But for Americans, the reality of the comparison between the insurrection inspired by the 45th US president on January, 6, 2021, and the latest revolt by supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed “Trump of the Tropics,” is even more troubling. Brazil is in turmoil after hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters stormed congressional buildings, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in the capital Brasilia. The assault came a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who returned to power after a 12-year hiatus following a victory over Bolsonaro in a run-off election on October 30.
While many elements of the situation in Brazil overlap with the populist conservatism epitomized by former President Donald Trump’s inner circle in the US, it also poses the question of whether the US, under assault from its own anti-democratic movement, is beginning to resemble the political turmoil that has long raged in less stable regions of the world.
For now, there are growing questions over whether key extremists in Trump’s inner circle, like Steve Bannon, helped fan the violence in Brasilia and doubts over the Brazilian election, as part of a bid to destabilize democracies worldwide.
Bolsonaro did not explicitly provoke the gathering of protesters as Trump did, and was not in the country at the time of the riot. He did, however, adopt the Trump playbook, sowing doubt about the vote’s legitimacy, refusing to concede his election loss and profiting from disinformation spread on social media. But his behavior is not necessarily an outlier in a nation and a continent where democracy is perpetually fragile and at risk.
Brazil was a military-run dictatorship until 1985 after the crushing of an earlier attempt at democracy, and civilian self-government since then has often been rocked by corruption, fears of military takeovers and prosecutions of former presidents. The erosion of democracy and the use of violence as a political tool were a feature of much of the Western Hemisphere long before Trump latched onto them.
So, while it may look like Brazilian extremists are copying their brethren in the US, the world’s most important democracy could actually be importing the characteristics of malfunctioning and chaotic political societies abroad.
Violence had long been feared following October’s election. Bolsonaro supporters, spurred by his false claims of electoral fraud, that mirrored Trump’s own behavior after the 2020 election, clearly incited his supporters. Just as in the United States, there are elements among Brazilian legislators and in political power in the states who support Bolsonaro and his efforts to undermine democracy.
The new House majority in Washington is packed with Republican members who voted not to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020 based on false claims of ballot fraud. And the new Speaker Kevin McCarthy only finally won the job on a 15th ballot after an intervention from Trump – poignantly on the night that marked the second anniversary of Congress returning to work after the Capitol riot.
In other echoes of January 6, Bolsonaro – like his populist, nationalist political cousin Trump – is currently in Florida. Like the 45th US president, he also prepared to undermine the election in advance and refused to concede defeat after making complaints about voting machines that were rejected by judges. The closest he got was when he said he would comply with the Constitution.
So far, Brazil’s democracy, as America’s did two years ago, has held firm, and protesters have been flushed out of government buildings. But the Biden administration has been concerned from the start about the implications of Bolsonaro’s election denialism in a nation that is a political and economic fulcrum in Latin America. It warned publicly and in private, weeks before the election that then-President Bolsonaro should not sabotage democracy, clearly understanding the parallels with Trump and more broadly the dangers facing Brazilian democracy since the end of military rule in the 1980s.
Biden, who has put the threats to global democracy at the center of his foreign policy, condemned the assault on democracy and on the peaceful transfer of power in a tweet. “Brazil’s democratic institutions have our full support and the will of the Brazilian people must not be undermined,” Biden wrote. “I look forward to continuing to work with @LulaOficial,” he wrote, referring to the current president.
But the violence in Brazil came as a jolt after the last year in which democracy appeared to be making a comeback around the world, including in the United States where voters in some swing states rejected election denialism pushed by many of Trump’s political proteges in the midterm elections.
The most powerful example that Washington can send to Brazil, and other nations where political systems are under duress, is that democracy bent but didn’t break in 2021, and that those who threatened it are starting to be held to account.
But two dates, January 6 in the US and January 8 in Brazil, now stand as flashing warning signs that the health and survival of free elections anywhere cannot be taken for granted.
President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.
The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.
The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.
“That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)
“All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”
Many states beyond the South with two GOP senators, such as Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah, lack nominees for court vacancies, but the South is disproportionately affected because of its sheer population and number of open seats. The South also endures as a battleground for intense litigation over civil rights and liberties.
Federal judges are appointed for life and can become a president’s most enduring legacy. Judges’ effect on American life is clear, from the top at the Supreme Court, down to district court judges who decide which litigants even get to trial.
District courts are “the gateway to access to justice,” Nelson said.
District court judges have also shown their muscle in recent years by blocking executive branch policy with nationwide injunctions. Biden’s early initiatives, notably over immigration and student-debt relief, were first thwarted in lower courts by Republican-appointed judges.
During Biden’s first two years, the White House and Senate Democrats plainly prioritized judicial vacancies in blue states, where they could make swift and immediate progress.
Overall, Biden won confirmations for 97 appointments to the US district courts, appellate bench and Supreme Court over the past two years.
For the comparable two-year period, Trump, who set out to transform the federal courts the help of White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, had named 85 judges. They scouted out likeminded conservative ideologues and then accelerated appointments in the following years by openly encouraging judges to retire to generate more vacancies.
U.S. Supreme Court says Trump-era border policy to remain in effect while legal challenges play out
10:08
– Source:
CNN
Like other progressive leaders, Nelson praises the Biden focus on a more diverse bench. Yet she said the White House could step up the pace of nominations and the Senate can move faster on the nominees it has received.
“Nancy Abudu is an excellent example of someone whose nomination has been stalled,” Nelson said. Abudu, a litigation director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, would, if confirmed, be the first Black woman on the US appeals court for the 11th Circuit, covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida. She was designated for an open Georgia seat and endorsed by the state’s two senators, both of whom are Democrats.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which had been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans last year, deadlocked in May on Abudu’s nomination, and she had been awaiting a procedural vote by the full Senate that then would have allowed an up-or-down vote on confirmation. Biden has renominated her for the new Congress.
The question now is whether the White House will be able to ramp up negotiations with red-state senators and whether the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, will ease the practice of requiring district court nominees to have the backing of home-state senators.
By the terms of the Constitution, a president seeks the “advice and consent” of the Senate judicial appointments. Senators traditionally have influenced the selection of nominations to district and appellate courts in their home states, even to the point of blocking a disfavored candidate. In recent years, however, presidents have been able to wield more latitude for appeals court nominations.
The Judiciary Committee, however, will not hold a hearing on a district court nomination unless both home-state senators have signed off, in what’s referred to as the “blue slip” process. These blue slips of paper, as they are relayed to the committee, are intended to signify that a home-state senator has been consulted in the president’s choice. For Biden’s judicial selections, that process poses significant roadblocks.
Herwig, overseeing the judicial selection machinery, stresses that Biden is trying to generate consensus and says appointments for a Louisiana-based seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (Judge Dana Douglas) and Indiana-based seat on the 7th Circuit (Judge Doris Pryor), which arose from some dealings with GOP senators, “demonstrate that there are possibilities to work together.” The Senate confirmed Douglas and Pryor, both former US magistrate judges, in December.
A second seat on the powerful 5th Circuit appellate court, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, is open with no nominee. Judge Gregg Costa, based in Texas, had announced about a year ago that he would be resigning in August 2022.
While a good portion of the open seats can be chalked up to Democratic and Republican differences, another notable appellate vacancy – for a Maryland seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit – rests in Democratic hands.
Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, announced her retirement more than a year ago, and made it effective in September 2022. But Biden and Sen. Ben Cardin, Maryland’s senior senator, have been at odds over a successor, and the White House apparently does not want to more forward without Cardin’s backing. Herwig would not comment on that vacancy, and a Cardin spokeswoman said the senator was awaiting word from the White House on his suggested nominees.
In the meantime, the 4th Circuit, resolving appeals from Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia district courts, remains closely divided with seven Democratic and six Republican appointees.
Biden’s team signaled from the start its priority for the judiciary, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has been fixated on filling the bench. Klain worked with then-Sen. Biden on the Judiciary Committee and separately helped evaluate judicial candidates in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Herwig is a product of the Senate, too, previously serving two Democratic senators who sit on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar.
In the South, however, where voting rights and immigration disputes rage, change has been slow. Going forward, as Democrats gained one more seat in the November midterm elections toward their Senate majority, southern states are likely to become a critical arena for an administration determined to reshape the bench.
The Administrative Office of the US Courts reports that as of January 6, there were 82 vacancies on federal district and appellate courts. Biden has designated nominees for only about half of those vacancies. (There are a total 677 authorized judgeships at the trial-level US district courts, 179 on the US courts of appeals and nine on the Supreme Court.)
The South has a disproportionate share of those vacancies without nominations.
Of all 50 states, Florida and Louisiana have the most openings with no nominees pending, 4 apiece. Texas has three vacancies with no nominees pending, and Alabama two (one dating to mid-2020) with no nominees offered.
It is plain, given the number of vacancies and how long some have existed, that it will not be easy to fill them. And it is unclear whether the Democratic White House and Republican senators are truly talking to each other, or actually talking past each other.
Press secretaries for Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, deeply invested in the ideology of the bench, and regularly opposing Biden appointees, said the senators were working with the administration on judges.
In Louisiana, the communications director to Sen. John Kennedy, another member of the Judiciary Committee, said Kennedy’s office had no information to provide on possible appointments in Louisiana.
Ryann DuRant, press secretary to Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, said the White House reached out to Tuberville soon after he became a senator in 2021 to address the courts, but that since then, “there has been radio silence from the White House.”
“When the White House is ready to move forward on Alabama judicial nominees,” DuRant added in a statement, “Senator Tuberville welcomes the opportunity to discuss as a part of his role to provide advice and consent.”
McKinley Lewis, communications director for Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said the senator welcomed “an open, good faith dialogue with the White House to ensure any nominees to serve on Florida’s federal courts will respect the limited role of the judiciary and will not legislate from the bench.”
Herwig declined to detail any conservations yet stressed that there was no senator with whom her team would not work.
It’s unclear whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will feel increased pressure, from its Democratic ranks or from outside liberal interests, to amend the “blue slip” process.
Trump’s total appointments in four years reached 231, a figure that might be hard for Biden to match, if stalemates continue in Republican-dominated locales.
There are at least another 20 vacancies expected in 2023, based on information gathered by the Administrative Office of the US Courts. About a third of those are in southern locales.
At some point, judges weighing retirement, and equally concerned about whether Biden could successfully tap a replacement, may simply opt against stepping down during his remaining presidency.
In the Trump years, his GOP allies openly encouraged judges thinking about retirement to just do it. It was a sign of how vigorously Republican leaders wanted to shape the courts.
Speaking specifically of Supreme Court justices, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a 2018 radio interview, “If you’re thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday.”
As President Joe Biden’s top advisers circulated at White House holiday parties and held quiet briefings for key allies last month, a formulation of the same question came up again and again: How can I help with the campaign?
It was a consistent, if informal, query from donors, operatives, activists and celebrities alike, one Biden adviser recalled. It was also a clear shift that only served to bolster the view inside the West Wing that, after a year defined by intra-party questions about just about everything Biden did, the party has coalesced around one final White House run.
Officially, there isn’t a campaign yet. And Biden has yet to personally interview any candidates for top roles. But as he nears a final decision on running for reelection, Biden has given every indication to those around him he is preparing to launch another bid for president.
A tight circle of Biden’s closest advisers have been working for months to build a campaign apparatus to be ready for his decision, and they have started to eye next month for a potential announcement.
They have consulted with top officials in battleground states on lessons learned from the midterms to build a strategy for 2024.
They are also methodically starting to rollout a message that emphasizes Biden’s accomplishments while allowing Republicans’ intra-party feuding to speak for itself. The central tenets of that message have shown up in Biden’s post-midterm election travel around the country – an itinerary that included visits to Arizona and Michigan and will put Biden in Georgia on January 15.
All three were critical to Biden’s path to victory in 2020 and will be again should he run in 2024. All three remain hotly contested battleground states.
“In time,” Biden said this week after a reporter asked when he would announce his reelection bid.
For the president, the decision to run again combines questions of duty, pride, family and health. Already the oldest president in history, Biden would be 86 at the end of potential second term. His team is keenly aware that Biden’s age – specifically the public perception tied to it – is one of his biggest liabilities. It remains the reason many Democratic voters say in polls he should not seek another term.
But to many on his team the decision appears all but made, even as Biden was set to consult with members of his family over his winter vacation in the US Virgin Islands about mounting a reelection bid. Aides said the president spent the week on St. Croix in high spirits, golfing with his grandson and relaxing in the sun on a secluded and private beach.
In conversations with CNN, close Biden allies, administration officials and members of Congress said it is nearly impossible to find anyone in the president’s world these days who believes anything other than the fact that the president will seek a second term.
“We all operate under the assumption he’s running,” said one senior administration official.
“The guy is running,” said a Democratic lawmaker in close touch with the West Wing.
“We all know: He’s running,” was how another top official in the administration put it. “All systems go.”
CNN Exclusive: Pelosi and Schumer say Biden should run for re-election in 2024
Biden said the day after the November midterms that he “intended” to run again, barring any unforeseen episode. And he and his family have signaled to others – including in early December to the visiting French President Emmanuel Macron – that they are preparing for a run.
Biden’s reluctance to definitively announce his intentions is in part driven by a desire to avoid triggering compliance with candidate election laws.
Advisers, however, note that when Biden says he’s a “great respecter of fate,” it’s less of a dodge than it would appear.
