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Tag: 2022 Midterm elections

  • Democrat wins Arizona attorney general race after recount

    Democrat wins Arizona attorney general race after recount

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    PHOENIX (AP) — A recount of votes has confirmed Democrat Kris Mayes narrowly defeated Republican Abraham Hamadeh in the Arizona attorney general’s race, one of the closest elections in state history.

    The highly anticipated results announced Thursday in Maricopa County Superior Court are among the last in the country to come out of November’s election and solidified another victory for Democrats who shunned election fraud conspiracies in what used to be a solidly Republican state.

    With Hamadeh’s defeat, Republicans running statewide in battleground states who spread former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen have all lost their races.

    Mayes finished 280 votes ahead of Hamadeh, down from a lead of 511 in the original count. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.

    “I’m excited and ready to get to work as your next attorney general and vow to be your lawyer for the people,” Mayes said in a statement.

    Judge Timothy Thomason, who also announced the results of recounts in two other races, said Republican Tom Horne prevailed in the race for state superintendent of public instruction and Republican Liz Harris won a state legislative seat in the Phoenix suburbs.

    The automatic recounts were required because the races were so close.

    Outside court, Mayes attorney Dan Barr said the results should give the public confidence in elections, despite the adjustments in vote totals as a result of the recount.

    “They didn’t just do a rubber stamp of what it was,” Barr said. “They did a careful evaluation of the votes and they came up with a different result. And so I think people should have a lot of confidence in the process.”

    In a tweet, Hamadeh said the discrepancies in the latest results from his race were shockingly high. “My legal team will be assessing our options to make sure every vote is counted,” wrote Hamadeh, who hasn’t conceded to Mayes.

    Mayes and Hamadeh were not in court during the hearing.

    Hamadeh had filed a separate challenge of the results in his race, but a judge dismissed that case last week.

    Hamadeh alleged problems with ballot printers in Maricopa County had led to a series of issues that disenfranchised voters and that his race was affected by improper handling of ballots that were duplicated or adjudicated by people because they could not be read by tabulators. In throwing out the lawsuit, a judge concluded Hamadeh didn’t prove the errors in vote counting that he had alleged. Records show there were 623 more votes recorded in the recount than results that were certified across the state about a month ago. About 500 were identified in Pinal County, which attributed the discrepancy between the certified returns and the recount results to human errors. One of the issues, which affected 63 ballots, was tied to voting machine settings and ballots with unclear markings.

    In the race for superintendent of public instruction, Horne ended the recount with a 9,188-vote lead. Hoffman had previously conceded to Horne, a former schools chief who served one term as attorney general before losing the 2014 primary. Horne posted a net gain of 221 votes in the recount.

    Horne had criticized Hoffman for embracing progressive teaching and promised to shut down any hint of “critical race theory,” which is not taught in state schools but is a hot-button issue for social conservatives. He also had said schools were shut down for far too long during the pandemic at Hoffman’s urging.

    Harris won with a 275-vote advantage over Republican Julie Willoughby in the race for a seat in state House District 13, which includes parts of the Phoenix-area suburbs of Chandler, Sun Lakes and Gilbert. Harris had a net gain of five votes in the recount.

    Although Republican Kari Lake filed an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the Arizona governor’s race by just over 17,000 votes, the governor’s race wasn’t close enough to trigger an automatic recount.

    Recounts are required in Arizona in races where the margin between the leading candidates is 0.5% or less. Hobbs defeated Lake by 0.67%.

    The judge who dismissed Lake’s case rejected her claim that problems with ballot printers at some polling places on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct.

    Lake, who has not conceded to Lake, is appealing the dismissal of her lawsuit with the Arizona Supreme Court. Hobbs takes office as governor on Monday.

    Once a Republican stronghold, Arizona’s top races were won by Democrats in November. Republicans had nominated a slate of candidates backed by Trump who focused on supporting his false claims about the 2020 election. In addition to Hobbs and Mayes, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly was reelected and Democrat Adrian Fontes won the race for secretary of state.

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  • GOP stumbles with independents contributed to midterm woes

    GOP stumbles with independents contributed to midterm woes

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    EAGAN, Minn. (AP) — As Republican Tyler Kistner’s closing ad aired last month in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the U.S., Vickie Klang felt that something was missing.

    The 58-year-old veterinary technician and self-described independent voter watched as the 30-second spot showed grainy black-and-white images of President Joe Biden with two-term Democratic Rep. Angie Craig superimposed alongside him. The narrator ominously described life in America as “dangerous and unaffordable” because of an alliance between the two Democrats.

    Absent from the ad, Klang thought, was anything close to a solution beyond electing Kistner.

    “You’re never telling me what you’re going to do for the state or the country,” Klang recalled. “That’s a huge turnoff.”

    Klang ultimately backed Craig, contributing to a 5 percentage point win for a Democratic incumbent whom Republicans spent more than $12 million to unseat. From Maine to California, Republicans faced similar unexpected setbacks with the small but crucial slice of voters who don’t identify with either major party, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate.

    Republican House candidates nationwide won the support of 38% of independent voters in last month’s midterm elections, VoteCast showed. That’s far short of the 51% that Democrats scored with the same group in 2018 when they swept into power by picking up 41 seats. The GOP’s lackluster showing among independents helps explain why Republicans flipped just nine seats, securing a threadbare majority that has already raised questions about the party’s ability to govern.

    Some Republican strategists say the finding is a sign that messages that resonate during party primaries, including searing critiques of Biden, were less effective in the general election campaign because independent voters were searching for more than just the opposition.

    “You’ve got to tell them what you’re going to do,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster and senior adviser to House Republicans who had been critical of GOP candidates’ messaging strategy this year. “Somehow the Republican campaigns managed not to do that. And that’s a real serious problem.”

    In the northern reaches of Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district, a swath of lakes and onetime farm country teeming with development near the Twin Cities, more than a dozen independent voters echo Winston’s assessment.

    Unlike Klang, who grew up in a union Democratic household, Steve Stauff of Shakopee, 20 miles (32 kilometers) west, was raised in a rural, conservative Republican home. The two share a recent history of voting for Republican and Democratic statewide candidates, as well as for independent candidate for governor Jesse Ventura in 1998.

    But Kistner’s message, like those of other losing Republican challengers in targeted races, appeared aimed more at Republicans than swing voters: simply linking Craig with Biden, whose job disapproval ratings had outpaced approval, and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, widely unpopular with Republicans.

    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy came out with a campaign proposal in September titled “Commitment to America,” billed as a GOP agenda. However, the proposal, a collection of repackaged goals such as increased domestic petroleum production, was light on details and mentioned little during the campaign.

    “We were just being told, ‘Pelosi bad, Biden bad, therefore Craig bad,’ instead of hearing ‘This is my plan to represent this district,’” said Stauff, a 42-year-old sales representative. “If you don’t bring me solutions to whatever problems you think we have, how can I take you seriously?”

    VoteCast suggests that independent voters distinguished between the problems facing the U.S. and Biden’s culpability for them. While few independents said the economy is doing well and about two-thirds disapproved of Biden’s handling of it, independents were slightly more likely to say inflation is the result of factors outside Biden’s control than that Biden is to blame, 51% to 47%, according to the survey.

    But that nuance was often missing from the GOP’s political message.

    An October Kistner ad included the claim, “Feeling hopeless? Thank Joe Biden and Angie Craig,” a point that failed to land with Kathy Lewis, an independent voter from Lakeville, Minnesota.

    “I understand how that is so hard on people,” said Lewis, a 71-year-old school board member in the Republican-leaning exurb southwest of St. Paul. “I’ve never really believed the president, no matter who it is … ever really controlled the inflation. They may have had an effect on it, but they didn’t really control it one way or the other.”

    Democrats did significantly better among true independents and those who lean toward a party than they have in recent midterms when they have also held the White House, according to analysis of Pew Research Center post-election surveys of self-identified voters in 2014, 2010 and 1998.

    While questions remained into the fall about the role the Supreme Court’s June decision overturning the 1973 landmark abortion rights precedent Roe v. Wade would play in the election, several 2nd District Minnesota independents cited it as a driving issue in their support for Craig.

    About 7 in 10 independent voters who don’t side with either party think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to VoteCast, which also found many voters across party lines were hesitant to support candidates who were considered extreme.

    Pamela Olson, an independent from rural Farmington, Minnesota, said she doesn’t typically vote on a single issue. Nor did she vote for Craig in 2020. That changed with the court’s decision, in light of Craig’s support for abortion rights and Kistner’s opposition in most cases.

    “It’s about freedoms in this country. And I think it is completely up to a woman and her doctor,” said Olson, a 56-year-old engineer. “There needs to be a choice for those individuals, not for somebody else to tell you what to do.”

    Besides the contention that GOP candidates did not focus on independents, Winston suggests that independent voters might be hesitating to lurch toward the alternative after the turmoil of Donald Trump’s presidency.

    “Change has to be something they are willing to vote for, as opposed to just the kneejerk reaction that ‘this is bad so I’m just going to go another direction,’” Winston said.

    ___

    Fingerhut reported from Washington.

    ___

    Find the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. Learn more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at https://www.ap.org/votecast.

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  • Arizona lawyers: Kari Lake election loss lawsuit lacks merit

    Arizona lawyers: Kari Lake election loss lawsuit lacks merit

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    PHOENIX (AP) — Republican Kari Lake didn’t offer evidence to back her claims of widespread, intentional misconduct on Election Day at her two-day trial challenging her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in Arizona governor’s race, lawyers for the state said Thursday.

