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Tag: Republican support

  • Election Day 2025: Live updates of key races, storylines and ballot measures around the country

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    Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET): 8:15 p.m.Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.8 p.m.Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.7:30 p.m. Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.7 p.m.Polling locations have closed in Virginia.Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor6:55 p.m.New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.6:45 p.m.Here is when polls close in states with key races. New York: 9 p.m.New Jersey: 8 p.m.Virginia: 7 p.m.California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)6:30 p.m.It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?This week holds the answers to those pressing questions. Here’s what you need to know before the results start rolling in Tuesday night.

    Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.

    The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.

    Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.

    Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections.

    Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET):

    8:15 p.m.

    Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.

    According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.

    And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.

    8 p.m.

    Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.

    Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

    Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.

    Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.

    Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.

    7:30 p.m.

    Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.

    The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.

    The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.

    7 p.m.

    Polling locations have closed in Virginia.

    Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.

    Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.

    There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.

    This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.

    Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor

    6:55 p.m.

    New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.

    As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.

    That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.

    6:45 p.m.

    Here is when polls close in states with key races.

    New York: 9 p.m.

    New Jersey: 8 p.m.

    Virginia: 7 p.m.

    California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)

    6:30 p.m.

    It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.

    Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?

    This week holds the answers to those pressing questions. Here’s what you need to know before the results start rolling in Tuesday night.

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  • Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

    Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

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    On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.

    The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.

    It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.

    Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected calls to resign. A son of Cuban immigrants, he has denounced the case against him as a racially motivated persecution. But his days in the Senate are almost certainly numbered, whether he leaves of his own accord or voters usher him out. Kim has announced that he will challenge Menendez next year, and so has Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. Menendez’s trial is scheduled for May, just one month before the primary. Early polls show Menendez barely registering support among Democrats.

    Casey Michel: We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment

    “I hit a breaking point,” Kim told me, explaining his decision to run. “I think a lot of people hit a breaking point, where they’re just like, ‘We’re done with this now.’”

    Accountability has come more swiftly for Santos. National party leaders had largely protected him—Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, Mike Johnson, both needed Santos’s vote in the GOP’s tight House majority. But a damning report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee proved to be his undoing: Earlier this month, Santos became just the sixth lawmaker in American history to be expelled from the House.

    The government’s case against Menendez could still fall apart; he’s beaten charges of corruption before. But the public can hold its elected officials to a higher standard than a jury would. If the appearance (and, in this case, reappearance) of impropriety can cause voters to lose faith in the system, the events of the past few months might go some way toward restoring it. That both Menendez and Santos have suffered consequences for their alleged misdeeds offers some reassurance to ethics watchdogs who have seen Trump survive scandal after scandal, and indictment after indictment. “You can’t get away with anything. There are still some guardrails,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.

    Yet Trump’s enduring impact on political accountability remains an open question. Has he lowered the standards for everyone, or do the laws of political gravity still apply to ethically compromised lawmakers not named Trump? “Donald Trump is a unique animal,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen, told me. “He has built a cultlike following and surrounded himself with people who believe that no matter what he does, he is in the right.” Few politicians could ever hope to build such a buffer.

    Trump hasn’t evaded accountability entirely: The ethical norms he shattered while in office likely contributed to his defeat in 2020. And although he’s leading in the polls, one or more convictions next year could weaken his bid and demonstrate that the systems meant to hold American leaders in check function even against politicians who have used their popularity to insulate themselves from culpability. “He is being charged,” Gilbert said. “There are accountability mechanisms that are moving in spite of that apparatus. And to me, that’s a sign that eventually the rule of law will prevail.”

    At the same time, the Menendez and Santos examples provide only so much comfort for ethics watchdogs. The allegations against both politicians were particularly egregious. The phrase lining his pockets is usually metaphorical, but in addition to gold bars, the FBI found envelopes of cash in the pockets of suit jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name in his closet.

    The earlier allegations Menendez faced were almost as lurid; prosecutors said he had accepted nearly $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist, including private flights and lavish Caribbean vacations, in exchange for helping the doctor secure contracts and visas for his girlfriends. A 2018 trial ended in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice subsequently dropped the case.

    Santos was caught lying about virtually his entire life—his religion, where he had gone to school, where he worked—and then was accused of using his campaign coffers as a personal piggy bank, spending the money on Botox and the website OnlyFans.

    Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

    Some of the charges against Trump, such as falsifying business records and mishandling classified documents, involve more complicated questions of law. “A lot of the Trump scandals that he’s been indicted for may sort of be beyond the grasp of the average voter,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, which conducted one of the surveys finding that Menendez’s approval rating had sunk after the indictment. “Gold bars are not beyond the grasp of the average voter. Voters get gold bars, and when it’s something that’s so easy for voters to understand, you’re a lot more likely to see this sort of precipitous decline.”

    Jensen told me that in his 16 years as a pollster, he had seen only two other examples where public support dropped so dramatically after the eruption of scandal. One was Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of attempting to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2009. The other was John Edwards, who, after running for president as a Democrat in 2008, admitted to having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling a recurrence of breast cancer. (He would later admit to fathering a child with his mistress, and face charges that he illegally used campaign funds to hide the affair; Edwards was found not guilty on the one count on which the jury reached a verdict.)

    The Trump era has revealed an asymmetry in how the parties respond to scandal. Republicans have overlooked or justified all sorts of behavior that would have doomed most other politicians, including multiple allegations of sexual assault (such as those that Trump essentially admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood video made public in 2016). Although Santos was expelled by a Republican-controlled House, Democrats provided the bulk of the votes to oust him, while a majority of GOP lawmakers voted against expulsion. Democrats were quick to pressure Senator Al Franken to resign in 2018 after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. (Some Democrats later regretted that they had pushed Franken out so fast.) The party also forced a defiant New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down in 2021 amid multiple allegations of misconduct and harassment.

    Trump’s gut-it-out strategy seems to have inspired politicians in both parties to resist demands to resign and to bet that the public’s short attention span will allow them to weather just about any controversy. Gone are the days when a scandalized politician would quit at the first sign of embarrassment, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did in 2008, less than 48 hours after the revelation that he had patronized high-end prostitutes. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was able to serve out his full term despite losing the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party in 2019 after photos surfaced of him dressed in racist costumes in a medical-school yearbook. Cuomo defied calls to resign for months, and Santos forced the House to expel him rather than quit. Menendez has similarly rebuffed the many longtime colleagues who have urged him to leave.

    Shame may have left politics in the Trump era, but consequences haven’t—at least in the cases of Menendez and Santos. “Maybe these can be first steps,” Bookbinder told me, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “If you say nothing matters, then really nothing will matter. I hope we can go back to the place where people do feel like they owe it to their constituents to behave in an ethical and legal way.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

    The GOP’s ‘Abusive Relationship’ With Trump

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    It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.

    Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.

    “It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.

    David Frum: Never again Trump

    Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.

    “At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.

    Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.

    Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.

    Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.

    Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.

    It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.

    Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”

    From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.

    But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.

    Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”

    Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.

    DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.

    Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.

    Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.

    Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.

    The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.

    Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?

    One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.

    Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.

    Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.

    Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.

    Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.

    But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.

    Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”

    Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.

    “I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. “Within so much of what we used to call the Republican establishment, there is still this denial” even after all these years of dealing with the former president “that Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • How Do You Actually Stop the Steal?

    How Do You Actually Stop the Steal?

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    Preventing the next attempt to overturn an election is a bit like playing whack-a-mole. Plug one gap in the nation’s rickety, interlocking system for counting votes—say, by ensuring that a power-hungry vice president cannot unilaterally declare his or her ticket the winner—and another pest seems to materialize immediately.

    Congress is confronting this reality as it tries to rewrite a 135-year-old law governing the final, fraught act of certifying the Electoral College results—the very statute that former President Donald Trump used as a pretext to demand that then–Vice President Mike Pence anoint him the victor on January 6, 2021. Last month, a bipartisan group of senators announced, to substantial fanfare, that it had reached an agreement to revise the 1887 Electoral Count Act. But closing off every path to subversion is proving to be a tricky task.

    The legislation is modest in scope; its aims are not. The proposal’s authors believe that its enactment is necessary to guarantee that the violent insurrection that occurred last time around does not become a quadrennial affair. “That happened. It was real. It was not a visit from friends back home,” Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress’s most famous centrist and a co-sponsor of the bill, testified Wednesday at a hearing on the measure. “And we have a duty to ensure that it never happens again.”

    Election-law experts across both parties agree that the Senate proposal, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act, would resolve legal ambiguities that Trump and his allies tried to exploit before the transfer of power. As written, the bill would clarify that the vice president, regardless of party, has only a ministerial role in presiding over Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote. The proposal would also make it harder for members of Congress to raise objections to a state’s electors; doing so would require support of at least one-fifth of the members in each chamber, rather than just one in both the House and the Senate, as it stands now. Another provision seeks to head off rogue state legislatures by ensuring that they respect the outcome of their popular vote as determined by the laws that were in place at the time of the election.