“When you’ve been through what he’s been through the last five decades, personally and politically, that’s not a BS answer,” said one person with long-standing close ties to Biden, citing the family tragedies that play a central role in the president’s worldview. “But nobody is more cognizant of the things that are out of your control.”
That said, the person noted, “The way things have aligned certainly drives a view that his theory of the case has been on the mark.”
Senior White House aides were buoyed by a notable shift at the end of last year. The core of Biden’s agenda had been signed into law, laying out a road map for tangible accomplishments to highlight in the months ahead even as a new House Republican majority was set to freeze broader White House legislative ambitions.
Predictions of an all but certain political demise appeared greatly exaggerated, but even some Democratic reservations remain – albeit in a significantly less public form.
“A lot of things went right at the right time to end the year the way we did,” one House Democrat said. “I’m behind him, but my concern is that they’re overreading just how responsible they are for what came together.”
Still, the results of the midterm election have marked a notable turning point – if not in Biden’s actual decision-making process, which only a handful of individuals close to the president are genuinely privy to, then in the widespread perception around whether Biden intends to seek a second term.
“There was a feeling that our folks could finally exhale,” one person familiar with the dynamics told CNN. “We laid out our plans and our theory of the case and it wasn’t that they didn’t believe it in, they just didn’t think it would carry the day politically. Well, now we have evidence it did just that.”
The evidence advisers point to includes a clear-cut record of consequential legislative success and an economy they believe has transitioned from a period of historically rapid recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic to a level of consistent durability. They believe that consistency comes as there are concrete signs the soaring inflation that has plagued his second year in office has started to ebb.
That sense of vindication was only deepened, some said, by the long-running sense among Biden’s closest allies that he has consistently been underestimated – including in the last presidential election.
“Especially after the midterms,” a senior administration official said, the broadly held belief about Biden’s political future solidified into: “Of course he’s running.”
Tapper questions Biden about his age ahead of potential 2024 bid
Earlier this year, some Biden advisers privately hoped for a decision and announcement by the middle of January, believing it was important to signal Biden’s intentions to fellow Democrats – including those who foster their own presidential aspirations.
But in the nearly two months since November’s midterms, Biden has left little question as to his plans, both in public and in private conversations, and nearly every Democrat seen as a possible contender has said they would hold off running if Biden gets in the race.
Aides have also kept a close eye on the lackadaisical launch of former President Donald Trump’s third run for the presidency, with a sense that it underscores there is no overarching need to rush out with a decision.
Biden’s advisers have kept a close eye on other likely top-tier Republican candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as the Democratic National Committee has continued its extensive efforts to compile research on potential challengers.
Yet there is a view that those Republicans are certain to spend the next year trending sharply right in order to compete in the GOP primary – something that will give Democrats ample areas of contrast, or attack, against whoever emerges in a general election.
While Biden recently said that he hopes to announce his decision early in the new year, many who know him well are skeptical that the president will meet that aspirational timeline. They point to the many self-imposed deadlines he has blown past before – from major policy announcements to his deliberations over whether to run for president in the 2020 election.
“No way,” said a top administration official about the prospects of Biden sharing his official decision in the first month of 2023. “Joe Biden likes to stretch things out.”
Biden’s team has pointed to former President Barack Obama’s reelection announcement in April 2011 as a guidepost, though expect Biden to make his announcement earlier than that – potentially by the end of February.
Much like the decision timeline, the nascent campaign infrastructure – and the key players that drive its operations – will reflect Biden. As one person who has worked with Biden on several campaigns put it: “The president will drive this and whatever we do will be because it’s what he thinks is the right path – no matter what talking heads or outside operatives say.”
That idea also serves as the driver behind a campaign infrastructure that has to some degree been built out on a steady basis since before Biden even set foot in the Oval Office.
Immediately after the 2020 election, Biden directed his campaign to turn over its assets to the Democratic National Committee, from the grassroots fundraising infrastructure to the distributed organizing program. The move helped drive roughly $90 million in state and electoral programs in the lead up to the midterms – nearly triple the amount of the 2018 midterm cycle.
Overall, the DNC raised $292 million through September 2022, a record for the committee, and Biden’s 2020 campaign infrastructure drove $155 million in grassroots fundraising.
The fundraising is critical, Democratic officials said, but the roots of any reelection campaign lie in decisions that built out state-level infrastructure months earlier than any prior cycle while overarching data operations were centralized and constantly refreshed at the same time.
The key states targeted for the new investments were all critical battlegrounds in the midterm elections. But in the words of one Democratic official, “it doesn’t take a political genius to overlay those battlegrounds with the Biden 2020 map.”
The states include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All but one of those states – North Carolina – was in the win column for Biden in 2020 and all will be central to any pathway should he choose to run in 2024.
When Biden is ready to make his announcement, the DNC infrastructure that was always quietly viewed as the core infrastructure of a reelection campaign will be ready to go.
It’s a dramatically different moment from the one Biden faced as he closed in on his decision in 2019 for a campaign that largely started from scratch and at various points faced financial, infrastructure and organizational issues.
This time around, Biden’s operation will “have the benefit of turning things on whenever we want them, as fast as we want them,” one adviser said.
Axelrod on 2024 primaries: If you’re thinking of challenging Biden, ‘forget about it’
For Biden, however, the message has always been the most important piece of the equation – and it’s already clear officials have a good sense of what it will be based on the work of Biden’s first two years.
Much of that work flows directly from past campaign promises or carry a through-line from Biden’s long-held views about both politics and policy. But advisers note, it will also making clear that there is vital work still to be done.
Top White House advisers Mike Donilon and Bruce Reed, both longtime Biden aides, have already begun work on the annual State of the Union address, which is viewed internally in part as a springboard for the president’s reelection message.
first speech as House speaker, McCarthy told his colleagues, “Now the hard work begins.” He also said: “As speaker of the House, my ultimate responsibility is not to my party, my conference, or even our Congress. My responsibility, our responsibility, is to our country.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
points at McCarthy after McCarthy confronted him over his “present” vote on the 14th ballot Friday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”2000″ width=”3000″/>
motion to adjourn on Thursday evening. The House voted to adjourn until noon on Friday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
Cheryl Johnson receives a standing ovation in the House chamber on Thursday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
Perry said he needed more changes before he could vote for McCarthy.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
He told CNN Thursday that the vote for speakership can end in two ways: “Either Kevin McCarthy withdraws from the race, or we construct a straitjacket that he is unable to evade.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
made a plea for unity in his nomination speech, saying, the “issues that divide us today are much less severe that they were in 1856; in fact, there’s far more that unite us, than divide us, regardless of our political party of ideology.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
House of Representatives members should be sworn in — even if a speaker is not chosen yet — so their families can witness the moment and not have to wait around the Capitol all day.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
told Gosar that there was no plan to do that. Last year, the House voted to censure Gosar and remove him from committees after he photoshopped an anime video to social media showing him appearing to kill Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”2000″ width=”3000″/>
The embattled New York Republican faces a federal probe into his finances and mounting scrutiny and condemnation over lies about his biography. ” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
In pictures: McCarthy elected speaker after historic stalemate
At the end of last year, key Democratic allies were brought into the White House for briefings about Biden’s messaging strategy in 2023, with a heavy emphasis on elements of his record that will start to take hold in the coming months.
Biden himself sought to emphasize the fruits of his legislative accomplishments during his first Cabinet meeting of the year on Thursday.
“We need to focus on implementing some of the big laws that we actually passed so the American people can feel what we’ve done,” Biden said.
“After a rough few years, we’re seeing some real bright spots I believe across our entire nation. I think we’re making some real progress,” he added.
Biden’s message – focused on bipartisanship and the accomplishments from his first two years in office – provides an intentional contrast with Republicans, who spent their first week in control of the House consumed by intraparty warfare over the normally smooth process of formalizing who will be speaker of the House.
White House officials intentionally stayed silent on the battle, content to let the chaos on the House floor speak for itself as Biden stuck to a schedule focused on legislative accomplishments and priorities for the year ahead.
The GOP infighting is only expected to worsen as presidential hopefuls enter a primary contest currently dominated by Trump, who is currently the only declared candidate in the race.
Still, advisers acknowledge the road, if Biden gives an official go-ahead will be both uneven and exceedingly long in the 22 months before votes are counted.
But the work to design and put into place the roadmap for that period has been quietly underway for months and has accelerating in the wake of a midterm election that provided reams of new information about the path ahead.
Biden’s inner circle remains small, as does the number of people fully engaged in the process, even as Democratic officials and top-tier campaign hands have received calls at various points of the last several weeks.
The 2020 campaign brain trust remains largely intact inside the White House and makes up the core of most critical voices for Biden, with campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon serving as deputy White House chief of staff and continuing to run point on his political operation.
Donilon and Reed serve as two of Biden’s closest White House advisers and Steve Ricchetti, another long-time Biden world mainstay, as counselor to the president. Anita Dunn, senior adviser to Biden, is now in her second stint inside Biden’s West Wing and Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, remain two of the most trusted voices in Biden’s orbit.
In preparation for a run, Biden’s team has delved into analysis and polling from last year’s midterm races, hoping to discern trends and identify weak points for the coming presidential race. They have sought to ensure voter and data files are completely updated and ready for next year, and are speaking to campaign managers, key digital staffers and field organizers to discuss practices that worked.
For now, the biggest focus of Biden’s team is trying to map out new ways to reach voters, a process that’s been underway for more than a year amid historic changes to how Americans vote. Discussions led by Rob Flaherty, currently serving at the White House as director of digital strategy, have sought to home in on how to create high-quality voter engagement in new ways, utilizing the experiences of successful Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Advisers don’t view the process as one that will be complete by the time Biden announces his decision. They instead expect to spend the coming year testing out various ways to target audiences and mobilize supporters.
It’s an approach that dovetails with the overarching view of the year ahead: a steady, methodical and intensive process that builds toward 2024 – one that got its first run in Biden’s first major event this year.
Biden traveled to Covington, Kentucky, last week to highlight nearly $2 billion that had been secured to repair a bridge that for decades had served as an intractable problem. Politicians from both parties had pledged to get the money to fix the Brent Spence Bridge – including Biden’s predecessor, who had made the pledge “several times,” one official was pleased to point out – but Biden was the one who could say he finally delivered.
As House Republicans continued their descent into full scale intra-party warfare over their next leader, Biden was standing on stage with a bipartisan group of lawmakers and governors touting the bipartisan win.
Among them was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an arch nemesis of Democrats who Biden heaped praise on for his help in getting the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law across the finish line, despite their clear and extensive differences.
McConnell, for his part, called it a “legislative miracle.”
“I wanted to start off the new year at this historic project here in Ohio and Kentucky with a bipartisan group of officials because I believe it sends an important message to the entire country,” Biden said in his remarks. “We can work together. We can get things done. We can move the nation forward.”
Biden’s message wasn’t lost on some watching in Washington.
“Tough to argue with the idea, especially with McConnell by your side,” one Republican campaign official said, even as it was made clear he opposed Biden. “It’s almost like, if you listen closely, you just might be hearing a central reelection campaign message.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur becomes the longest-serving woman in Congress this week after winning her first competitive race in decades. But she sees her work in Washington as far from over.
“I operate in a different way than many of my colleagues simply because of what I have lived,” said the Ohio Democrat, who was the first in her family to graduate from college and represents the kind of Rust Belt community slipping away from her party.
“So why do I stay? It isn’t just to get a title that she stayed the longest. But to use every ounce of strength I have to try to hammer this message: You’re leaving us out. You’re not seeing us.”
First elected in 1982, Kaptur became the longest-serving woman in the US House of Representatives in 2018. But now she’s breaking the record of former Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a fellow Democrat who retired at the end of 2016 after 40 years in Congress. Throughout that time, Kaptur has urged her party – especially leadership, which has often been dominated by lawmakers from the coasts – to wake up to the plight of “industrial and agricultural America,” not only for the survival of the party, but also for democracy.
In an interview with CNN late last year, Kaptur recalled approaching a “very high-ranking member of the House” and warning that the federal government needed to invest in the middle of the country. “We are going to have political unrest. I even used a stronger word. I said even perhaps fascism,” she said.
That was before the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Kaptur won a 21st term in November in a district that was redrawn from heavily Democrat to more Republican, defeating an election denier who was at the Capitol on January 6.
J.R. Majewski has said he went to protest peacefully and left when “it got ugly,” but the House GOP’s campaign arm eventually cut off spending for him in the district after revelations about him misrepresenting his military record. Kaptur, although she faced criticism from some constituents that she’d been in Washington too long, won by 13 points.
“I view myself like the Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol. It is a woman and she looks east to the rising sun,” said Kaptur, who counts among her proudest achievements the 17-year struggle for the construction of the World War II memorial. It was one of her constituents, a letter carrier from the village of Berkey, who pushed her to introduce legislation for it.
Kaptur left a doctorate program at MIT to run for Congress, having already worked for President Jimmy Carter as a domestic policy adviser. She was one of just 24 women in Congress when she arrived. Today there are 149.
“So that is really consequential progress – in one generation,” Kaptur said of the record number of women serving this year. She wrote a book in 1996 about women in Congress in the 20th century, joking that she’s been too busy to update it.
But having more women in Congress is less important to Kaptur than where the women are from and the kinds of communities they represent.
“As a woman, let me just say, if you come from the part of America where I do – and I don’t just mean geographically, but I mean economically – we still don’t have a majority.”
“What’s the difference between a very rich woman and man in Congress?” asked Kaptur, who lives in the same Toledo house she grew up in. “People like us, we’re there. We’re there. We are radishes in a salad. … But we’re important voices because what we have experienced enlightens the dialogue.”