    Lake also never established her claim that printer problems at Maricopa County polling places were intentional acts that would have changed the race’s outcome had they not occurred, said Abha Khanna, a lawyer representing Hobbs, who ultimately won the race by just over 17,000 votes. At the trial’s closing arguments Thursday, Khanna said Lake’s claims were based on hearsay, speculation and theatrics. “What we got instead was just loose threads and gaping plot holes. We know now that her story was a work of fiction,” Khanna said.

    Kurt Olsen, one of Lake’s attorneys, said officials tried to downplay the effects of the printer problems in Maricopa County. “This is about trust, your honor,” Olsen said. “It’s about restoring people’s trust. There is not a person that’s watching this thing that isn’t shaking their head now.”

    Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, didn’t say when he would issue a ruling.

    Lake faces extremely long odds in her challenge, needing to prove not only that misconduct occurred, but also that it was intended to deny her victory and did in fact result in the wrong woman being declared the winner.

    Outside the courthouse after the proceedings, Lake said her attorneys proved their case.

    “We proved without a shadow of a doubt that there was malicious intent that caused disruption so great it changed the results of the election,” Lake said. “We provided expert testimony. We provided experts. The other side brought in activists to try to save face. They admitted that they’ve known about these ballot problems.”

    Her lawyers focused on problems with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of voters. The defective printers produced ballots that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators at polling places. Lines backed up in some areas amid the confusion.

    County officials say everyone had a chance to vote and that all ballots were counted, adding ballots affected by printer issues were taken to more sophisticated counters at the elections department headquarters.

    Lake’s attorneys also claim the chain of custody for ballots was broken at an off-site facility, where a contractor scans mail ballots to prepare them for processing. The county disputes that claim.

    Lake was among the most vocal Republicans this year in promoting former President Donald Trump’s election falsehoods, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most of the other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake has not. Instead, she is asking the judge to either declare her the winner or order a revote in Maricopa County.

    Her attorneys pointed to a witness who examined ballots on behalf of her campaign and discovered 14 ballots that had 19-inch images of the ballot printed on 20-inch paper, meaning the ballots wouldn’t be read by a tabulator. The witness insisted someone changed those printer configurations, a claim disputed by elections officials.

    County officials say the ballot images were slightly smaller as a result of a shrink-to-fit feature being selected on a printer by a tech employee who was looking for solutions to Election Day issues. They say about 1,200 ballots were affected by turning on the feature and that those ballots were duplicated so that they could be read by a tabulator. Ultimately, these ballots were counted, officials said.

    Lake’s last witness was Richard Baris, a pollster who conducted exit polling in Arizona and claimed technical problems at polling places had disenfranchised enough voters that it would have changed the outcome of the race in Lake’s favor.

    Baris claimed that 25,000 to 40,000 people who would normally have voted actually didn’t cast ballots as a result of Election Day problems — and that the voters that day were more likely to support Lake. Baris said his estimate was primarily influenced by the number of people who started answering his exit poll but didn’t finish the process.

    Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who testified on behalf of election officials, said Baris’ claim was “a series of assumptions and speculation.”

    Thompson had previously dismissed eight of the 10 claims Lake raised in her lawsuit. Among those were Lake’s allegation that Hobbs, in her capacity as secretary of state, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer engaged in censorship by flagging social media posts with election misinformation for possible removal by Twitter. He also dismissed her claims of discrimination against Republicans and that mail-in voting procedures are illegal.

    Hobbs takes office as governor on Jan. 2.

    Meanwhile, a trial is scheduled Friday in Republican Abraham Hamadeh’s challenge of his narrow defeat to Democrat Kris Mayes in the Arizona attorney general’s race. Hamadeh, who lost by 511 votes, alleges in his lawsuit that problems with printers in Maricopa County led to issues involving disenfranchised voters.

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  • Kari Lake will get to make case for election misconduct

    Kari Lake will get to make case for election misconduct

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    PHOENIX (AP) — A judge on Monday dismissed part of a lawsuit filed by Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, but will allow her to call witnesses in an attempt to prove that she lost because of misconduct by election officials.

    Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson dismissed eight of the 10 claims Lake raised in her lawsuit, which asks the judge to either declare her the winner or hold a revote in the county. Thompson took no position on the merits of Lake’s two surviving claims, but he wrote that the law allows her to make her case.

    Lake lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes out of 2.6 million cast. She will attempt to prove in a two-day hearing scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday that ballot printers malfunctioned in Maricopa County because of intentional interference by election officials and that ballots were improperly added at a county contractor that handles returned mail ballots.

    A representative for Lake will be allowed to examine 150 ballots on Tuesday.

    “Buckle up, America. This is far from over,” Lake wrote on Twitter after the ruling.

    She faces the extremely high bar of proving not only that misconduct occurred but that it affected the outcome of her race. Thompson will make a final decision, which will likely be appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court.

    The judge dismissed a variety of constitutional claims, including Lake’s allegation that Hobbs, in her capacity as secretary of state, and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer engaged in censorship by flagging social media posts with election misinformation for possible removal by Twitter.

    Lake was among the most vocal 2022 Republicans promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most of the other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races, Lake has not.

    She has zeroed in on problems with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of voters. The defective printers produced ballots that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators at polling places. Lines backed up in some areas amid the confusion.

    Affected ballots were taken to the more sophisticated counters at the elections department headquarters in downtown Phoenix. County officials say everyone had a chance to vote and all ballots were counted.

    “The judiciary has served as a bulwark against these efforts to undo our democratic system from within, and we ask this court to assume that role again,” Abha Khanna, a lawyer representing Hobbs in her capacity as the governor-elect, said in court Monday, urging the judge to dismiss Lake’s lawsuit in its entirety.

    Meanwhile, a judge in conservative Mohave County said he would rule Tuesday on a separate election challenge filed by Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general who lost by 511 votes to Democrat Kris Mayes. Hamadeh’s case raises many of the same claims as Lake’s. Mayes and Hobbs in her official capacity as secretary of state have asked Judge Lee Jantzen to dismiss the challenge.

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  • Sam Bankman-Fried donated over $40 million in the 2022 election cycle. Where did it go?

    Sam Bankman-Fried donated over $40 million in the 2022 election cycle. Where did it go?

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    Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, made about $40 million in political donations in the 2022 election cycle, according to a CBS News review of Federal Elections Commission (FEC) campaign finance data. 

    Bankman-Fried was charged with a variety of financial crimes on Tuesday, including campaign finance violations and a “scheme and artifice to defraud” FTX customers by using their funds to pay off debts of his other company, Alameda Research. He is currently in jail in the Bahamas. 

    Democratic donations

    Public records of Bankman-Fried’s money show it primarily went to support Democratic committees and candidates. He donated $6 million to the House Majority PAC, the main outside group supporting House Democrats. He also gave $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $66,500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

    The bulk of his political donations — $27 million — bankrolled the “Protect Our Future PAC,” a group advocating for pandemic preparedness. 

    The “Protect Our Future PAC” spent $24.2 million on independent expenditures (mailers, ads) to support 19 Democratic House candidates including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia and recently elected Reps. Maxwell Frost, of Florida, and Jasmine Crockett, of Texas. Carrick Flynn, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the Oregon Democratic primary, saw $10 million in outside spending from the “Protect Our Future PAC.”

    Under federal campaign finance law, candidates are supposed to have no say or knowledge of outside groups spending on independent expenditures to support or oppose them. 

    Republican donations

    Bankman-Fried said in an interview in late November that his donations to Republicans were roughly equal to those he made to Democrats, but that “all my Republican donations were dark.” He also said he made all of these donations during the primary contests.

    “Reporters freak the f*** out if you donate to a Republican, because they’re all super liberal. And I didn’t want to have that fight, so I just made all the Republican ones dark,” he said in the interview, adding he thought he may have been the “second or third biggest” GOP donor this cycle. 

    This quote in particular prompted an FEC complaint from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which says Bankman-Fried was able to direct millions “to influence federal elections while evading federal laws that require disclosure of the true source of the contributions.”

    One federal charge levied against Bankman-Fried alleges that he and allies made political donations under other people’s names, which would be a campaign finance violation. 

    “West Realm Shire Services,” listed as the official PAC for FTX, gave $1 million to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, as well as $750,000 to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund. 

    “All of this dirty money was used in service of Bankman-Fried’s desire to buy bipartisan influence and impact the direction of public policy in Washington,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said at a press conference Tuesday. “These contributions were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators, when in fact the contributions were funded by Alameda Research with stolen customer money.”

    In addition, two individuals that worked with Bankman-Fried, co-CEO of FTX Digital Markeys Ryan Salame and FTX director of engineering Nishad Singh, also made millions of dollars in political donations. Neither has yet been indicted on the same federal charges Bankman-Fried has, and a court filing Wednesday suggests Salame may have provided tips about Bankman-Fried’s actions. 

    Salame spent $24.5 million in donations, primarily to Republican candidates through the party’s “WinRed” platform. He gave $2.5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $2 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund. He also gave $89,200 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and $109,500 to the National Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

    Salame also donated $13 million to the “American Dream Federal Action” hybrid PAC, which spent $12.2 million on independent expenditures to support Republican Senate and House candidates such as Republican Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois and Senator-elect Katie Britt of Alabama. 

