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Tag: 2022 Midterm elections

  • New wave of GOP candidates poised to join 2024 campaign

    New wave of GOP candidates poised to join 2024 campaign

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The opening phase of the Republican presidential primary has largely centered on the escalating collision between former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    But a new wave of GOP White House hopefuls will begin entering the 2024 race as soon as this coming week after a monthslong lull. They include former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who will formally launch his campaign Wednesday.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he will finalize his plans in “weeks, not months.” He has kept a busy schedule of early state visits and policy speeches as aides have discussed details of an announcement including dates as early as May, but more likely in June. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who has formed a presidential exploratory committee, is expected to join the race in a similar time frame.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been meeting with former aides and he returned to New Hampshire this past week, where he said at a town hall in the first-in-the-nation primary state, “Tonight is the beginning of the case against Donald Trump.” Christie has said he will make a decision “in the next couple of weeks.”

    The contenders will enter the race at a critical moment as DeSantis, who hasn’t officially announced a campaign, has struggled to live up to sky-high expectations among some early backers. He has been losing support among elected Republicans in his own state to Trump and is prompting concern among some in the party that his positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights, among other issues, could render him unelectable in a general election.

    Trump in recent weeks has solidified his status as the early front-runner, even after he was indicted in New York. He remains the subject of intensifying investigations in Atlanta and Washington and persistent concerns about his electability after losing to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

    Would-be rivals hope that dynamic leaves an opening for one of the fresh entrants to emerge as an alternative to the current polling leaders. Some strategists hope Trump and DeSantis will attack one another so viciously that they will turn off voters, who will search for an alternative.

    “It’s not uncommon for a third candidate who’s not involved in the kerfuffle to rise,” said Bryan Lanza, a former Trump adviser, who has been informally advising Larry Elder, the conservative talk radio host who announced his campaign Thursday.

    Lanza said he expects a robust race to be the “leader of the second tier” of candidates currently polling at under 10%.

    Beyond Trump and Elder, the current field of official GOP presidential candidates includes Trump’s U.N. ambassador, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Both announced their bids in February.

    Biden is expected to announce his 2024 campaign as soon as this coming week. He faces minimal competition for the Democratic nomination.

    Among Republicans, the early debates that are slated to begin this summer could be crucial in determining who builds momentum, particularly given DeSantis’ expectations.

    That means candidates may need to cement their planning soon, even if they would prefer to wait longer. The Republican National Committee has scheduled the first debate for August and is expected to set strict benchmarks that candidates must satisfy to participate, including amassing tens of thousands of individual donors.

    “That takes a little time to do and so if you’re gong to be serious about this — and I think you have to be on the stage to be serious about it — then you probably have to make the decision by May,” Christie said this past week during an interview with the media outlet Semafor.

    Candidates-in-waiting have seen little reason to jump in sooner, particularly given Trump’s propensity to attack. Instead, they have been biding their time, visiting early voting states, delivering speeches and wooing donors as they assess the field. Pence, for instance, was in California this past week meeting with potential backers and will host another donor retreat for his nonprofit group in late May.

    “If I was in their shoes, I would wait as long as possible,” said former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was considered an early favorite for the Republican nomination when he ran against Trump in 2016. He remembers realizing, in those early weeks, how dramatically Trump had upended the race, dominating everything.

    “There was no way around it then,” he said. “And right now, anybody who thinks they’re somehow going to go in and change that is missing the reality.”

    The rivalry between Trump and DeSantis has been turning uglier by the day, with political groups supporting both men already spending millions on attack ads.

    While DeSantis has largely ignored Trump’s jabs questioning his commitment to Social Security, his relationship with young girls as a teacher decades ago and even his sexuality, a pro-DeSantis super political action committee, Never Back Down, began to respond in its first round of paid ads last weekend.

    “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Gov. DeSantis,” the narrator says in an ad that ran on Fox News. “What happened to Donald Trump?”

    The spot ran in conjunction with an online ad, which described Trump as “a coward” and a “gun grabber,” that was aimed at those attending an RNC donor retreat in Indiana.

    Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has been airing its spots on cable news channels highlighting DeSantis’ votes to cut Social Security and Medicare and raise the retirement age.

    “The more you learn about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values. He’s just not ready to be president,” said the narrator in one. Another, seizing on a report that DeSantis once ate pudding with his fingers, urged the governor “to keep his pudding fingers off our money.”

    Trump and his campaign have long seen DeSantis as his only serious challenger and believed the more crowded the field, the better for Trump, as candidates split the anti-Trump vote. But a repeat of 2016′s massive field hasn’t materialized, with potential candidates such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan passing on campaigns.

    There are still plenty of unknown dynamics, including whether governors such as Kristi Noem of South Dakota or Chris Sununu of New Hampshire will enter the contest. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin have not explicitly ruled out running.

    Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist and longtime Christie adviser, believes that Trump is the favorite but nonetheless beatable. He cautioned that races are complicated, with unexpected outcomes.

    “I do think that DeSantis is right now firmly the alternative to Trump, but I don’t know if it stays that way. There’s still way too long to go,” he said, arguing that a debate moment or news story could change the trajectory.

    “Somebody’s just got to get momentum,” he said. “It’s just so wide open even with Trump being the prohibitive favorite.”

    ___

    Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in New York and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

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  • Radio host Larry Elder announces 2024 GOP bid for president

    Radio host Larry Elder announces 2024 GOP bid for president

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    Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder, who sought to replace the California governor in a failed 2021 recall effort, announced Thursday he is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    Elder, 70, made the announcement on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and followed up with a tweet.

    “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable. We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President,” he wrote.

    The long-shot candidate joins a Republican field that includes former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has said he plans to seek reelection.

    Elder made his first bid for public office in 2021, when he received the most votes out of 46 people who were hoping to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall effort. But a majority of voters ended up voting against removing Newsom, making the vote count in the replacement contest irrelevant.

    Some Democrats say Elder’s role as a foil to Newsom helped the Democratic governor inspire voters in liberal California to turn out and reject the recall. Newsom attacked Elder for his support of Trump and his conservative positions, such as opposing abortion rights and restrictions imposed to slow the spread of COVID-19, such as mask mandates.

    But Elder said the experience of running for office — and the millions of votes he received — showed he had a message that resonated with voters. A lawyer who grew up in Los Angeles’ rough South Central neighborhood, Elder attended an Ivy League college and then law school. He has a following among conservatives through his radio programs and has been a frequent guest on Fox News and other right-wing media.

    Elder, who is Black, has criticized Democrats’ “woke” agenda, Black Lives Matter and the notion of systemic racism, positions that have put him at odds with many other Black people.

    During the recall campaign, a former fiancée said Elder showed her a gun during a 2015 argument. Elder denied the allegations.

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  • Haley vs. Scott: From South Carolina allies to 2024 rivals

    Haley vs. Scott: From South Carolina allies to 2024 rivals

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — As she introduced South Carolina’s next senator, then-Gov. Nikki Haley said her decision to appoint Tim Scott was “pretty simple.”

    “This man loves South Carolina,” Haley said of Scott, a congressman at the time. “He is very aware that what he does and every vote he makes affects South Carolina and affects our country. And so it was with that that I knew he was the right person.”

    Scott was just as effusive, praising Haley as someone who governed with “conviction” and “integrity.” He pledged to “get on the team with Nikki Haley to make sure that all of America continues to hear the great things about South Carolina.”

    Haley and Scott are forever linked by that announcement at the South Carolina Statehouse on a winter day in 2012, cementing their status as rising stars in a Republican Party frustrated by Barack Obama’s reelection just a month earlier. But nearly a dozen years later, they find themselves poised to run against each other for the GOP presidential nomination. Haley has already launched a campaign, and Scott took steps last week toward initiating a bid of his own.

    Both carry historic potential, with Haley aiming to become the first woman and first person of Indian descent to win the presidency. Scott would be the first Black Republican president. But much of the race’s early attention has focused on former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is presumed to be on the cusp of announcing his own bid.

    As the GOP field begins to take shape, the potential of a Haley-Scott faceoff is putting some of their mutual supporters in the critical early voting state of South Carolina in a conundrum as they weigh which candidate to support.

    One of those longtime donors and backers is Mikee Johnson, a South Carolina businessman who has known Haley since high school and serves on the board of her Original Six Foundation, which provides after-school programming and literacy resources for children in rural South Carolina school districts. But like many Republicans across the state, Johnson has also been a friend and ally of Scott, whom he said he’ll back over Haley in the presidential race.

    “I really admire all the things Nikki’s done, her friendship’s important to me, but at this point, I think his style is more what I would like to see our leaders — not just our president — aspire to getting things done in the style and approach that he goes about it,” Johnson said.

    Another is David Wilkins, who was South Carolina’s state House speaker when Haley was in the Legislature, later chairing her gubernatorial transition team and now serving alongside her on the board of Clemson University. Saying he has the “greatest respect” for Scott, whom he has supported in his Senate bids, Wilkins — who also served as ambassador to Canada under President George W. Bush — said his bond is stronger with Haley.

    “He’s an outstanding senator, and we’re very proud of him here in South Carolina,” Wilkins said, of Scott. “I just have a very strong friendship with her. It’s not choosing one person over another. It’s just going with the person that I believe in, that I’m dear friends with, somebody I’ve known for 20 years.”

    The intertwined relationships of those who have supported both Haley and Scott mirror the politicians themselves, whose shared political history dates back further than the pivotal Senate appointment. The two worked alongside each other for a single term in the state House of Representatives, after Scott joined Haley in the chamber following the 2008 election.

    That next session, they both signed onto a number of resolutions and bills, including a constitutional amendment — ultimately approved by the state’s voters — guaranteeing workers the right to voting by secret ballot on union representation.

    They also teamed up, along with a number of co-sponsors, on other less successful bills, including measures to audit state education funds, endow “rights of due process and equal protection” at fertilization and a “truth in spending” measure for all state and local government entities. Other measures that didn’t pass would have made several statewide positions like the agriculture commissioner, secretary of state and education superintendent appointed, not elected, positions.

    In 2010, Scott briefly ran for lieutenant governor, ultimately abandoning that pursuit to seek the 1st District seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Henry Brown. At that time, South Carolina’s governor and lieutenant governor were elected separately; had Scott stayed in that race and won it, he and Haley would have served together as South Carolina’s top officeholders.

    But two years later, when Jim DeMint abruptly announced his resignation from the Senate, the paths of Haley and Scott crossed yet again. Rob Godfrey, a longtime Haley adviser who served for a time as her chief spokesperson, said the governor’s process was deliberate, making a short list that included Scott, Rep. Trey Gowdy and former first lady Jenny Sanford, ex-wife of former Gov. Mark Sanford, who was Haley’s predecessor.

    Also on the short list was former Attorney General Henry McMaster, one of Haley’s 2010 rivals who went on to become one of her biggest backers and eventual successor. Catherine Templeton, a labor lawyer who Haley appointed to lead the state’s labor and then public health agencies, was under consideration as well.

    “She took every one of those candidates and their background and their credentials and what they offered the state seriously during this process, and at the end of the day determined that there was one person who was best suited to take on the job and carry on the legacy of Sen. DeMint but also blaze his own trail,” Godfrey said.

    In picking Scott, Haley said she wanted to appoint someone she felt could retain the seat in subsequent elections, and who was in the same ideological vein as DeMint.

    “It’s not how much political experience you have, it’s about the fight,” Haley said at the time. “It’s about the philosophical beliefs. It’s about knowing what you’re sent to Washington to do.”

    Scott more than proved Haley correct, winning a 2014 special election to fill the remaining two years of DeMint’s term, then winning a full one of his own two years later. Last fall, Scott won reelection by more than 20 percentage points, a Senate race he had long said would be his last.

    “Absolutely, she was thinking into the future,” said Chad Connelly, who was state GOP chair at the time.

    That future is now, as Haley and Scott both prepare to compete against each other for the nation’s highest office. A day after Haley’s announcement, Scott embarked on a “listening tour.” Haley declined to comment about Scott when asked by The Associated Press.

    “I have such great respect for Nikki Haley,” Scott said in a recent interview, adding he hadn’t spoken with Haley before launching his exploratory committee. “She is a strong, powerful force for good.”

    He also dismissed any awkwardness in running against the Republican who appointed him to the Senate, and with whom he would be in direct competition in vying for the very voters that had elected them both statewide.

    “You put your uniform on, you shake hands, and you go on the field. You fight for good. You fight to win the game,” Scott said. “You take your uniform off, you shake hands and you continue down the road.”