She fought for years to get a spot on the House Appropriations Committee – eventually going up against Nancy Pelosi. “I was so offended,” Kaptur said, casting it as the “fight of a hardscrabble working-class person” against a former head of the Democratic Party of California.
Kaptur has occasionally been at odds with Pelosi in leadership races – even briefly challenging her for party leader in 2002 – although the two women have recently praised and supported each other. Kaptur’s voting record on abortion has also evolved to be more in line with the national party.
When the Ohio Democrat got to the Appropriations Committee in the early 1990s, she was one of only three women. Democratic then-Rep. Lindy Boggs of Louisiana had to tell her to stand up when addressing the panel.
She’s unsuccessfully sought to lead the committee – losing out to women from more coastal states. But in 2019, she became the first woman to chair the subcommittee on energy and water development and her bill to create the Great Lakes Authority – a federal regional commission to address environmental and economic issues – recently passed as part of the omnibus spending package.
Still, she said, it can be hard to be heard.
This Capitol Hill duo has worked on family issues for nearly 30 years
“When you’re not in leadership, you don’t have a seat at the table – maybe you have your subcommittee or your committee, something like that – but it almost is impenetrable,” she said of the institution. “And the American people know it. They feel it and that’s why they’re becoming radical in their political expressions.”
But she credits President Joe Biden for visiting Lorain, a city in Northeast Ohio, last year. “That is unheard of. Joe Biden is trying. He’s in a party that can’t see places like Lorain and Cleveland and Toledo.”
She laments the defeat of Democrat Tim Ryan, whom she backed in last year’s Ohio Senate race, and blames the national party for long ignoring disaffected voters who ultimately backed the Republican nominee.
“So my struggle is unending. And I hope God gives me the years, maybe I can pound some of this sense into the institution, but I don’t know,” Kaptur said.
And then, with a laugh, later added, “I gotta stay as long as Mitch McConnell.”
Watch “Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?” on CNN at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, January 8.
CNN
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The evolution of Rudy Giuliani is an epic tale. A celebrated crime fighter who brought down mafia bosses and put Wall Street crooks behind bars, he traded on trust and integrity to prove Republicans could still get elected as mayors of big cities.
His empathy and leadership on 9/11 in New York City made him a global figure and a bona fide hero.
How that man, who used to get standing ovations whenever he entered a room, morphed into former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory lackey peddling lies about the 2020 election is the subject of the new CNN Original Series, “Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?”
The images of Giuliani’s early success paired with his later disgrace are striking and sad.
I reached out to one key voice in the series, CNN political analyst John Avlon, who was Giuliani’s chief speech writer during his second term as mayor, including on 9/11, and later worked for Giuliani’s presidential campaign.
Excerpts of our conversation about Avlon’s perceptions of the series and what happened to his old boss are below.
WOLF: The Giuliani of today is at the fulcrum of so many of Trump’s problems. Giuliani’s dirt digging in Ukraine contributed to the first Trump impeachment. Giuliani helped enable the election denialism that led to the second Trump impeachment. How would you describe his place in Trump’s political history?
AVLON: I think that among some hard-core Trump true believers, Rudy will be scapegoated as the source of Trump’s multiple problems. I think that’s an attempt to evade Trump’s responsibility for the chaos he himself caused.
But you have got to hand it to him – Rudy is the first presidential lawyer whose actions contributed to not one, but two impeachments. That’s a special place in American history. And unfortunately, I think this tragic last chapter in his life will overwhelm the very positive, constructive role he played in different chapters of his life.
I don’t think it’ll ultimately eclipse 9/11 and his leadership on that day. But he lit his legacy on fire in service of Donald Trump and got nothing in return except disgrace, ignominy, (possible) disbarment and a gutting of his personal fortune.
WOLF:I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn about those earlier chapters. He’s this prosecutor who brought down mafia families and insider traders. He’s the mayor who cleaned up the city. How does that guy become the conspiracy theory pusher?
AVLON: That’s, to a large extent, what the documentary is about. I think it is important for people to remember he was a leading lawyer of his generation, with an objective record of success in terms of dismantling the mob and taking on Wall Street.
That alone would have made him a major figure in contemporary American politics. But then what he did as mayor was absolutely remarkable. George Will called it America’s most successful case of conservative governance.
I worked for him in City Hall in his second term as chief speechwriter, and if you just look at the data of what he did, it’s remarkable:
He cut murders by 68%, crime by 56%.
He turned a $2 billion deficit into a multibillion-dollar surplus.
He cut taxes for New Yorkers.
He improved the quality of life.
I think his policies ushered in an era of resurgence for urban America. In New York City, I think 20 years of Rudy and (Michael)Bloomberg together really helped turn around the city in fundamental ways.
The tragedy – and I use the term advisedly because it’s self-inflicted, but it is tragic – is that the guy who believed that the law is a search for the truth ended up trying to defend his client in the court of public opinion using the law in pursuit of a lie.
I think that he got caught in a right-wing echo chamber ecosystem, where he was totally invested in an alternate reality that was fundamentally hyperpartisan and therefore they couldn’t even conceive of losing fairly.
And so at the end of the day, they tried to overturn an election, overturn our democracy on the basis of a pretty self-evident lie with no evidence.
I’m not going to try to diagnose how he’s changed. But the filter in the judgment of the man I knew and was proud to work for is fundamentally off.
WOLF: The perception is that he has changed as a person, but there are these interesting moments in the documentary that presage the Rudy of today. We see a riot of police officers at City Hall in 1992 that is compared with the riot at the Capitol. In ’89, he suggested but did not pursue the idea that there had been fraudulent voting. Has he actually changed, or has he just been uncovered?
AVLON: Robert Caro has a great line about how power doesn’t corrupt, power reveals. I’m always more inclined to believe the adage that as people grow older, they get more so. There are moments, and the documentary makes a lot of them, to draw a narrative connection between the police riot and January 6th. The person I knew and worked for – those incidents did not define him on a day-to-day basis.
Character counts. One of the things for good or for ill about Rudy, and something that I learned on 9/11, is you don’t have to be perfect to be a hero. Rudy was not one of these politicians who pretended to be perfect.
He understood that he was a flawed human being and was actively interested in figuring out his flaws and what motivated him in certain low times. He was someone who thought philosophically about politics.
If you talked to him about his position on abortion, for example, he would, in an unpretentious way, start talking about St. Thomas Aquinas, the debate about when life begins.
He was also thekind of human who thought about becoming a priest and ended up becoming a prosecutor. But I think there has been a change in his judgment.
The Trump orbit tends to attract people who are not at their best in terms of stability. Rudy found attention and relevance at the expense of his legacy and reputation.
WOLF: It was instructive for me to revisit just how much of a national hero he was after 9/11. How do you think that specifically affected him? You saw it happen.
AVLON: First of all, there is a misperception that’s partly partisan nature that Rudy was deeply unpopular before 9/11. That is statistically not true.
That’s not to say he wasn’t controversial and divisive at times. What he would say is that when you’re turning around a ship at sea, you’ve got to throw your shoulder to the wheel.
9/11 was a classic case of the man meeting the moment. The New York Observer, which was often critical of Rudy, said that he distinguished himself almost overnight as New York’s greatest mayor.
He became seen as sort of a modern-day Churchill and that was because of his instinctive response to an unprecedented massive attack.
And it was also because of his empathy and his honesty. He was able to channel grief in a constructive direction. He was resolute. He said the number of people who died was more than any of us can bear, and he was an inspiration to a fundamentally shaken and horrified world.
And it was extraordinary. For months and years afterward, he would be greeted with standing ovations when he walked in the room.
I think it’s a little too simple to say that creates a presumption of that kind of reception wherever you go. But I think what it does is highlight how tragic the fall has been.
And if he had kept his credibility as sort of a centrist Republican senior statesman who was tough on the issues that a lot of people care about – law and order, fiscal discipline, etc., including on social issues – he could have played a major stabilizing force within the Republican Party.
He could have been somebody who parks and statues and streets would have been named after across the nation, because of his example of leadership on that day, which was the apotheosis of his career. That was a reflection of the true mettle and character.
WOLF: You talked about him being a Republican in a Democratic city. He wasn’t the only big city Republican mayor. Los Angeles had one at the time. Republicans put up John McCain for president in 2008. Mitt Romney tried to be severely conservative, but these days he’s just about as moderate as Republicans get. Do you think Republicans are interested in moving back into that middle ground and governing a big city as opposed to just using it as a foil for their national ambitions?
AVLON: It’s a great and important question. If you take the biggest possible step back at America’s historical political divisions, you’ll see that much bigger than Democrat / Republican or liberal / conservative is urban vs. rural.
We need urban Republicans and rural Democrats to help bridge divides. When there were progressive Republicans back in the day, particularly in the Northeast, and conservative Democrats, there were a ton of problems. But you could always find governing majorities within divided government. You could cobble together coalition.
The decline of urban Republicans and rural Democrats is enormously disruptive for the country in terms of further inflaming hyperpartisanship and polarization and the kind of distrust that already exists culturally kind of in our America.
Republicans should care about playing in urban areas, and Democrats should care a hell of a lot more about playing in rural areas in red states.
WOLF:We tend to think that it was proximity to Trump that radicalized Rudy, but there’s a riff in the documentary about Giuliani’s visceral reaction to the Barack Obama presidency, similar to how Trump reacted to Obama’s presidency, actually. I wondered how you felt about seeing that portion.
AVLON: After his presidential campaign,he becomes more and more sort of isolated in that bubble. That right-wing ecosystem. It’s a form of acculturation where the hyperpartisan environment becomes kind of assumed.
It’s the places you’re giving speeches. It’s the television networks you watch. You spend all your time with partisans. It isolates you from the act of responsibility of governing and uniting a very diverse city – even certainly he had challenges with that.
I think that his animus toward Hillary Clinton and the Clintons was one of the things that drove him to embrace Donald Trump late in the (2016) campaign.
By the way, he never endorsed (former New Jersey Gov.) Chris Christie or (former Florida Gov.) Jeb Bush, but he really was inclined to support either of them first, because they’re the kind of Republicans that he was.
After he made that comment about Obama, I believe it was a fundraiser for (then-Wisconsin Gov.)Scott Walker, he actually called me at home to explain himself. (Read CNN’s report from 2015, when Giuliani said he didn’t think Obama “loves America.”)
It was strange, because I think we just had our first son, and Margaret and I met working on his presidential campaign. (Avlon is married to the CNN political commentator and host of PBS’ “Firing Line,” Margaret Hoover). And he called me to, like, explain what he meant.
I thought it was revealing of the right-wing media he had been ingesting, and also that somewhere there was a degree of guilt that he felt the need to explain himself to me, who worked for him before, a long time ago.
Longtime Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow is calling it quits and will not stand for reelection in 2024.
At a minimum, her decision makes Democrats’ already difficult job of retaining Senate control in 2024 even harder. Senators caucusing with the party hold 23 of the 34 seats expected to be up for reelection. Seven of them represent states Trump won at least once. This includes Michigan.
Sen. Gary Peters – the last Democrat not named Stabenow to run for Senate in Michigan – won reelection by less than 2 points in 2020.
Stabenow likely would have made Democrats’ job easier had she opted to run again. After narrowly unseating Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham in 2000, she has won reelection by at least 5 points in three subsequent contests.
But Democrats now have a battle on the horizon in another state that flipped from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden four years later. Beyond Michigan, Democrats face a messy situation in Arizona with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema becoming an independent.
With 51 senators now caucusing with Democrats, losses in Arizona and Michigan alone could be enough to flip the chamber to Republicans.
Yet, Republicans’ ability to flip Michigan will be highly dependent on two important questions.
First, what type of party do GOP primary voters want?
And second, will Republicans in key Great Lakes battleground states continue to outperform national results if Trump isn’t on the ballot?
In 2022, we saw GOP primary voters across the map select nominees who ended up being rejected by the general election electorate. Republicans underperformed the partisan fundamentals in a number of key Senate races, allowing Democrats to maintain control of the chamber while narrowly losing the House.
There were several examples of this in Michigan last year. While there was no Senate race, the state held elections for key statewide offices, including governor, attorney general and secretary of state. The Republican candidates for these positions promoted false claims that Biden had not won the 2020 election legitimately.
The result was that none of them came close to winning any of these races. This was most evident in the gubernatorial contest, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer turned what should have been a close race against Republican Tudor Dixon into a double-digit blowout.
If Republicans are going to want to compete in Michigan in 2024 – or any swing-state Senate races in two years – primary voters will likely need to choose more mainstream candidates than they did in 2022.
Of course, it won’t just be about individual candidates. It will be about regional trends as well.
One of the biggest electoral changes in the past decade has been the Republican breakthrough in Great Lakes states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They went from voting to the left of the nation in the 2012 presidential election to voting to the nation’s right in 2016 and 2020. This was in large part because of Trump’s appeal to White voters without a college degree.
But Trump may not be on the ballot in 2024, and it’s unclear whether the pro-Republican trend in these Great Lakes states will continue without him.
Look at what happened last year. Michigan voted to the left of the nation in US House races. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted basically in line with the nation, once you account for uncontested races.
Indeed, it would not be surprising to see a shift in how states vote relative to the nation if Trump is out of the picture. This has happened every eight years in recent cycles (e.g., 1976, 1984, 1992, 2000, 2008 and 2016).