    Other groups

    Singh made more than $12 million in donations, with $2.25 million going to Women Vote!, the independent expenditure arm for Emily’s List; $1.1 million to the LGBTQ Victory Fund and $1 million to the Senate Majority Fund, the main outside group for Senate Democrats. 

    Singh and Bankman-Fried donated a combined $6 million to the “Future Forward PAC” in 2020. This PAC supported Biden’s 2020 Presidential run. 

    The candidates

    A majority of campaigns that received direct contributions from Bankman-Fried told CBS News they have already donated his donations or plan to do so. Because of federal contribution limits, these numbers are much smaller than his other donations to PACs and range from $2,900 to $5,800. 

    Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, received $5,800 from Bankman-Fried this year. Her office says she already donated those campaign contributions to Planned Parenthood North Central States. 

    Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who is up for re-election in 2026, received $5,800 from him in August 2021. Cassidy spokesperson Ty Bofferding said the campaign is not keeping the donation “and is planning to contribute the funds to an appropriate cause.”

    Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, received $5,800 from Bankman-Fried in June 2022. In addition, the “Gillibrand Victory Fund” joint fundraising group got $10,800 from Bankman-Fried. Gillibrand spokesman Evan Lukaske said she donated the funds to Arriva, Inc., a nonprofit based in the Bronx borough of New York City “that aims to promote individual wealth and economic development in low-to-moderate income communities.”

    Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, is expected to donate the $5,800 he received to charity, a spokesperson said. Sen. Alex Padilla of California donated the contributions he received last month, according to his office. 

    Two notable Democrats, incoming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, also picked up contributions from Bankman-Fried, and are planning to donate the funds they received, according to Bloomberg. 

    Bankman-Fried donated $5,800 multiple times to Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ campaign. She returned excess donations in September and October of 2021, citing contribution limits. A representative for Collins says her campaign plans to give the rest of Bankman-Fried’s donations to charity. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, a potential 2024 Senate candidate in Arizona, also returned an excess donation from Bankman-Fried in March of 2021. 

    “I never solicited a donation from SBF, but he did donate to my campaign. We are an operation that rejects corporate PAC $$ which means we also reject stolen money,” tweeted Frost. “I don’t want or need support from those scamming working folks, and I’m going to fight to get dark money out of politics.”

    John Woolley contributed to this story.

    Aaron Navarro

    Aaron Navarro is an associate producer for the political unit at CBS News, focusing on House and gubernatorial campaigns as well as the census and redistricting.

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  • Gen Z Congressman-elect Maxwell Frost was denied an apartment over

    Gen Z Congressman-elect Maxwell Frost was denied an apartment over

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    Maxwell Frost made history last month when he won election in Florida’s 10th Congressional District, becoming the first Gen Z member of Congress at just 25 years old. But that historic win didn’t come easy — and now, the financial toll of the campaign is making it difficult for him to secure a home near the House. 

    In a Twitter thread on Thursday, Frost said that he had just applied to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C. During that process, he told the person taking his application that his “credit was really bad.” 

    “He said I’d be fine,” Frost said. “Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee. This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.” 

    He went on to say that he has bad credit because he “ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half.” 

    During his campaign, Frost told Politico that he had quit his job to focus on campaigning. He drove for Uber to pay his bills, a “sacrifice” he said he made because “I can’t imagine myself not doing anything but fixing the problems we have right now.” 

    But that money didn’t go far enough, Frost said on Thursday, saying he “didn’t make enough money from Uber itself to pay for my living.” 

    “It isn’t magic that we won our very difficult race. For that primary, I quit my full time job cause I knew that to win at 25 yrs old, I’d need to be a full time candidate. 7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. It’s not sustainable or right but it’s what we had to do,” he tweeted. “As a candidate, you can’t give yourself a stipend or anything till the very end of your campaign. So most of the run, you have no $ coming in unless you work a second job.” 

    Members of the House and Senate earn $174,000 a year, but that salary will not begin until Frost is sworn in on January 3. In the meantime, he needs to find a place to live in D.C.’s pricey housing market. According to Apartment List, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city is $1,786, well above the national average. Zillow shows an even higher cost of living, with a median rent of more than $2,300 for a one-bedroom apartment, slightly over $300 more than what the price was last year. 

    Frost noted that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez faced something similar when she was elected in 2018. 

    “I have three months without salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real,” she told The New York Times. “…I’ve really been just kind of squirreling away and then hoping that gets me to Janaury.” 

    Four years later, “it’s still a problem,” Frost said Thursday. 

    “We have to do better for the whole country.” 

    Li Cohen


    li.jpg

    Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending reporter for CBS News, focusing on social justice issues.

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  • Early results suggest tight race in Georgia runoff

    Early results suggest tight race in Georgia runoff

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    Early results suggest tight race in Georgia runoff – CBS News


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    Early results in the Senate runoff in Georgia show a tight race between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and his GOP challenger, Herschel Walker. CBS News elections and surveys director Anthony Salvanto, CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns and CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa join Ed O’Keefe on “Red and Blue” to discuss.

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  • Democratic Sen. Warnock wins Georgia runoff against Walker

    Democratic Sen. Warnock wins Georgia runoff against Walker

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    ATLANTA (AP) — Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election Tuesday, ensuring Democrats an outright majority in the Senate for the rest of President Joe Biden’s current term and capping an underwhelming midterm cycle for the GOP in the last major vote of the year.

    With Warnock’s second runoff victory in as many years, Democrats will have a 51-49 Senate majority, gaining a seat from the current 50-50 split with John Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania. There will be divided government, however, with Republicans having narrowly flipped House control.

    “After a hard-fought campaign — or, should I say, campaigns — it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock, 53, told jubilant supporters who packed a downtown Atlanta hotel ballroom.

    “I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children,” declared Warnock, a Baptist pastor and his state’s first Black senator. “Georgia, you have been praying with your lips and your legs, your hands and your feet, your heads and your hearts. You have put in the hard work, and here we are standing together.”

    In last month’s election, Warnock led Walker by 37,000 votes out of almost 4 million cast, but fell short of the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff. The senator appeared to be headed for a wider final margin in Tuesday’s runoff, with Walker, a football legend at the University of Georgia and in the NFL, unable to overcome a bevy of damaging allegations, including claims that he paid for two former girlfriends’ abortions despite supporting a national ban on the procedure.

    “The numbers look like they’re not going to add up,” Walker, an ally and friend of former President Donald Trump, told supporters late Tuesday at the College Football Hall of Fame in downtown Atlanta. “There’s no excuses in life, and I’m not going to make any excuses now because we put up one heck of a fight.”

    Democrats’ Georgia victory solidifies the state’s place as a Deep South battleground two years after Warnock and fellow Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff won 2021 runoffs that gave the party Senate control just months after Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate in 30 years to win Georgia. Voters returned Warnock to the Senate in the same cycle they reelected Republican Gov. Brian Kemp by a comfortable margin and chose an all-GOP slate of statewide constitutional officers.

    Walker’s defeat bookends the GOP’s struggles this year to win with flawed candidates cast from Trump’s mold, a blow to the former president as he builds his third White House bid ahead of 2024.

    Democrats’ new outright majority in the Senate means the party will no longer have to negotiate a power-sharing deal with Republicans and won’t have to rely on Vice President Kamala Harris to break as many tie votes.

    National Democrats celebrated Tuesday, with Biden tweeting a photo of his congratulatory phone call to the senator. “Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected Ultra MAGAism, and … sent a good man back to the Senate,” Biden tweeted, referencing Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

    About 1.9 million runoff votes were cast in Georgia by mail and during early voting. A robust Election Day turnout added about 1.4 million more, slightly more than the Election Day totals in November and in 2020.

    Total turnout still trailed the 2021 runoff turnout of about 4.5 million. Voting rights groups pointed to changes made by state lawmakers after the 2020 election that shortened the period for runoffs, from nine weeks to four, as a reason for the decline in early and mail voting.

    Warnock emphasized his willingness to work across the aisle and his personal values, buoyed by his status as senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

    Walker benefited during the campaign from nearly unmatched name recognition from his football career, yet was dogged by questions about his fitness for office.

    A multimillionaire businessman, Walker faced questions about his past, including his exaggerations of his business achievements, academic credentials and philanthropic activities.

    In his personal life, Walker faced new attention on his ex-wife’s previous accounts of domestic violence, including details that he once held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. He has never denied those specifics and wrote of his violent tendencies in a 2008 memoir that attributed the behavior to mental illness.

    As a candidate, he sometimes mangled policy discussions, attributing the climate crisis to China’s “bad air” overtaking “good air” from the United States and arguing that diabetics could manage their health by “eating right,” a practice that isn’t enough for insulin-dependent diabetic patients.

    On Tuesday, Atlanta voter Tom Callaway praised the Republican Party’s strength in Georgia and said he’d supported Kemp in the opening round of voting. But he said he cast his ballot for Warnock because he didn’t think “Herschel Walker has the credentials to be a senator.”

    “I didn’t believe he had a statement of what he really believed in or had a campaign that made sense,” Callaway said.

    Walker, meanwhile, sought to portray Warnock as a yes-man for Biden. He sometimes made the attack in especially personal terms, accusing Warnock of “being on his knees, begging” at the White House — a searing charge for a Black challenger to level against a Black senator about his relationship with a white president.