    “We were friends before,” he added. “We’ll be friends after.”

    ___

    Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

    ___

    Associated Press writer Tom Beaumont in Marion, Iowa, contributed to this report.

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  • Progressives focus on local-level wins to counter setbacks

    Progressives focus on local-level wins to counter setbacks

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    CHICAGO (AP) — For many progressives, the past decade has been littered with disappointments. But recent down-ballot victories are providing hope of reshaping the Democratic Party from the bottom up, rather than from Washington.

    In Chicago earlier this month, a former teacher’s union organizer unexpectedly won the mayor’s race. In St. Louis, progressives secured a majority on the municipal board. The next opportunities could lie in Philadelphia and Houston, which also hold mayoral elections this year.

    The focus on lower-level contests already has helped progressives gain power and influence policy at a local level, organizers say, shaping issues such as the minimum wage. It also may help the movement find future stars, with today’s city and county officials becoming tomorrow’s breakout members of Congress and only moving further up the political ladder.

    “Progressives have taken a look at how to be strategic and how to build power,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants who was a leading national voice for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 and 2020 presidential bids. “If you look around and you say, ‘Who is ready to run for president?’ If your field is shallow, what do you have to do? You’ve got to build the bench.”

    This year’s focus on state and local races follows years of incremental progress and some stinging setbacks. Sanders electrified the left with 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns that centered on bold calls for universal, government-funded health care. But he lost each time to rivals aligned with the Democratic establishment who advocated for a more cautious approach.

    On Capitol Hill, progressive candidates successfully defeated several high-profile incumbents during the 2018 midterms and the election of candidates like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But from New York to Michigan and Ohio and Texas, prominent progressives were defeated during primary campaigns last year. And, as President Joe Biden now gears up for reelection, he faces no serious challenge from the left.

    Still, Sanders and others have left their mark, pushing mainstream Democrats to the left on key issues like combating climate change and forgiveness of student loan debt while inspiring some of those at the forefront of today’s movement.

    That includes Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, who appealed to a diverse and young electorate as he campaigned with Sanders and other top congressional progressives.

    “Let’s take this bold progressive movement around these United States of America,” Johnson said in his victory speech.

    Our Revolution, an activist group which grew out of Sanders’ 2016 White House bid, endorsed Johnson and progressive candidates who recently won three of four seats on the St. Louis City Board of Aldermen. That gave progressives a slim majority in a city where the mayor, Tishaura Jones, is also a self-described progressive.

    Our Revolution said it activated its 90,000 members in Chicago an average of three times each to urge them to vote for Johnson, and made 100,000 phone calls in St. Louis. The group is also backing Helen Gym, a progressive former Philadelphia City Council member who is among roughly a dozen candidates competing in next month’s Democratic mayoral primary.

    “When we win on the ground in our cities, that’s actually the blueprint, because we cannot wait for Congress,” Gym said during a recent call with Our Revolution volunteers.

    Our Revolution’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, said local progressive organizing, including for races like school board, is more effective now than it has been in decades.

    “We’re building power, bottom up, city by city,” Geevarghese said, adding that ”in major metropolitan areas you’ve got credible progressive slates vying for power against the Democratic establishment.”

    Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Democratic National Committee member, countered that there doesn’t have to be tension between the party’s left and moderate wings. She said Johnson called for addressing “quality of life issues” such as homelessness through consensus-building, rather than ideological confrontation.

    “Every one of these cities are complicated places and you have to work together to get things done,” Weingarten said. “You have to work with people you don’t always agree with. And that is a strength and not a weakness.”

    It hasn’t all been rosy for progressives. Moderate candidates topped progressive alternatives in last week’s Denver City Council races.

    But there are more opportunities ahead. In the nation’s fourth-largest city of Houston, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who has been an outspoken progressive in Congress since she got there in 1995, is running for mayor.

    And the left isn’t abandoning congressional races.

    Progressive champion Rep. Barbara Lee and fellow Democratic Rep. Katie Porter, who was a vocal supporter of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ’s progressive campaign for president in 2020, are among those running to replace retiring California Sen. Dianne Feinstein next year.

    In Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, a progressive 43-year-old Iraq war veteran and Spanish speaker who represents much of downtown Phoenix, is trying to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. She left the Democratic Party last year and, if she seeks reelection, would run as an independent.

    “Working-class Democrats are getting elected, and corporate Democrats are not,” said Chuck Rocha, a key architect of Sanders’ 2016 campaign who heads Nuestro PAC, which has endorsed Gallego. But Rocha was quick to caution that Gallego isn’t running as “a progressive or liberal savior.”

    “He’s going to run as ‘I was an enlisted Marine who had to sleep on my mama’s couch until I got a bed in college’ and has been a champion of working-class folks in the state of Arizona,” Rocha said.

    Questions about a resurgent Democratic left come as Biden prepares to formally kickoff his reelection campaign and will have to decide how to frame his political vision and ideology to appeal to swing voters. After besting Sanders and Warren in the 2020 primary, Biden embraced major progressive goals, promoting expanding social programs and climate-change fighting green energy.

    Biden eventually oversaw passage of dramatic federal spending increases, including on health care and green technology. He tried to forgive student loans for millions of Americans, but saw the plan challenged in court.

    On other issues, however, Biden has been more moderate. After major legislation to curb police brutality and institutional racism stalled in Congress, the president signed an executive order to make modest reforms. He also has said repeatedly that, rather than heed calls by some progressives to cut funding for law enforcement, the answer should be more police funding.

    More recently, the president angered liberal Democrats by failing to veto Republican-championed legislation reversing new, local crime regulations in the nation’s capital and approving a major oil drilling project in Alaska.

    Biden campaign aides say he’s shown flexibility to best respond to ongoing political and policy challenges. And Rocha said that Gallego will benefit from Biden’s 2024 campaign, which should rely heavily on promoting his administration’s legislative accomplishments and how they benefited working-class families in swing states like Arizona.

    But some progressives say the White House should take notice of the movement’s down-ballot wins.

    “I hope he’s paying attention,” said Hannah Riddle, director of candidate services for the activist group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Running on economic populism is a winning strategy. And that model can be replicated all over the country.”

    ___ Weissert reported from Washington.

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  • Trump’s response to criminal charges revives election lies

    Trump’s response to criminal charges revives election lies

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Legally, the most important words former President Donald Trump said after he was charged with 34 felonies by the Manhattan District Attorney last week were “not guilty.” But, politically, the most significant may be “election interference.”

    Trump’s repetition of those words, which have been taken up by other top Republicans, show how he is trying to turn his historic position as the first former president charged with crimes to his advantage. It’s another example of what’s been a consistent refrain throughout his political career — claiming without evidence that an election is being rigged against him.

    After his initial court appearance in the New York case, the first of several in which he is in legal jeopardy, Trump ticked through the varied investigations he was facing and branded them as “massive” attempts to interfere with the 2024 election.

    “Our justice system has become lawless,” Trump said as he appeared before supporters at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. “They’re using it now, in addition to everything else, to win elections.”

    Trump has made some version of those claims in at least 20 social media posts since March 3, the bulk of which occurred in the last two weeks, accelerating when a Manhattan grand jury appeared to be wrapping up its work and preparing to indict the former president. Trump declared his latest bid for the White House shortly after the November midterms, in what some in his orbit saw as an effort to head off the various probes swirling around him.

    Alleging an election is being stolen from him is a routine Trump tactic, despite no evidence to back up his assertions. When competing for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Trump claimed his loss in the Iowa caucuses was due to fraud. When he won the White House that November but lost the popular vote, Trump claimed the only reason for falling short in the latter category was because undocumented immigrants voted. A task force he formed to find voter fraud disbanded without finding any evidence to back up his claim.

    In 2020, Trump began arguing the election would be fraudulent months before voting started. He attacked efforts to loosen restrictions on mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, and expanded those allegations after losing the election to claim he’d actually won it. Those lies led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

    Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the 2020 election was tainted. The former president’s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.

    Trump is behaving like a politician in the legal crosshairs, said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist.

    “He’s certainly not the first politician to be prosecuted — sometimes fairly, sometimes not — to play the political victim card,” Levitsky said.

    Levitsky, who cowrote the book “How Democracies Die,” said that several former presidents of other countries, when prosecuted, have claimed it was a plot to foil their future elections. Most recently, that was the complaint of Brazil’s former president Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva after he was jailed before the 2018 election. Silva was freed by his country’s supreme court and won back the presidency in October.

    What’s notable in Trump’s case, however, is that his own party is echoing the stolen election claims ahead of the next campaign. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last month said he was directing his party’s committee chairs to “investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

    “That a whole party is carrying this line is somewhat unusual,” Levitsky said.

    Last week’s charges in New York court stemmed from Trump’s reimbursements to his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, of hush money paid in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged they had an affair. Even some critics of Trump have seen the charges as a stretch of New York laws.

    The heart of the Manhattan case is prosecutors’ claim that Trump falsified business records at his company to make the payoff in order to keep a potentially damaging story quiet while he was campaigning — an illegal attempt by Trump, they argued, to try to influence the election.

    The former president also faces legal jeopardy from other investigations, two of which are related to his attempts to try to interfere with the 2020 election.

    Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are probing Trump’s January 2021 call to the state’s top elections officer asking him to “find” enough votes to declare Trump the winner there, as well as other efforts by the former president and his allies to overturn his narrow election loss in the state.

    The U.S. Justice Department also has launched a federal special counsel probe into Trump’s attempts to try to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Trump is also enmeshed in a federal special counsel investigation of his handling of classified documents found at his Florida estate.

    Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, when asked at a news conference on Tuesday whether the timing of the case was political, responded by saying, “I bring cases when they’re ready.”

    Bragg’s office declined to comment on Trump’s statements about “election interference,” as did the Department of Justice.

    Critics warn that Trump is, once again, sowing suspicions of fraud that could damage democracy. “We’ve seen this film before,” Joanna Lydgate, chief executive officer of States United Action, which tracks politicians who embrace Trump’s election lies, said in a statement. “We know this is dangerous because we all saw what happened on January 6th.”

    Trump has routinely waved off such warnings, and has seamlessly integrated his current legal jeopardy into the false allegations he’s made for three years about Democratic Party wrongdoing leading to his ouster.

    In his first campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, days before the Manhattan indictment, Trump railed against all the investigations and said that his opponents were using the probes “because it’s harder for them to stuff the ballot boxes, of which they stuffed plenty.”

    “The new weapon being used by out-of-control unhinged Democrats to cheat on election is criminally investigating a candidate,” he said.

    Trump and other Republicans have sometimes contradicted themselves, decrying the investigations as an attempt to tarnish Trump while also predicting they’ll aid his bid for the White House.

    “I think you’ll see his poll numbers go up,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., one of the president’s most vocal backers in the House, predicated at a GOP conference last month. “He’s never been in a stronger position.” She condemned the charges last week as “unprecedented election interference.”

    Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which has long been critical of Trump’s allegations of election rigging, noted that all the investigations of the former president began well before he started running for president again.

    “Nobody is above the law, including former presidents, and running for president cannot and must not serve as a shield for wrongful conduct,” Scherb said.

    ___ Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • DeSantis flexes executive powers while eyeing White House

    DeSantis flexes executive powers while eyeing White House

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    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Suspending an elected Democratic prosecutor. Forbidding gender-affirming treatments for minors. Expanding the “Don’t Say Gay” law to high schools.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has exercised his executive powers to advance elements of his aggressive conservative agenda, drawing on appointees, boards and the state Constitution in a deliberate manner as he builds toward an expected presidential candidacy.

    The approach displays the Republican’s willingness to leverage his office to notch political wins and punish political enemies, even as the GOP-dominated Legislature has sped his proposals through the statehouse. It also signals the meticulous style that underpins his brash public persona and offers hints about how he could govern if elected president.

    For DeSantis, the unilateral moves are part of his broad mandate as the elected chief executive of Florida. He is coming off a dominant reelection victory last fall where he campaigned on a host of conservative policies that energized the state’s Republican base and helped flip reliably Democratic counties such as Miami-Dade.

    “November’s election results represent a vindication of our joint efforts over these past four years. The results also vest in us the responsibility to lead and provide us the opportunity to shoot for the stars,” DeSantis told lawmakers in his annual address to begin the legislative session this year. “Boldness be our friend in this endeavor. We have a lot we need to accomplish.”