And that would make Democrats less vulnerable in Michigan than you might think, even without Stabenow as their nominee. Keep in mind that Democrats haven’t lost a Senate race in the Wolverine State since 1994.
A return to the pre-Trump era in Michigan and other key Great Lakes states may also mean that the advantage Republicans have held in the Electoral College relative to the popular vote in the two most recent presidential elections may not materialize in 2024.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow will not seek reelection in 2024, the longtime Michigan Democrat said Thursday, opening up a Senate seat in a key swing state.
“Inspired by a new generation of leaders, I have decided to pass the torch in the U.S. Senate. I am announcing today that I will not seek re-election and will leave the U.S. Senate at the end of my term on January 3, 2025,” Stabenow, 72, said in a statement.
Stabenow’s decision comes just months after Democrats held on to control of the Senate in the midterm elections. Senate Democrats were already facing a tough map in 2024, but Stabenow’s decision to retire puts another seat in a crucial swing state in play.
Stabenow, who previously served in the Michigan state House and state Senate, first won election to Congress in 1996, winning a swing seat in Central Michigan. After two terms in the House, she won election to the Senate in 2000, unseating Republican incumbent Spencer Abraham. In the Senate, she rose to become the current No. 3 Democrat in the chamber as chair of her caucus’s Policy and Communications Committee. She also currently chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee.
“No one embodies the true Michigan spirit more than Debbie Stabenow,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. “From the state legislature to the House of Representatives, and for the last two decades in the United States Senate, Debbie has made a difference for Michiganders every step along the way.”
Democrats are defending 23 of the 34 Senate seats up for reelection next year, including three seats in states that backed former President Donald Trump by at least 8 points in 2020: West Virginia, Montana and Ohio.
Besides Michigan, the party is also defending seats in other battleground states such as Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the wake of Stabenow’s announcement, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin is closely looking at running for Senate, a source close to the congresswoman’s team told CNN.
Other potential candidates for the seat include Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga and Rep.-elect John James and Democratic Reps. Dan Kildee and Debbie Dingell and Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who drew national attention last year in a floor speech pushing back against anti-LGBTQ attacks from a Republican colleague. James lost a closer-than-expected race to Stabenow in 2018 and then narrowly lost a bid for the state’s other Senate seat in 2020, before winning election to the House in November from a swing seat north of Detroit.
Two high-profile Democrats took their names out of contention Thursday for Stabenow’s seat.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement to CNN that he is “fully focused” on his current role and “not seeking any other job.”
The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, moved last year to Michigan, where the parents of his husband, Chasten, live.
A spokesperson for Senate Democrats’ campaign arm expressed confidence Thursday in holding Stabenow’s seat.
“In 2022, Michigan Democrats won resounding statewide victories, and we are confident Democrats will hold this Senate seat in 2024,” David Bergstein of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said in a statement.
Mike Berg, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that the committee is going to “aggressively target this seat in 2024.”
“Senate Democrats don’t even have a campaign chair yet and they are already dealing with a major retirement,” he said in a statement.
This story has been updated with additional information.
The 118th Congress, being sworn in Tuesday, will eclipse several records set by the outgoing Congress.
It features a record-setting number of women, 149 – expanding female representation by just two members above the record set by the 117th Congress. Overall, women of color will also break a record for their representation this year, with 58 serving, and within the House alone, there will be a record number of both Latinas and Black women.
The new Congress also boasts the House’s first Gen-Z lawmaker and the longest-serving woman in congressional history.
Some newcomers, Republicans and Democrats alike, also achieved historic firsts in their own states, ushering a diverse group into a politically split Washington.
Here’s a look at the lawmakers, some new and some returning, who are making history in each chamber during this session of Congress.
Alabama: Republican Katie Britt is the first woman elected to the Senate from Alabama, winning an open seat vacated by her onetime boss, GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, who held the seat for nearly four decades.
Alabama’s two previous female senators both were appointed to fill vacancies.
California: Democrat Alex Padilla will be the first elected Latino senator from California, winning a special election for the remainder of Vice President Kamala Harris’ term as well as an election for a full six-year term. Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrant parents, was appointed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to the seat Harris vacated when she became vice president.
Oklahoma: Republican Markwayne Mullin will be the first Native American senator from Oklahoma in almost 100 years, winning the special election to succeed GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe, who is resigning. Mullin, a member of the Cherokee Nation, represented the state’s 2nd Congressional District in the last Congress. Democrat Robert Owen, also a member of the Cherokee Nation, represented Oklahoma in the Senate from 1907 to 1925.
AZ-06: Juan Ciscomani will be the first Latino Republican elected to Congress from Arizona. Ciscomani, who was born in Mexico and immigrated to the US with his family as a child, previously worked at the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and was a senior adviser to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
CA-42: Democrat Robert Garcia will be the first out LGBTQ immigrant elected to Congress. Garcia, who immigrated from Lima, Peru, in the early 1980s at the age of 5, has been the mayor of Long Beach.
CO-08: Democrat Yadira Caraveo will be the first Latina elected to Congress from Colorado. Caraveo, a state representative and the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents, defeated Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer to win the seat located north of Denver.
FL-10: Democrat Maxwell Frost will be the first Gen-Z member of Congress after winning the open seat for Florida’s 10th Congressional District.
The 25-year-old representative-elect told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on November 9 that when President Joe Biden called to congratulate him, the president recalled being too young to be sworn in as a senator when he was first elected at age 29.
“He asked me if it was the same situation. I said, ‘No, Mr. President, you had me beat on that. I’m already old enough to be sworn in on January 3.’ So, it was great to talk with him. You know, he was elected at a very young age, too, so he understands that experience,” Frost said on “CNN This Morning.”
IL-03: Democrat Delia Ramirez will be the first Latina elected to Congress from Illinois. Ramirez, who served as a Chicago-area state representative and is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, was also the first Guatemalan American to serve in the Illinois General Assembly.
IL-17: Democrat Eric Sorensen will be the first out gay person elected to Congress from Illinois. Sorensen, a former Rockford and Quad Cities meteorologist, defeated Republican Esther Joy King in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos.
MI-10: Republican John James of Michigan will be the first Black Republican elected to Congress from Michigan, winning the open-seat race for the redrawn 10th Congressional District in the Detroit suburbs.
MI-13: Democrat Shri Thanedar will be the first Indian American elected to Congress from Michigan. Thaneder, who immigrated to the US from India, was elected to the Michigan House in 2020 and unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018.
NY-03: Republican George Santos won the first House election between two out gay candidates – in New York’s 3rd Congressional District. Santos, the son of Brazilian immigrants, defeated Democrat Robert Zimmerman for the Long Island-based seat.
Santos is entering the House under intense scrutiny after admitting to lying about key pieces of his background while state and federal prosecutors look into his finances and fellow lawmakers voice their outrage over his resume fabrications.
OH-09: Democrat Marcy Kaptur will become the longest-serving woman in Congress when she’s sworn in to represent the state’s 9th Congressional District for her 21st term. Kaptur, who was first elected in 1982 and is currently the longest-serving woman in House history, will break the record set by Barbara Mikulski, who represented Maryland in the House and Senate for a combined 40 years.
OR-5 and 6: Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democrat Andrea Salinas will be the first two Latinos elected to Congress from Oregon.
Chavez-DeRemer, who is Mexican American, will represent the 5th Congressional District, succeeding Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader.
Salinas, whose father immigrated to the US from Mexico, won the state’s newly created 6th Congressional District.
PA-12: Democrat Summer Lee will be the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania. Lee, who had been a Pittsburgh-area state representative, will succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle.
VT: Democrat Becca Balint will be the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person elected to Congress from Vermont. She will succeed Rep. Peter Welch, who was elected to represent the state in the Senate.
WA-03: Marie Gluesenkamp Perez will be the first Latino Democrat elected to Congress from Washington state. Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto repair shop owner whose father immigrated to the US from Mexico, defeated Republican Joe Kent to succeed GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who finished third in the August top-two primary. Herrera Beutler was herself the first Hispanic member of Congress from Washington state.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, sworn in for a second term Sunday, called the sentencing last week of two men convicted of plotting to kidnap her “just,” while urging both parties to confront threats and violent rhetoric.
“Whether it is someone harassing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Congressman Fred Upton here in Michigan, or me, or our attorney general, or secretary of state, it’s unacceptable,” she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview the day she was sworn in. “But I do think it’s important that people on both sides of the aisle, who care more about our democracy than their political agenda, stand up and take it on.”
Thirteen people were charged in the kidnapping plot, with the group discussing sending a bomb to the governor. The co-leaders of the plot were sentenced last week to 16 years and nearly 20 years in federal prison, respectively, after prosecutors had sought a life sentence in both their cases.
Whitmer, who had dealt with an unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic and issued stay-at-home orders that made her a target, expressed concern over how the plot has been described, saying, “There’s a tendency to minimize some of these threats.”
“They weren’t planning to ransom me, they weren’t going to keep me, they were planning to assassinate me. And the plot has been covered as a kidnapping plot,” she said. “There was one person who showed up on, you know, on a Supreme Court justice’s lawn and turned himself in, and it was covered as an assassination attempt. And so I think that when you look at the facts of both of those, and you see how differently they’re covered, I do, you know, have concern about the language that we use, especially when women are a target as opposed to men.”
The Justice Department charged the man who was arrested near Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland with attempting or threatening to kidnap or murder a US judge.
Whitmer, first elected governor in 2018, said the threat against her had “changed how I assess going into situations” and “changed my concern for all the people around me.”
“I would be lying if I told you I was unfazed,” she said, adding, “I think it’s important to understand, I’m an ordinary person. I’ve got an extraordinary job and have served in extraordinary times. I’m a mom. I’m a daughter.”
After the challenges of the past few years, Whitmer said she’s “excited” about starting a new term.
“There was so much chaos, politically and in the environment, I didn’t know if I would, you know, get an opportunity to serve for four more years,” the Democratic governor said. “I never imagined I’d win by almost 11 points and come in with a whole new legislature.”
Whitmer sailed to a resounding victory in November, beating her Republican challenger Tudor Dixon 55% to 44%, while Democrats also won a majority in the Michigan legislature – giving them control of both chambers and the governorship for the first time in nearly four decades. Among her top priorities, Whitmer listed public education, economic development, protecting the Great Lakes and ensuring people have access to safe drinking water and high-speed internet. She also mentioned repealing the retirement tax that Republicans passed last legislature and getting a 1931 state law banning abortion “off the books.”
With her reelection in a pivotal swing state, Whitmer has furthered cemented her status as a national figure in the Democratic Party, but she has brushed off speculation about a 2024 White House bid while not completely closing the door to running for something else down the line.
“I think doing my job well is the best way that I can contribute to the national Democratic Party – is to be able to be someone that they can point to and say, ‘This is what happens when you elect Democrats,’” she said, reflecting on how her 2022 campaign “talked about abortion in the most personal terms” and how she thinks that contributed to Democrats’ success.
She anticipates President Joe Biden running for the White House again in 2024, telling CNN that he would have her “enthusiastic support” if he does.
“I do not have plans to run for anything other than to spend the next four years serving this state as governor with a majority Democratic legislature for the first time in a long time,” Whitmer said, while also noting that she felt similarly when she left the state legislature in 2015, only later to run for governor in 2018.
“I know enough about myself to know if there is something that needs to get done, and if there’s a role I can play, I will want to play it,” she said.
But regardless of whether she runs for something again or not, Whitmer said she “will stay engaged one way or another,” reflecting on what’s to come after the governor’s mansion. “Michigan will always play an outsized role in the national politics, so I look forward to making sure that our voices are impactful and Michigan gets what we need and we’ve got leaders who serve every person.”
Republicans’ take over of the House this week will usher in a two-year political era that threatens to bring governing showdowns and shutdowns as a GOP speaker and Democratic president try to wield power from opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The unprecedented possibility that former President Donald Trump, who’s already launched another bid for the White House, could face indictment could tear the nation further apart at a moment when American democracy remains under grave strain. The already stirring 2024 presidential campaign, meanwhile, will stir more political toxins as both parties sense the White House and control of Congress are up for grabs after the closely fought midterms.
Abroad, the war in Ukraine brings the constant, alarming possibility of spillover into a NATO-Russia conflict and will test the willingness of American taxpayers to keep sending billions of dollars to sustain foreigners’ dreams of freedom. As he leads the West in this crisis, President Joe Biden faces ever more overt challenges from rising superpower China and alarming advances in the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
If 2022 was a tumultuous and dangerous year, 2023 could be just as fraught.
Washington is bracing for a sharp shock. Since November, the big story has been about the red wave that didn’t arrive. But the reality of divided government will finally dawn this week. A House Republican majority, in which radical conservatives now have disproportionate influence, will take over one half of Capitol Hill. Republicans will fling investigations, obstruction and possible impeachments at the White House, designed to throttle Biden’s presidency and ruin his reelection hopes.
Ironically, voters who disdained Trump-style circus politics and election denialism will get more of it since the smaller-than-expected GOP majority means acolytes of the ex-president, like expected House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, will have significant sway. The new Republican-run House represents, in effect, a return to power of Trumpism in a powerful corner of Washington. If House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy wins his desperate struggle against his party’s hardliners to secure the speakership, he’ll be at constant risk of walking the plank after making multiple concessions to extreme right-wingers.
A weak speaker and a nihilistic pro-Trump faction in the wider GOP threaten to produce a series of spending showdowns with the White House – most dangerously over the need to raise the government’s borrowing authority by the middle of the year, which could throw the US into default if it’s not done.
