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Tag: us elections

  • Opinion: How the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses self-destructed | CNN

    Opinion: How the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses self-destructed | CNN

    Editor’s Note: Laura Belin is the primary author at the website Bleeding Heartland. She has been covering Iowa politics since 2007. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    The Democratic National Committee’s overhaul of the presidential nominating calendar will create many challenges for Iowa Democrats, who are already at a low point following another disappointing election cycle.

    The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted Friday to recommend a schedule that removes Iowa from the small group of early primary states. The full DNC will vote on the calendar in January; while some tweaks are possible, it’s nearly certain the Iowa caucuses won’t be in the mix.

    I grew up in Iowa with the luxury of seeing presidential candidates up close and have enjoyed attending precinct caucuses since I was 18 years old in 1988. But as painful as it is for fans of the caucuses to accept, the DNC has valid reasons to start the presidential campaign elsewhere.

    Although Iowa was a bellwether state for six straight presidential elections and voted twice to elect Barack Obama, five of the last seven general elections have been Republican landslides here.

    It’s one thing to experience a red wave when the same thing is happening nationwide, as in 2010 and 2014. It’s another for Iowa Democrats to lose up and down the ballot last month — including in many onetime strongholds — when the party’s candidates exceeded expectations in many other states.

    Next year, Iowa will have no Democrats in our congressional delegation for the first time since 1956, only one Democratic statewide elected official for the first time since 1982 and the smallest Democratic state legislative caucuses in decades.

    Granted, South Carolina (which would supplant Iowa on the DNC’s new calendar) is not a swing state either. But moving that state ahead will give Black Democrats a bigger role in choosing a nominee, which is overdue.

    As critics of the current calendar have noted for years, the electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire are much less diverse than the US population and bear little resemblance to the Democratic Party’s base.

    Moreover, President Joe Biden and others, notably former presidential candidate Julián Castro, have rightly pointed out that it is much more difficult to participate in a caucus than a primary election.

    Iowa Democrats didn’t do enough to make our caucus system more accessible and transparent before the last couple of presidential election cycles. Party leaders dismissed most calls for serious reform, instead choosing a united front with New Hampshire.

    The party altered the system in 2020, creating a paper trail and reporting raw supporter totals for the first time. But Iowans who wanted to help select a presidential nominee still needed to be in a specific place and time for an hour or more on a cold winter night. No early voting, no absentee voting, no proxy voting.

    The massive problems with reporting the 2020 caucus results after a mobile app malfunctioned further damaged Iowa’s case for remaining first.

    Iowa Democratic leaders proposed bigger changes this year, including “presidential preference cards” that could be mailed before caucus night. The complicated “realignment” process, which sometimes produced screwy delegate math, would have been eliminated as each caucusgoer selected one presidential contender. It was too little, too late.

    Losing the early state slot will make it harder for Iowa Democrats to rebuild. For decades, presidential candidates have helped the party identify supporters and recruit volunteers. Old-timers will tell you Tom Harkin’s first US Senate campaign in 1984 got a big boost from the organizing that preceded that year’s Democratic caucuses.

    Presidential candidates have headlined fundraisers for numerous down-ballot candidates and local party groups in the early states. Their campaigns have paid large sums directly to the Iowa Democratic Party for access to the voter file or tickets to large “cattle call” events. All of that is going away now.

    Financial considerations aside, Iowa’s 2024 Democratic candidates will find it harder to qualify for the ballot without thousands of caucusgoers signing their nominating petitions as they attend their neighborhood caucuses.

    Meanwhile, Iowa GOP candidates and party organizations will continue to enjoy the old ways as presidential hopefuls generate local enthusiasm and boost attendance at events throughout the coming year.

    Republicans, including Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, already are portraying the DNC’s decision as an insult not only to all Iowans but also to all Americans outside urban areas. Gov. Kim Reynolds tweeted, “Democrats have abandoned rural America and denied everyday Iowans a voice in the presidential nominating process.”

    Iowa law requires our state’s precinct caucuses to take place “at least eight days earlier” than the scheduled date for any other state’s caucus or primary in the presidential nominating process. Republicans who control the Iowa Legislature have no interest in changing that law, especially since the GOP is preserving our state’s first-in-the-nation status.

    Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn confirmed last week that Democrats will follow state law “and address compliance with DNC rules” later. So the party will hold caucuses in early 2024 to select delegates to county conventions and members of various party committees.

    But those caucuses will have no broader significance. While more than 100,000 Republicans show up to support their favorite presidential candidate, only hard-core Democratic activists will attend.

    Serious presidential candidates will avoid campaigning here, so as not to lose delegates under the DNC’s new rules, which would penalize contenders who have staff, run ads or give speeches in unsanctioned early states. Iowa will lose half the state’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention as well.

    As Iowa Democrats prepare for life after the caucuses as we know them, they should seek inspiration from state parties that never received the money and attention that comes with being first.

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  • Sen. Sherrod Brown says Ohio is still a swing state ahead of 2024 election | CNN Politics

    Sen. Sherrod Brown says Ohio is still a swing state ahead of 2024 election | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio said Sunday that “of course” the Buckeye State was still a swing state, brushing off concerns about a 2024 reelection bid after Republican J.D. Vance won the state’s other Senate seat last month.

    “I’m not worried. … I know it’s a challenge always, but I’m going about doing my job,” Brown told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    Vance’s Senate win over Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan continued a long line of Republican victories in a state that has tilted toward the party in recent years. Other than Brown, no Democrat has won a nonjudicial statewide office in the state since 2008, and former President Barack Obama was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win the state, doing so in 2012.