    A spokesman for the governor said DeSantis compiled a full accounting of his powers after he won office so he could effectively execute his agenda and added that many of his policies have been adopted by the Legislature.

    DeSantis gained a national following through his resistance to extensive coronavirus lockdowns, and has since bolstered his place as a Republican firebrand by positioning himself on the front lines of the nation’s culture wars. He’s expected to formally launch his White House bid after the state Legislature finishes its regular session in early May.

    In the meantime DeSantis has been ramping up his out-of-state travel with visits to presidential battleground states. Statehouse Republicans, who have a supermajority, are already moving quickly to deliver on several of DeSantis’ conservative priorities, which will give him an additional boost before he announces his candidacy.

    While DeSantis is seen as former President Donald Trump’s most formidable Republican rival, his path to the presidential nomination may not be easy. Trump maintains wide support in the Republican Party, which is largely rallying around him after he became the first former president to face criminal charges. The move by a district attorney in New York has put Republicans eyeing a challenge to Trump, including DeSantis, in the awkward position of defending him against what they argue are politically motivated charges.

    Those headwinds make DeSantis’ activity in Florida all the more important as they bolster the argument by his supporters that the governor would advance the same policy agenda as Trump, but without the constant turmoil.

    One of his signature policies bans classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that isn’t age appropriate, a law opponents have labeled “ Don’t Say Gay.” DeSantis did not initially push for the law but has since championed it in Florida and beyond as part of his fight against what he calls the “woke” indoctrination of children in schools.

    This year, as lawmakers seem ready to expand the prohibition to the eighth grade, the DeSantis administration quietly filed an administrative proposal with state education regulators that would ban the subjects from being taught in all grades.

    The measure filed by the state Education Department, which is led by a DeSantis appointee, will be considered later this month by the state Board of Education, a body appointed by the governor. It does not need legislative approval.

    DeSantis has not commented on the proposal and directed questions to Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., who said it was meant to clarify confusion around the existing law and reinforce that teachers should not deviate from existing curriculums.

    The governor took a similar approach last year, when he and his administration’s Health Department campaigned against gender-affirming care for minors and pushed state health regulators to ban the treatments.

    The prohibition, which was approved by two state boards and took effect this year, bans sex reassignment surgeries and puberty blocking therapies for minors. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee, has said the treatments are experimental and risky for children.

    Brandon Wolf, press secretary for the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, warned of the potential for similar actions under a potential DeSantis presidency.

    “The very same ways he has perverted and weaponized state agencies and state boards in Florida, you can imagine he would do the same thing on the federal level,” Wolf said. “And what makes him potentially more dangerous than Donald Trump is that DeSantis actually knows how government works.”

    Jamie Miller, a former executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, said it’s difficult to forecast what kind of president DeSantis would be but noted the governor’s Florida policies won wide support last fall.

    “Our entire system is based on conducting the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority,” said Miller, noting the governor’s nearly 20 percentage point reelection win.

    DeSantis’ agenda has faced few substantive obstacles in Florida. Democrats have no power at any level of state government, and his policies often withstand legal challenges when cases reach the conservative appeals courts in the region.

    Still, the governor has proved willing to engage his office against any dissent, as his ongoing feud with Disney has shown.

    The company drew his ire last year when it criticized the “Don’t Say Gay” law and, as punishment, DeSantis pushed lawmakers to give him control of a self-governing district Disney oversees in its theme park properties.

    But before a set of new DeSantis appointees could assume control of the district, Disney’s board passed restrictive covenants that strip the incoming members of most of their powers, blunting the governor’s retaliation.

    DeSantis, determined to maintain one of his key political victories, has dispatched the chief inspector general, another appointee, to investigate the Disney board’s move and has vowed to take additional revenge against the company.

    One of DeSantis’ most high-profile uses of executive power came last year when he suspended Andrew Warren, an elected Democratic prosecutor in Tampa, using a provision in the state Constitution that allows a governor to remove officials for incompetence or neglect of duty.

    In an executive order, DeSantis cited Warren’s signing of statements that he wouldn’t pursue criminal charges against those seeking or providing abortion or gender transition treatments as key reasons for the suspension.

    “When you flagrantly violate your oath of office, when you make yourself above the law, you have violated your duty, you have neglected your duty and you are displaying a lack of competence to be able to perform those duties,” DeSantis said while announcing the suspension.

    Warren immediately filed a federal lawsuit to get his job back. The judge ruled that DeSantis violated the First Amendment and the Florida Constitution by removing Warren, but that the federal courts lack the power to reinstate him. Warren is appealing the decision.

    “He loves to talk about the free state of Florida, but it’s absolutely not free unless you agree with everything Ron DeSantis says,” Warren said in an interview. “He’s exploiting cracks in the system to trample on both the spirit and letter of the law to punish those who disagree with him.”

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  • DeSantis visits Iowa as interest in likely Trump rival rises

    DeSantis visits Iowa as interest in likely Trump rival rises

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    DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Ahead of a widely expected presidential campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced himself to eager audiences of Iowa Republicans on Friday with a message that leaned into the antagonism toward the left that has made him a popular figure among conservatives.

    “We will never surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis told an audience of more than 1,000 at the Rhythm City Casino Resort in the eastern Iowa city of Davenport, his first Iowa stop as he moves toward seeking the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. “Our state is where woke goes to die.”

    With the Iowa caucuses less than a year away, Republicans in the state are taking a harder look at DeSantis, who is emerging as a leading rival to Donald Trump. The former president, who is mounting his third bid for the White House, will be in Davenport on Monday as early signs warn that some Republicans may be looking for someone else to lead the party into the future.

    Trump mocked DeSantis’ trip on social media, asking “why would people show up?”

    And White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took issue with the Florida governor’s threatening language that criticized young transgender people and their parents.

    “When … these MAGA Republicans don’t agree with an issue or with policy, they don’t bring forth something that’s either going to have a good faith conversation. They go to this conversation of ‘woke.’ … What that turns into is hate; what that turns into is despicable policy.”

    But show up they did, including more than 1,000 Friday evening in the capital city, Des Moines, where DeSantis ignited his biggest ovation by accusing schools of seeking to impose a leftist agenda on students on issues of gender and race.

    “I think we really have done a great job of drawing a line in the sand and saying the purpose of our schools is to educate kids, not indoctrinate them,” DeSantis said in the auditorium on the Iowa state fairgrounds. “Parents should be able to send their kids to school without having somebody’s agenda shoved down their throat.”

    DeSantis appeared alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in Davenport and Des Moines and met with a small contingent of GOP lawmakers in the capital city. He was also promoting his newly released book, “The Courage to be Free.”

    The visit is an early test of DeSantis’ support in the state that will kick off the contest for the Republican nomination next year. Trump remains widely popular among Iowa Republicans, though positive views of the former president have slipped somewhat since he left the White House. Now, 80% say they have a favorable rating of him, down slightly from 91% in September 2021, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released Friday. Eighteen percent have unfavorable views of Trump.

    The poll’s movement suggests Iowa Republicans are not singularly committed to Trump for 2024 and are open to considering other candidates. Though slightly behind the well-known Trump, DeSantis gets a rosy review from Iowa Republicans — 74% favorable rating. Notably, DeSantis has high name recognition in a state over 1,000 miles away from his own; just 20% say they aren’t sure how to rate him.

    Sandy Bodine said she was impressed with DeSantis as the ballroom emptied out after Friday’s morning event.

    “He’s very articulate, uses common sense it seems in governing,” the retired human resources worker for 3M Co. said.

    Bodine would consider attending the 2024 caucuses and supporting DeSantis, though she is registered to neither major political party and has never caucuses before. Regardless, Trump is out of the running for Bodine, who is from nearby Clinton.

    “I don’t like Trump,” she said. She “unfortunately” voted for Biden in 2020, she said. “He’s not a statesman and we need a statesman. I can see DeSantis as a statesman.”

    But others in the crowd suggested they would stick with the former president. Retiree Al Greenfield, of Davenport, said he came out of curiosity but “I don’t particularly care for” the Florida governor. “He doesn’t have the experience,” said Greenfield, who’s 70. “He doesn’t know the swamp.”

    Greenfield is ardently for Trump and plans to caucus for him next year.

    Nearby stood Diana Otterman, of Bettendorf, who was still considering her options.

    “Gov. DeSantis is a wonderful man. I’m for DeSantis, but I’m also for Trump. I haven’t decided yet,” the 70-year-old retiree said. “So we’ll see how God works it out and how the people vote.”

    While DeSantis was making his presence known in Iowa, several prominent former Trump supporters called on him to take the next step and announce he’s running.

    “More than ever our country needs strong leadership, someone that gets things done & isn’t afraid to stand up for what’s right,” tweeted former Pennsylvania Rep. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta. “Come on, Ron, your country needs you!”

    Barletta had accused Trump of disloyalty after the former president endorsed a rival in his gubernatorial primary.

    DeSantis’ visit coincided with a trip to the state by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her 2024 candidacy last month. Trump’s stop on Monday will be his first visit to the state since launching his latest presidential bid.

    In recent weeks, DeSantis’ team has begun holding conversations with a handful of prospective campaign staffers in key states. Late last month, he gathered privately with donors, elected officials and national conservative activists to discuss his views, which include limiting how race and sexuality are taught in schools.

    DeSantis is expected to announce his candidacy in late spring or early summer, after the conclusion of the Florida legislative session in mid-May.

    The anticipation is reminiscent, to an extent, of the support in Iowa for George W. Bush ahead of the 2000 election, though with significant differences, said veteran Iowa GOP activist David Oman.

    DeSantis is seen, as Bush was, as a next-generation, big-state Republican governor who won reelection resoundingly, said Oman, who was among Iowa Republicans who helped recruit Bush to run.

    Bush swooped into Iowa amid fanfare in June 1999 and sailed to victory in the Iowa caucuses the following year en route to the 2000 GOP nomination and the White House. Not insignificantly, Bush enjoyed the hands-on campaign outreach in Iowa of his father, former President George H. W. Bush, who had built lasting relationships during his 1980 and 1988 Iowa caucus campaigns.

    “There’s another former president in this cycle. Only he is not interested in helping a first time candidate,” Oman said, referring to Trump. “W was the overwhelming favorite in Iowa. I believe there is not an overwhelming favorite this time.”

    ___

    AP writers Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville contributed from Washington.

    ___

    The second paragraph of this story has been corrected to make the quote “where woke goes to die,” not “where woke mob goes to die.”

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  • Oklahomans head to polls for one issue: legal marijuana

    Oklahomans head to polls for one issue: legal marijuana

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    OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma voters will decide Tuesday whether to make the state one of the most conservative to green light cannabis use for adults.

    State Question 820, the result of a signature gathering drive last year, is the only item on the statewide ballot. Other conservative states have legalized recreational cannabis use, including Montana in 2020 and Missouri last year, but several have rejected it, including Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota.

    The plan faces opposition from leaders of several faith groups, along with law enforcement and prosecutors, led by former Republican Gov. Frank Keating, an ex-FBI agent, and Terri White, the former head of the state’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.

    “We don’t want a stoned society,” Keating said Monday, flanked by district attorneys and law enforcement officers from across the state.

    The proposal, if passed, would allow anyone over the age of 21 to purchase and possess up to 1 ounce of marijuana, plus concentrates and marijuana-infused products. People could also legally grow up to 12 marijuana plants. Recreational sales would be subjected to a 15% excise tax on top of the standard sales tax. The excise tax would be used to help fund local municipalities, the court system, public schools, substance abuse treatment and the state’s general revenue fund.

    The proposal also outlines a judicial process for people to seek expungement or dismissal of prior marijuana-related convictions.

    Oklahoma voters already approved medical marijuana in 2018 by 14 percentage points and the state has one of the most liberal programs in the country, with roughly 10% of the state’s adult population having a medical license.

    The low barriers for entry into the industry has led to a flood of growers, processors and dispensary operators competing for a limited number of customers. Supporters also say the state’s marijuana industry would be buoyed by a rush of out-of-state customers, particularly from Texas, which has close to 8 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area just a little more than an hour drive from the Oklahoma border.

    “We do have one of the most permissible (medical) programs in the country, but the idea that you have to spend your time and money to go to a doctor and basically buy immunity from criminal prosecution is a pay-to-play system that I just don’t like,” said Ryan Kiesel, a former state lawmaker and one of the organizers of the Yes on 820 campaign.

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  • How Biden leaves wiggle room to opt against reelection bid

    How Biden leaves wiggle room to opt against reelection bid

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden exudes confidence as the next race for the White House approaches.