    Warnock promoted his Senate accomplishments, touting a provision he sponsored to cap insulin costs for Medicare patients. He hailed deals on infrastructure and maternal health care forged with Republican senators, mentioning those GOP colleagues more than he did Biden or other Washington Democrats.

    Warnock distanced himself from Biden, whose approval ratings have lagged as inflation remains high. After the general election, Biden promised to help Warnock in any way he could, even if it meant staying away from Georgia. Bypassing the president, Warnock decided instead to campaign with former President Barack Obama in the days before the runoff election.

    Walker, meanwhile, avoided campaigning with Trump until the campaign’s final day, when the pair conducted a conference call Monday with supporters.

    Walker joins failed Senate nominees Dr. Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania, Blake Masters of Arizona, Adam Laxalt of Nevada and Don Bolduc of New Hampshire as Trump loyalists who ultimately lost races that Republicans once thought they would — or at least could — win.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy and Ron Harris contributed to this report.

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  • Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

    Dems move to make South Carolina, not Iowa, 1st voting state

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

    The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

    Discussion on prioritizing diversity drew such impassioned reaction at the committee gathering in Washington that DNC chair Jaime Harrison wiped away tears as committee member Donna Brazile suggested that Democrats had spent years failing to fight for Black voters: “Do you know what it’s like to live on a dirt road? Do you know what it’s like to try to find running water that is clean?”

    “Do you know what it’s like to wait and see if the storm is going to pass you by and your roof is still intact?” Brazile asked. “That’s what this is about.”

    The committee approved moving South Carolina’s primary to Feb. 3 and having Nevada and New Hampshire vote three days later. Georgia would go the following week and Michigan two weeks after that.

    The move marks a dramatic shift from the current calendar, which has had Iowa holding the first-in-the-nation caucuses since 1972, followed by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary since 1920. Nevada and South Carolina have gone next since the 2008 presidential election, when Democrats last did a major overhaul of their primary calendar.

    The changes will still have to be approved by the full DNC in a vote likely early next year, but it will almost certainly follow the rule-making committee’s lead.

    The revamped schedule could largely be moot for 2024 if Biden opts to seek a second term, but may remake Democratic presidential cycles after that. The president has said for months that he intends to run again, and White House aides have begun making staffing discussions for his likely reelection campaign, even though no final decision has been made.

    The DNC also plans to revisit the primary calendar again before 2028 — meaning more changes could be coming before then.

    Biden wrote in a letter to rules committee members on Thursday that the party should scrap “restrictive” caucuses altogether because their rules on in-person participation can sometimes exclude working-class and other voters. He told also told party leaders privately that he’d like to see South Carolina go first to better ensure that voters of color aren’t marginalized as Democrats choose a presidential nominee.

    Four of the five states now poised to start the party’s primary are presidential battlegrounds, meaning the eventual Democratic winner would be able to lay groundwork in important general election locales. That’s especially true for Michigan and Georgia, which both voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020. The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1976.

    The first five voting states would be positioned to cast ballots before Super Tuesday, the day when much of the rest of the country holds primaries. That gives the early states outsize influence since White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting much of the rest of the country.

    Scott Brennan, a rules committee member from Iowa, said “small, rural states” like his “must have a voice in the presidential nominating process.”

    “Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party in newer generations,” Brennan said.

    The Republican National Committee has already decided to keep Iowa’s caucus as the first contest in its 2024 presidential primary, ensuring that GOP White House hopefuls — which include Trump — have continued to frequently campaign there.

    House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat and one of Biden’s top supporters in Congress, said the president called him Thursday to inform him of his push to move his state up.

    “I didn’t ask to be first,” Clyburn said. “It was his idea to be first.”

    Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 boosted the candidate’s flagging presidential campaign just ahead of South Carolina’s primary, which he won big. That helped Biden shake off early losses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada and eventually take the White House.

    “He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn said.

    Still, the vote by the rules committee has faced serious pushback, with some states vowing to ignore the changes altogether. That’s despite the panel approving language saying states could lose all of their delegates to the party’s national convention if they attempt to violate new rules.

    Iowa and New Hampshire have said laws in their states mandate them going before others, and they intend to abide by those, not DNC decrees. Only committee members from Iowa and New Hampshire objected to the proposal that passed Friday, with everyone else supporting it.

    Nevada, with its heavily Hispanic population, initially balked at sharing the second-place slot with New Hampshire, a state 2,500 miles away. Nevada committee member Artie Blanco’s voice cracked as she argued against the change.

    “If we want to build a strong relationship with Latinos,” Blanco said, “then Nevada must stand alone on a date and not have to share that date.”

    After more discussion, Blanco said later that she would support the new calendar. It was “not ideal” for her state to go the same day as another, she said, but “we accept what the will of the president is.”

    Harrison said the new slate of five early voting states will need to show they are working toward moving their primaries to those dates by early next year or risk losing their place. Some state legislatures set primary dates; others have their secretaries of state or the directors of their state parties do it.

    The DNC chair choked up after the vote as he talked about South Carolina once having been the site of the first attack of the Civil War and now being in line to lead off his party’s primary.

    “This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger,” Harrison said.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard contributed from Columbia, S.C.

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  • GOP-controlled Arizona county refuses to certify election

    GOP-controlled Arizona county refuses to certify election

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    PHOENIX (AP) — Republican officials in a rural Arizona county refused Monday to certify the 2022 election despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count, a decision that was quickly challenged in court by the state’s top election official.

    The refusal to certify by Cochise County in southeastern Arizona comes amid pressure from prominent Republicans to reject results showing Democrats winning top races.

    Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who narrowly won the race for governor, asked a judge to order county officials to canvass the election, which she said is an obligation under Arizona law. Lawyers representing a Cochise County voter and a group of retirees filed a similar lawsuit Monday, the deadline for counties to approve the official tally of votes, known as the canvass.

    The two Republican county supervisors delayed the canvass vote until Friday, when they want to hear once more about concerns over the certification of ballot tabulators, though election officials have repeatedly said the equipment is properly approved.

    State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time.

    That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.

    Hobbs’ lawsuit asks the Cochise County Superior Court to order officials to certify by Thursday. Failing to certify would undermine the will of the county’s voters “and sow further confusion and doubt about the integrity of Arizona’s election system,” lawyers for Hobbs wrote.

    “The Board of Supervisors had all of the information they needed to certify this election and failed to uphold their responsibility for Cochise voters,” Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for Hobbs, said in an email.

    Arizona law requires county officials to approve the election canvass, and lawyers in several counties warned Republican supervisors they could face criminal charges for failing to carry out their obligations.

    Election results have largely been certified without issue in jurisdictions across the country. That’s not been the case in Arizona, which was a focal point for efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and push false narratives of fraud.

    Officials in a northeastern Pennsylvania county where paper shortages caused Election Day ballot problems deadlocked Monday on whether to report official vote tallies to the state, effectively preventing their certification of the results.

    Arizona was long a GOP stronghold, but this month Democrats won most of the highest profile races over Republicans who aggressively promoted Trump’s 2020 election lies. Kari Lake, the GOP candidate for governor who lost to Hobbs, and Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, have refused to acknowledge their losses.

    They blame Republican election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, including metro Phoenix, for a problem with some ballot printers. Officials in Maricopa County said everyone had a chance to vote and all legal ballots were counted.

    Navajo, a rural Republican-leaning county, and Coconino, which is staunchly Democratic, voted to certify on Monday. In conservative Mohave and Yavapai counties, supervisors voted to canvass the results despite their own misgivings and several dozen speakers urging them not to.

    “Delaying this vote again will only prolong the agony without actually changing anything,” said Mohave County Supervisor Hildy Angius, a Republican. The county last week delayed its certification vote to register a protest against voting issues in Maricopa County.

    In Cochise County, GOP supervisors abandoned plans to hand count all ballots, which a court said would be illegal, but demanded last week that the secretary of state prove vote-counting machines were legally certified before they would approve the election results. On Monday, they said they wanted to hear again about those concerns.

    There are two companies that are accredited by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to conduct testing and certification of voting equipment, such as the electronic tabulators used in Arizona to read and count ballots.

    Conspiracy theories surrounding this process surfaced in early 2021, focused on what appeared to be an outdated accreditation certificate for one of the companies that was posted online. Federal officials investigated and reported that an administrative error had resulted in the agency failing to reissue an updated certificate as the company remained in good standing and underwent audits in 2018 and in early 2021.

    Officials also noted federal law dictates the only way a testing company can lose certification is for the commission to revoke it, which did not occur.

    Lake has pointed to problems on Election Day in Maricopa County, where printers at some vote centers produced ballots with markings that were too light to be read by on-site tabulators. Lines backed up amid the confusion, and Lake says an unknown number of her supporters may have been dissuaded from voting as a result.

    She filed a public records lawsuit last week, demanding the county produce documents shedding light on the issue before voting to certify the election on Monday. Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich also demanded an explanation ahead of the vote.

    The county responded on Sunday, saying nobody was prevented from voting, and 85% of vote centers never had lines longer than 45 minutes. Most vote centers with long lines had others nearby with shorter waits, county officials said.

    The response blamed prominent Republicans, including party chair Kelli Ward, for sowing confusion by telling supporters on Twitter not to place their ballots in a secure box to be tabulated later by more robust machines at county elections headquarters.

    The county said that just under 17,000 Election Day ballots were placed in those secure boxes and all were counted. Officials also said the problem was distributed across the county, dispelling claims by Lake that it was concentrated in Republican areas. Election Day ballots went overwhelmingly for Republicans, though only 16% of the 1.56 million votes cast in Maricopa County were made in-person on Election Day.