    But Brown, a liberal populist, has found success in Ohio with a progressive message. In 2019, he explored a presidential bid through a “listening tour” that included stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the four key early-voting states in the 2020 primary, before deciding against a run. He is expected to seek a fourth term next year.

    “Not many people thinking about the 2024 election. I’ll do my job,” Brown said Sunday. “We’ll see how that goes.”

    Brown, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, also said he believed the US is on the “right track” to bring inflation down, and he defended Congress’ role in protecting Americans investing in cryptocurrency following the implosion of FTX, the multi-billion-dollar crypto exchange.

    Soon after FTX went down, crypto firms were inundated by requests from customers seeking to claw their money back – the crypto equivalent of a run on the bank. Several firms have been forced to suspend withdrawals while they sort out their liquidity problems.

    “To say Congress has done nothing is not quite accurate. We’ve done a series of hearings exposing the problems with crypto, the problems for consumers, the problems for our economy here and the problems internationally for their national security,” Brown said. “We will continue that.”

    “I would love to do something legislatively. I don’t know that Congress is capable of that because of crypto’s hold on one political party in the Senate and the House,” he added, referring to the GOP.

    “But we’re trying every day.”

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  • Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story | CNN Business

    Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    For days, Twitter owner Elon Musk had teased a massive bombshell disclosure based on internal company documents that he claimed would reveal “what really happened” inside Twitter when it decided to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

    But on Friday, instead of releasing a trove of documents to the public, Musk’s big reveal pointed to a series of tweets by the journalist Matt Taibbi, who had been provided with emails that largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.

    Attracting thousands of retweets, Taibbi’s winding tweet thread reaffirmed how, in the initial hours after the Post story went live, Twitter employees grappled with fears that it could have been the result of a Russian hacking operation.

    It showed employees on Twitter’s legal, policy and communications teams debating – and at times disagreeing – over whether to restrict the article under the company’s hacked materials policy, weeks before the 2020 election, where Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, ran against then-President Donald Trump.

    While some questioned the basis for the decision and warned that Twitter would be inviting allegations of anti-conservative bias, others within the company, including senior officials, said the circumstances surrounding the Post story were unclear and recommended caution, according to screenshots of internal communications shared by Taibbi.

    (Then-CEO Jack Dorsey – whom Taibbi said was not involved in the decision – has told US lawmakers that in hindsight, suppressing the story was a mistake.)

    The emails Taibbi obtained are consistent with what former Twitter site integrity head Yoel Roth told journalist Kara Swisher in an onstage interview earlier this week. During that interview, Roth said he felt at the time that the Post reporting bore the hallmarks of a Russian hack-and-leak operation, an assessment that was shared at the time by dozens of former US intelligence officials. Roth did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    The Taibbi posts undercut a top claim by Musk and Republicans, who have accused the FBI of leaning on social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories.

    Musk tweeted Friday night, amid the Taibbi posts, that Twitter had acted “under orders from the government.”

    Taibbi said in his series of tweets that “there is no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

    Lawyers for Facebook parent company Meta have made similar comments in recent weeks, disputing claims from Republicans that the FBI coerced Facebook to suppress the laptop stories.

    Taibbi said the material he reviewed referenced general FBI warnings about potential attempted Russian interference in the elections, which also dovetails with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public account of Facebook’s handling of the New York Post story and affirms how Twitter was on high alert for possible foreign meddling.

    In the wake of the article’s suppression, Taibbi said one Democratic congressman, California Rep. Ro Khanna, wrote to Twitter’s chief legal officer suggesting it was a bad look and a departure from First Amendment ideals to suppress a news report containing details that affect a presidential candidate. Khanna noted in the email he was saying this even though he was a “total Biden partisan.” Khanna did not respond to a request for comment.

    The tweet thread also highlighted how officials from both political parties routinely wrote to Twitter asking for specific tweets to be removed. Taibbi included a screenshot of an email from the “Biden team” asking to delete tweets. A CNN review of those tweets on an archive site showed some purported photos of Hunter Biden, including nudity, that may have violated Twitter policy.

    Taibbi said the contact from political parties happened more frequently from Democrats, but provided no internal documents to back up his assertion. He also did not say that Democrats requested that Twitter suppress the Post story, and his account did not suggest that the US government had ever pressured Twitter to suppress the story.

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  • Biden proposes South Carolina as first primary state in drastic shake up of presidential nominating calendar | CNN Politics

    Biden proposes South Carolina as first primary state in drastic shake up of presidential nominating calendar | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has asked Democratic National Committee leaders to drastically reshape the 2024 presidential nominating calendar and make South Carolina the first state to host a primary, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire on the same day a week later, Georgia the following week and then Michigan, a source confirms to CNN.

    Biden’s preferences were announced Thursday evening at a dinner for members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee by committee co-chairs Jim Roosevelt, Jr. and Minyon Moore. The committee is set to meet Friday and Saturday in Washington and is poised to propose a new presidential nominating calendar.

    Biden’s expression of his preferences will play a significant role in the process. A DNC source said his elevation of South Carolina to the first-in-the-nation primary has sparked significant debate as members meet Thursday night. But with Biden’s support, this proposal is likely to ultimately gain the support of the committee, though this person emphasized that nothing is final until the votes are held.