    During last month’s State of the Union address, he lured unruly Republicans into agreeing with him that federal entitlements should be protected. He’s intensified travel outside Washington, trumpeting job-creation in Wisconsin and steep federal health care spending to Florida seniors while touting a trillion-dollar public works package that he says can do everything from revitalize Baltimore’s port to easing train tunnel congestion under the Hudson River.

    And he used spy-thriller tactics to sweep into war-scarred Ukraine.

    For most presidents, these are powerful elements to include as the centerpiece of a reelection campaign — pledging to protect people and the economy at home and democracy in the heart of Europe. But, with the famously fickle 80-year-old Biden stopping short of officially declaring his 2024 candidacy, he’s leaving just enough room to back out of a race and focus instead on using such moves to cement his legacy.

    “I look at Biden from the outside, as a historian, and say, ‘Boy, if he stepped away now, his place in history is secure and extraordinarily positive,’” said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “That’s how a normal person thinks about these things. That’s not how a president thinks about these things.”

    Those close to Biden insist he’s not legacy shopping and that he will announce a campaign, likely after the first quarter campaign fundraising period ends this month. The party has cleared a path for Biden’s renomination with rivals from his left, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, pledging to support the president’s reelection.

    Bestselling self-help author Marianne Williamson is formally launching a primary challenge to Biden on Saturday that’s largely being shrugged off by the party.

    The Democratic National Committee has unanimously expressed “our full and complete support” for Biden’s reelection. Party leaders aren’t planning primary debates, arguing there’s no longer enough time to even build out a debate schedule that would pit Biden against Williamson or anyone else.

    In an interview last week with The Associated Press, first lady Jill Biden said there was “pretty much” nothing left for the president to do but pick a time and place to announce his reelection bid.

    “How many times does he have to say it for you to believe it?” she asked.

    Still, there are signals that even if the prevailing assumption among most Democrats is that Biden will seek another term, the decision isn’t yet final. Even Jill Biden was more muted in subsequent interviews when assessing her husband’s political future.

    “It’s Joe’s decision,” she told CNN, noting that she’s personally “all for it.”

    “If he’s in, we’re there,” she added. “If he wants to do something else, we’re there too.”

    After the AP interview, the president joked to ABC that he needed to call his wife “to find out” if he was running again.

    His intention “has been from the beginning to run,” the president told the network. “But there’s too many other things we have to finish in the near term before I start a campaign.”

    While Biden’s standing among Democratic officials is solid, actual voters seem more wary. A recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found just 37% of Democrats want Biden to seek a second term, down from 52% in the weeks before last year’s midterm elections.

    Biden’s age has been a leading concern since the early days of his first campaign. Already the oldest president in U.S. history, he’d be 86 by the end of a second term, should he win one.

    If Biden were to eschew a run, the biggest question is whether the party could quickly coalesce around someone else. Much of the initial focus would shift to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has already said that she expects to remain on a Biden ticket in 2024. But she was notably in South Carolina this week, promoting the administration’s efforts to expand broadband access.

    The state is politically significant, however, after Democrats moved South Carolina’s primary to the front of their primary calendar at Biden’s behest.

    Other Democrats outside Washington have worked to gingerly build national profiles without offending Biden. They include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has positioned himself as a foil to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seen as a leading alternative to former President Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

    While Biden’s plans are under intense scrutiny, the Republican presidential field has also been slow to form. So far, there are just four official entrants — Trump, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Michigan businessman Perry Johnson. Others, including former Vice President Mike Pence, ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, may join in the coming months. Some, such as DeSantis, could wait until late summer to officially announce their campaigns.

    For his part, Biden has a history of dithering. He agonized over whether to seek the presidency in 2004 and 2016 before ultimately deciding to sit out those races. Both times, he noted that he essentially spent so long deciding that he’d run out of time to be successful in a campaign, rather than really saying he didn’t want to run.

    “He’s notoriously slow on campaign decisions,” said Andrew Feldman, a Democratic strategist who interned on Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign and worked as part of an advance staffer team during his vice presidency. “None of this should be a surprise.”

    Feldman said Biden is “always thinking about his legacy” but also “thinking about getting results for the American people.”

    “I think legacy and results and reelection are very much intertwined,” he said.

    As far as legacy goes, Biden aides concede that future governing will likely never be as easy as when Democrats controlled Congress during the administration’s first two years. The president’s now continually low approval ratings may also never climb back to where they were when he first took office, they admit.

    But the president’s advisers counter that there is no real Democratic alternative capable of defeating Trump or another top Republican like DeSantis. That’s not to say Biden doesn’t think about his place in history. In 2021, the president took careful notes during an Oval Office meeting with historians that stretched more than two hours — though those discussions focused more on threats to American democracy than Biden’s personal legacy.

    “This is a guy who essentially grew up in politics, has been involved at high levels of politics as senator, vice president and then president for many decades,” said Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington. “He’s someone who is especially concerned with his legacy.”

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  • Chicago Mayor Lightfoot ousted; Vallas, Johnson in runoff

    Chicago Mayor Lightfoot ousted; Vallas, Johnson in runoff

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    CHICAGO (AP) — Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson will meet in a runoff to be the next mayor of Chicago after voters denied incumbent Lori Lightfoot a second term, issuing a rebuke to a leader who made history as head of the nation’s third-largest city.

    Vallas, a former schools CEO backed by the police union, and Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, advanced to the April 4 runoff after none of the nine candidates was able to secure over 50% of the vote on Tuesday to win outright.

    Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to lead the city, won her first term in 2019 after promising to end decades of corruption and backroom dealing at City Hall. But opponents blamed Lightfoot for an increase in crime that occured in cities across the U.S. during the pandemic and criticized her as being a divisive, overly contentious leader.

    She is the first elected Chicago mayor to lose a reelection bid since 1983, when Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor, lost her Democratic primary.

    Speaking to supporters Tuesday night, Lightfoot called being Chicago’s mayor “the honor of a lifetime.”

    “Regardless of tonight’s outcome, we fought the right fights and we put this city on a better path,” Lightfoot said. She told her fellow mayors around the country not to fear being bold.

    At his victory party, Vallas noted that Lightfoot had called to congratulate him and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause. In a nod to his campaign promise to combat crime, he said that, if elected, he would work to address public safety issues.

    “We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said.

    Johnson on Tuesday night noted the improbability that he would make the runoff, considering his low name recognition at the start of the race.

    “A few months ago they said they didn’t know who I was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know,” Johnson said. He thanked the unions that supported him and gave a special shout-out to his wife, telling the crowd, “Chicago, a Black woman will still be in charge.”

    Lightfoot’s loss is unusual for mayors in large cities, who have tended to win reelection with relative ease. But it’s also a sign of the turmoil in U.S. cities following the COVID-19 pandemic, with its economic fallout and spikes in violent crime in many places.

    Public safety has been an issue in other recent elections, including the recall of a San Francisco district attorney who was criticized for progressive policies. The pandemic also may shape elections for mayor in other cities this year, such as Philadelphia and Houston, where incumbents cannot run again due to term limits.

    There are clear contrasts between Vallas and Johnson.

    Vallas served as an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration. He has called for adding hundreds of police officers to patrol the city, saying crime is out of control and morale among officers sunk to a new low during Lightfoot’s tenure.

    Vallas’ opponents have criticized him as too conservative to lead the Democratic stronghold. Lightfoot blasted him for welcoming support from the police union’s controversial leader, who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists at the Capitol and equated Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers to the Holocaust.

    Johnson received about $1 million from the Chicago Teachers Union for his campaign and had support from several other progressive organizations, including United Working Families. The former teacher and union organizer has argued that the answer to addressing crime is not more money for police but more investment in mental health care, education, jobs and affordable housing, and he was accused by rivals such as Lightfoot of wanting to defund the police.

    Johnson has avoided the word “defund” during the race, and his campaign says he does not want to cut the number of police officers. But in a 2020 radio interview, Johnson said defunding is not just a slogan but “an actual real political goal,” and he sponsored a nonbinding resolution on the county board to redirect money from policing and jails to social services.

    Crime was an issue that resonated with voters.

    Rita DiPietro, who lives downtown, said she supported Lightfoot in 2019. But she voted for Vallas on Tuesday, saying she was impressed by his detailed strategy to address public safety.

    “The candidates all talk about what they’d like to do,” she said. “This guy actually has a plan. He knows how he’s going to do it.”

    Lindsey Hegarty, a 30-year-old paralegal who lives on Chicago’s North Side, said she backed Johnson because “he seemed like the most progressive candidate on issues like policing, mental health” and public transit.

    Race also was a factor as candidates courted votes in the highly segregated city, which is closely divided in population among Black, Hispanic and white residents. Vallas was the only white candidate in the field. Lightfoot, Johnson and five other candidates are Black, though Lightfoot argued she was the only Black candidate who could win. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was the only Latino in the race.

    Lightfoot accused Vallas of using “the ultimate dog whistle” by saying his campaign is about “taking back our city,” and of cozying up to the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, whom she calls a racist. A recent Chicago Tribune story also found Vallas’ Twitter account had liked racist tweets and tweets that mocked Lightfoot’s appearance and referred to her as masculine.

    Vallas denied his comments were related to race and says his police union endorsement is from rank-and-file officers. He also said he wasn’t responsible for the liked tweets, which he called “abhorrent,” and suggested someone had improperly accessed his account.

    Lightfoot touted her record of investing in neighborhoods and supporting workers, such as by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She also noted that the city had navigated unprecedented challenges such as the pandemic and its economic and public safety fallout to protests over policing.

    Asked if she was treated unfairly because of her race and gender, Lightfoot said: “I’m a black woman in America. Of course.”

    Vallas, who has led school systems in Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia, lost a 2019 bid for mayor. This time, he was laser-focused on public safety, saying police officers who left the force under Lightfoot’s administration will return if he’s elected.

    The other candidates were businessman Willie Wilson, Chicago City Council members Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer, activist Ja’Mal Green and state Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Claire Savage and Teresa Crawford in Chicago contributed to this report.

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  • Republican losses fan election conspiracies in rural Arizona

    Republican losses fan election conspiracies in rural Arizona

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    BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) — James Knox was glad to get out of the big city.

    Part of a network of activists who believe U.S. elections are unreliable, Knox has unsuccessfully tried to convince supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county and home to Phoenix, that they should throw out elections that Republicans lost and get rid of voting machines.

    So earlier this past week, Knox went somewhere more hospitable to his project — nearly 200 miles south of his home in the Phoenix exurb of Queen Creek to Cochise County. During last year’s elections, the county’s conservative-majority Board of Supervisors tried to count all ballots by hand — until a judge blocked that — and then refused to certify the results until a judge ordered them to do so.

    “Here, it’s a little bit easier to be heard by the board,” Knox said before the latest supervisors’ meeting, where members discussed replacing the respected elections director, who resigned after objecting to the board’s decisions.

    Last year was a tough one for the election denial movement in Arizona. Its candidates for U.S. Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general all lost. But it’s still thriving in rural Cochise County, a vivid example of how paranoia about elections fanned by former President Donald Trump maintains a stubborn grip in rural parts of the country.

    Trump last year backed a slate of candidates for top state election positions in Arizona and elsewhere who parroted his lie about losing the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud. Every one of those candidates lost in the battleground states that typically decide the presidency. But the election conspiracy movement maintains a firm hold in beet-red rural spots such as Cochise County, a swath of the Sonoran Desert dotted with ranches, small towns and U.S.-Mexico border communities that encompasses an area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.

    The county’s respected elections director, Lisa Marra, who had opposed the board’s voting moves, recently resigned from the nonpartisan position after five years in the job. The two Republicans on the three-member board are seeking to replace her with the elected county recorder, David Stevens, another Republican.

    Stevens is a friend of former GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, who attended Trump’s rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol riot and who ran unsuccessfully last year for secretary of state, Arizona’s top election post. Finchem had said he would not have certified President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona.

    Stevens was prepared to oversee Cochise County’s hand count when Marra objected last year, and only stopped once a judge ruled that it violated state law. Stevens and the two Republican board members have appealed that ruling. The recorder recently joined a nonprofit founded by Finchem to focus on election “integrity.”

    In Arizona, elected recorders such as Stevens already play a part in elections. They register voters, distribute mail ballots and verify signatures on the ones sent back, while the nonpartisan election director handles the counting. Stevens said he has always been a fair broker in elections and that in 2020, he spoke more to Democratic groups about voting than Republican ones.