    Maricopa County supervisors heard for hours from dozens of people angry about the election, some demanding the county hold a revote, though there is no provision in state law allowing that. Supervisors unanimously approved the canvass.

    “This was not a perfect election,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican. “But it was safe and secure. The votes have been counted accurately.”

    Meanwhile, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner said he would decide in the next few days whether to allow an election challenge by Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, to move ahead.

    Warner, who was appointed to the court in 2007 by Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, spoke after a Monday afternoon hearing. Hamadeh filed the lawsuit earlier this month against his opponent, Democrat Kris Mayes, who holds a 510-vote lead in the race, along with every county recorder in Arizona and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is now governor-elect.

    The lawsuit alleges errors and inaccuracies at some voting centers and seeks to have Hamadeh installed as attorney general. A lawyer for Mayes says the suit is premature.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Terry Tang and Anita Snow in Phoenix and Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed.

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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  • Georgia runoff: Early voting for Warnock-Walker round 2

    Georgia runoff: Early voting for Warnock-Walker round 2

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    ATLANTA (AP) — In-person early voting for the last U.S. Senate seat is underway statewide in Georgia’s runoff, with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock working to get the jump on Republican challenger Herschel Walker who is putting less emphasis on advance balloting.

    After winning a state lawsuit to allow Saturday voting after Thanksgiving, Warnock spent the weekend urging his supporters not to wait until the Dec. 6 runoff. Trying to leverage his role as pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church and Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, Warnock concentrated his efforts Sunday among Black communities in metro Atlanta.

    “What we are doing right now is soul work,” Warnock said at Liberty International Church southwest of downtown, where he rallied supporters before leading a march to a nearby early voting site where he cast his ballot. “We are engaged in a political exercise,” Warnock continued, “but this is moral and spiritual work, and for us that has always been based on the foundation of the church.”

    Walker, in contrast, did not hold public events over the long Thanksgiving weekend, and in his return to the campaign Monday night in the northern Atlanta suburb of Cumming, he did not mention early voting specifically. “Tell your friends to come with you to vote,” he said. “If you don’t have any friends, go make some friends.”

    Separately, the Republican Party and its aligned PACs are trying to drive turnout after Walker underperformed other Georgia Republicans in the general election. Walker finished the first round with about 200,000 fewer votes than Gov. Brian Kemp, who easily won a second term. Walker resumes his campaign Monday with stops in small-town Toccoa and suburban Cumming.

    Early in-person voting continues through Friday. Runoff Election Day is Tuesday of next week.

    Warnock led Walker by about 37,000 votes out of about 4 million cast in the general election but fell short of the majority required under Georgia law, triggering a four-week runoff blitz. Warnock first won the seat as part of concurrent Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, 2021, when he and Sen. Jon Ossoff prevailed over Republican incumbents to give Democrats narrow control of the Senate for the start of President Joe Biden’s tenure. Warnock won a special election and now is seeking a full six-year term.

    This time, Senate control is not in play, with Democrats already having secured 50 seats to go with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. That puts pressure on both Warnock and Walker to convince Georgia voters that it’s worth their time to cast a second ballot, even if the national stakes aren’t as high.

    As of late Sunday, almost 200,000 ballots had been cast in the relative handful of counties that opted to have weekend voting. The first day of statewide early voting on Monday added at least 250,000 more, the largest in-person early voting day in Georgia history, according to Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling. That’s included long lines in several heavily Democratic counties of metro Atlanta, enough to give Democrats confidence that their core supporters remain excited to vote for Warnock. But the total remains a fraction of the nearly 2.3 million early in-person voters ahead of the Nov. 8 general election.

    And Democrats remain cautious given that the early voting window is much shorter than two years ago, when the second round spanned two months between the general election and runoff. Voting on Saturday was allowed only because Warnock and Democrats sued amid a dispute with the Republican secretary of state over whether Saturday voting could occur on a holiday weekend.

    The senator followed up with a parade of Black leaders for weekend rallies and a march reminiscent of voting rights demonstrations during the civil rights movement.

    “We have one vote here that can change the world,” Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor and onetime aide to King, implored Black voters on Sunday. Rising from his wheelchair to speak, the 90-year-old former congressman and U.N. ambassador reminded the assembly of the congressional compromise that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and paved the way for Jim Crow segregation across the South.

    “One vote at the end of the Civil War pulled all of the Union troops out of the South and lost us the rights we had fought for in the war and that people had fought for us,” he said, starting “a struggle that we have been in ever since.”

    Warnock praised the weekend turnout as he campaigned Monday with college students on the campus of Morehouse College, where he graduated. “I don’t want us to get too comfortable, or self- congratulatory,” he said. “We’ve had just two days of early voting, today is day three. We cannot take our foot off the gas.”

    Later Monday, Warnock appeared in suburban Cobb County with musician Dave Matthews, who praised Warnock as a “decent man.” The audience of hundreds included many middle-aged white voters, a key target for Warnock as he tries to reach past core Democrats to capture voters who sometimes choose Republicans.

    “When you go home, please tell all your friends that were like, on the fence, to get on the correct side of the fence,” Matthews said.

    Walker, for his part, has drawn enthusiastic crowds in the early weeks of the runoff, as well, and his campaign aides remain confident that he has no problem among core Republicans. His challenge comes with the middle of the Georgia electorate, a gap highlighted by his shortfall compared to Kemp.

    “I feel Herschel Walker benefited by having Brian Kemp in the original election on Nov. 8, and I think Kemp not being there will hurt the Republicans a little bit,” said Alpharetta resident Marcelo Salvatierra, who voted for Republican Kemp and Democrat Warnock and still supports the senator in the runoff.

    Salvatierra said he backed Kemp’s re-election “because it seems to me Georgia has done well.” But Republicans at the federal level, he said, never offered a serious counter to Democratic control of Washington, while Walker also comes with considerable personal baggage.

    “Character matters and I sense he doesn’t have character,” Salvatierra said.

    Warnock has encouraged that sentiment among core Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. For months, he’s said Walker, a former football star making his first bid for public office, was “not ready” for the Senate. In recent weeks, he’s ratcheted up the attack to say Walker is “not fit,” highlighting the challenger’s falsehoods about his accomplishments in the private sector, along with allegations of violence against women and accusations by two women that Walker encouraged and paid for their abortions. Walker, who backs a national ban on abortions without exceptions, denies that he ever paid for any abortions.

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

    Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections

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  • Lake seeks election records in suit against Arizona county

    Lake seeks election records in suit against Arizona county

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    PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, has filed a public records lawsuit demanding Maricopa County hand over a variety of documents related to the election.

    Lake has refused to acknowledge that she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs and has for weeks drawn attention to voters who said they experienced long lines and other difficulties while voting on Election Day in Arizona’s largest county.

    Her lawyer, Tim LaSota, says in the suit filed Wednesday that the county has not fulfilled public records requests filed on Nov. 15 and 16. The requests seek to identify voters who may have had trouble casting a ballot, such as people who checked in at more than one vote center or those who returned a mail ballot and also checked in at a polling place.

    Lake is also asking for information about counted and uncounted ballots that were accidentally mixed. County officials have acknowledged the problem occurred at a handful of vote centers but say it happens in most elections and can be reconciled.

    Lake and her allies have bombarded Maricopa County with complaints about Election Day problems, which stem largely from a problem with printers at some vote centers that led them to print ballots with markings that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators. All ballots were counted, but Lake says some of her supporters may have been unable to cast a ballot amid the chaos.

    Lake wants the county to produce the records before certifying the election. The Board of Supervisors, controlled 4-1 by Republicans, votes to certify the election on Monday, the deadline under state law. Certification votes are also scheduled for Monday in five other counties, including two where Republican supervisors voted earlier to delay certifying the election.

    The statewide canvass is scheduled for Dec. 5.

    County officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican, has said the county takes responsibility for the printer issue but blamed prominent Republicans including state GOP Chair Kelli Ward for exacerbating the problem by telling voters not to allow their ballots to be counted at the elections headquarters in downtown Phoenix.

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  • Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024

    Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024

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    Before Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls.

    Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls.

    Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters. And while it might take months to figure out their full impact, GOP-backed voting laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions the way they did during the March primary in Texas.

    “The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

    Even though some voting experts’ worst fears didn’t materialize, some voters still experienced the types of routine foul-ups that happen on a small scale in every election. Many of those fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic voters.

    “Things went better than expected,” said Amir Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “But we have to say that with a caveat: Our expectations are low.”

    Badat said his organization recorded long lines at various polling places from South Carolina to Texas.

    There were particular problems in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Shortages of paper ballots and at least one polling location opening late led to long lines and triggered an investigation of the predominantly Democratic county by the state’s Republican authorities.

    The investigation is partly a reflection of how certain voting snafus on Election Day are increasingly falling on Republican voters, who have been discouraged from using mailed ballots or using early in-person voting by Trump and his allies. But it’s a very different problem from what Texas had during its March primary.

    Then, a controversial new voting law that increased the requirements on mail ballots led to about 13% of all such ballots being rejected, much higher compared with other elections. It was an ominous sign for a wave of new laws, passed after Trump’s loss to Biden and false claims about mail voting, but there have been no problems of that scale reported for the general election.