    If the DNC ultimately adopts this calendar, it would be an extraordinary shake up of the existing order and would strip Iowa of the first-in-the-nation status that it has held since 1920. Iowa has traditionally gone first, followed by New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It would also add a fifth state to the slate before Super Tuesday (the first Tuesday in March) and elevate Georgia and Michigan as early nominating states for the first time.

    South Carolina’s primary would be held on February 6, Nevada and New Hampshire would have their contests on February 13, Georgia’s primary would be on February 20 and Michigan’s would be on February 27, according to the source.

    Biden had also sent a letter to DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee members on Thursday laying out what he believed should be guiding principles for the committee as it discusses the calendar.

    “Just like my Administration, the Democratic Party has worked hard to reflect the diversity of America – but our nominating process does not,” the president’s letter reads. “For fifty years, the first month of our presidential nominating process has been a treasured part of our democratic process, but it is time to update the process for the 21st century. I am committed to working with the DNC to get this done.”

    The president wrote: “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window. As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color – and that includes Black, Brown and Asian American & Pacific Islander voters.

    “For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” he continued. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

    Biden said in the letter the Democratic Party should abolish caucuses, arguing they are “inherently anti-participatory” and “restrictive.”

    The Washington Post was first to report on the president’s preferred order for the nominating calendar and the letter he sent to committee members.

    The DNC earlier this year approved a plan to prioritize diverse battleground states that choose to hold primaries, not caucuses, as it considers which states should hold early contests. Beyond the tumult of the 2020 caucuses, Iowa is largely White, no longer considered a battleground state and is required by state law to hold caucuses.

    “There’s very little support for Iowa because they don’t fit into the framework and because of the debacle of 2020. There’s a lot of emotional momentum – it’s not unanimous – but there’s a lot of emotional momentum to replace Iowa with a state that is more representative, more inclusive and instills more confidence and is a battleground state,” one DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member told CNN.

    Any new proposal by the committee would have to be approved at a full DNC meeting, which will take place early next year. If a new schedule is adopted, it would be the first changes made to the Democratic nominating calendar since 2006, when Nevada and South Carolina were added as early states. It would also break with the Republican calendar, as the Republican National Committee voted earlier this year to reaffirm the early state lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

    Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who has spearheaded Michigan’s effort to become an early-voting state, told CNN earlier on Thursday she was “feeling good” about Michigan’s chances and that she believed the state was in a “strong position” heading into the committee meeting.

    “The White House knows that we don’t win presidencies without the heartland,” Dingell said. “And we’ve got to have a primary system where candidates are campaigning in a heartland state that reflects the diversity of this country and that they’re testing them because that’s where we win or lose in general elections.”

    Nevada has been making a play to move up further in the calendar and unseat New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation primary. New Hampshire has held the first primary on the presidential nominating calendar since 1920 and that status is protected by state law.

    Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, whose reelection in November was critical to allowing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate, argues her state’s diverse electorate makes it a “microcosm of the rest of the country.”

    “If you’re a presidential candidate and you can win in Nevada, you have a message that resonates across the country,” Cortez Masto told MSNBC earlier this month.

    The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ political arm, CHC BOLD PAC, on Wednesday announced it was backing Nevada’s application to host the first-in-the-nation primary.

    “The state that goes first matters, and we know that Latino voters will only become even more decisive in future election cycles when it comes to winning the White House and majorities in the House and Senate,” Reps. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Raul Ruiz of California, leaders of the CHC BOLD PAC, said in a statement.

    New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen tweeted Thursday, “NH’s First-In-The-Nation primary gives every candidate an opportunity to connect directly with engaged, informed voters in a battleground state – and Granite Staters are experts at assessing candidates & campaigns. I’m proud to support NH’s #FITN primary.”

    Earlier this year, the DNC committee heard presentations from 16 states – including the four current early states – as well as Puerto Rico on their pitches on why they should become an early state or hold on to their spot. Amid pressure to boot Iowa from its top position, the Hawkeye State made its case to stay first in the calendar and proposed simplifying the caucus process.

    Minnesota is also among the states jockeying to join the early-state ranks. The chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Ken Martin, sent a memo to DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee members on Wednesday arguing Minnesota is “more diverse and has a stronger party infrastructure than Iowa, but unlike Michigan, it is not large enough that it would overshadow the other early primary states or make it harder and more expensive for candidates to compete in during this critical window.”

    Both Michigan’s and Minnesota’s cases were bolstered after Democrats in both states won trifecta control of the governor and state legislatures in the midterms. Primary dates are generally set by law, so state parties would need cooperation from their legislatures and governors to become early-voting states. The Michigan state Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, this week already took the step of voting to move the presidential primary up a month earlier to February.

    Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, along with other party leaders in the state, sent a letter this month to members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee pledging to passing legislation moving up the primary date if Minnesota was selected as an early state. The letter, obtained by CNN, argued Minnesota is a “highly representative approximation of the country, paired with a robust state and local party infrastructure, an engaged electorate, and a logistical and financial advantage for campaigns.”

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  • Rural Arizona county delays certifying midterm results as election disputes persist | CNN Politics

    Rural Arizona county delays certifying midterm results as election disputes persist | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Officials in a rural Arizona county Monday delayed the certification of November’s midterm elections, missing the legal deadline and leading the Arizona secretary of state’s office to sue over the county’s failure to sign off on the results.

    By a 2-1 vote Monday morning, the Republican majority on the Cochise County Board of Supervisors pushed back certification until Friday, citing concerns about voting machines. Because Monday was the deadline for all 15 Arizona counties to certify their results, Cochise’s action could put at risk the votes of some 47,000 county residents and could inject chaos into the election if those votes go uncounted.