    Still, many residents are furious at Stevens’ new role.

    “Recorder Stevens has proven he’s part of the crazy conspiracy crowd,” said Jennifer Druckman, a retiree who was one of dozens who spoke out against Stevens getting expanded responsibilities to oversee elections in the county.

    Cochise is staunchly conservative — Trump won the county by 20 percentage points in 2020 even as Biden took the state. But the backlash to the election chaos has been palpable.

    Activists are circulating petitions to recall Supervisor Tom Crosby, one of the two Republicans who voted for the hand count in October. Crosby also refused to certify the county’s vote tallies as a way to stop the state from finalizing election results in December after Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake for governor.

    After a judge ordered the Cochise County board to certify the election, Crosby skipped the next meeting, leaving fellow Republican Peggy Judd and Democrat Ann English to take the vote. It was a dramatic example of how the once-routine task of formalizing election results became charged with politics as Trump allies in scattered rural counties in the West targeted certification as a way to disrupt elections.

    In an interview after this past week’s meeting, Crosby scoffed at speakers’ claims that he represents a threat to democracy.

    “The ‘Big Lie’ is that checking voting machines is subverting democracy,” Crosby said. “My constituents feel like, if we can’t check ‘em, we don’t want ’em.”

    Election officials, including in Cochise County, check the accuracy of their machines by comparing their tabulations with paper ballot receipts, but Crosby said he still had broader suspicions. Crosby also dismissed the recall effort.

    “If it’s leftists bashing me or patriots saying I’m wonderful, the message is the same,” he said.

    But not everyone upset at Crosby is a leftist. Greg Lamberth, a retired engineer and lifelong Republican, is one of the people circulating petitions to recall the supervisor.

    “I don’t see Mr. Crosby as acting in a way that gives us a functional government in Cochise County,” Lamberth said in an interview, noting the county has already spent more than $100,000 in legal fees related to its election adventures.

    A former Marine, Lamberth is also disappointed in Stevens, a onetime military information technology specialist.

    “He knows damn well that a hand count is less accurate than a machine count,” Lamberth said.

    That’s why election officials decades ago largely turned away from hand counts and used tabulators to tally up ballots. Trump and his allies have attacked those devices, making unsupported allegations they were rigged against him in 2020, sometimes insinuating that foreign powers such as Venezuela were behind it. Those allegations triggered pushes for hand counts in a few rural counties in Nevada and New Mexico.

    Stevens said in an interview that last October, a small group of conservative citizens approached him and asked whether the county could tally all ballots by hand rather than rely on machines. Stevens said he told them no — it was too close to the election to change procedure.

    But Stevens suggested the county conduct a parallel hand count to check the machines’ accuracy. Other election officials were alarmed, warning it could fan misinformation about the true tally in statewide races. A judge ruled the county didn’t have discretion to pursue a full hand count; the county is appealing.

    Stevens stressed that none of this was his idea or that of the supervisors.

    “All this comes from the grassroots,” he said in an interview in his office in the county building, where a pockmarked target from a shooting range hung from the wall and assembled Lego Star Wars sets sat on his coffee table.

    While Stevens knocked down some prominent Arizona election conspiracy theories, saying most were a product of people not understanding the complexity of the elections process, he said he didn’t want to dismiss the value of a hand count.

    “I try not to have preconceived notions — let’s find out,” Stevens said.

    Elisabeth Tyndall, the chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party, said the problem is that Cochise’s Republican power structure simply cannot say “no” to its base.

    “We have had Republican leadership pretty much forever,” Tyndall said. “They haven’t held their fellow Republicans accountable for nonsense.”

    Despite their overwhelming numerical advantages at the ballot box, many Cochise Republicans still see themselves as an aggrieved minority that needs to get more aggressive.

    Bob McCormick, 82, a retired real estate agent, was a member of the small group that initially met with Stevens. He said their numbers are now more than 100.

    Still, McCormick knew as he waited to enter the supervisors meeting that he was outnumbered by angry Democrats wanting to vent at the Republican supervisors and Stevens.

    “For every 10 of them, one of us shows up,” McCormick said of Democrats. “We really don’t fight. Until we change the whole system, we’re going to be in trouble.”

    ___

    Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Lawsuit is latest evidence of bogus ‘stolen election’ claims

    Lawsuit is latest evidence of bogus ‘stolen election’ claims

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    Two years after former President Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread election fraud sparked an attack on the U.S. Capitol, more evidence is piling up that those who spread the misinformation knew it was false.

    On Thursday, the voting machine company Dominion filed court papers documenting that numerous Fox News personalities knew there was no evidence to support the claims peddled by Trump’s allies, but aired them anyway on the nation’s most-watched cable network. The same day, a special grand jury in Atlanta concluded there was no evidence of the fraud that Trump alleged cost him Georgia during the 2020 election.

    In December, the congressional Jan. 6 committee disclosed that Trump’s top advisers and even family members repeatedly warned him that the allegations he was making about fraud costing him reelection were false — only to have the president continue making those claims, anyway.

    The latest revelations are not just historical curiosities. They add to the wealth of evidence that there was no widespread fraud during the 2020 presidential election and that even some of Trump’s most prominent supporters were aware of that fact at the time.

    Trump has announced he’s running for president again in 2024 and continues to repeat the lie that he lost in 2020 only because of fraud and irregularities.

    “It demonstrates a profound cynicism about the political process and the gullibility of Trump’s supporters,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has followed the election falsehoods closely since 2020.

    “It’s really playing with fire,” Hasen said. “It’s one thing to make extravagant and unsupported statements about someone’s position on taxes or immigration.” But doing the same about the actual process of voting and counting ballots is different, he said: “Lies about elections are much more dangerous than lies about actual policy.”

    From the beginning, it was clear that Trump’s assertions of widespread fraud were false.

    Trump’s own attorney general told him there was no evidence of significant wrongdoing related to the election. He and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits and lost all but one of them — a bid to reduce the time voters had to correct errors on Pennsylvania mail ballots.

    Trump claimed that fraud cost him wins in key swing states that determined the White House — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But, repeatedly, reviews of the vote tallies or Republican-controlled investigations in those states turned up no evidence that had happened.

    In Michigan, an investigation by the GOP-controlled state Senate found no widespread fraud and debunked several false claims of irregularities from Trump allies. In Nevada, the Republican secretary of state said there was no evidence of significant errors in the election. In Wisconsin, an audit from the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau — which reports to the Republican-controlled Legislature — found the election there was “safe and secure.”

    In Georgia, where Trump’s efforts to overturn the results is being investigated, the 2020 ballots were counted three times — each tally confirming Biden’s win. That included a hand recount of the 5 million ballots cast in the presidential race.

    In Arizona, a months-long, error-riddled review of ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, that was run by election conspiracy theorists ended by finding that Biden had won by a slightly larger margin than official results showed. The review was not more reliable than the official tally by Republican-run Maricopa County, which has repeatedly said there were no irregularities in the 2020 election there.

    The latest revelation that people spreading Trump’s false claims knew there was no evidence to support them comes from a court filing in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Dominion’s machines were the targets of Trump and other conspiracy theorists’ allegations in late 2020 and last year, including the contention that they had been rigged by an international cabal seeking to defeat Trump.

    In its latest filing, Dominion cites texts and emails between prominent Fox personalities who did not believe the allegations or the people closest to Trump who spread them most aggressively, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell.

    The Dominion filing alleges that the network was initially cautious about fraud claims, with its top anchor, Bret Baier, privately stating two days after the 2020 election “there is NO evidence of election fraud.”

    But after Powell and Giuliani began making allegations about fraud that were picked up by conservative competitors, executives and top hosts started worrying about losing viewers to the conservative network Newsmax, which repeatedly aired unrebutted allegations from Trump’s side. Fox started inviting the two Trump allies on their shows and top executives pushed back on news reporters who tried to fact-check the allegations.

    “Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence of election fraud, Tucker Carlson told a producer about the attorney on Nov. 16, 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal. Two days later, according to the filing, Carlson told fellow Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

    The next day, the lawsuit notes, Carlson addressed the issue on his show less bluntly: “Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened, and precisely who did it. … We are certainly hopeful that she will.”

    Fox, in response, filed a counterclaim against Dominion alleging it was trying to chill coverage of a political controversy and that it aired denials of the allegations from Dominion and its representatives.

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  • Haley’s candidacy shows balancing act for women in politics

    Haley’s candidacy shows balancing act for women in politics

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    In announcing her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week, Nikki Haley made a subtle reference to the historic nature of her candidacy.

    “I don’t put up with bullies,” Haley said in a video that launched her bid to become the first female president of the U.S. “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”

    Haley has plenty of accomplishments, including becoming the first woman elected governor of South Carolina and representing the U.S. at the United Nations. But her introduction captured the balancing act women — particularly conservative women — often navigate as they aspire to win the top job in American politics.

    They must show toughness to prove they can compete against rivals who are almost always men for a job that has only been held by men. But there’s also something of an invisible line that can’t be crossed for fear of being viewed as too tough and repelling voters.

    “We’ve seen higher levels of Republican women running and winning in recent elections,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “But what you also see these women often doing is working hard to meet that double bind. … It’s like, ‘I’m tough, but I’m also feminine. I’m also meeting my kind of feminine expectations.’”

    Sexism in politics is hardly limited to one political party, with women in public life often under pressure to appear “likable” in ways that aren’t expected of men. During a Democratic primary debate in 2008, a male moderator pressed Hillary Clinton on the “likability issue” in relation to her rival, Barack Obama.

    “I don’t think I’m that bad,” Clinton responded. Obama broke in to say, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

    More recently, prominent Democratic women have also sought to project toughness in their campaigns. Sharice Davids, a former mixed martial arts fighter, sparred in a 2018 ad for a Kansas congressional seat. Amy McGrath, who challenged Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in 2020, highlighted her experience as a Marine fighter pilot.

    But the dynamics are different, Dittmar said, in Republican politics, where voters tend to have more traditional views about stereotypical gender roles. That can incentivize Republican women seeking top offices to demonstrate both their toughness and femininity. She noted how former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself as a vice presidential nominee in 2008 with a joke comparing hockey moms to a pitbull with lipstick.

    “It’s another way to cue” to voters that candidates are both tough and feminine, Dittmar said.

    Haley’s formal announcement in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday was peppered with examples. A congressman described Haley as leading with “an iron fist in a velvet glove.” The mother of Otto Warmbier, the young American who died after he was held and tortured in North Korea, said Haley taught her how to fight but also checked on her with the compassion of a fellow mom. And Haley herself called on voters to send “a tough-as-nails woman to the White House.”

    Haley is one of only five Republican women to launch prominent campaigns for the office this century. By comparison, 12 Democratic women have been prominent candidates, including six in 2020, according to CAWP. The 12 include Clinton as the party’s 2016 nominee and a 2020 candidate, Kamala Harris, who became the country’s first female vice president.

    Women face other hurdles their male peers do not, including online abuse that overwhelmingly targets women, especially women of color, and sometimes-sexist media coverage.

    In a pointed example Thursday, CNN anchor Don Lemon said that Haley “isn’t in her prime” because she is 51. He added that “a woman is considered being in her prime in her 20s, 30s and maybe 40s.” Lemon himself is 56.

    Haley’s main competition so far for the nomination, former President Donald Trump, has a long record of insulting his rivals, targeting women with sexist attacks including criticizing their appearance.

    Clinton’s campaign accused Trump during the 2016 election of repeatedly interrupting her during a debate, saying it resembled a frustrating experience many women have with men. Trump also made critical remarks about the appearance of the last major Republican female candidate to challenge him for the presidency, businesswoman Carly Fiorina.

    Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the last of six women to drop out of the party’s 2020 presidential primary, referenced sexism as a factor, noting the two remaining hopefuls were white men. Trump said her problem was actually a “lack of talent” and called her mean and unlikable.

    Before Haley made her bid official, Trump called her “a very ambitious person,” telling conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt that Haley “just couldn’t stay in her seat.” He also said he essentially gave Haley his blessing before she reversed course on an earlier decision not to challenge him. “I said, ‘You know what, Nikki, if you want to run, you go ahead and run.’”

    Haley, a former accountant and state legislator who became South Carolina’s first female and first Indian American governor, is no stranger to sexist and racist attacks.

    The daughter of Indian immigrants, she has written and talked about growing up in a small town as the only brown-skinned family. During her 2010 campaign for governor, a state lawmaker used a racial slur to reference her. He later apologized.