    Texas changed the design of its mail ballots, which solved many of the problems voters had putting identifying information in the proper place. Other states that added regulations on voting didn’t appear to have widespread problems, though voting rights groups and analysts say it will take weeks of combing through data to find out the laws’ impacts.

    The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law is compiling data to determine whether new voting laws in states such as Georgia contributed to a drop in turnout among Black and Hispanic voters.

    Preliminary figures show turnout was lower this year than in the last midterm election four years ago in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas — four states that passed significant voting restrictions since the 2020 election — although there could be a number of reasons why.

    “It’s difficult to judge, empirically, the kind of effect these laws have on turnout because so many factors go into turnout,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “You also have plenty of exaggeration on the Democratic side that any kind of change in voting laws are going to cause some major effect on the election, which has been proven not to be the case.”

    In Georgia, for example, Republicans made it more complicated to apply for mailed ballots after the 2020 election — among other things, requiring voters to include their driver’s license number or some other form of identification rather than a signature. That may be one reason why early in-person voting soared in popularity in the state this year, and turnout there dipped only slightly from 2018.

    Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, which advocates for tighter voting laws, said the fairly robust turnout in the midterm elections shows that fears of the new voting regulations were overblown.

    “We are on the back end of an election that was supposed to be the end of democracy, and it very much was not,” Snead said.

    Poll watchers were a significant concern of voting rights groups and election officials heading into Election Day. The representatives of the two major political parties are a key part of any secure election process, credentialed observers who can object to perceived violations of rules.

    But this year, groups aligned with conspiracy theorists who challenged Biden’s 2020 victory recruited poll watchers heavily, and some states reported that aggressive volunteers caused disruptions during the primary. But there were fewer issues in November.

    In North Carolina, where several counties had reported problems with poll watchers in the May primary, the state elections board reported 21 incidents of misbehavior at the polls in the general election, most during the early, in-person voting period and by members of campaigns rather than poll watchers. The observers were responsible for eight of the incidents.

    Voting experts were pleasantly surprised there weren’t more problems with poll watchers, marking the second general election in a row when a feared threat of aggressive Republican observers did not materialize.

    “This seems to be an increase over 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let down our guard.”

    One of the main organizers of the poll watcher effort was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran Republican election lawyer who joined Trump on a Jan. 2, 2020, call to Georgia’s top election official when the president asked that the state “find” enough votes to declare him the winner. Mitchell then launched an organization to train volunteers who wanted to keep an eye on election officials, which was seen as the driver of the poll watcher surge.

    Mitchell said the relatively quiet election is vindication that groups like hers were simply concerned with election integrity rather than causing disruptions.

    “Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be ‘Peaceful, Lawful, Honest,’” Mitchell wrote in the conservative online publication The Federalist. “Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process. It didn’t happen.”

    Voting rights groups say they’re relieved their fears didn’t materialize, but they say threats to democracy remain on the horizon for 2024 — especially with Trump announcing that he’s running again. Wendy Weiser, a voting and elections expert at the Brennan Center, agreed that things overall went smoother than expected.

    “By and large, sabotage didn’t happen,” Weiser said. “I don’t think that means we’re in the clear.”

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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  • Arizona’s Ducey meets with Hobbs, despite no concession from Lake

    Arizona’s Ducey meets with Hobbs, despite no concession from Lake

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    Outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday his Republican administration will ensure an orderly transition to Democrat Katie Hobbs, his first public statement on her victory.

    Ducey met with Hobbs in his office more than a week after her victory became clear and days after the last ballots were counted. However, defeated Republican Kari Lake has not conceded and has worked since the election to draw attention to voters who say they were affected by a problem with ballot printers at some polling places in Maricopa County.

    “All of us have waited patiently for the democratic process to play out,” Ducey said in a statement. “The people of Arizona have spoken, their votes have been counted and we respect their decision.”

    Ducey called to congratulate Hobbs the day after The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race, but he had not made a public statement about the outcome before Wednesday.

    Ducey was co-chairman of the Republican Governors Association, which spent more than $10 million on television ads attacking Hobbs, but he was not an enthusiastic supporter of Lake. He endorsed her rival in the GOP primary and, though he endorsed the entire GOP ticket for the general election, he did not campaign with Lake.

    President Trump Holds Rally In Mesa, Arizona
    Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey speaks during a rally for President Donald Trump at the International Air Response facility on October 19, 2018 in Mesa, Arizona.

    Ralph Freso / Getty Images


    Hobbs, currently secretary of state, has formed a transition team that is vetting potential staff and preparing for her to become the first Democrat to hold the state’s top office since Janet Napolitano stepped down to be U.S. Homeland Security secretary after the 2008 election.

    The Ducey-Hobbs meeting came a day after the Republican National Committee and the GOP candidate for Arizona attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, filed an election challenge in his race, which is slated for an automatic recount with Hamadeh trailing by 510 votes.

    That challenge, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, alleges a variety of problems affected the outcome of the extremely tight race. It says some ballots were counted that should not have been while others were rejected when they should have been counted. It alleges election workers made mistakes in duplicating ballots that could not be read by electronic tabulators and in determining the intent of voters when ballots were ambiguous.

    The suit also claims some voters in Maricopa County were denied an opportunity to vote because of a widely publicized problem at some vote centers where printers produced ballots with markings that were too light to be read by on-site tabulators. Some voters experiencing problems left without voting and didn’t check out with poll workers, so they were unable to vote elsewhere because the county’s computer system shows them as voting.

    The suit says Hamadeh and the RNC are not “alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022 general election.”

    “The voters of Arizona demand answers and deserve transparency about the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the General Election by certain election officials,” Hamadeh said in a statement.

    Democrat Kris Mayes will ask a judge to dismiss Hamadeh’s complaint, Mayes attorney Dan Barr said.

    “Abe Hamadeh’s complaint is devoid of actual facts,” Barr said in a statement. “It does not plausibly allege that mistakes in the administration of the election actually occurred, and if they did occur, that they would have made any difference in the result.”

    Election Day votes went overwhelmingly for Republicans, but Democrats dominated mail ballots.

    Maricopa County officials have acknowledged that some voters were inconvenienced by issues with printers, which were resolved in the early afternoon of Election Day. Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates has said the problems were made worse by prominent Republicans who led their supporters to fear ballots would not be counted.  

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  • Murkowski and Peltola win reelection in Alaska

    Murkowski and Peltola win reelection in Alaska

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    Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has won reelection, Alaska’s Division of Elections announced Wednesday, as did the state’s at-large Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. Alaska used ranked-choice voting system for both races.

    Murkowski — the only Republican who was up for reelection who had voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his second Senate impeachment trial — fended off a challenge by fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka, who was backed by Trump. Democrat Pat Chesbro was also on the ballot. 

    But the Elections Division announced Wednesday that, after the third round, Murkowski was the winner with 135,972 votes. Tshibaka received 117,299 votes in the final tabulation. 

    Murkowski tweeted Wednesday that she is “honored that Alaskans – of all regions, backgrounds and party affiliations – have once again granted me their confidence to continue working with them and on their behalf in the U.S. Senate.”

    The balance of power in the Senate is still 50 Democrats to 49 Republicans, with the final seat to be determined in Georgia’s runoff on Dec. 6. The Democrats have already clinched a majority.

    There were four candidates on the ballot in the race for the state’s only congressional seat. According to the Elections Division, Peltola won in the third round, defeating Trump-backed candidate and former governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. 

    In the final tabulation, Peltola got 136,893 votes after the reallocation, while Palin received 129,433. Republican Nick Begich’s voters split the following way: 43,013 to Palin (66.9%), 7,460 to Peltola (11.6%), and 13,864 with no second choice (21.5%).

    Peltola tweeted Wednesday night: “WE DID IT!!” next to a screenshot of a headline about her victory, and a video of a dancing crab. 

    She was first elected to the House in a special election this summer to finish out the late Rep. Don Young’s term, becoming the first Democrat to be elected to the seat in nearly 50 years. She has now been elected to a full term. 

    In Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, a winner is determined after winning 50% of the vote. The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and voters’ second choices are reallocated to the remaining candidates. Then, in the third round, the candidate with the next fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are reallocated to the remaining candidates – and so on until a single candidate reaches the 50% threshold. 

    With the latest results, CBS News now projects that in the House of Representatives, the Republicans have won 221 seats, and the Democrats have won 213. The Republicans have already clinched a majority in the House, albeit a narrow one, needing only 218. 

    Aaron Navarro

    Aaron Navarro is an associate producer for the political unit at CBS News, focusing on House and gubernatorial campaigns as well as the census and redistricting.

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  • New Hampshire town’s vote oddity was human error, not fraud

    New Hampshire town’s vote oddity was human error, not fraud

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    CLAIM: Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan received 1,100 votes in a New Hampshire town with only 700 residents, suggesting fraud.

    AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The town clerk of Columbia, New Hampshire, confirmed that she miswrote 106 votes as 1,106 votes, causing a temporary reporting error that has been corrected. The error didn’t change the results of the statewide Senate race, which Hassan won by more than 56,000 votes.

    THE FACTS: Social media users this week pointed out an apparent vote discrepancy in Columbia, New Hampshire, claiming Hassan received more votes in the midterm election than there were residents in the small town.

    “Another Democrat miracle!” read one headline. “Maggie Hassan Wins 1,100 Votes from Town with Population Under 700.”

    “This requires open revolt of a fake election across the board,” a Twitter user wrote alongside the headline.

    Columbia reported a population of 659 people in the 2020 census.