    In the lawsuit filed by the office of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs – a Democrat who will be the state’s next governor – officials said failing to certify the election results violates state law and could “potentially disenfranchise” the county’s voters.

    CNN has reached out to the supervisors for comment.

    The standoff between officials in Cochise County and the Arizona secretary of state’s office illustrates how election misinformation is continuing to stoke controversy about the 2022 results in some corners of the country even though many of the candidates who echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were defeated in November.

    A crowd of grassroots activists turned up at a special meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to loudly protest that county’s election administration procedures during a public comment portion of the meeting after problems with printers at voting locations on Election Day led to long lines at about a third of the county’s voting locations. In a new letter to the state attorney general’s office – which had demanded an explanation of the problems – the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said that “no voter was disenfranchised because of the difficulty the county experienced with some of its printers.”

    Disputes over the results have erupted elsewhere.

    In Pennsylvania, where counties also faced a Monday deadline to certify their general election balloting, local officials have faced an onslaught of petitions demanding recounts. And officials in Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, deadlocked Monday on whether to certify the results, according to multiple media reports. Election officials there did not respond to inquiries from CNN on Monday afternoon.

    In a statement to CNN, officials with the Pennsylvania Department of State said they have reached out to Luzerne officials “to inquire about the board’s decision and their intended next steps.”

    On Election Day, a paper shortage in Luzerne County prompted a court-ordered extension of in-person voting.

    Arizona, another key battleground state, has long been a cauldron of election conspiracies. GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and GOP secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, both of whom pushed Trump’s lies about 2020, have refused to concede their races, as they continue to sow doubts about this year’s election results.

    Lake’s campaign filed a lawsuit last week demanding more information from Maricopa County’s elections department about the number of voters who checked in to polling places compared to the ballots cast. And Arizona’s GOP attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh – who, like Lake and Finchem, was backed by Trump – filed a lawsuit in the state superior court in Maricopa County last week challenging the election results based on what the suit describes as errors in the management of the election.

    Hamadeh is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount. But the lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the Arizona secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asks the court to declare Hamadeh as the winner. A recount cannot begin until the state’s votes are certified.

    Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting is Local, said the drama over certification of the votes and the refusal by losing candidates to back down is part of an “infrastructure of election denial” that has been building since the 2020 election in Arizona.

    “Those folks are going to continue to try and find fertile ground for their efforts to undermine our elections. They are not going to give up,” Gulotta said. “We had a whole slate of election deniers, many of whom were not elected.”

    But their refusal to concede “was inevitable in Arizona, at least in this cycle, given the candidates. These aren’t good losers,” he added. “They said from the beginning that they would be bad losers.”

    In Cochise County, the Republican officials on the county Board of Supervisors advocated for the delay, citing concerns about voting machines.

    Ann English, the Democratic chairwoman, argued that there was “no reason for us to delay.”

    But Republican commissioners Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, who have cited claims that the machines were not properly certified, voted to delay signing off on the results. Monday’s action marked the second time the Republican-controlled board has delayed certification. And it marked the latest effort by Republicans on the board to register their disapproval of vote-tallying machines. Earlier this month, they attempted to mount an expansive hand count audit of the midterm results, pitting them against Cochise’s election director and the county attorney, who warned that the gambit might break the law.

    State election officials said the concerns cited by the Republican majority about the vote-tallying machines are rooted in debunked conspiracy theories.

    The state’s election director Kori Lorick has confirmed in writing that the voting machines had been tested and certified – a point Hobbs reiterated in Monday’s lawsuit. She is asking the court to force the board to certify the results by Thursday.

    An initial deadline of December 5 had been set for statewide certification. In the lawsuit, Hobbs’ lawyers said state law does allow for a slight delay if her office has not received a county’s results, but not past December 8 – or 30 days after the election.

    “Absent this Court’s intervention, the Secretary will have no choice but to complete statewide canvass by December 8 without Cochise County’s votes included,” her lawyers added.

    If votes from this Republican stronghold somehow went uncounted, it could flip two races to Democrats: the contest for state superintendent and a congressional race in which Republican Juan Ciscomani already has been projected as the winner by CNN and other outlets.

    In a recent opinion piece published in The Arizona Republic, two former election officials in Maricopa County – said the courts were likely to step in and force Cochise to certify the results.

    But Republican Helen Purcell, a former Maricopa County recorder, and Tammy Patrick, a Democrat and the county’s former federal compliance officer, warned that “a Republican-controlled board of supervisors could end up disenfranchising their own voters and hand Democrats even more victories in the midterms.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • These are the end-of-year political showdowns that will help decide America’s future | CNN Politics

    These are the end-of-year political showdowns that will help decide America’s future | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    America is heading for a year-end political collision that will set the stage for showdowns between the new Republican-led House and the Democrats who still wield power in the Senate and White House.

    A fraught coda to the political battles of 2022 will decide who holds the government purse strings and how far the US will go in funding Ukraine’s war with Russia. It will showcase extremism in the incoming GOP-run House and the size of the Democratic Senate majority. And the 2024 presidential campaign is grinding into gear with ex-President Donald Trump stirring controversy on multiple fronts and President Joe Biden pondering a reelection bid.

    In Congress, a lame-duck session will see standoffs that could risk a government shutdown and over the must-lift US government borrowing limit, with grave implications for the economy.