As Democrats head into the minority under a new generation of leaders, government shutdowns are more likely than bipartisanship. The GOP is vowing to investigate the business ties of the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and the crisis at the southern border. The GOP could suffer, however, if voters think they overreached – a factor Biden will use as he eyes a second term.
In the Senate, Democrats are still celebrating the expansion of their tiny majority in the midterms. (After two years split at 50-50, the chamber is now 51-49 in their favor). Wasting no time in seeking to carve out a reputation among voters as a force for bipartisanship and effective governance, the president will travel to Kentucky this week. He’ll take part in an event also featuring Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to highlight the infrastructure package that passed with bipartisan support in 2021.
Attorney General Merrick Garland could shortly face one of the most fateful decisions in modern politics: whether to indict Trump over his attempt to steal the 2020 election and over his hoarding of classified documents.
A criminal prosecution of an ex-president and current presidential candidate by the administration that succeeded him would subject the country’s political and judicial institutions to more extreme strain than even Trump has yet managed. The ex-president has already claimed persecution over investigations he faces – and an early declaration of his 2024 campaign has given him the chance to frame them as politicized.
If Trump were indicted, the uproar could be so corrosive that it’s fair to ask whether such an action would be truly in the national interest – assuming special counsel Jack Smith assembles a case that would have a reasonable chance of success in court.
Yet if Trump did indeed break the law – and given the strength of the evidence of insurrection against him presented in the House January 6 committee’s criminal referrals – his case also creates an even more profound dilemma. A failure to prosecute him would set a precedent that puts ex-presidents above the law.
“If a president can incite an insurrection and not be held accountable, then really there’s no limit to what a president can do or can’t do,” outgoing Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the select committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
“If he’s not guilty of a crime, then I, frankly, fear for the future of his country because now every future president can say, ‘Hey, here’s the bar.’ And the bar is, do everything you can to stay in power.”
Like it or not, with his November announcement, Trump has pitched America into the next presidential campaign. But unusual doubts cloud his future after seven years dominating the Republican Party. His limp campaign launch, bleating over his 2020 election loss and the poor track record of his hand-picked election-denying candidates in the midterms have dented Trump’s aura.
Potential alternative figureheads for his populist, nationalist culture war politics, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are emerging who could test the ex-president’s bond with his adoring conservative base. Even as he fends off multiple investigations, Trump must urgently show he’s still the GOP top dog as more and more Republicans consider him a national liability.
Biden is edging closer to giving Americans a new piece of history – a reelection campaign from a president who is over 80. His success in staving off a Republican landslide in the midterms has quelled some anxiety among Democrats about a possible reelection run. And Biden’s strongest card is that he’s already beaten Trump once. Still, he wouldn’t be able to play that card if Trump fades and another potential GOP nominee emerges. DeSantis, for example, is roughly half the current president’s age.
As 2023 opens, a repeat White House duel between Trump and Biden – which polls show voters do not want – is the best bet. But shifting politics, the momentous events in the months to come and the vagaries of fate means there’s no guarantee this will be the case come the end of the year.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year showed how outside, global events can redefine a presidency. Biden’s leadership of the West against Moscow’s unprovoked aggression will be an impressive centerpiece of his legacy. But Russian President Vladimir Putin shows every sign of fighting on for years. Ukraine says it won’t stop until all his forces are driven out. So Biden’s capacity to stop the war from spilling over into a disastrous Russia-NATO clash will be constantly tested.
And who knows how long US and European voters will stomach high energy prices and sending billions of taxpayer cash to arm Ukraine if Western economies dip into recession this year.
Biden has his hands full elsewhere. An alarming airborne near miss between a Chinese jet and US military jet over the South China Sea over the holiday hints at how tensions in the region, especially over Taiwan, could trigger another superpower standoff. Biden also faces burgeoning nuclear crises with Iran and North Korea, which, along with Russia’s nuclear saber rattling, suggests the beginning of a dangerous new era of global conflict and risk.
Rarely has an economy been so hard to judge. In 2022, 40-year-high inflation and tumbling stock markets coincided with historically low unemployment rates, which created an odd simultaneous sensation of economic anxiety and wellbeing. The key question for 2023 will be whether the Federal Reserve’s harsh interest rate medicine – designed to bring down the cost of living – can bring about a soft landing without triggering a recession that many analysts believe is on the way.
Washington spending showdowns and potential government shutdowns could also pose new threats to growth. The economy will be outside any political leader’s capacity to control, but its state at the end of the year will play a vital role in an election that will define America, domestically and globally after 2024.
“My sense is people don’t think government will have the courage to take on the powerful and then be able to deliver,” Shapiro said in an interview with CNN. “So I think some people are like, ‘This guy really did take on the big guy, and he really did deliver something.’”
What he’s talking about is a wide record of six years as Pennsylvania attorney general. He didn’t just bemoan the opioid crisis but secured $3.25 billion for treatment and other services in the state. And he wasn’t just complaining about corruption but overseeing the arrests of more than 100 corrupt officials from both parties.
In a midterm year in which Democrats lost the House but still did better than expected, Shapiro – who will be sworn in January 17 – dominated every day of his race in a state that was key to both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidential wins.
Former President Barack Obama told Shapiro directly that he’s among the 2022 generation of Democrats who need to have a voice in the future of the party, according to people familiar with the conversation. Famed consultant James Carville called Shapiro’s campaign the best of 2022. He’s already being chattered about by many Democrats as perhaps the future first Jewish president.
As Democrats start planning for what’s next – what they stand for, instead of just what they stand against with Trumpism – even White House aides who now rave about Biden’s accomplishments being on par with Lyndon Johnson’s acknowledge that they’re still struggling to make many voters see the direct impact on their lives. Happy as they are about how well Democrats did in the midterms, they see most of that as a rejection of Republicans and Trumpism, with top Democrats telling CNN they know they have a different task in front of them as they head into preparations for an expected Biden reelection campaign and efforts to hold the Senate and win back the House in 2024.
Pollsters John Anzalone and Matt Hogan said in memo last month that while the party should be “understandably encouraged,” Democrats “should be careful not to interpret the results as evidence that voters liked the party more than pre-election polls suggested.”
From MAGA crowds to Bernie Sanders rallies in Pennsylvania and beyond, voters in interviews often express a common feeling that a small group is getting away with what regular Americans never could, and a cynicism that any politician is even trying to do anything to stop them.
Put Shapiro’s tight-rimmed glasses and studied Obama-style speaking rhythms next to Democrat John Fetterman’s Carhartt shorts, tattoos and bouncer chin beard and few would see the incoming governor rather than the already iconic Pennsylvania senator-elect as the one with populist appeal. Yet it was Shapiro, who grew up the son of a pediatrician in the Philadelphia suburbs and has been measuring each step on his path to Harrisburg since law school – and some around him say grade school – who got more votes in November.
Focus groups conducted by Shapiro’s campaign as he was preparing to launch last year had people saying he was “polished,” according to people familiar with the findings. Worried that could slip to “boring,” or just being written off as a career politician, aides packed his stump speeches full of more references to cases or parts of the $328 million in relief, restitution, penalties and other payments his office says he obtained over six years on the job.
When Shapiro talked about climate change, he talked about getting to affordable energy costs and about the fracking companies he sued as attorney general because the pollution was endangering Pennsylvanians’ health. When he talked about student loans, he talked about the $200 million in debt he got canceled by suing a big lender. He was just as likely to bring up the massive investigation his office did into decades of sexual abuse in Catholic dioceses across the state as he was a local construction company from which he recovered $21 million in stolen wages, knowing that either effort would give him credibility and appeal to voters who don’t think much about politics, or rarely think about voting for Democrats.
“They don’t want to hear you talk,” said a top Shapiro aide. “They want to see what you can do.”
He had a running start heading into his gubernatorial campaign: Since his election as attorney general in 2016, Shapiro and his team had made publicizing the work he was doing a central part of the strategy, from pressuring a huge state insurance company by having news conferences with women who’d been through breast cancer treatment, to mounting campaigns to have supporters write open letter op-eds to CEOs they were after, to setting up a hotline for church abuse victims to call in with their stories.
With Republicans all over the country stoking crime fears throughout the midterms, Shapiro would talk about the 8,200 drug dealers he’d locked up in his six years on the job. He’d then immediately follow up, saying that the opiates many of them were selling were part of a crisis “manufactured by greed” and how he’d also gone after those companies with the power of his office.
“Look at his model,” said Rep. Dwight Evans, a Democrat who represents much of Philadelphia. “What he says is, people deserve to be safe and feel safe. You got to have a way of showing outcomes. And he does that.”
Shapiro’s Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, raised only $7 million, had an account full of QAnon-friendly tweets, was seen in a picture dressed up in a Confederate uniform, held events where men claiming to be security blocked reporters from entering and paid consulting fees to the antisemitic website Gab. But in a swing state that Biden only narrowly won in 2020 – and had gone to Trump four years earlier – Shapiro’s eventual victory was far from a guarantee.
In reflective moments during the campaign, Shapiro would talk about the “heaviness” he felt while campaigning and about the way his wife would poke him in the chest or voters would grab him by the arm and tell him, “You have to win.” An observant Jew, whose campaign debated whether to feature a shot of a challah bread in an opening video in which he spoke about getting home every Friday night for dinner with his family (it ultimately did) and who often cited an old Jewish teaching that “no one is required to complete the task, nor are we allowed to refrain from it,” he said he felt the weight both politically and personally.
Voters ended up rejecting election-denying Republicans in nearly every competitive midterm race around the country. Shapiro, though, didn’t wax on about the abstract wonders of democracy or voting rights, but detailed the 43 challenges to the 2020 vote count that he defeated in court.
He went on offense, mocking Mastriano for talking a “good game” about freedom, then saying “real freedom” is about freedom of choice in abortion rights, freedom to not have banned books, freedom to not feel targeted by guns on the streets and freedom to have job opportunities.
He talked about the events of January 6, 2021, but only to say that Mastriano’s presence in the crowd outside the US Capitol ahead of rioters storming the building showed that he didn’t “respect” Pennsylvanians enough to care what they thought.
He never went more than a few words without drawing a direct line back to what he’d already accomplished.
Part of Shapiro’s standard routine is always insisting he doesn’t pay attention to national politics and doesn’t think much about what other Democrats beyond Pennsylvania are doing or saying. One of his favorite lines during the campaign was how his focus was on Washington County, just southwest of Pittsburgh, and not Washington, DC.
So when asked about other Democrats being wary of going after corporations over fears they’d be tagged as socialists, or about Biden’s only sporadic attacks on oil companies for profiting as gas prices were high, Shapiro pleaded ignorance – pointedly.
“I don’t have a frame of reference,” he said, “but I guess I am surprised they wouldn’t talk about it as well.”
The result for Shapiro: He set a record of winning the most votes ever for a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate. As his campaign has proudly pointed out, his win was so big that he could have gotten there even without a single vote from Philadelphia and its suburbs: In Erie County, which Biden won by 1 point in 2020, Shapiro won by 21 points; and in Washington County, which Biden lost by 22 points, Shapiro only lost by 2.
His coattails helped keep the Senate race tilted to Fetterman even when the candidate was sidelined by a stroke. He also helped his party hold three swing US House seats and narrowly win a majority in the state House of Representatives for the first time in more than a decade.
“He was able to represent everyday consumers against the big guys,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, the outgoing chair of the Democratic Governors Association and a former state attorney general himself. “People remember that, when you stood up on their behalf.”
As attorney general, Shapiro faced the corny political joke: “AG” really stands for “aspiring governor.” While many have made the jump, few have done it successfully.
Shapiro knows he’s going to have to adjust.
“When we were in the AG’s office, these cases would come to us,” said the Shapiro aide. “Now we’re in the position of, we drive the agenda.”
They’re still trying to sort out what exactly that the shift in mentality will mean.
“It’s hard to accuse me of not doing things,” Shapiro said. “I feel a responsibility to now be able to take what I did, that type of approach in the AG’s office and show that government can work.”
There’s only so far most Democrats can go in following the Shapiro model. Members of Congress can’t go to grand juries. A president can’t negotiate legal settlements.
But with Shapiro and fellow Democratic Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts winning their governor’s races, other Democratic attorneys general are gearing up for more.
Even in states with multiple competitive races, every Democratic attorney general was reelected in 2022, except in rapidly reddening Iowa, and the party picked up the office in the key swing state of Arizona.
Those and other state AGs are already moving individually and in small groups on more investigations they expect to soon go public in a big way, including more pharmaceutical inquiries, privacy and data protection, and online consumer fraud. Also now rising on the list of targets: cryptocurrency.
“It certainly works. It gets the attention of corporate America. They know they have to contend with us,” said Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who also co-chairs the Democratic Attorneys General Association and just won a second term back home. “And the voters appreciate it, and it’s recognized.”
The Federal Election Commission has levied a $30,000 fine on incoming Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and a private border wall organization he was once affiliated with due to campaign finance violations committed during his unsuccessful 2020 Senate bid.
In an agreement approved by the FEC last month, about a week after Kobach was elected, he admitted to illegally accepting an in-kind contribution from We Build the Wall, a Steve Bannon-linked group which ran a fundraising campaign to build a private border wall but became ensnarled in allegations of fraud.
CNN has reached out to attorneys for Kobach and We Build the Wall for comment.
In 2019, Kobach’s campaign rented We Build the Wall’s 295,000-person email list for just $2,000, a price significantly below the normal rate.
