Comparing Barack Obama’s re-election to President Biden’s election last year, he notes that Democrats gained about 1.55 million votes in the big cities and suburbs of the region surveyed. In the same period, they lost about 557,000 votes in heavily rural counties.But in midsize and small counties, Democrats lost over 2.63 million votes between the two elections. Dubbing these communities “factory towns,” Mr. Martin separates them by midsize counties anchored around cities with a population of 35,000 or more and smaller counties that lean on manufacturing but do not have such sizable cities.Taken together, the changes illustrate the degree to which Mr. Obama relied upon the votes of working-class white voters to propel his re-election — and how much Mr. Biden leaned on suburbanites to offset his losses in working-class communities that had once been a pillar of the Democratic coalition.What alarms Mr. Martin, and many Democratic officials, is whether the party can sustain those gains in metropolitan areas. It’s uncertain, as he puts it, “if moderate suburban Republicans will continue to vote for Democrats when Trump is not on the ballot.”Democratic gains up and down the ballot in fast-growing Sun Belt states like Arizona and Georgia garnered significant attention last year. Yet Mr. Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency and Democrats couldn’t have flipped the Senate without victories in 2020 across the Great Lakes region.However, those wins proved more difficult than many pre-election polls concluded because of the G.O.P.’s continued strength in manufacturing communities. And, the report noted, these communities made up a significant portion of the region’s vote share. In Wisconsin, midsize and small manufacturing counties make up 58 percent of the statewide vote. In Michigan, half of the voting population is in these communities.This is where the decline in manufacturing has been most damaging to Democrats. The ten states included in the survey have lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs since the beginning of this century.In the small to midsize “factory town” counties in those states, where support for the Republican presidential nominee grew between 2012 and 2020, the losses were acute: More than 70 percent suffered declines in manufacturing jobs.The elimination of those jobs also led to declines in health care, according to data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.In the counties that suffered manufacturing losses and health care declines, Republicans surged between 2012 and 2020. Nearly half of the party’s gains in these states came in communities where there were both manufacturing cuts and worsening health care.Republicans also prospered in communities hit hard by the decline in manufacturing that were predominantly white. With fewer well-paying industry jobs, the power of local unions declined as well, silencing what was always the beating heart of Democratic political organizing in these areas. In 154 such counties, Democrats suffered a net loss of over 613,000 votes between the elections in 2016 and 2020.Perhaps most striking was the decline in union membership across the region.Nine of the 10 states included in the survey have accounted for 93 percent of the loss of union members nationwide in the last two decades. And just in the last 10 years, these states have lost 10 percent of their union membership — an average that is three times greater than nationally. More

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      Wisconsin Republican Defends Legitimacy of 2020 Election Investigation

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      The Wisconsin Republican leading the state’s partisan inquiry into the 2020 election results on Monday warned election clerks that they would face subpoenas if they did not cooperate and defended the investigation’s legitimacy by declaring that he was not seeking to overturn President Biden’s victory in the state.“We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election,” Michael Gableman, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice overseeing the investigation, argued in a video posted on YouTube. The inquiry, he said, “may include a vigorous and comprehensive audit if the facts that are discovered justify such a course of action.”The video from Mr. Gableman comes after he and Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leaders have faced increasing criticism from both their party’s far right and from Democrats. The right has accused Mr. Gableman of not doing enough to push lies about the 2020 election propagated by former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats have painted the $680,000 inquiry into the election as a waste of state resources and a distraction from other needed business. Mr. Gableman was assigned to look into Mr. Trump’s false claims that the state’s election was stolen from him by Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, nearly three months ago. The five-minute video released on Monday was the first extensive public statement Mr. Gableman has made outlining the scope and aim of his investigation.The Republicans’ continuing effort to re-examine the 2020 results in Wisconsin comes as Trump allies elsewhere have gone to great lengths to undermine Mr. Biden’s victory. Arizona Republicans are near the end of a monthslong review of ballots in Maricopa County. Pennsylvania Republicans last week approved subpoenas for driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers for every voter in the state. And 18 states, including Texas this month, have passed laws this year adding new voting restrictions.In recent weeks, Trump-allied conservatives in Wisconsin have shown public frustration at the pace and transparency of Mr. Gableman’s investigation. This month, a group led by David A. Clarke Jr., a former Milwaukee County sheriff who has been a prominent purveyor of false claims about the election, held a rally at the State Capitol in Madison to protest what it argued was insufficient devotion by Mr. Gableman and the state’s Republican leaders to challenging the 2020 results. Mr. Gableman said on Monday that his investigation would require the municipal officials who operate Wisconsin’s elections to prove that voting was conducted properly. He said local clerks would be required to obey any subpoenas he might issue.Election clerks in Milwaukee and Green Bay ignored previous subpoenas issued by the Republican chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee for ballots and voting machines. Mr. Vos had declined to approve those subpoenas.“The responsibility to demonstrate that our elections were conducted with fairness, inclusivity and accountability is on the government and on the private, for-profit interests that did work for the government,” Mr. Gableman said. “The burden is not on the people to show in advance of an investigation that public officials and their contractors behaved dishonestly.”Mr. Gableman added that he did not plan to release information to the public on a regular time frame but would do so when he found it appropriate.“My job as special counsel is to gather all relevant information and, while I will draw my own conclusions, my goal is to put everything I know and everything I learn before you, the citizen, so that you can make up your own mind,” he said.The chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, said the Gableman video was evidence that state Republicans were at odds with one another over how far the election investigation should go.“Robin Vos and his far-right ‘investigator’ Michael Gableman are clearly upset that the most extreme fringe doesn’t think they’re going far enough to entertain conspiracy theories,” Mr. Wikler said. “They’re wasting taxpayer funds to serve the political interests of a small group of Republican insiders who want to erode the freedom to vote. It’s a sham, a waste of time and money, and it’s damaging our democracy.” More