    Read: Kamala Harris might have to stop the steal

    The proposed changes “set us on a path to reform that represents an extraordinary bipartisan achievement,” Bob Bauer, a longtime Democratic election lawyer who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration, told the Senate Rules Committee. “The proposals before the committee represent a vast improvement over existing law. There can be no question about that—none whatsoever.”

    Actually, there were a few questions. Appearing on the same panel, another Democratic lawyer, Norm Eisen, conceded that the Electoral Count Reform Act marked “a significant step forward” in efforts to thwart another attempt to overturn the presidential election. But he warned that, as written, the proposal “could invite unwelcome manipulation.” Eisen highlighted a pair of provisions that he said could be exploited by governors trying to ignore or outright reject the popular vote in their state.

    One would set a six-day window to challenge the certification of an election by a governor. The goal is to ensure that legal disputes are resolved in time for the Electoral College to meet in December and then for Congress to certify the results in January. But, Eisen pointed out, that time frame could actually play to the advantage of a governor who certified the wrong winner rather than the candidate who clearly won his or her state’s election. “It just doesn’t work,” he told the committee.

    Another provision Eisen flagged would bar states from declaring a “failed election” while allowing them to change or extend their elections because of “extraordinary and catastrophic events.” The point is to give states some flexibility to alter elections for legitimate reasons, as in the case of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster; the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, occurred on a pivotal election day as New Yorkers prepared to choose their next mayor. (New York City postponed its primary by two weeks.) The bill, however, doesn’t clearly define what constitutes “extraordinary and catastrophic events.” That, too, presents an opportunity for “mischief” by election-denying state officials, Eisen warned. What if a governor alleged, without evidence, rampant voter fraud and deemed that “an extraordinary event” that warranted a re-vote?

    Eisen’s concerns are shared by another prominent Democratic election lawyer, Marc Elias, who successfully fought in court many of the challenges that Trump and other Republicans brought against the 2020 results. Part of their complaint is the bill’s narrow scope: In order to win Republican support for any changes to election law, Democrats had to jettison their much broader dreams of enacting stronger protections for voting rights and minimum federal standards for access to the polls.

    But Eisen and Elias are also highlighting a potential flaw with the new proposal that may be impossible for Congress to fully rectify. For instance, the bill seeks to reduce the chances that the vice president, Congress, or a rogue secretary of state will mess around with or overturn election results. In doing so, however, the legislation grants more authority to governors to certify a state’s electors. What if the sitting governor is corrupt? As Eisen was testifying Wednesday, vote counters in Arizona were determining whether Republicans had nominated one of the nation’s most steadfast election conspiracy theorists, Kari Lake, as the state’s next governor. In Pennsylvania, the GOP has already given its nod to a Trump loyalist, Doug Mastriano, who marched to the Capitol on January 6.

    The bill’s bipartisan support increases its chances of passage, and during the hearing, lawmakers in both parties seemed open to some revisions. “It’s a good start, but like every important bill, the initial version has some areas that need development,” Eisen, who served as a House counsel for the Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, told me afterward. Some provisions, he said, “do pose risk if they are not fixed.”

    Nine Republicans are already backing the legislation in the Senate, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has praised the effort, suggesting that the bill will have enough votes to overcome a filibuster if Democrats fall in line. Each party has reasons to vote for it. Democrats want to prevent Trump and his allies from trying again to overturn a defeat, while Republicans fear a scenario in which Vice President Kamala Harris plays a decisive role when presiding over Congress on January 6, 2025. Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a Republican, said there was “a sense of urgency” to act before the next presidential campaign begins. “My personal feeling is we need to button this up before the end of the year,” she said at the hearing.

    Yet among Democrats, there remains some pause, as senators recognize a need to adopt a compromise while lamenting the new bill’s limitations. “The text didn’t exploit itself,” Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat of California, said at one point during the hearing, referring to the flaws in the 1887 Electoral Count Act. “People did. The former president did. Senators, members of Congress did.”

    Congress is fond of loopholes—closing them, opening them, preserving them. And even the strongest defenders of the Electoral Count Reform Act acknowledged that the proposal was not entirely free of them. “No law can prevent all mischief,” Derek Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa, told me. The question lawmakers must answer in the coming months is whether this new attempt to fortify America’s elections stops more mischief than it inspires.

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    Russell Berman

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