    Meanwhile, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is scrambling to solidify support in his bid to become speaker in January, with a smaller-than-expected incoming majority giving his extreme pro-Trump colleagues extra power.

    And the House January 6 committee is poised to soon unveil its final report on Trump’s negligence and incitement leading up to the US Capitol insurrection. The findings, amid signs of acrimony inside the panel, could further color sentiment towards the ex-president as he seeks to build momentum after an underwhelming 2024 campaign launch – and as powerful donors, as well as prominent Republicans considering their own White House ambitions, are openly castigating Trump for hosting and then failing to disavow White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. The special counsel probe into his hoarding of classified documents and 2020 election chicanery is also gathering pace.

    Trump is also one of the factors playing into the Georgia Senate runoff election on December 6 that could give Democrats slender breathing room in the chamber or extend the 50-50 split broken only by Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote that made Biden’s agenda so precarious for the last two years.

    These next few weeks will show the country has failed to fully process the trauma of the Trump presidency or to arrive at the sense of normality that Biden promised during the 2020 campaign – even as the two rivals maneuver ahead of a possible rematch in 2024. They will also stress the near impossibility of governing at a time when America is deeply split between two political poles since big questions are likely to get pushed down the road.

    Big issues not solved this December will be pitched into an even more volatile atmosphere by an aggressive GOP-controlled House primed to slam the White House with partisan investigations.

    There’s also the renewed threat of a freight rail strike that could again clog supply lines and fresh Democratic calls for more action on gun control after a tragic new spate of mass shootings. The Democrats have a massive agenda before relinquishing the House but have little political room or time to accomplish it.

    Still, Congress is expected to mark one milestone in the coming weeks. The Senate is expected to vote to codify rights to same-sex and interracial marriage after a procedural vote on the measure earlier in November demonstrated strong bipartisan support.

    Here is what to look out for in the coming weeks.

    Congress must pass a bill to fund the government by December 16 or risk a partial government shutdown. The administration has asked for $37.7 billion in aid for Ukraine, $10 billion for extended efforts to combat Covid-19 and an unspecified amount for disaster relief after hurricanes hit Florida and Puerto Rico.

    Democrats will remain in control of the House until the new Congress in 2023, but a major spending package will also still likely require agreement from 10 Republicans to beat a Senate filibuster. GOP senators are especially skeptical about the administration’s warnings that the US will suffer a relapse in its exit from the pandemic without billions more dollars in funding. And even getting a Democratic majority in the chamber to sign on could be a challenge since West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin could make another stand against another spurt of government spending, especially since he would face a tough race if he decides to run for reelection in 2024.

    There is likely sufficient support for new aid to Ukraine in the Senate, but funding President Volodymyr Zelensky’s war for democracy against Russia is set to become far less routine next year as pro-Trump House members, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, are vowing to halt aid needed for vital weapons and ammunition. They want the cash sent to reinforce the southern US border instead.

    The most serious showdown of the new Congress could come over raising the government’s borrowing limit that is due to be reached sometime next year. Failure to do so could trash faith in America’s willingness to pay its bills and send shockwaves through the US and global economy.

    McCarthy has already warned he will require spending concessions on key programs in return for allowing the government to borrow more money – a scenario that triggered several damaging fiscal showdowns during the Obama administration.

    To avoid a repeat, Democrats could use the waning days of their control of both chambers to raise the debt ceiling themselves, using a budgetary process known as reconciliation that could bypass a Senate filibuster. But the process is hugely complex, in terms of congressional choreography and time.

    Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said before Thanksgiving that the “best way to get it done, the way it’s been done the last two or three times is bipartisan.” But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell didn’t express much interest in Schumer’s invitation sit down to sort out the issue, saying “I don’t think the debt limit issue is until sometime next year.”

    The House Republican leader has a big problem – finding the votes in the new GOP majority to fulfill his dream of becoming speaker.

    McCarthy staked out a series of hardline positions heading into the holiday in an apparent effort to appease pro-Trump lawmakers after several declared they won’t vote for him. The California lawmaker can afford to lose only a few GOP votes if he wants to be speaker.

    During a trip to the border last week, he warned Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign or face possible impeachment next year. And he said he’ll follow through on a threat to throw high-profile Democrats, such as Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar, off of top committees next year.

    Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Schiff accused McCarthy of adopting extremist positions for his own naked political gain.

    “Kevin McCarthy has no ideology, has no core set of beliefs,” Schiff told CNN’s Dana Bash, saying the top House Republican will do “whatever he needs to do to get the votes of the QAnon caucus within his conference.”

    McCarthy’s struggle to confirm his speakership lies partly in the smaller-than-expected GOP majority following the lack of an expected “red wave” in this month’s election. And it could be a preview of a volatile majority and the extent to which his tenure, if he does win the speakership, will be hostage to the whims of the far-right Freedom Caucus and pro-Trump lawyers who want to use their majority as a weapon against Biden. But McCarthy also has to worry that two years of relentless, partisan investigations could turn off voters and lead them to snatch away the party’s fragile edge in the House in the 2024 election.

    But before the 2024 election gets into full swing, there’s unfinished business from 2022. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker go head-to-head in a runoff on December 6 after neither broke the 50 percent threshold the first time around.

    Former President Barack Obama, who was the most effective Democratic messenger in the midterms, is due to campaign for Warnock on Thursday. Walker’s chances could depend on whether he is able to win over a significant block of Republican voters who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him despite backing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Walker’s problem is that he’s a protégé of Trump, from whom Kemp kept a good distance.