    Former Rep. Susan Brooks of Indiana, who led GOP efforts to recruit and elect more women to the U.S. House, called Haley’s candidacy “good for the party” and the country.

    Olivia Perez-Cubas is spokeswoman for Winning For Women, which formed to help elect more GOP women after Democratic women led a takeover of the U.S. House in 2018. She said the group wants to ensure the Republican Party is representative of the U.S., which means it needs more diversity, including more women.

    She is also hopeful that having more women in office or running as candidates will help Republicans attract more female voters, who have been more likely to support Democrats than Republicans in recent presidential elections. AP VoteCast, a broad survey of the electorate, shows 55% of women voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and 43% voted for Trump.

    “Voters like to see and hear themselves reflected,” she said. “And when we can put forward a strong candidate that’s a woman, that’s great for everyone.”

    Still, Perez-Cubas acknowledged that just as in many careers, the bar for women is “always just a little bit higher.”

    Republican businesswoman Tudor Dixon was the first woman to be the GOP nominee for governor in Michigan, defeating four male rivals in the 2022 primary. Her nomination was surprising to some voters, Dixon said, including one woman who liked the Republican’s policies but said, “I just can’t vote for you because you have four girls and I don’t think you should be leaving them.”

    Michigan was one of five states where 2022 gubernatorial contests were between two women, a U.S. record. But it also led to “disgusting” comparisons between herself and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Dixon said, such as who was younger or more physically fit — discussions that rarely happen in contests between two men.

    She applauded Haley for getting into the race, saying it’s not an easy thing to do.

    “You are personally attacked. You put yourself out there, and it’s hard,” she said. “But young women should see that they can do this, and that the future is that women are doing the same things that men are doing.”

    Evelyn Sanguinetti, who was Illinois’ first Latina lieutenant governor when she served with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, had similar experiences on the campaign trail. She was excited about Haley’s bid, noting the historic nature of electing a woman who is of Indian descent and could, she said, lead with empathy and compassion at a time when the country is greatly divided.

    “I’d like for our daughters to see that, because we’ve been seeing a lot of males, particularly white males, for a really long time,” Sanguinetti said.

    In her Wednesday speech, Haley made a point to eschew so-called identity politics. But she stood on stage wearing the white of the suffragette movement and had a message to her rivals.

    “As I set out on this new journey I will simply say this,” Haley said. “May the best woman win.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Haley calls for generational change in launching 2024 bid

    Haley calls for generational change in launching 2024 bid

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    CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Nikki Haley launched her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday with a call for generational change in Washington and a rejection of what she derided as “identity politics” dividing the United States.

    Speaking from the historic coastal city of Charleston, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador struck themes intended to resonate with the Republican voters she will court as the first major GOP challenger to former President Donald Trump.

    She blasted President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats as too liberal and insisted there’s not a problem with racism in the U.S. as they contend. But there were occasional notes that could appeal beyond the GOP base, including appeals for unity and criticism of corporate bailouts.

    Haley, who is 51, said that Republicans have repeatedly lost the popular vote in recent elections because they “failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.” The solution, she said, was to “put your trust in a new generation.”

    “America is not past its prime,” she told a crowd of several hundred people gathered near Charleston’s visitors center. “It’s just that our politicians are past theirs.”

    That was an obvious knock on Biden, who, at 80, is the oldest president in history, a fact that makes even some Democrats uneasy. But it was also a slight of Trump, who has launched a third White House bid and remains popular with wide swaths of Republican voters. Trump is 76 and has had an up-and-down relationship with Haley from the early days of the 2016 campaign through her time in his administration.

    Haley said she would support a “mandatory mental competency test for politicians over 75 years old.”

    While Haley is the first major Republican to officially challenge Trump, she will hardly be the last. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are among those expected to launch campaigns in the coming months. Haley’s fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott is also weighing a White House bid.

    At a time when Biden is holding together a Western alliance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and facing scrutiny for his handling of unidentified aerial objects, Haley leaned into the national security credentials she said she gained at the U.N. Among the speakers who introduced her was the mother of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea and died shortly after his release.

    In her remarks, Haley criticized Biden’s presiding over the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, North Korea’s launch of missiles, heightened Russian aggression and an emboldened China.

    “Today our enemies think that the American era has passed,” she said. “They’re wrong.”

    As the presidential primary season comes into focus, the biggest question is whether anyone in the field will be able to push Trump from his position at the top of a party that he transformed with his first campaign in 2016. Though he enjoys enduring support with some Republican voters, he’s been blamed by some party officials for the GOP’s lackluster performance in last year’s midterms.

    As in 2016, a crowded field could work to Trump’s advantage, allowing him to march to the nomination while his opponents divide support among themselves.

    In an interview with Fox News Digital, Trump said he was glad Haley is running.

    “I want her to follow her heart — even though she made a commitment that she would never run against who she called the greatest president of her lifetime,” he said.

    Pence hasn’t yet announced a campaign. But during a visit Wednesday to the early voting state of Iowa, he said she did a “great job” when she worked in the Trump administration.

    “I wish her well,” Pence said. “She may have more company soon in the race for president, and I promise folks here in Iowa and all of you I’ll keep you posted.”

    During a visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another possible presidential contender, said Haley’s announcement was highly anticipated.

    “So we’ll let her have her day,” Noem said.

    During her launch, Haley made clear that she would seek to distinguish herself in the GOP field in part by emphasizing her biography. She spoke of growing up in a small South Carolina town as the daughter of immigrants who experienced racist taunts. Still, she insisted that America was not a “racist country.”

    “This self loathing is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic,” she said.

    But the nation’s complicated experience with race was hard to dismiss. As Haley spoke, a white racist who killed 10 Black people last year at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

    And the very venue from which Haley spoke was just a few blocks from Mother Emanuel AME Church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered in 2015 by a self-avowed white supremacist who had been pictured holding Confederate flags. One of the survivors, Felicia Sanders, was in attendance Wednesday. Sanders’ son Tywanza was killed in the massacre.

    The Charleston shooting was a defining moment of Haley’s governorship. For years, she resisted calls to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds, even portraying a rival’s push for its removal as a desperate stunt. But after the church shootings and with the support of other leading Republicans, Haley advocated for legislation to remove the flag. It came down less than a month after the murders.

    A campaign video that Haley released on Tuesday referred to the shooting, but made no reference to her work to remove the flag.

    In unveiling her campaign in Charleston, Haley sought to show some strength in her home state, which holds a critical early primary that influences the GOP nomination. Ahead of Wednesday’s event, Rep. Ralph Norman — whom Trump backed in the 2022 midterm elections — became the first House member from South Carolina to publicly endorse Haley.

    Those in the crowd said they were excited by the prospect of a Haley presidency. Retiree Connie Campbell said she was all in for the former governor, who she said has “got so much to offer.”

    “She’s very experienced in politics and as a family person, a mother, a wife,” said Campbell, noting her admiration for the way Haley led South Carolina through tragedies including the Charleston shooting. “She had a lot to go through as our governor.”

    If elected, Haley would be the first woman as well as woman of color to assume the presidency, a historic fact that she embraced — to an extent. She said she rejects identity politics and also doesn’t believe in “glass ceilings.” That phrase became popular in politics when Hillary Clinton conceded to Barack Obama after a bitter primary fight in 2008, noting that she wasn’t yet able to “shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

    Still, Haley wore white on stage in a nod to the suffragette movement and leaned into gender as she wrapped up her remarks.

    “As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this – may the best woman win,” she said to roars of approval.

    ___

    Price reported from New York. Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Schools become flashpoint for Republicans eyeing White House

    Schools become flashpoint for Republicans eyeing White House

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has called for parents to elect and fire school principals. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. And Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who is expected to announce her White House candidacy this coming week, is among the Republicans taking aim at critical race theory.

    In the opening stages of the 2024 GOP presidential race, the “parents’ rights” movement and lessons for schoolchildren are emerging as flashpoints.

    The focus on issues related to racism, sexuality and education is a way for potential White House hopefuls to distinguish themselves in a crowded field, suggesting new and deeper ways for government to shape what happens in local classrooms.

    But the effort has prompted criticism from LGBTQ advocacy groups, teachers’ unions, some parents and student activists and those worried about efforts to avoid lessons about systemic racism. Democrats have cast the efforts as race-baiting and improperly injecting politics into schools.

    “What we’re seeing now, at least in this period, is much more focus on so-called ‘culture war’ issues,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College.

    Nowhere is the drive more visible than in Florida, where DeSantis has made an aggressive push against what he calls “woke” policies.

    He gained national attention last year for signing the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill into law, barring instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for young elementary schoolers, as well as material deemed not age-appropriate, which critics have argued is vague and could stifle classroom discussions. He also signed the “Stop WOKE” act in 2022, a law that restricted teaching that members of one race are inherently racist or should feel guilt about past actions by other people of the same race, among other things.

    DeSantis has also extended his political influence to local school board races, endorsing candidates last year in what had been nonpartisan contests and flipping at least three boards from a liberal majority to a conservative majority.

    More recently, he blocked high schools from teaching a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies, contending it was a violation of a state law and historically inaccurate. Beyond K-12 schools, he appointed six conservative trustees to the board of a small liberal arts college and he has announced plans to restrict state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory.

    Critical race theory, a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism, has been a top target. The theory, which DeSantis has called “pernicious,” was developed by scholars in the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, which function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.

    As DeSantis emerges as the most formidable potential challenger to Trump, who has staked out his own positions on the same issues and recently released a nearly 5-minute video outlining what his campaign called a “Plan to Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents.”

    Declaring that “public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” and warning about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids,” Trump pledged, if elected president again, that he would cut federal money for any school or program promoting “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on to our children.”

    Trump said he planned to create a national credentialing organization that would certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children” and would set up favorable treatment for states and school districts that adopt reforms such as allowing parents to directly elect school principals.

    “If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should have the right and be able to vote or to fire them and to select someone else that will do the job properly,” Trump said at a campaign appearance in South Carolina.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is considering a presidential campaign, is using a group he formed to rally conservatives against transgender-affirming policies in schools. The group’s plans to run ads, hold rallies and canvass in early voting state Iowa comes as a federal appeals court is set to consider a case involving an Iowa school district’s policy to support transgender students.

    In the U.S., public education is run by states and largely paid for by state and local taxpayers. The federal government does not, for instance, certify teachers or regulate how schools hire staff. And Washington also doesn’t control curriculum standards like those DeSantis has backed in Florida. But Congress or the Department of Education can incentivize certain education practices by tying them to federal money.

    So it’s not unheard of for presidential candidates to talk about education.

    George H.W. Bush declared he wanted to be known as the “education president” and started a push for national standards and goals. His son, George W. Bush, centered his message in the 2000 campaign in part on education reform and during the first year of his administration, signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which ignited a national debate over the proper use of standardized testing in schools.

    The more recent divisive shift to social issues in schools is an outgrowth of Glenn Youngkin’s successful bid in 2021 to become the first Republican in more than a decade to be elected as Virginia’s governor. Youngkin, himself a potential presidential candidate in 2024, campaigned on parental rights. He appealed to parents frustrated over school closures during the pandemic and said he would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

    Once in office, his administration began the process of rewriting the state’s model policies for the treatment of transgender students, issuing guidance for school divisions that would roll back some accommodations and tighten parental notification requirements.

    Kristin Davison, a strategist for Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign, said Youngkin focused on education after the pandemic thrust parents into the classroom, leading to frustrations with remote learning to the curriculum itself.

    “Voters want their leaders to understand the issues that they’re talking about at their kitchen table,” she said. “Right now, families are sitting at their kitchen table looking at report cards, looking at homework assignments, frustrated at curriculum.”

    The debate over education still carried weight during last year’s elections, potentially giving Republican presidential candidates a reason to stay focused on the issue. Half of voters in 2022 said their local K-8 schools were teaching too much about gender identity issues, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate. Only about one-quarter said schools teach too little on the subject.

    About 4 in 10 voters said too little is taught on racism in the U.S., while about one-third said schools were teaching too much on related issues. Roughly one-quarter of voters said the focus on each is “about right.”

    There was broad agreement among Republicans — about 8 in 10 of whom said gender identity is taught too much in schools. A smaller majority, 56%, said that about racism.

    Among Democrats, about two-thirds said there’s too little taught about racism. But there was less consensus around teaching gender identity. About 4 in 10 said too little is taught, about 2 in 10 said too much is taught and about 4 in 10 said schools handle it about right.

    Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and strategist who worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, said the GOP messages about protecting children seem to be aimed at trying to win over suburban women, who have drifted away from Trump and the GOP, particularly after the Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion last year.

    “I think it’s getting extra energy because of its appeal or its presumed appeal to women voters,” she said.

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  • Election-denying lawmakers hold key election oversight roles

    Election-denying lawmakers hold key election oversight roles

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    HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republican lawmakers who have spread election conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential outcome was rigged are overseeing legislative committees charged with setting election policy in two major political battleground states.

    Divided government in Pennsylvania and Arizona means that any voting restrictions those GOP legislators propose is likely to fail. Even so, the high-profile appointments give the lawmakers a platform to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections in states that will be pivotal in selecting the next president in 2024.

    Awarding such plum positions to lawmakers who have repeated conspiracies and spread misinformation cuts against more than two years of evidence showing there were no widespread problems or fraud in the last presidential election. It also would appear to run counter to the message delivered in the November midterm elections, when voters rejected election-denying candidates running for top offices in presidential battleground states.

    At the same time, many mainstream Republicans are trying to move past the lies told by former President Donald Trump and his allies about his loss to President Joe Biden.

    “It is an issue that many Americans and many Pennsylvanians are tired of seeing litigated and relitigated over and over,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Amanda Cappalletti, the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that handles election legislation. “I think we’re all ready to move on, and we see from audit after audit that our elections are secure, they are fair and that people’s votes are being counted.”

    Multiple reviews and audits in the six battleground states where Trump disputed his loss, as well as dozens of court rejections and repeated admonishments from officials in his own administration, have underscored that the 2020 presidential results were accurate. There was no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines that would have altered the result.

    The legislative appointments in Pennsylvania and Arizona highlight the divide between the two major parties over election law. Already this year, Democratic-controlled legislatures are moving to expand access to voting and heighten penalties for intimidating voters and election workers, while many Republican-led states are aiming to pass further restrictions, a trend that accelerated after Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

    Democratic governors and legislative victories last fall will blunt the influence of Republicans who took steps or pushed rhetoric seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

    But in Arizona and Pennsylvania, two lawmakers who dismiss the validity of that election — not to mention other elections since then — will have key positions of influence as the majority chairs of legislative committees that oversee election legislation.

    In Arizona, Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers takes over the Senate Elections Committee after being appointed by an ally, Senate President Warren Petersen. He was one of two lawmakers who signed subpoenas that led to Senate Republicans’ widely derided audit of the 2020 election.

    Rogers, who has gained a national following for spreading conspiracy theories and questioning elections, has faced repeated ethics charges for her inflammatory rhetoric, support for white supremacists and conspiracy-filled social media posts.

    She now will be a main gatekeeper for election and voting bills in Arizona, where election changes are a top priority for some Republican lawmakers. Some want to eliminate voting by mail and early voting options that are used by more than 80% of the state’s voters.

    She has scheduled a committee meeting for Monday to consider bills that would ban unmonitored drop boxes, prohibit drive-through voting or ballot pickup and impose what voting-rights advocates say are additional burdens on early voting.

    In Pennsylvania, Republican Sen. Cris Dush takes over as chair of the Senate State Government Committee after pushing to block the state’s electoral votes from going to Biden in 2020. Dush also mounted an election investigation that he hoped would use the Arizona-style audit as a model.

    He was appointed by the Senate’s ranking Republican, President Pro Tem Kim Ward, whose office explained Dush’s appointment only by saying that seniority plays a role and that members have priority requests.

    In the first weeks of this year’s session, Dush has moved along measures to expand voter identification requirements and add a layer of post-election audits. Both are proposed constitutional amendments designed to bypass a governor’s veto by going to voters for approval.

    Dush said he also plans to develop legislation to require more security measures for drop boxes and ballots.

    “I’m going to make a promise to the people of Pennsylvania: The things that I’m doing here as chair of State Government, it’s going to be things that will be conducted in a fair, impartial manner,” Dush said in an interview. “You know, we’ve just got to make sure that we can ensure the integrity of the vote and people aren’t disenfranchised.”

    Arizona and Pennsylvania have newly elected Democratic governors who presumably would veto hard-line GOP bills opposed by Democrats.

    Still, Democrats, county election officials and voting-rights advocates in both states want changes to election laws that, with Dush and Rogers in place, may never see the light of day.

    Alex Gulotta, the Arizona director for the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said he anticipates the Legislature there will pass a lot of “bad elections bills.” He said moderate Republican lawmakers who might have voted down problematic measures under a Republican governor now might let them pass because they know Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs will likely veto them.

    “This is performative,” Gulotta said. “This isn’t substantive.”

    The question, he said, is whether Rogers and other Arizona lawmakers can cooperate on “small fixes” where there is consensus. That, he said, will take “real statesmanship.”

    Liz Avore, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab, said the organization expects another busy period of lawmaking related to voting and elections ahead of the 2024 presidential vote, even as candidates who repeated Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election lost bids for governor, secretary of state and attorney general in key battleground states.

    Democratic and Republican-led states are often moving in opposite directions, but some bipartisan consensus has emerged around certain aspects of election law, such as restoring voting rights to felons and expanding early in-person voting, Avore said.

    Republican proposals, such as expanding voter identification requirements, are popular and have majority support, as do some Democratic proposals to broaden access, said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

    But to be successful with voters, Republicans need to mind the lessons from 2022. Denying the outcomes of fair elections, he said, “is a loser for the Republican Party. Straight up.”

    ___

    Cooper reported from Phoenix.

    ___

    Follow Marc Levy on Twitter: http://twitter.com/timelywriter

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  • Trump opens 2024 run, says he’s ‘more committed’ than ever

    Trump opens 2024 run, says he’s ‘more committed’ than ever

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 White House bid with stops Saturday in New Hampshire and South Carolina, events in early-voting states marking the first campaign appearances since announcing his latest run more than two months ago.

    “Together we will complete the unfinished business of making America great again,” Trump said at an evening event in Columbia to introduce his South Carolina leadership team.

    Trump and his allies hope the events in states with enormous power in selecting the nominee will offer a show of force behind the former president after a sluggish start to his campaign that left many questioning his commitment to running again.

    “They said, ‘He’s not doing rallies, he’s not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost that step,’” Trump said at the New Hampshire GOP’s annual meeting in Salem, his first event.

    But, he told the audience of party leaders, “I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than I ever was.” In South Carolina, he further dismissed the speculation by saying that ”we have huge rallies planned, bigger than ever before.”

    While Trump has spent the months since he announced largely ensconced in his Florida club and at his nearby golf course, his aides insist they have been busy behind the scenes. His campaign opened a headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, and has been hiring staff. And in recent weeks, backers have been reaching out to political operatives and elected officials to secure support for Trump at a critical point when other Republicans are preparing their own expected challenges.

    In New Hampshire, Trump promoted his campaign agenda, including immigration and crime, and said his policies would be the opposite of President Joe Biden’s. He cited the Democrats’ move to change the election calendar, costing New Hampshire its leadoff primary spot, and accused Biden, a fifth-place finisher in New Hampshire in 2020, of “disgracefully trashing this beloved political tradition.”

    “I hope you’re going to remember that during the general election,” Trump told party members. Trump himself twice won the primary, but lost the state each time to Democrats.

    Later in South Carolina, Trump said he planned to keep the state’s presidential primary as the “first in the South” and called it “a very important state.”

    In his speech, he hurtled from criticism of Biden and Democrats to disparaging comments about transgender people, mockery of people promoting the use of electric stoves and electric cars, and reminiscing about efforts while serving as president to increase oil production, strike trade deals and crack down on migration at the U.S-Mexico border.

    While Trump remains the only declared 2024 presidential candidate, potential challengers, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, are expected to get their campaigns underway in the coming months.

    After his South Carolina speech, Trump told The Associated Press in an interview that it would be “a great act of disloyalty” if DeSantis opposed him in the primary and took credit for the governor’s initial election.

    “If he runs, that’s fine. I’m way up in the polls,” Trump said. “He’s going to have to do what he wants to do, but he may run. I do think it would be a great act of disloyalty because, you know, I got him in. He had no chance. His political life was over.”

    He said he hasn’t spoken to DeSantis in a long time.

    Gov. Henry McMaster, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and several members of the state’s congressional delegation attended Trump’s event at the Statehouse.

    Trump’s team has struggled to line up support from South Carolina lawmakers, even some who eagerly backed him before. Some have said that more than a year out from primary balloting is too early to make endorsements or that they are waiting to see who else enters the race. Others have said it is time for the party to move past Trump to a new generation of leadership.

    South Carolina House Speaker Murrell Smith was among the legislative leaders awaiting Trump’s arrival, although he said he was there not to make a formal endorsement but to welcome the former president to the state in his role as speaker.

    Otherwise, dozens of supporters crammed into the ceremonial lobby between the state House and Senate, competing with reporters and camera crews for space among marble-topped tables and a life-sized bronze statue of former Vice President John C. Calhoun.

    Dave Wilson, president of conservative Christian nonprofit Palmetto Family, said some conservative voters may have concerns about Trump’s recent comments that Republicans who opposed abortion without exceptions had cost the party in the November elections.

    “It gives pause to some folks within the conservative ranks of the Republican Party as to whether or not we need the process to work itself out,” said Wilson, whose group hosted Pence for a speech in 2021.

    But Gerri McDaniel, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, rejected the idea that voters were ready to move on from the former president. “Some of the media keep saying he’s losing his support. No, he’s not,” she said. “It’s only going to be greater than it was before because there are so many people who are angry about what’s happening in Washington.”

    The South Carolina event was in some ways off-brand for a onetime reality television star who typically favors big rallies and has tried to cultivate an outsider image. Rallies are expensive, and Trump added new financial challenges when he decided to begin his campaign in November — far earlier than many had urged. That leaves him subject to strict fundraising regulations and bars him from using his well-funded leadership political action committee to pay for such events, which can cost several million dollars.

    Trump’s campaign, in its early stages, has already drawn controversy, most particularly when he had dinner with Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who had made a series of antisemitic comments. Trump also was widely mocked for selling a series of digital trading cards that pictured him as a superhero, a cowboy and an astronaut, among others.

    He is the subject of a series of criminal investigations, including one into the discovery of hundreds of documents with classified markings at his Florida club and whether he obstructed justice by refusing to return them, as well as state and federal examinations of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden.

    Still, early polling shows he’s a favorite to win his party’s nomination.

    “The gun is fired, and the campaign season has started,” said Stephen Stepanek, outgoing chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. Trump announced that Stepanek will serve as senior adviser for his campaign in the state.

    ___

    Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina, and Colvin from New York. Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.

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  • Dems vote to give states more time on new primary calendar

    Dems vote to give states more time on new primary calendar

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — A Democratic National Committee panel voted Wednesday to give New Hampshire and Georgia more time to make changes that would allow both to be part of a revamped group of five states leading off the party’s presidential primary starting next year.

    But even as they voted 25-0 to extend the compliance deadline until June 3, members of the DNC rules committee complained about New Hampshire’s ongoing feud with the national party because the new calendar would cost it the chance to hold the nation’s first primary.

    The fight underscores how the effort to shake up the Democratic presidential primary could turn increasingly bitter, even at a time when the party will be counting on staying unified as it tries to hold the White House and Senate in 2024.

    The DNC rules committee voted last month to approve a plan championed by President Joe Biden that would strip Iowa’s caucus of its traditional post leading off the primary and replace it with South Carolina, which would open primary voting on Feb. 3. New Hampshire and Nevada would hold primaries together three days later, with Georgia’s primary coming Feb. 13 and Michigan’s two weeks later. Most of the rest of the country would subsequently vote on Super Tuesday in early March.

    The Democrats’ proposed shakeup comes after Iowa’s 2020 caucus was marred by technical problems. Biden says the new proposed calendar better reflects his party’s deeply diverse electoral base, which relies heavily on African American voters.

    The president is also seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27% of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

    Those changes are set to be formally approved for next year’s presidential race by the full DNC at its meeting next week in Philadelphia.

    Nevada and South Carolina have already agreed to comply with the new calendar’s requirements. In Michigan, moving the primary date requires an act of the Legislature. Democrats control both chambers in that state, but they would need Republican support to enact the change before the end of February 2024, so it’s not yet clear when the proposed changes might be approved.

    The greater sticking points have been New Hampshire and Georgia.