    However, the discrepancy was the result of a temporary reporting error by Marcia Parkhurst, Columbia’s town clerk, who explained the situation in an email to The Associated Press on Tuesday.

    “Apparently when I was transferring the results from one copy to the copy that I was going to send to the SOS, I wrote the ‘1’ twice,” Parkhurst wrote. “Obviously with only 309 votes cast, there couldn’t possibly be 1,106 votes for one person.”

    Parkhurst said that when she became aware of the error Monday morning, she immediately called the New Hampshire secretary of state’s office. That office had already been receiving calls noting the issue.

    “Unfortunately, I’m human and make mistakes especially after an almost 15 hour day,” Parkhurst wrote. “There was no “voter fraud” as people are talking about.”

    The secretary of state’s office issued its own statement on Monday, explaining that “the original figure entered was a simple typo.”

    “The reported number far exceeded the number of ballots actually cast in the town,” the statement said. “The Secretary of State has confirmed with the town clerk of Columbia that Senator Hassan only received 106 votes on election night.”

    Election results posted on the secretary of state’s website on Tuesday showed the correct vote totals. Statewide, Hassan beat Republican challenger Don Bolduc by more than 56,000 votes.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.

    ___

    This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

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  • Democrats defend every state legislative chamber in their control this year

    Democrats defend every state legislative chamber in their control this year

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    Democrats were able to defend every state legislative chamber in their control this year — making it the first midterm elections since 1934 in which the party in power has not lost a chamber. 

    They were also able to flip chambers in several states, a shift from previous midterm cycles where Democrats have struggled at the state level. In Pennsylvania, Democrats narrowly gained control of the state House for the first time since 2010. They flipped the Minnesota Senate for the first time in a decade, and both chambers in Michigan, giving the party a trifecta in both states. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democrats prevented Republicans from gaining supermajorities, protecting Democratic governors’ veto power. And in New Hampshire, control of the House remains unknown, nearly two weeks after the elections. 

    In a memo first shared with CBS News, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said the victories serve as a lesson to Democrats up and down the ballot.

    “Democrats made history in state legislatures this year — defying the odds, bucking political wisdom, and laying out a blueprint for Democratic wins at the state legislative level,” wrote DLCC president Jessica Post. She credited investing early and helping local leaders and said that unlike 2010, Democrats this decade will be able to go on offense. Now, the DLCC is calling for the party to continue building from the ground up.

    Post argued that some of the obstacles Democrats faced this year stemmed from GOP control of some of the nation’s state legislatures because it’s the legislature that often controls the way congressional districts are drawn.

    “Democratic efforts to control the U.S. House are more difficult because of Democrats’ failure to invest in state legislatures earlier,” Post wrote. “Congressional Democrats were running in districts rigged by Republican state legislators in many states. If Democrats want to fight back against the MAGA agenda and make our country better for all Americans, that work must start in state legislatures.”

    The state level successes come on the heels of redistricting. According to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), there are many reasons for Democrats’ victories in 2022 but investment in state level races was a part of it. 

    “It was a big lesson of the last decade, that Democrats needed to be more focused on the states and state level infrastructure, and I think you’ve seen the party really rally to that over the last several cycles, and 2022 was the culmination of that investment,” said NDRC President Kelly Burton said.

    The NDRC started its work before the actual redistricting process. Compared to the previous decade, Republican control over the redistricting process decreased by more than 20%. Burton said without such efforts, the results would have been worse for Democrats. She believes the party will continue to invest heavily on the state level because it’s paying off.

    The DLCC started sending funds to legislature candidates for 2022 last fall and released its strategy identifying what it believed would be the most competitive states in the spring. In total, the DLCC raised and spent $50 million this cycle, surpassing the 2018 midterms. Its finance team also helped state partners raise more than $105 million for targets this election season. 

    The memo noted two major themes were front and center during this election cycle as part of its winning strategy: abortion rights and protecting democracy. 

    The DLCC recognized abortion rights would be a major factor in state legislative elections early on and launched its States to Save Roe website in January even before the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. It then continued to capitalize on the issue “at every turn.” 

    The committee also worked to tie all Republicans to what it called “MAGA extremists” and warned Republicans posed an existential threat to democracy. As part of that, they took aim at state officials like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania who was in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, for former President Trump’s speech.

    At the same time, candidates continued to address how they would lower costs, the memo said, blunting some of the attacks by Republicans amid soaring inflation. Some efforts included direct relief checks, tax rebates or working to cut child and health care costs.

    While the DLCC is calling for the party to build off the 2022 successes, it was not alone in its efforts to increase Democrats’ numbers in the state assemblies and senates. The States Project invested nearly $60 million in state chambers, the most in a single cycle by an outside effort. 

    The DLCC is now looking to 2024, helping to defend majorities as well as flip seats in states like New Hampshire and Arizona. Next year, Virginia is also a battleground with its off-year elections. 

    While Republicans lost chambers in 2022 – they did see representation grow in several states. In Florida, where the party already had a trifecta, Republicans were able to gain supermajorities in both the state House and Senate. They were also able to gain supermajorities in at least one chamber in Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin. In Oregon, GOP candidates also gained seats – ending Democrats’ supermajority in the state.

    In a memo to donors following the election, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) said it had its best fundraising cycle to date but pointed to significant spending disadvantages. Overall, the RSLC spent a record $30 million but was outspent by Democratic groups combined at the state legislative level four to one.

    It is not yet clear just how much outside Republican groups spent on legislative races.  

    Sarah Ewall-Wice

    CBS News reporter covering economic policy.

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  • Frisch concedes race against Boebert as it goes to recount

    Frisch concedes race against Boebert as it goes to recount

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    DENVER (AP) — While conceding his tight U.S. House race to Republican Lauren Boebert, Democrat Adam Frisch said on Friday that his surprisingly strong campaign showed just how tired many GOP voters are of Boebert’s brash style.

    The Associated Press has declared the election in Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District too close to call. AP will await the results of a potential recount to call the race. With nearly all votes counted, the incumbent Boebert leads Frisch by about 0.17 percentage points, or 554 votes out of over 327,000 votes counted.

    The unexpectedly close margin for Boebert, one of Congress’s staunchest supporters of former President Donald Trump, was the latest indication that Trump’s influence on Republican voters could be waning amid a nationwide fight over the direction of the Republican Party. It is a question some Republican leaders raised in partly blaming Trump for their dismal midterm results even as the former president forged ahead in launching his 2024 presidential bid.

    “America is tired of the circus, tired of the lack of respect for our institutions and democracy, and tired of the lack of civility in our discourse,” Frisch said. The Democrat added that he hasn’t ruled out another bid for the seat in 2024. Prognosticators, pundits and the political establishment had largely thought Frisch’s campaign futile, but the thin margin is its own small victory for the Democrat.

    “We were written off by the political class, we were written off by the donor class and we were written off by the political media,” Frisch told the AP. “I wish more people didn’t take nine months to call me back.”

    Frisch said he supports the mandatory recount but that it would be unrealistic to think it would flip enough votes for him to win. He called Boebert to concede the race.

    In Colorado, a mandatory recount is triggered when the margin of votes between the top two candidates is at or below 0.5% of the leading candidate’s vote total. That margin was around 0.34% on Friday.

    Frisch’s comments come after Boebert claimed victory late Thursday in a tweeted video of her standing in front of the U.S. Capitol.

    “Come January, you can be certain of two things,” said Boebert before thanking her supporters, “I will be sworn in for my second term as your congresswoman and Republicans can finally turn Pelosi’s house back into the People’s House.”

    In the mold of Trump, Boebert’s provocative style has galvanized anti-establishment angst and won a loyal following on the right. With frequent TV appearances and a near-household name, the campaign cash flowed in — she raised $6.6 million in the past two years, an astronomical sum for a freshman member of the House.

    Frisch campaigned on a largely conservative platform and against what he dubbed Boebert’s “antics” and “angertainment.”

    The former city council member in the posh town of Aspen hoped to entice disaffected Republicans and build a bi-partisan political coalition. He rarely mentioned he was a Democrat on the campaign trail and backed removing Democrat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, saying he wanted to lower the partisan temperature in Washington. It was an indirect dig at Boebert that resonated with voters in a highly rural district that, though conservative, have often backed pragmatists.

    “We have shown the country that extremists politicians can be defeated, loud voices are not invincible, and shouting will not solve problems,” said Frisch.

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  • Jeffries makes historic bid to lead House Dems after Pelosi

    Jeffries makes historic bid to lead House Dems after Pelosi

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    NEW YORK (AP) — A day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would step aside, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York launched a history-making bid Friday to become the first Black person to helm a major political party in Congress as leader of the House Democrats.

    In a letter to colleagues, Jeffries gave a nod to the “legendary figures” before him: Pelosi, the first female speaker in U.S. history, and her leadership team. He encouraged his fellow House members to embrace a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to unleash their “full potential as a team.” And he pledged to draw on the diverse Democratic caucus as it works to govern in a divided Congress and win back the majority after House Republicans narrowly seized control in the midterm elections.

    “The House Democratic Caucus is the most authentic representation of the gorgeous mosaic of the American people,” Jeffries wrote.

    “I write to humbly ask for your support for the position of House Democratic Leader as we once again prepare to meet the moment.”

    Along with Pelosi, the other top two House Democrats — Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the whip — also announced their intentions to step down from the top posts. All three are in their 80s. Clyburn is stepping down as whip but says he wants to remain in leadership.