    After Trump announced his 2024 campaign days after the midterms, Warnock and his supporters started framing the runoff as the first chance for Democrats to stop Trump’s bid to return to the White House. Their argument recalled complaints by many Republicans that Trump’s intervention in two 2020 Senate runoffs in Georgia cost the GOP the chance to control the Senate.

    This might all be about one seat. But holding the Senate 51-49 rather than 50-50 would be huge for Democrats because it would insulate them from the incapacitation of one of their members and could diminish the power of Manchin, who has been a stubborn brake on Biden’s aspirations for two years.

    The former president finds himself under unusual political pressure inside the Republican Party he has dominated since 2015. His backing of several losing, election-denying and unpolished candidates in the midterms angered many key figures in the party. His hosting of Fuentes at the same time as rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate worried Republicans who fear that while he may be a formidable candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump’s empathy for the far-right will again doom him before a national electorate.

    Another potential Republican presidential candidate, outgoing Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, condemned the incident as “very troubling” on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

    “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or anti-Semite,” Hutchinson said. “You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from it.”

    Trump acknowledged the meeting in a Truth Social post, but claimed he knew nothing about Fuentes. He also did not disavow him or his views.

    This latest storm comes as the new special counsel Jack Smith, blasted by Trump as a “political hitman,” gets up to speed on the serious legal challenges facing the ex-president, who’s suffered several recent defeats in court in his bid to delay accountability. Trump’s early declaration of a campaign – apparently to quell the buzz around possible alternative Republican candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – leaves the former president needing a way to create some traction in December and in the early months of the year when he might find it hardest to win political exposure.

    The opening stages of the campaign will begin to answer the central question of Trump’s 2024 run – whether his so far rock solid appeal to the GOP base will counter concerns in the wider party about his broader viability.

    Trump’s decision to jump in the race has also increased scrutiny of whether Biden, who turned 80 earlier this month, will decide to run for reelection. The president was asked by CNN’s Betsy Klein during his holiday vacation in Nantucket how his conversations about 2024 were going with his family.

    “We’re not having any. We’re celebrating,” Biden replied.

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  • Election deniers faced defeat but election denialism is still swirling in Arizona | CNN Politics

    Election deniers faced defeat but election denialism is still swirling in Arizona | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Many of the candidates who promoted former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” were defeated in November, a pattern heralded by Democrats that is already reshaping the contours of the 2024 election – leading the former president to modulate his tone when he recently launched another bid for the White House.

    But the efforts to cast doubts about the management and operation of the 2022 election are still festering in Arizona, long a hotbed of election conspiracies that spawned the sham audit of the 2020 Maricopa County results by the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas after Trump questioned Joe Biden’s victory there. The continuing election denialism underscores that although the highest profile promoters of Trump’s election lies were defeated, the efforts to undermine democracy will carry on.

    Several Trump-backed Republican candidates at the top of Arizona’s ticket, including defeated GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, defeated Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, as well as GOP Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh – who is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount – have seized on a problem with Maricopa County’s printers on Election Day to make exaggerated claims about the election.

    Maricopa officials have said that printer problems affected about 70 vote centers, preventing some ballots from being read by tabulator machines on Election Day, but that the problems were fixed and that those ballots were set aside in a secure ballot box and counted separately. Bill Gates, the Republican Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, called the inconvenience and the long lines that resulted “unfortunate” in one Twitter video but said “every voter had an opportunity to cast a vote on Election Day.”

    But that has not stopped the issue from spiraling into a swirl of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the overall management of the election within the hard-right faction of Arizona’s Republican Party, despite the best efforts by other Republican election officials to squelch conspiracy theories and fact-check them in real time.

    Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 election results, is once again among the officials signaling that it is time to move on.

    Though Lake has not conceded in her race against Democrat Katie Hobbs, who is the current secretary of state, Ducey posted pictures Wednesday of his meeting with Hobbs on Twitter, noting that he had congratulated the governor-elect on “her victory in a hard-fought race and offered my full cooperation as she prepares to assume the leadership of the State of Arizona.”

    The issues could come to a head next week. Monday is the deadline for counties in the Grand Canyon State to certify their general election results – with statewide certification slated to follow on December 5. Any recounts cannot begin until after certification. In the leadup to those events, Lake has posted videos and missives on Twitter insisting that she is “still in the fight.”

    Because some voters were forced to stand in long lines – a unremarkable occurrence on Election Day in many states – Lake charged during a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s program “War Room” that her opponents “discriminated against people who chose to vote on Election Day.”

    Rather than using Trump’s 2020 buzzwords like ‘rigged,’ Lake has generally used more narrow language, describing the management of the election as “botched” and “the shoddiest ever” while accusing Maricopa County of “dragging its feet” in providing information about the election to her campaign.

    Marc Elias, an attorney specializing in election litigation who has taken a central role in pushing back against GOP efforts to restrict ballot access, noted in a post on his Democracy Docket website that Lake’s complaints about “voter suppression” were ironic given Republican’s efforts to limit voting access in recent years. He noted that there are videos on Lake’s Twitter feed of voters who “claimed that they waited in long lines to vote, were sent from one polling place to another by overworked election officials and had their provisional ballots rejected because they failed to register in time for the election.”

    “If you didn’t know better, you might think Lake was a champion of access to voting, supporter of funding for election officials and advocate for same day voter registration. She is none of those,” Elias wrote.

    Elias pointed out that the circumstance of voters being forced to wait in long lines due to equipment failures is not out of the ordinary.