The campaign was also accused of additional campaign finance violations in connection with We Build the Wall, but the FEC, which is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans, either dismissed those allegations or was equally divided.
Kobach is an immigration hardliner and a longtime spreader of false election claims who served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019 and has close ties to former President Donald Trump.
Kobach was narrowly elected Kansas attorney general in November, defeating Democrat Chris Mann 51% to 49% in the reliably red state. His victory came after two consecutive defeats in recent election cycles – losing bids for the governorship in 2018 and for the GOP nomination for US Senate in 2020.
He previously served on We Build the Wall’s board and as the organization’s general counsel.
Two men have pleaded guilty in federal court, and another was convicted of defrauding donors in connection with We Build The Wall. Bannon and the organization itself are now facing charges in New York state. Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to state charges, had previously been indicted in federal court but was pardoned by then-President Trump at the end of his term.
President Joe Biden this week returns to St. Croix, one of his and first lady Jill Biden’s beloved vacation spots, seeking a final opportunity for rest before what is expected to be a contentious 2023 and reelection run.
As Biden unwinds in a familiar spot – the first couple have visited the US Virgin Islands for more than a dozen years, vacationing there approximately ten times since the mid-2000s – the work on his path forward intensifies back in a frigid Washington, DC. Advisers are already preparing the president’s annual State of the Union address, typically delivered in late January or early February, viewing the speech as an opportunity to lay down the stakes and themes that Biden could adopt on the campaign trail.
The first couple arrived in St. Croix on Tuesday, along with family members, a gathering of the tight-knit clan who, according to several people with knowledge of recent conversations who have spoken to CNN, have now pledged support for another White House run by Biden. Senior administration officials once viewed this week’s tropical escape as a crucial juncture that would play a major part in deciding his political future, and – while the president does still plan to mull with his family the pros and cons of mounting a reelection bid – people who have discussed the matter with him lately say the decision is essentially made.
CNN Exclusive: Pelosi and Schumer say Biden should run for re-election in 2024
Clues that Biden was expected in St. Croix were everywhere in the run-up to his arrival: the jumbo C-17 transport planes sitting among the puddle jumpers at the airport; temporary security checkpoints among the bougainvillea along the quiet coastal road; unusually high numbers of visitors from Washington.
Even for a popular tourist destination accustomed to a wave of winter travelers, this week’s presidential visit has maxed out the island’s resources. Rental cars were all taken, and hotels were at capacity, according to residents.
After the Bidens skipped the US Virgin Islands tradition the last two years, this trip may have some of the same vibes as one of their more recent vacations. In the early hours of 2019, when Biden was last contemplating a presidential bid, the couple were photographed taking a selfie at Point Udall in St. Croix on New Year’s Day, catching the first sunrise of the new year at the easternmost point under the American Flag, as the popular tourist spot is known.
A decision had been made. Several months later, Biden would announce his candidacy for the presidency.
In 2014, Joe and Jill Biden enjoyed their time on the island so much, they visited St. Croix twice – once to ring in the new year and again for a weekend in March, a quick getaway trip not on the then-vice president’s official schedule.
In 2015, the couple again passed the week after Christmas there, after deciding he would not run for the White House.
In 2016, Bidens spent the waning days of his vice presidency relaxing on St. Croix, ahead of Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House.
Biden’s loyalty to the US territory has been the most high-profile of any American politician in recent history. A sitting American president has not visited St. Croix since Harry S. Truman in 1948. Truman arrived by yacht – the USS Williamsburg – and was hosted at an estate owned by the manufacturer of Jeeps.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton visited neighboring St. Thomas, another of the US Virgin Islands, for his winter vacation, chartering a catamaran with his family and snorkeling with daughter Chelsea.
In a 2020 statement, Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said of Biden, “We consider him our hometown president.” Asked why the Bidens have picked St. Croix as their island getaway, Vanessa Valdivia, the first lady’s press secretary, told CNN, “Over the years, the president and first lady have frequently traveled to a warmer location the week after Christmas, going to the US Virgin Island several times.”
For the entirety of his presidency, Biden has skipped out when he can on weekends in Washington, DC, in favor of his longtime family home in Wilmington, Delaware, where residence staff and storied rooms aren’t a thing.
St. Croix, for the first couple, has provided that sort of intense privacy, plus the warmth and beach that the Bidens favor.
During their visits in the years after Biden served as vice president, when his security apparatus dwindled and normalcy found a return to their daily routine, the first couple could be spotted around the island on occasion with virtually no entourage, driving themselves along the flower-lined roads in a rental Toyota sedan.
The home they leased was modest – only a few bedrooms – and was available at other times of the year for other tourists on vacation rental websites.
Yet on Tuesday, law enforcement was busy in the same area making preparations for Biden’s visit, including setting up flood lights and popping up white tents to act as checkpoints along the roadside.
The Bidens are staying at the home of his friends Bill and Connie Neville in St. Croix, the White House says. The president and first lady have stayed at the home of the tech executive on previous visits to the island.
The first couple are “beach people,” said a family friend familiar with their vacation preferences. Others who know them well said there is little more they enjoy when relaxing than pitching an umbrella on the beach, tossing a towel onto the sand and closing their eyes under a warm sun.
Their Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, neighbors are now used to being screened by Secret Service agents during beach walks, the telltale signal the president and/or first lady have walked down from their oceanside vacation residence to the beach for a respite closer to the waves.
The first lady, in particular, finds peace in her books and soaking up the sun. This spring, staff for Jill Biden – on a solo, whirlwind, three-country visit to Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica – made sure to schedule private time for the first lady beside the pool at a resort out of Panama City, so she could lay out like dozens of other vacationers, steps from the waterside.
“They both prefer hot and sunny and humid to wet and snowy and cold,” said another close acquaintance of the Bidens.
For the first couple, a true respite involves privacy as well, not just sun and warmth. St. Croix has fit the checklist. Locals have spotted the couple in years past at the grocery store, going mostly unnoticed as they shopped for vacation provisions at Seaside Market and Deli. Joe Biden has played rounds of golf at the Buccaneer Resort, a par-70 course described as “challenging, yet very playable” on the property’s website.
They have attended mass at the white-steepled Holy Cross Catholic Church in the island’s main town Christiansted.
The break from Washington comes on the heels of a busy holiday season. Jill Biden – so tasked with dozens of White House celebrations, photo lines, family visits and general hosting duties that she had laryngitis for several days – is on her second week off from her teaching duties at Northern Virginia Community College.
For Joe Biden, the stakes of getting away are not just about rest and recuperation.
Barring unforeseen events or a sudden change of heart, Biden’s team is laying the groundwork for a reelection announcement in the coming months, putting to rest persistent speculation about whether the 80-year-old president would seek another term.
CNN has reported that Jill Biden is “all in” on the 2024 campaign despite previous concerns about the deep implications of what a second run might mean for her family and her husband. She has, as one White House official told CNN, “zero concerns” about Joe Biden’s schedule and stamina.
“This is, ultimately, a family decision,” Joe Biden said at a news conference last month. “I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it.”
Aside from the rigors of launching the final political campaign of his career, Biden will face a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, intent on stymieing many of his legislative ambitions. Republican leaders have also vowed to mount investigations into Biden’s administration and his family.
With his legislative prospects dampened, Biden plans to travel extensively in the new year promoting the accomplishments from his first two years in office. It will be an intense period that could ultimately include a rematch with his 2020 opponent, Trump – and one that will require the full backing of his wife of 45 years, along with the support of his extended family.
If there is a time to speak up on hesitations, either his own or from his offspring, it would be during this vacation.
Wayne Nichols, who leads Alexander Hamilton tours of St. Croix in the character of the founding father, recalled a 2019 encounter he had with Biden, with whom he engaged while the then-not-quite-presidential candidate was walking alone on the east end of the island.
At the time, Biden was also mulling a daunting campaign. After passing on a bid in 2016 following the death of his son, he was being encouraged by his family to mount a challenge to Trump.
Nichols said he stopped Biden to ask if he would run.
“My question to him was, ‘Well, you’re going to run?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m running now.’ And I thought, well, technically you’re walking,” Nichols recalled this week, wondering whether he might again cross paths with Biden.
Nichols came across Joe Biden a second time that week in 2019, while out for a walk on the island – Joe Biden up front, Jill Biden walking a few paces behind – when someone in the group told Jill Biden that her husband ought to run for president.
“‘When you get up there, let him know that,’” Nichols said she responded.
As the Bidens make similar deliberations this year, they won’t be getting around in a rented Toyota and their stops on the island will go less unnoticed.
“I have a feeling this is the place,” Nichols said of Biden often choosing St. Croix as his spot to find stillness for a consequential decision about the future. “Chilling there by the water with the nice weather. They get to talk about it. And I believe he’ll run again, only because I don’t know that he thinks there’s any alternative.”
President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. It was clear, he later told advisers, just how much work remained to convince them of the durability of that commitment.
Eighteen months after those meetings in Europe, Biden departed Washington on Tuesday for his year-end vacation, riding the momentum of historic legislative success and the defiance of political gravity that has reshaped the expectations for the critical months – and decisions – ahead. It’s a moment that Biden never seemed to doubt would come, even as his party – and some inside the White House – questioned or outright urged a change in approach to address political and economic headwinds driven primarily by soaring inflation that threatened to drag down his presidency.
During those 2021 meetings in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of allies genuinely shaken by the January 6 insurrection and the events that led to it. But the president tried to reassure them that the visceral divides that culminated in the violence that day would heal and the bleak moment in US politics would pass.
He was met with polite appreciation from his foreign counterparts. But the deep skepticism served only to underscore his commitment to a belief that sat at the heart of a pledge that was often pilloried during the campaign as naïve. The only real reassurance, Biden would note, was delivering on what he’d promised.
“That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure,” Biden told reporters in Brussels shortly before he boarded Air Force One for a flight to Switzerland and a sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.”
The moment provided a brief window into the president’s high-stakes theory of the case – one that appeared exceedingly aspirational given his party’s narrow congressional majorities and staunch GOP opposition. But even as this year began, Biden and his team were grasping to break free of a series of crises and the cornerstone of his agenda – a sweeping bill that included numerous administration priorities – appeared in shambles.
Biden’s anticipated final major action before the end of 2022 serves as an almost poetic coda for his first two years. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he will sign will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.
The turn from aspirational goals to palpable accomplishments – highlighted over the last several months by Biden’s travel to major corporate groundbreakings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan – underpins the sharp reversal for the White House. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.
“One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence.
Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.
Biden’s closest confidants also stress that it’s a perspective that is instructive as the White House prepares for the dramatically reshaped Washington that will confront him upon his return from his family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.
“The whole idea of showing people government can work – we were mocked for that in some corners,” a Biden adviser said. “That’s literally what’s happening now.”
There are still clear challenges ahead. Inflation remains high even if its grip appears to be easing. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.
Biden’s approval ratings, while ticking up, remain low and his age remains a real, if less publicly addressed, concern held by Democrats as they wait for an official decision about whether he will seek reelection.
But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.
It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team has become increasingly confident that a reelection campaign will be green lit in the weeks ahead.
White House officials view the political salience of his agenda as both an underappreciated element of their ability to defy the expectations of sweeping GOP gains in the midterms and as a critical piece of what comes next. The prospect of divided government – and the exceedingly narrow legislative pathway it brings – has limited effect on an agenda that is now in the implementation phase.
“It forms the foundation for even stronger achievements as the nation heads into the New Year,” Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle, wrote in a political memo circulated to allies this month.
Biden, advisers said, has laid down strict directives to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation in the months ahead.
“It’s not subtle,” a senior administration official said of the message from the top. “We have to get it right and in the moments we don’t, we damn well be ready to explain it – and fix it.”
For Biden’s tight-knit and long-serving advisers, this is a moment that both vindicates and validates core elements of a campaign and presidency that at various points were dismissed, underestimated or at some points even mocked.
“A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.
Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal, in particular, as a central policy plank of his campaign as Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals – none of which included a viable way to pass a bitterly divided Congress.
Biden and his economic advisers zeroed in on an intensive manufacturing and supply chain agenda that grew more aggressive and transformational as a once-in-a-century pandemic gripped the country. They saw it as the key to reverse the accelerants at the heart of the atmosphere that created the opening for Donald Trump to reach the Oval Office.
“This was the right moment for his theory of the case,” Feldman said. “He could apply the principles that have really guided him throughout his whole career.”
Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.
“Ever since I’ve talked to the president about the economy, he’s distinguished between the short-term and the long-term, between consumption and investment,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economist as vice president who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers. “These have always been foundational to his economic thinking.”
The animating principles of Biden’s 2020 campaign hardly diverged from the key themes outlined by Donilon, Biden’s in-house mind-meld, in the 22-page memo he drafted in early 2015 as the then-vice president weighed jumping into the 2016 race.
From think tanks to business schools to Davos, Biden took the role of a kind of middle class evangelist, pressing for the pursuit of policies that addressed short-term incentives that had driven jobs away and wages down. Those speeches and discussions served as a roadmap of sorts for an agenda that is now largely law. They detailed major infrastructure investments and a incentivizing research and development that had atrophied. There were broad outlines of nascent ideas to connect hollowed out manufacturing centers and communities to new opportunities. Biden proposed changes to the tax code that tracked near where his administration would eventually land as it sought to finance spending plans.
Even the anecdotes from the period – whether the one about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and American “possibilities” or his father’s sayings about the dignity of work, or the importance of “breathing room” – are the same that populate his speeches as president.