    New Hampshire state law mandates that it hold the nation’s first primary — a rule Iowa was able to circumvent only because it held a caucus. Top New Hampshire Democrats say they’ve handled that responsibility successfully for more than a century and have vowed to simply jump the other states and lead off primary voting again in 2024, regardless of the DNC’s new calendar.

    In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger sets his state’s primary date. He has indicated he’d only be willing to move it if the Republican National Committee pushes to change the date of its Georgia primary, which hasn’t happened.

    Wednesday’s vote gave Georgia and New Hampshire more time — but also saw committee members voice their frustrations with New Hampshire.

    “I really do believe it is irresponsible, the statements being made in New Hampshire,” said Lee Saunders, a rules committee member and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

    “I would just urge everybody to cool down a little bit,” Saunders said.

    Rules committee member Leah Daughtry said she was “similarly taken aback and quite frankly shocked” by New Hampshire’s objections to the new calendar. She also rejected that state’s assertions that it shouldn’t lose its place because of tradition stretching back more than a century.

    “Hanging their argument on this 100-year-old privilege is really, for me as an African American woman, really quite disturbing,” Daughtry said, noting that Black women didn’t have the right to vote about a century ago.

    Rules committee member JoAnne Dowdell from New Hampshire countered that “politics is part of our DNA.”

    “We believe it is possible to lift up diverse voices and keep New Hampshire at the start of the process,” Dowdell said.

    The Democrats’ 2024 primary calendar could be moot if Biden opts to run for reelection, as expected. In that case, Democrats will have little appetite for building out a robust primary schedule that could allow a major challenger from his own party to run against the president.

    The DNC rules committee also has already pledged to revisit the primary calendar after 2024. Still, any changes it makes for next year — even if there is ultimately no competitive primary — could help shape future decisions about which states go first, potentially triggering an important shift on where presidential candidates campaign hardest as future races begin.

    Rules committee co-chair Minyon Moore said its members remain committed to “the president’s vision.”

    “We want to make sure the states can have as much time as they need to work though this process,” Moore said.

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  • Slotkin preps Senate run after winning tough reelection bid

    Slotkin preps Senate run after winning tough reelection bid

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    LANSING, Mich.. (AP) — Just three months ago, Rep. Elissa Slotkin was one of the most vulnerable Democrats in Washington, fighting an expensive campaign for reelection in a Michigan district that Republicans were sure they could retake.

    That was all a distant memory recently as Slotkin sat beaming next to Sen. Debbie Stabenow at a Lansing luncheon commemorating Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Fresh off a surprisingly comfortable 5 percentage-point victory, Slotkin was eager to praise Stabenow, the dean of Michigan Democrats, whose Senate seat is suddenly open after the four-term senator announced her plans to retire.

    “She knows what it takes to win and she is not going to let her seat flip when she leaves,” Slotkin said of Stabenow in an interview. “She feels, I think, very connected to making sure her legacy is upheld by passing the torch to someone who can win it.”

    In what is quickly emerging as one of the most closely watched Senate races of the 2024 campaign, Slotkin is aggressively acting on Stabenow’s call for “the next generation of leadership.” The 46-year-old former CIA intelligence officer is taking steps to prepare for a Senate run, including forming a national campaign team, according to an aide close to the congresswoman who requested anonymity to discuss planning.

    In the interview, Slotkin nodded to the plans, saying she was putting her “ducks in a row” before an announcement.

    Slotkin would almost certainly face competition from fellow Democrats in one of the most politically competitive states in the U.S. The ultimate winner of next year’s primary will be crucial in the party’s effort to maintain the Senate, where Democrats hold a one-seat majority and are facing tough headwinds as they defend seats in Republican-leaning states from West Virginia to Montana and Ohio.

    But Slotkin is gaining notice as someone who can help bring generational change to a party whose ranks on Capitol Hill are dominated by people several decades her senior. And the margin of her victory last year could offer reassurance that she’s prepared for another tough campaign.

    “Extremely hard-working. Great fundraiser. Has run in tough elections. I think she would be at the very top,” Michigan Democratic strategist Amy Chapman, who was Barack Obama’s state director in 2008, said in assessing Slotkin’s primary prospects. Chapman is neutral in the Senate primary.

    Slotkin’s potential Democratic rivals include Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Reps. Debbie Dingell and Haley Stevens, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. Only one Michigan Republican has held a seat in the Senate in the past 40 years, Spencer Abraham, from 1995 to 2001. He was defeated for reelection by Stabenow.

    Many of the possible contenders have their own unique background that could distinguish them in a primary.

    Gilchrist is the only Black party prospect in a state where the Detroit area accounts for half of the statewide vote. Benson won reelection by a wider margin in November than Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who sailed to a second term. McMorrow made a national name for herself last year with an impassioned floor speech about her opposition to restrictions on race- and gender-related topics in schools. Dingell, whose late husband, John, was the longest-serving House member ever, represents suburban Detroit.

    But for now, Slotkin appears to be the most aggressive in acting in light of Stabenow’s Jan. 5 retirement announcement, which surprised much of the Michigan Democratic establishment.

    Slotkin used her regular internal political meeting that day to begin discussing steps she would need to take to explore a bid, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation who requested anonymity to discuss private planning. Since then, she has talked to state and local Michigan Democratic elected officials and has been in touch with donors inside and outside Michigan who have helped establish her as one of the U.S. House’s top campaign fundraisers.

    Slotkin raised $10 million for her 2022 campaign, second among targeted Democrats only to Rep. Katie Porter of California.

    Slotkin was elected in 2018 by narrowly beating two-term incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Bishop in a longtime Republican-leaning district. She also became Stabenow’s congresswoman, representing the senator’s home in Lansing.

    The 72-year-old Stabenow, who represented the Lansing area in the House for four years before running for the Senate, took the junior Democrat under her wing on the campaign trail, guiding her to influential activists and groups, Slotkin said. Their relationship has stayed strong since, according to Slotkin.

    “Sometimes she lets me borrow her little hideaway office near the House floor if I have votes until two in the morning,” Slotkin added.

    Stabenow has given no sign she plans to support any of the several prospects seeking to succeed her, except to nod to the list’s several relative newcomers. “I’m really enthused about the the opportunity for the next generation of leadership,” she said in an interview.

    After Slotkin narrowly won reelection in 2020, new congressional maps divided her home in Holly just northeast of Lansing from the state Capitol, her district’s population center and its Democratic voting base. In moving to Lansing to run in Michigan’s new 7th District, Slotkin was viewed by Republicans as vulnerable because she would be new to about a third of the district’s voters, many in rural GOP-leaning counties north of Lansing.

    Democrat Joe Biden also had barely won in the new configuration, giving hope to Republican House strategists who wagered Biden’s low job approval last year would help sink vulnerable House Democrats.

    Instead, Slotkin beat Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett in a race in which the two parties combined to spend more than $40 million, making it the third-most expensive House race in 2022.

    “She’s had millions and millions of dollars spent raising her positive name ID throughout the current iteration of her congressional district and the prior iteration,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democratic political strategist who is neutral in the primary. “That’s why you’ve got to call Slotkin the favorite.”

    Slotkin, however, is little known among Michigan’s Black voters, a liability considering nearly 78 percent of Detroit’s population is Black, according to the 2020 U.S. Census.

    Though she has advertised on Detroit television during her campaigns, she has never represented Detroit nor its exurbs with large Black populations such as Flint.

    “I do believe she has her work cut out for her in the Black community in Detroit,” said Alexis Wiley, the former chief of staff to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan. “I don’t think you can overstate the uphill battle there.”

    Slotkin entered Congress with nationally recognized freshmen such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who openly clashed with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She carved out a reputation in the House as quietly persevering, though vocal when necessary, said former Rep. Cindy Axne of Iowa, who entered Congress with Slotkin and calls her a friend.

    “There’s nobody better at strategy that I’m aware of than Elissa Slotkin,” Axne said.

    Last week, Slotkin traveled to Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan’s two largest cities and both outside her district, to attend events commemorating King’s birthday with Black leaders.

    It was what she called part of an effort to “talk to opinion leaders” and “see what they think,” though she stopped short of suggesting a deadline for an announcement.

    Ever the strategist, she noted “first movers are important in politics,” but that it’s also a “countervailing wind against preparation and methodical planning.”

    “I could make an announcement, but then I don’t have the team in place,” she said. “So, I want to do it right.”

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  • Trump rings in 2023 facing headwinds in his White House run

    Trump rings in 2023 facing headwinds in his White House run

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump began 2022 on a high. Primary candidates were flocking to Florida to court the former president for a coveted endorsement. His rallies were drawing thousands. A bevy of investigations remained largely under the radar.

    One year later, Trump is facing a very different reality.

    He is mired in criminal investigations that could end with indictments. He has been blamed for Republicans’ disappointing performance in the November elections. And while he is now a declared presidential candidate, the six weeks since he announced have been marked by self-inflicted crises. Trump has not held a single campaign event and he barely leaves the confines of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

    Instead of staving off challengers, his potential 2024 rivals appear ever more emboldened. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, fresh off a resounding reelection victory, increasingly is seen as Trump’s most formidable competition.

    Trump’s subdued campaign announcement has left even former stalwarts wondering whether he is serious about another run for the White House.

    “There was a movie called ‘Failure to Launch.’ I think that’s what Donald Trump’s process of running has been so far. He had the announcement, and he hasn’t done anything to back it up since then,” said Michael Biundo, a GOP operative who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign but is steering clear this time.

    “What campaign?” asked longtime GOP donor Dan Eberhart, who gave $100,000 to Trump’s 2020 reelection effort but is now gravitating to DeSantis. “Trump’s early launch seems more a reaction to DeSantis’ overperformance and a legal strategy against prosecution than a political campaign.”

    Trump campaign officials insist they have been spending the weeks since his Nov. 15 announcement methodically building out a political operation. Trump, they note, announced just before the holiday season, when politicians typically lie low, and he did so unusually early, giving him plenty of time to ramp up.

    “This is a marathon and our game plan is being implemented by design,” said Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung.

    “We’re also assembling top-level teams in early voting states and expanding our massive data operation to ensure we dominate on all fronts,” he said. “We are not going to play the media’s game that tries to dictate how we campaign.”

    Trump also defended criticism of his campaign’s slow start. “The Rallies will be bigger and better than ever (because our Country is going to Hell), but it’s a little bit early, don’t you think?” he wrote on his social media site.

    While he has eschewed campaign events, the former president has nonetheless courted controversy.

    There was his dinner with a white nationalist and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has been spouting antisemitic tropes and conspiracies; his suggestions that parts of the Constitution be terminated to return him to power; and the “major announcement” that turned out to be the launch of $99 digital trading cards that do not benefit his campaign.

    Since his announcement, he has also faced a series of legal losses, including the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate inquiry involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump’s namesake company was convicted of tax fraud last month for helping executives dodge taxes on extravagant perks. In Georgia, a special grand jury appears to be wrapping up its work investigating his efforts to remain in power.

    Trump’s potential rivals have spent months laying the groundwork for their own campaigns, visiting early-voting states, speaking before conservative groups and building the kinds of relationships that could benefit them down the line.

    Bob Vander Plaats, the president and CEO of The Family Leader, an Iowa-based conservative group, pointed to Republicans such as former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who have made repeat visits to the state.

    “They’ve done the early work that is needed to be out in front of Iowans and they’re very well received,” he said, noting the period since Trump announced his candidacy has been “unusually quiet. In a lot of ways, it kind of feels like it’s the announcement that didn’t even happen or doesn’t feel like it happened because there was no immediate buzz. … I don’t hear from people on he ground, ‘I can’t wait for Trump to run.’ ‘Did you hear Trump’s announcement?’”

    He called the poor performance of some Trump-backed candidates in the 2022 midterms a “caution flag” and said that even Trump supporters are open to backing someone else in the 2024 contest.

    “For the president, I think he’s definitely going to have to earn the nomination,” he said.

    Despite his vulnerabilities, Trump remains the early GOP front-runner. While he is seen as potentially beatable in a one-on-one matchup, he is likely to benefit from a crowded field that splits the anti-Trump votes, just as he did when he ran and won in 2016.

    But Biundo, the former Trump campaign adviser, said that after watching likely candidates such as Pence pay visits to early voting states, he too, believes the field is wide open.

    “I don’t think Donald Trump has it locked up. I don’t think Ron DeSantis has it locked up. I don’t think anyone has it locked up,” he said. “At this point, it’s an open primary.”

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