    “Long lines caused by insufficient or broken voting equipment is a tax usually paid by Black, brown and young voters. At the same time that voters in Maricopa County were waiting in two-hour lines, students at the University of Michigan were enduring near freezing temperatures during their six-hour long wait to cast their ballots,” Elias said.

    But Lake’s arguments about problems with the election were bolstered by a letter from Arizona’s Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright last week to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office seeking information about what Wright described as “myriad problems that occurred in relation to Maricopa County’s administration of the 2022 General Election.” (Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is a Republican).

    The letter requested information about ballot-on-demand printer configuration settings that contributed to problems getting ballots read by on-site ballot tabulators; as well as the procedures for handling ballots that were supposed to be segregated and placed in the secure ballot box; and information about the handling of voters who checked in at one polling place but wanted to check out to vote in a second voting location, either because of wait times or other issues.

    Gates said the county would respond to the questions from the attorney general’s office “with transparency as we have done throughout this election” before it holds its public meeting on Monday to canvass the election. The canvass, Gates said, is “meant to provide a record of the votes counted and those that were not legally cast.”

    “There will be no delays or games; we will canvass in accordance with state law,” he said in the statement.

    But in Cochise County, a community of roughly 125,000 people in southeastern Arizona, the two Republicans on the three-person Board of Supervisors recently opted to delay a vote on certification until Monday’s deadline, citing their concerns about vote-tallying machines.

    That prompted the Secretary of State’s office to threaten legal action if county did not complete certification by the deadline. Peggy Judd, one of the Republican supervisors who initially voted to delay action, told The Arizona Republic this week that she has decided to certify the results when the board meets.

    CNN has reached out to Judd for comment.

    Still, the 11th-hour drama in the Republican stronghold underscores the mistrust of standard election procedures that has taken hold in parts of this battleground state ever since Biden won the state in 2020, the first Democrat presidential nominee to do so in nearly a quarter century.

    Officials in a second county – Mohave, in the northwest corner of the state – also voted to delay their certification until Monday’s deadline. But officials there described their move as a political statement to register displeasure with issues that arose on Election Day in Maricopa County.

    Like Lake, Finchem has refused to concede his race to Democrat Adrian Fontes while he has sent out fundraising solicitations to his supporters claiming that he is trying to get to the bottom of “myriad issues” with the election. He has repeatedly called for a new election.

    Hamadeh, the GOP attorney general candidate, filed a lawsuit in state superior court in Maricopa County this week challenging the election results based on what the suit describes as errors in the management of the election. Hamadeh’s lawsuit notes that plaintiffs are not “alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022 general election.”

    But the lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the Arizona secretary of state from certifying Mayes as the winner and asking the court to declare Hamadeh as the winner – while alleging that there was an “erroneous count of votes,” “wrongful disqualification of provisional and early ballots” and “wrongful exclusion of provisional voters.” The Republican National Committee has joined the lawsuit.

    Hamadeh trails Mayes by just 510 votes and the race is heading toward an automatic recount.

    “Legal counsel for the Secretary of State’s Office is reviewing the election contest and preparing a response but believes the lawsuit is legally baseless and factually speculative,” a spokesperson for the office said Friday, adding that “none of the claims raised warrant the extraordinary remedy of changing the election results and overturning the will of Arizona voters.”

    Lake has promised that her campaign’s attempt to get more information from election officials this week is only the beginning of her efforts. It remains to be seen whether she will have any more success than Trump did in his many failed lawsuits – and whether following a course that has now been resoundingly rejected by voters will be politically prudent as she lays the groundwork for her next act.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Harris dives into Asian diplomacy amid questions back home about her political future | CNN Politics

    Harris dives into Asian diplomacy amid questions back home about her political future | CNN Politics


    Palawan, Philippines
    CNN
     — 

    Vice President Kamala Harris is sticking close to her script when responding to what Democrats hope will once again be their greatest electoral mobilizer: Donald Trump and his third White House bid.

    “The president said he intends to run and if he does, I will be running with him,” she told CNN on Tuesday – the first time she’d been asked about Trump’s 2024 candidacy, which he announced last week. She was addressing a gaggle of reporters aboard the Teresa Magbanua, a Philippine Coast Guard vessel stationed at the edge of the South China Sea.

    Her cautious response at the end of a weeklong gaffe-free trip to Thailand and the Philippines could serve as a reflection of Harris’ vice presidency in its second year: toe the line but don’t make waves.

    As she returns from Asia, she’s stuck in a swirl of uncertainty about her place in the party if the now 80-year-old President Joe Biden does not seek a second term. The President is expected to consider the decision over Thanksgiving and upcoming holidays with family, whose advice he’ll seek about running for reelection.

    Harris’ trip to Asia – her third to the region since taking office – was another chance for America’s first South Asian vice president to showcase her ability to lead in the traditional ways of the vice presidency without overstepping her role as No. 2.

    She attended a series of bilateral meetings and greetings with Asian prime ministers and presidents alike, including China’s President Xi Jinping, called a last-minute high-profile meeting with Indo-Pacific countries after North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile hours before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ summit began and went on a symbolic visit to the Philippines’ archipelago island of Palawan, which could potentially heighten tensions with China.

    With Biden in Washington, DC, for his granddaughter’s wedding, Harris continued her role as his top-ranking envoy in a trip meant to deepen ties to mostly friendly Asian nations and cast the US as the region’s best option for economic stability –part of an ongoing effort to counter China’s growing influence.

    The vice president called the trip a success, as she brandished her policy chops in the region, attempting to fashion herself as a deft leader who speaks for Biden in his absence.