Ricchetti, who as counselor to the president helped lead the White House legislative effort, pointed to a clear “through-line” from Biden’s days as a senator, through his time as vice president and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
Biden wrote a book detailing his decision not to run for president as he dealt with the pain of his son Beau’s fight with, and eventual death from, brain cancer. That process and the book tour that followed are viewed by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in the eventual decision to run in 2020.
“Much of what we prioritized at that time we took with us and used as the foundation,” Ricchetti said of the years leading up to the campaign.
If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.
Officials structured the infrastructure, manufacturing, research and development, climate and equity proposals into interlocking pieces, designed to work in tandem even if they were eventually scaled back during the legislative process.
“At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.
What the proposals – particularly across industries and policy priorities tied to climate and manufacturing – also represented was a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not monolithic, economic orthodoxy. Biden would oversee the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He’d do so in many cases with Republican support.
To be clear, subscribing to the term “industrial policy” still isn’t universally embraced. Even Deese, who has driven and defined its core elements, prefers “Modern American Industrial Strategy.” In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.
Deese likes to point out its roots in the American economy can be traced to Alexander Hamilton.
But the convergence of factors that led it to once again gain broader, and bipartisan, traction was in many ways tailor-made for Biden.
A resurgence in research and development funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. The elevation of labor unions and a focus on creating the conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
On their face, these issues are politically popular and hardly exclusive to Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.
“There’s a cost associated with industrial weakness,” Deese said. “The pandemic laid bare something that had been the case for years.”
That was true for semiconductors – the tiny chips essential for everything from cars and washing machines to advanced weapons systems – that drove the bipartisan urgency behind the $280 billion CHIPS and Science law. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.
For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer.Young was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted to advance the eventual law that has driven new private sector investment or commitments in the last several months.
The pandemic. The rise of China as key feature of policy making in both parties. A president animated by the idea of long-term economic incentives crafted to connect workers and communities left behind for decades.
“These policy insights might not have come to fruition were it not for a confluence of events,” Bernstein acknowledged.
Ted Kaufman has a simple explanation for Biden’s approach and the places where it paid off after two years.
“There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” said Kaufman, the former Delaware senator, longtime Biden Senate chief of staff and one of the president’s closest friends. “This is a guy who is so incredibly well qualified to be president because of experience.”
As to why that experience has rarely been rewarded by voters, Kaufman had another simple explanation.
“It’s hard because you have a record,” he said.
In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Another incumbent, or another moment, and advisers note that it wouldn’t be a question of if Biden would win. He wouldn’t have even run.
Instead, as he weighs running for reelection at age 80, he enters the final two years of this term with much of his agenda now law. Core elements of that agenda were driven by bipartisan consensus. Even Biden’s final bipartisan achievement of the year – the $1.7 trillion spending package – includes an initial $500 million to seed the technology and innovation hubs created by the CHIPS and Science Act in parts of the country outside of traditional tech sectors.
While Democrats narrowly lost their House majority in the midterm elections, the party expanded its Senate majority by a seat.
Perhaps most critically for Biden, the voters sharply reject some of the most extreme voices parroting 2020 election lies in critical races for governor and secretary of state.
In the months leading up to the midterm elections, Biden had started regularly recounting the experience with his foreign counterparts on that first foreign trip in an effort to underscore the stakes.
In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.
“What was clear in those meetings is the United States is better positioned than any other nation to lead the world economy in the years ahead if we keep our focus,” Biden said.
This must feel like the year that won’t end for former President Donald Trump, whose actions appear to be catching up with him in public, painful and expensive ways.
Trump is infamous for escaping accountability, but he’s been put under the microscope in the second half of 2022 in a way that has complicated things for the 2024 contender.
The FBI searched his Florida resort, where classified documents were seized. His business was found guilty of criminal tax fraud. Documents relating to his tax returns were released by House Democrats, who are expected to release his actual returns before turning over the committee gavel next year to Republicans, who won a smaller-than-expected majority under Trump’s influence. Many candidates Trump backed failed in key Senate races, costing Republicans a majority in that chamber.
The former president himself hasn’t been charged with any crimes. But a special counsel has been appointed at the Justice Department to oversee two Trump-related investigations – surrounding the hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago and the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Trump has railed against the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and his most ardent supporters tried to stonewall it, but it’s hard to objectively dismiss its damning 800-page detailed report, which spells out his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his role inspiring rioters to attack the Capitol.
And though the committee’s criminal referrals of Trump to the Justice Department are largely symbolic, the former president still has to wait and see what comes of the DOJ’s own twin probes.
In the meantime, there’s no sign that the former president – who launched his third nonconsecutive presidential bid last month – has done much to clear the GOP field, with other hopefuls mulling their options over the holidays.
The ongoing end-of-year revelations chipping away at Trump’s facade of power include large developments like the January 6 committee report – and smaller details.
Hidden in court documents is the inconvenient truth that even his loudest acolytes on Fox News knew his 2020 election fantasy was false.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News opinion host, admitted he didn’t “for one second” believe the fraud claims he helped push.
It might be nice for Fox viewers to hear that from Hannity, but the admission came off the air and in a deposition as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the conservative network, according to the New York Times.
Hannity, as we know from text messages, was in close contact with Trump’s then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in the days leading up to January 6.
That the conservative elites in Trump’s circle knew the truth adds context to the fears of fraud they pushed to encourage Republican lawmakers to pass new election security laws in key states.
The release of Trump’s tax information, without his consent, by House Democrats confirmed what anyone could have guessed – that he paid no federal income tax in a year when he was leading the country.
Even in years like 2018, where he paid about $1 million in federal taxes, the rate he paid, a bit more than 4%, was on par with the bottom half of American taxpayers.
The special tax rules for real estate barons, which Congress can’t seem to address, help explain why Trump’s tax bill looks so different than that of regular wage-earning Americans. But the end result is that the former president looks like a tax avoider.
Trump broke with tradition in 2016 by refusing to release any of his personal tax returns. But his team immediately tried to weaponize the release of his information. “If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans without cause,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said last week.
Trump made sure his influence was felt during the 2022 midterms, but after Republicans failed to secure a “red wave,” some members of his party have blamed him for the GOP’s poor showing.
He must now grapple with polls like CNN’s from earlier this month, which showed that most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want the party to nominate someone other than Trump in 2024. Their top pick for an alternative? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The GOP governor, who won a resounding reelection last month, enjoyed much stronger favorability ratings than Trump among Republicans, according to the CNN survey.
That’s bad news for a man who jumped out in front of the 2024 Republican field and launched another presidential bid at the precise moment he began to appear politically weak.
Even his most ardent supporters are growing tired of some of his antics. The $99 Trump-themed digital trading cards timed the NFT market all wrong and drew ridicule even from his most loyal supporters.
“I can’t do this any more,” complained Stephen Bannon, the former adviser who was sentenced to four months in jail for contempt of Congress after ignoring a subpoena from the January 6 committee. (He’s appealed that conviction.)
Many of the issues that dogged Trump in 2022 won’t be over with the start of the new year – and could even escalate.
His business, convicted of tax fraud in late 2022, also faces civil charges from the New York attorney general in 2023.
On the election-stealing front, it’s not just Special Counsel Jack Smith that Trump has to worry about. An Atlanta-area special grand jury investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State has already begun writing its final report, CNN reported earlier this month. That will serve as a mechanism for the panel to recommend whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should pursue indictments.
While Trump envisions himself returning to the White House, one of the final bipartisan efforts lawmakers agreed on this month was an update to the Electoral Count Act, making clear that attempts like Trump’s after 2020 – to exploit antiquated language in federal election law and undermine the Electoral College – can never occur again.
Kwanzaa is celebrated each year from December 26 to January 1, with a day dedicated to each of the Nguzo Saba, or seven principles. Celebrants light a kinara, or seven-pronged candle holder, for each principle: unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani).
In a video posted Monday, President Joe Biden and first lady Dr. Jill Biden offered thanks “for the rich heritage of African Americans, which is deep in the story of our nation.”
“In 2023, it’s our hope that we’ll all remember the wisdom of the seven principles of Kwanzaa, especially the values of unity and faith, as we work to make the promise of our nation real in the lives of every American,” the president said, standing before a kinara in the White House.
And Vice President Kamala Harris – the nation’s first Black vice president, in addition to being the first woman to hold the role – took the opportunity to share her own experience with Kwanzaa as a child.
“Growing up, Kwanzaa was always a special time – we came together with generations of friends and family and neighbors,” Harris said. “There were never enough chairs, so my sister and I and the other children would often sit on the floor, and together we lit the candles of the kinara, and then the elders would talk about how Kwanzaa is a time to celebrate culture, community and family, and they of course taught us about the seven principles.”
Harris said that her favorite principle as a child was the second, kujichagulia, or self-determination, which she called “a deeply American principle – one that guides me each day as vice president.”
The vice president was joined by her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff – the first Jewish spouse to serve in his role. Earlier this month, the White House unveiled its first official White House menorah, while Harris hosted the first Hanukkah gathering at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory.
But perhaps the most important lesson as we head into the 2024 cycle hasn’t gotten enough oxygen: the closeness of the 2022 midterms. Indeed, an examination of the data reveals that 2022 was a historically close election in a historically divided era.
Let’s start with seat counts in governorships and in the House and Senate. Post-election, neither party dominates. Republicans have maintained the thinnest majority of governorships (52%) and House seats (51%). Democrats will control the Senate with a bare majority (51% of the seats).
It’s not unusual for any one of these (governorships, House seats or Senate seats) to be narrowly split. After all, we’ve just had two years in which each party has held 50 Senate seats.
What is unusual is to have all three be so closely divided. By my count, this is apparently the first time since the popular election of senators (1914) when neither party will hold more than 52% of governorships, House seats or Senate seats.
When you examine the vote counts from the 2022 election, the closeness becomes even more apparent. Republicans won the House popular vote by less than 3 points and would likely have won by about 2 points had both parties run candidates in every district. That would have been the second-closest midterm margin in the House popular vote in the last 70 years.
The popular vote margins in governor’s and Senate races this year were even closer. There were 36 gubernatorial races in 2022, with Democrats winning more votes cast for governor in total than Republicans – by less than 0.3 points.
That margin was the closest in midterm- or presidential-year gubernatorial races since at least 1990.
The margin in Senate races was still tighter. Republican candidates for Senate won more votes than Democratic candidates – by 0.1 points. Democrats likely would have gotten more votes had they run a candidate in Utah instead of endorsing independent Evan McMullin.
Still, the 0.1-point popular vote margin was the closest in Senate races in any election since at least before the beginning of World War II.
Not every state held gubernatorial and Senate races this year, but those that did were well representative of the country as a whole when looked at together. They collectively voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin comparable with his actual national popular vote advantage.
What makes the closeness of the 2022 elections especially notable is how it exemplifies an electorate that has been quite divided for nearly 35 years.
We have not had a presidential election in which the popular vote was decided by double-digits since 1984. This streak of single-digit elections is the longest since most states began popularly electing presidents in the 1820s.
The largest margin in the House popular vote since 1984 was the nearly-11-point win Democrats notched in the 2008 election. In fact, the last time the House popular vote margin was 11 points or more was 40 years ago, in 1982. We haven’t seen such a string of close results in the House popular vote in 200 years.
Political scientists have debated the reasons for this tight set of recent elections. Arguably, the best explanation is political polarization. The era of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats is mostly gone now. The pool of swing voters has, accordingly, shrunk.
But that hasn’t made swing voters any less valuable today. These voters, who go back and forth between the parties, remain highly sought after by Democrats and Republicans, and they can make all the difference. For instance, a number of purple states (such as Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) elected candidates of different parties for governor and senator this year.
The 2024 election will undoubtedly see both parties trying to win over these swing voters. The early read suggests neither party can feel secure about their chances. You can find polls that have Biden (the likely Democratic nominee) and his likely Republican opponent (either former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) within a few points of each other among this group.
The bottom line is: Neither party has a lasting majority from the public. That was true in the historically close election of 2022 and in the historically divided era of the last 35 years. And it could very well also be also true in the next presidential election.
An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.
Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November, sued in an effort to overturn the election. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson allowed a two-day trial on some of Lake’s claims, which concluded late Thursday afternoon.
The court ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, who built her candidacy on her support for former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She has since falsely claimed to have won last month’s election.
Saturday’s ruling is also the latest blow for election deniers nationwide and harks back to the long stream of legal losses Trump suffered in 2020 as he sought to challenge his election loss.
In a tweet after the ruling, Lake, who sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify, said she would appeal the decision “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”
Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he permitted Lake an attempt to prove at trial the two remaining counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.
The county, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the midterms and 2020 election.
Technical experts who testified in support of Lake provided analysis that “does not nearly approach the degree of precision” needed to conclude that the election results were tainted,” Thompson said in his ruling.
After the election, Lake falsely claimed that a mishap with some printers in Maricopa County was part of a deliberate effort to rig the vote against her. But the judge’s ruling noted that Lake’s “own witness testified before this Court that … printer failures were largely the result of unforeseen mechanical failure.”
According to Thompson’s ruling, Lake’s team had to show that someone intentionally caused the county’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction – and as a result of that, enough “identifiable” votes were lost to change the outcome of the election.
“Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence,” Thompson wrote.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican who helps oversee elections, called the ruling “a win for Arizona voters and American democracy.”
“Arizona courts have made it clear that frivolous political theater meant to undermine elections will not be tolerated,” Gates said in a statement Saturday.