    A new generation wasted no time preparing to take their place. Along with Jeffries, Reps. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California — who have worked together as a lower-rung leadership team — swiftly wrote to colleagues with their bids for the second- and third-ranking positions in House Democratic leadership. Jeffries and Clark are in their 50s, while Aguilar is in his 40s.

    The trio has been working together for years, preparing for just this moment, seeking to engineer a smooth transition when Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn decided to leave.

    Pelosi heartily backed the potential new leaders.

    “It is with pride, gratitude and confidence in their abilities that I salute Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, Assistant Speaker Katherine Clark and Vice Chairman Pete Aguilar for being ready and willing to assume this awesome responsibility,” Pelosi said Friday in a statement.

    House Democrats will meet behind closed doors as a caucus in two weeks, after the Thanksgiving holiday, to select their members. So far, Jeffries, Clark and Aguilar have no stated challengers.

    The Brooklyn-born Jeffries has long been seen as a charismatic new leader, known for his sharp but careful style, first in New York politics and then when he entered the national stage upon winning election to Congress in 2012.

    A former corporate lawyer and state assemblyman, Jeffries has represented Brooklyn and parts of Queens for a decade and quickly rose through the ranks in Congress, serving as the party’s 5th-highest-ranking member as chair of the House Democratic Caucus.

    “You could sense there was some purpose in him,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, recalling the quiet and pensive young lawmaker he first met decades go.

    “He always seemed like a guy that was headed somewhere but was willing to pace himself to get there,” Sharpton said. “You meet a lot of people that are ambitious, that would do anything. You never got that impression from Hakeem.”

    While Jeffries has been part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he’s seen as a more moderate, business-friendly lawmaker who is sometimes at odds with the House’s furthest-left members.

    But his appeal rests in his political skill at a transformative time as Pelosi and her team make way for a new era.

    Carl Heastie, a Democratic state lawmaker who became the first Black person to serve as the speaker of the New York State Assembly, bonded with Jeffries on the campaign trail two decades ago over a love of hip-hop.

    “Hakeem had that ‘it’ factor,” Heastie said. “He stands out in the room.”

    If Jeffries is chosen to serve as the minority leader, the Democrats will be led in both chambers of Congress by men from Brooklyn — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native, lives in a neighborhood near where Jeffries lives with his wife and two sons.

    His district includes the Black cultural hub of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, home to Jackie Robinson and once represented by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.

    The job of minority leader puts Jeffries in line to become speaker if Democrats regain House control.

    “Another glass ceiling broken,” said Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., about his colleague’s rise. “I look forward to be able to call him speaker.”

    Jeffries first won election to the House in 2012, replacing Democrat Edolphus Towns, who decided to retire instead of facing what was expected to be a tough primary challenge from Jeffries.

    Growing up in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, Jeffries attended New York City public schools before graduating from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied political science. He received a master’s in public policy from Georgetown University and a law degree from New York University.

    He clerked for a federal judge and worked for several years at a New York City law firm and later as a corporate lawyer for CBS.

    His first runs for public office were strong back-to-back but unsuccessful attempts to unseat longtime Democratic state Assemblyman Roger Green starting in 2000.

    New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was Green’s campaign manager, said Jeffries was then “an up-and-coming insurgent” who “wanted to make his mark in central Brooklyn — and in fact, he did.”

    When the seat opened in 2006, Jeffries won. He served six years in Albany, working on criminal justice and civil rights legislation.

    He sponsored a law that stopped the New York Police Department from keeping a database of personal details of every person stopped and questioned under the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, even if the people were released and not charged with a crime.

    He continued that work in Congress. After the 2014 chokehold death in New York of Eric Garner, a Black man whose gasps of “I can’t breathe!” became part a national rallying cry against police brutality, Jeffries sought to pass legislation that would make the chokehold maneuver a federal crime.

    James, who rose up through the same Brooklyn Democratic political circles as Jeffries and worked with him on affordable housing issues when she was on the City Council, said she reached out to Jeffries on Thursday night.

    “I texted him and urged him not to forget the residents of public housing we served,” James said. “And he answered back and said, ‘Never.’”

    ___

    Mascaro reported from Washington.

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  • Trump 2024 rivals court his donors at big Las Vegas meeting

    Trump 2024 rivals court his donors at big Las Vegas meeting

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    LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Republican Party’s nascent 2024 class, emboldened as ever, openly cast Donald Trump as “a loser” over and over on Friday as they courted donors and activists fretting about the GOP’s future under the former president’s leadership.

    Trump’s vocal critics included current and former Republican governors, members of his own Cabinet and major donors who gathered along the Las Vegas strip for what organizers described as the unofficial beginning of the next presidential primary season. It was a remarkable display of defiance for a party defined almost wholly by its allegiance to Trump for the past six years.

    “Maybe there’s a little blood in the water and the sharks are circling,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican presidential prospect himself and frequent Trump critic said in an interview. “I don’t think we’ve ever gotten to this point before.”

    The gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting, which began Friday, comes just days after Trump became the first candidate to formally launch a 2024 campaign. His allies hoped his early announcement might ward off serious primary challenges, but several potential candidates said that’s not likely after Trump loyalists lost midterm contests last week in battleground states from Arizona to Pennsylvania. His political standing within the GOP, already weakening, plummeted further.

    Ahead of his Friday night address, Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State under Trump, mocked one of his former boss’ slogans: “We were told we’d get tired of winning. But I’m tired of losing.”

    “Personality, celebrity just aren’t going to get it done,” he said later from the ballroom stage.

    Trump is scheduled to address the weekend gathering by video conference on Saturday. The vast majority of the high-profile Republican officials considering a 2024 White House bid appeared in person the two-day conference, which included a series of private donor meetings and public speeches.

    The program featured DeSantis, a leading Trump rival, and Pence, whom Trump blames for not overturning the 2020 election. Other speakers included Hogan, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and Florida Sen. Rick Scott.

    Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another potential 2024 contender, canceled his appearance after a Sunday shooting at the University of Virginia that left three dead.

    House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who could become the House speaker when Republicans take over in January, is also scheduled.

    There seemed to be little sympathy for Trump’s latest legal challenges.

    Hours before Friday’s opening dinner, Attorney General Merrick Garland named 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 probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

    Sununu, the New Hampshire governor who easily won reelection last week, said there was no sign that his party would rally to Trump’s defense this time.

    “Those are his issues to sort out,” Sununu said. “Everyone’s gonna sit back and watch the show. And that’s not just his supporters — that’s his money, that’s donors, that’s fundraisers,” said the Republican governor, who easily won reelection last week. “We’re just moving on.”

    With a loyal base of support among rank-and-file voters and a sprawling fundraising operation featuring small-dollar contributions, Trump does not need major donors or party leaders to reach for the GOP nomination a third time. But unwillingness by big-money Republicans to commit to him — at least, for now — could make his path back to the White House more difficult.

    There was little sign of enthusiasm for Trump’s 2024 presidential aspirations in the hallways and conference rooms of the weekend gathering. At Friday night’s dinner, organizers offered attendees yarmulkes bearing Trump’s name, but there were few takers.

    That’s even as Jewish Republicans continued to heap praise on Trump’s commitment to Israel while in the White House.

    “There’s no question that what President Trump accomplished over his four years in terms of strengthening the the U.S.-Israel relationship was unparalleled. He was the most pro-Israel president ever,” said Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition’s executive director.

    But that may not be enough to win over the coalition’s leading donors this time.

    “For a lot of people who are attending this conference, this is about the future,” Brooks said. “And for some of them, President Trump may be their answer. For others, they’re interested in what others have to say.”

    New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie leaned into Trump’s political failures during a private dinner with the group’s leading donors on Thursday. In a subsequent interview, he did not back down.

    “In my view, he’s now a loser. He’s an electoral loser,” said Christie, another 2024 prospect. “You look at a general electorate, I don’t think there’s a Democrat he can beat because he’s now toxic to suburban voters on a personal level, and he’s earned it.”

    The annual event is playing out at the Las Vegas Strip’s Venetian Hotel in a nod to the Republican Jewish Coalition’s longtime benefactor, Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino magnate who died last year. His wife Miriam Adelson remains a fundraising force within the GOP, though her level of giving in the recent midterm election, which exceeded $20 million, was somewhat scaled back.

    The 76-year-old Israeli-born Miriam Adelson “is staying neutral” in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary, according to the family’s longtime political gatekeeper Andy Abboud.

    She is not alone.

    Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, backed Trump’s previous campaigns but has no plans to support him in 2024, according to a Lauder spokesman.

    Longtime Trump backer Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group investment firm, told Axios this week that he would back someone from a “new generation” of Republicans. Kenneth C. Griffin, the hedge-fund billionaire, is already openly backing DeSantis.

    On Friday, aerospace CEO Phillip Friedman described himself as a “big Trump supporter,” but said he’s open to listening to others moving forward.

    “There’s a couple other people who have his policies but don’t have the baggage,” Friedman said of Trump.

    In his keynote address, Pence focused largely on the Trump administration’s accomplishments, but included a few indirect jabs at the former president.

    “To win the future,” Pence said, “we as Republicans and elected leaders must do more than criticize and complain.”

    He was more direct i n an interview this week.

    “I think we will have better choices in 2024,” Pence told The Associated Press. “And I’m very confident that Republican primary voters will choose wisely.”

    ___

    AP writer Michelle Price in New York contributed.

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