During the two-day trial, Lake’s legal team broadly criticized Maricopa County’s management of the election and claimed that long lines led Republican would-be voters to turn away on Election Day.
Tom Liddy, a lawyer for Maricopa County, faulted Lake’s campaign and the Arizona Republican Party for casting doubt on the validity of early and mail-in votes, which left GOP voters bearing the brunt of minor issues on Election Day.
“That’s political malpractice,” said Liddy, a Republican. “You reap what you sow.”
Maricopa County elections co-director Scott Jarrett detailed the causes of printing problems in some polling places on Election Day that resulted in on-site ballot tabulators being unable to read some ballots.
Jarrett said in some printers, toner wasn’t dark enough – a problem that resulted in voters whose ballots couldn’t be read having to place their ballots in “door 3,” a secure box used for ballots that would need to be counted later at a central location. Jarrett said about 17,000 ballots ended up in “door 3” boxes across the county.
He also said that at three of the county’s 223 sites, “shrink to fit” settings were improperly selected on ballot printers by technicians who were attempting to solve those toner problems. That resulted in about 1,300 ballots being printed slightly too small for on-site tabulators to process.
Those ballots were later duplicated by hand and then counted, he said.
He said he had “no reason to believe” any of the problems were the result of intentional misconduct. All of those votes, he said, were ultimately counted after they were transferred to a bipartisan duplication board.
Lake’s team had also claimed at the trial that employees at Runbeck, a Maricopa County ballot processing contractor, had improperly inserted their own ballots and those of family members into batches to be counted on site, rather than returning those ballots through proper channels.
In response, Rey Valenzuela, the Maricopa County co-director of elections in charge of early voting, said that the county had never authorized Runbeck employees to deliver ballots directly to the Runbeck site and that he was not aware of the contractor’s employees ever having done so.
Lake’s legal team has until Monday to respond. Hobbs is slated to be inaugurated as governor on January 2.
This is story has been updated with additional details.
“The Electoral College now – which has given us five popular-vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone – has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people. It was a danger on January 6,” the Maryland Democrat said in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College, that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief. We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else. Whoever gets the most votes wins.”
“The truth is that we need to be continually renovating and improving our institutions,” Raskin said, later noting that he supports the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which represents a pledge made by certain states and the District of Columbia to award their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote nationwide.
Under the US Constitution, Americans don’t select their president directly. They vote for their state’s electors, who are then expected to carry out the will of the voters when they vote for president and vice president.
Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 both won the national popular vote in their races but lost the Electoral College vote count. Other presidential nominees who lost after winning the popular vote included Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876) and Grover Cleveland (1888).
“The framers [of the Constitution] were great, and they were patriots, but they didn’t have the benefit of the experience that we have lived, and we know that the Electoral College doesn’t fit anymore,” Raskin said.
“But it’s not remotely sufficient,” he said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that Electoral College thing you have, that’s so great, we think we’ll adopt that too.’”
Raskin’s remarks come just days after the select committee – which has investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol – issued its final report, a comprehensive overview of the bipartisan panel’s findings on how former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In a symbolic move, the committee in its last public meeting referred Trump to the Justice Department on four criminal charges.
Raskin said the unprecedented referrals were necessary because of the “magnitude of the attack on democracy” on January 6. He also warned of a future coup attempt.
“There’s very dangerous rhetoric going on out there that’s a real break from everything we’ve known in our lifetimes,” he said.
“What it means to live in a democracy with basic civic respect is that people can disagree without resorting to violence. But the internet has played a negative role, especially for the right wing, the extreme right, which now engages in very dangerous hyperbolic rhetoric that exposes people to danger.”
The story of January 6 has largely focused on a cast of very prominent characters, including former President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle who have become household names, like his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
But those with notable names were merely the tip of the iceberg for the January 6 committee, which spent 18 months investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses behind closed doors, including scores of Trump aides who were hardly ever in the headlines.
The January 6 committee’s report, which came out Thursday, highlights how investigators tracked down little-known insiders – from the Trump campaign to the National Guard to the Republican National Committee – who witnessed key moments and provided critical information to the panel.
One critical example of the outsize role of little-known figures: The committee’s report mentions an unnamed White House staffer who told Trump around 1:21 p.m. on January 6, 2021, that “they’re rioting down at the Capitol.” This represents one of the first instances of Trump being told directly that the situation was descending into violence.
With the panel’s report public and witness interview transcripts trickling out on a daily basis, we’re getting a new glimpse into how these obscure figures played big roles in the inquiry. Some of them even provided information that will be useful to the ongoing criminal probes by the Justice Department and state prosecutors in Georgia, who are investigating Trump’s election schemes.
Here are a few lesser-known insiders and what they shared with the committee.
The committee’s dive into the hundreds of millions of dollars that were made in campaign fundraising off Trump’s bogus election fraud claims includes the story of a young RNC staffer who was fired after he pushed back on some of the assertions being made in fundraising emails.
Ethan Katz, who provided testimony to the committee, was an RNC copywriter who made clear to his superiors he was not comfortable with the false claims the Trump campaign and its allies were making after the election, according to the report.
His direct boss told the committee that she wasn’t sure why Katz was terminated three weeks after the election. However, it came after Katz repeatedly questioned the direction leadership was taking in Republicans’ post-election fundraising messaging.
The first confrontation – corroborated by multiple witnesses – came in a meeting with the entirety of the Trump digital team, in which Katz grilled a higher-up on how the campaign was saying it wanted to stop the count in several battleground states while keeping it going in another.
In the second episode in the report, he refused a directive to write an email declaring Trump the winner in Pennsylvania – an email Katz suspected was meant to preempt the election being called for Joe Biden in that state.
Another copy writer was assigned the task, the report said, and an email falsely declaring a Trump victory in Pennsylvania was sent on November 4.
Katz was one of several lower-level digital staffers who spoke to the committee, shedding light on how the campaign and the RNC tried to walk the line between not putting themselves in potential legal jeopardy by blasting out false claims while exploiting Trump’s fraud narrative for fundraising.
Among the first people the committee identifies as having concocted the fake electors strategy – in which slates of fraudulent Trump electors were put forward as alternatives to Biden electors – is Vince Haley, the deputy assistant to the president for policy, strategy and speechwriting.
Texts and emails that Haley turned over to the committee show how he repeatedly pushed the idea of using illegitimate GOP slates of presidential electors in battleground states to some of Trump’s closest staff members.
Supposed election fraud by Democrats is “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told Johnny McEntee, an assistant to Trump, in text messages one week after the 2020 election that he turned over to the January 6 committee.
“We should baldly assert” that state legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if that prevents socialism, he said.
The messages highlight how Trump allies and White House staffers appeared to know that their efforts to overturn the election could be problematic early on but believed they were justified if the plan was successful in keeping Trump in office.
Haley added, “[i]ndependent of the fraud – or really along with that argument – Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin] and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that conservative radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states.”
Haley then sent McEntee names and contact information for state legislators in six states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump later called several of those state officials, according to the report.
Two not-well-known Trump campaign officials who were already of interest to the Justice Department provided especially helpful testimony to the January 6 committee.
One of them, Georgia-based staffer Robert Sinners, described how he felt misled by campaign higher-ups about the legal sketchiness around the fake electors plan – evidence that might go to show a corrupt intent.
The second, Trump campaign associate general counsel Joshua Findlay, described fielding concerns from the activists being recruited to be fake electors and recounted to the committee how the campaign’s core team tried to hand off the scheme to the more fringe Trump lawyers.
Findlay also gave valuable testimony connecting the plot to the former president himself. He told the committee that he was tasked by another campaign official in early December with exploring the feasibility of the plan and that the official conveyed to him that the president wanted the campaign to “look into” the alternative electors proposal.
When it was decided that Giuliani would be in charge of the gambit, Findlay was left with the impression that it was because Trump wanted Giuliani to lead it. Findlay testified that Trump campaign leadership backed off the plan a few days after he had been told to look into it, with top lawyers bailing on the idea.
However, the campaign’s director of election day operations, Mike Roman, took on a chief operation role in the gambit.
The role played by Roman – who declined to answer many of committee’s questions in his testimony, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights – was fleshed out by communications handed over to the committee by Sinners. They showed that Roman was organizing information tracking the effort.
Sinners told the committee that he would not have participated with the scheme had he known the campaign’s top lawyers were not on board with the plan. He testified that he felt “angry,” according to the report, that “no one really cared if – if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy” by doing this, and “we were just … useful idiots or rubes at that point.”
The Justice Department has been seeking information about Sinners and Findlay. Their committee testimony, along with that of others, showed how the Trump campaign was willing to move forward with the fake electors plot – putting its participants in legal jeopardy – even as its top lawyers sought to distance themselves from the scheme.
To get to the heart of what was happening in the White House and Trump campaign war rooms, the committee looked to junior staffers – people who were key observers to the action but didn’t have an orchestrating role.
One such staffer was Angela McCallum, the national executive assistant on Trump’s reelection campaign.
After the election, McCallum was part of the Trump campaign’s operation to contact hundreds of state legislators to ask for their support for efforts to replace state electors.
Though McCallum does not appear to have had a leadership role in the operation, nor was she directly quoted by the committee, footnotes from the report show that she turned over several text messages, campaign spreadsheets and even a script for calling state legislators.
Her insight appears to have given the committee information on the campaign’s outreach efforts to push the fake electors plan. Her notes say that campaign staff tried contacting over 190 Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan alone.
McCallum’s text records also show how campaign supervisors viewed the ongoing outreach efforts. In one instance, McCallum provided a text message sent by an operative the committee believes may have brought the fake elector certificates to Washington, based on the message’s photo of the operative in front of the Capitol.
“This has got to be the cover a book I write one day,” the operative, whom the committee could not find to serve a subpoena, said in the message. “I should probably buy [Mike] [R]oman a tie or something for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.”
In another message, the operative, who was McCallum’s supervisor, celebrated after reporters published a recorded voicemail McCallum left on a state legislators’ phone.
“Honest to god I’m so proud of this” because “[t]hey unwittingly just got your message out there,” the message read, according to the report.
He continued, telling McCallum that “you used the awesome power of the presidency to scare a state rep into getting a statewide newspaper to deliver your talking points.”
The long delay in sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol on January 6 was among the most glaring security failures that day. Previously unreported testimony revealed for the first time in the committee’s final report shows that one commander on the ground had his forces ready to respond hours before they were given approval to actually do so.
National Guard Col. Craig Hunter is not a household name, but as the highest-ranking commander on the ground on January 6, his testimony helped the committee untangle conflicting accounts provided by more senior officials and ultimately arrive at a conclusion about what caused the delayed response.
Hunter provided a detailed timeline of his own actions that day, including that he immediately started preparing his troops to respond at around 2 p.m. ET after hearing that shots had reportedly been fired at the US Capitol.
“So, at that point in my mind I said, ‘Okay, then they will be requesting the DC National Guard now, so we have to move,” Hunter told the committee, according to its final report.
Within the hour, Hunter had a plan in place. Over 100 National Guard troops were already loaded on to buses with their gear, and Hunter informed other responding law enforcement agencies that backup was coming as soon as he got approval from his superiors.
“At 3:10 p.m., Colonel Hunter felt it was time to tell his superiors all that he had done and hopefully get fast approval,” the report says.
But Hunter was unaware that a looming communications breakdown between senior military leaders – including the acting secretary of Defense and secretary of the Army – would delay approval of his plan for more than three hours.
At that very moment, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was putting together a redundant plan for transporting those forces to the Capitol and was not aware that he had already been given authority to issue the order himself, the report says.
The confusion, coupled with a lack of communication between senior military leaders and commanders on the ground, was a key factor in the delayed response, the report says.
In hindsight, the failures of top military officials are even more glaring considering Hunter had already devised a plan that could have been put into motion hours earlier.
They also did not occur in a vacuum. Trump could have personally intervened at any time, to hasten and coordinate the military response, but chose not to.
This story has been updated with additional information.
first speech as House speaker, McCarthy told his colleagues, “Now the hard work begins.” He also said: “As speaker of the House, my ultimate responsibility is not to my party, my conference, or even our Congress. My responsibility, our responsibility, is to our country.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
points at McCarthy after McCarthy confronted him over his “present” vote on the 14th ballot Friday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”2000″ width=”3000″/>
motion to adjourn on Thursday evening. The House voted to adjourn until noon on Friday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
Cheryl Johnson receives a standing ovation in the House chamber on Thursday.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
Perry said he needed more changes before he could vote for McCarthy.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
He told CNN Thursday that the vote for speakership can end in two ways: “Either Kevin McCarthy withdraws from the race, or we construct a straitjacket that he is unable to evade.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
made a plea for unity in his nomination speech, saying, the “issues that divide us today are much less severe that they were in 1856; in fact, there’s far more that unite us, than divide us, regardless of our political party of ideology.”” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
House of Representatives members should be sworn in — even if a speaker is not chosen yet — so their families can witness the moment and not have to wait around the Capitol all day.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
told Gosar that there was no plan to do that. Last year, the House voted to censure Gosar and remove him from committees after he photoshopped an anime video to social media showing him appearing to kill Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden.” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”2000″ width=”3000″/>
The embattled New York Republican faces a federal probe into his finances and mounting scrutiny and condemnation over lies about his biography. ” class=”image_gallery-image__dam-img image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image_gallery-image__dam-img–loading’)’ height=”1667″ width=”2500″/>