    “It is very important that we were here today to restate the United States commitment to international rules and norms. This trip and this visit in particular has also been about demonstrating the strength and importance of our relationship with the Philippines both as it relates to economic issues and also security issues,” Harris said in Palawan, in a speech where she rejected China’s aggression in the South China Sea and announced funding initiatives ameant to beef up the country’s systems and deepen security ties.

    Still, Harris’ events were tightly scripted and the trip itself, highly choreographed.

    Harris’ “brief greeting” with Xi, as her office described it, was her first face-to-face meeting with the world leader, happening on the margins of APEC. It was likely Harris’ most high-profile moment of the trip, despite the lack of US press in the room to witness it. The vice president met with him just a week after Biden’s first in-person bilateral with Xi, which lasted three hours.

    But unlike the president, who can share as much of a conversation as he pleases, there was an obvious limit to how much Harris felt comfortable sharing. She repeatedly declined to go far beyond what was written in a carefully calculated statement on her meeting with Xi.

    “We discussed that we are keeping open lines of communication, that we do not seek conflict or confrontation, but we welcome competition,” Harris told reporters in a press conference wrapping up her trip to Thailand, dodging twice whether that conversation touched on North Korea or Taiwan.

    If the goal was to remain gaffe free, the planning seems to have paid off. The Republican National Committee only clipped on Twitter moments thatmay have been awkward but didn’t lend themselves to real criticism –unusual treatment for one of their most attacked Democrats.

    On the first day of APEC, a “deeply concerned” Harris rushed aides to convene a last-minute unannounced multi-lateral emergency meeting with Indo-Pacific region allies, according to a senior administration official, after North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile Friday morning– her second most high-profile moment of the trip.

    Harris directed her team once she was briefed on the latest launch, a White House official said utilizing the Indo-Pacific nation’s presence at the APEC Leaders Summit to do so. At the head of a u-shaped table inside a small room in the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, the vice president accused North Korea of “brazen violation of multiple UN security resolutions.”

    “This conduct by North Korea most recently is a brazen violation of multiple UN Security resolutions. It destabilizes security in the region, and unnecessarily raises tensions. We strongly condemn these actions, and we again call North Korea to stop further unlawful destabilizing,” Harris said. “On behalf of the United States, I reaffirmed our ironclad commitment to our Indo Pacific Alliance.”

    Her statement closely tracked one the National Security Council issued hours earlier on Biden’s behalf, almost to a tee.

    The last-minute nature of the meeting caused aides to move quickly to corral the US press, but without time to pre-set cameras, press from the US, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Korea were fighting for an angle – causing the photo-op visuals to be at times shaky and askew.

    Still, it was a moment that looked almost presidential for Harris as it was reminiscent of the emergency in-person meeting Biden convened with top allies during his final day at the G20 in Indonesia, when a Russian-made missile fell inside the borders of a NATO ally.

    But the presidential posturing had limits. During the weeklong trip, the vice president only answered political and policy questions on two separate occasions from the group of all women reporters traveling with her from Washington – taking two or three questions each time.

    Harris didn’t stray from talking points in her answers, careful not to move beyond Biden’s position on a multitude of issues.

    Harris has long sought opportunities to showcase her own interests and craft her own lane as a younger vice president with potential presidential ambitions.

    Domestically, she has taken the lead for the administration on abortion rights. And on foreign trips, Harris has told aides she wants to go outside of the box when it comes to the schedule. A major part of that has been to meet with women and families in different countries.

    That directive was evident in Manila, when she participated in a moderated conversation about women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship inside a ballroom in the Sofitel.

    “On the issue of the economic wellbeing of women, I think we all know, and I feel very strongly, you lift up the economic status of a woman, her family will be lifted. Her community will be lifted,” Harris said as the Filipino women nodded in agreement. “All of society will benefit. Lift up the economic status of women, and all of society benefits.”

    In the Palawan fishing village of Tagburos, Harris watched women clean fish in front of a picturesque backdrop to talk about the devastation climate change and illegal fishing has had on the village.

    “Hi ma’am,” they yelled as she approached. Harris’ translator introduced the women as her best friends.

    “Best friends,” Harris said, with a laugh and a wave.

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  • CNN projects Rep. Mary Peltola will win race for Alaska House seat, thwarting Sarah Palin’s political comeback again | CNN Politics

    CNN projects Rep. Mary Peltola will win race for Alaska House seat, thwarting Sarah Palin’s political comeback again | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democrat who won a special election that sent her to Congress this summer, will once again thwart former Gov. Sarah Palin’s bid for a political comeback. CNN projected Wednesday that Peltola will win the race for Alaska’s at-large House seat after the state’s ranked choice voting tabulation, defeating Palin and Republican Nick Begich III.

    CNN also projected that Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski will win reelection. She’ll defeat Republican Kelly Tshibaka and Democrat Patricia Chesbro. CNN had previously projected that a Republican would hold the seat.

    And Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy will win reelection, CNN projected. He defeats Democrat Les Gara and independent Bill Walker. Dunleavy won more than 50% of first choice votes, so ranked choice tabulation was not required.

    In Alaska, voters in 2020 approved a switch to a ranked choice voting system. It is in place in 2022 for the first time.

    Under the new system, Alaska holds open primaries and voters cast ballots for one candidate of any party, and the top four finishers advance. In the general election, voters rank those four candidates, from their first choice to their fourth choice.

    If no candidate tops 50% of the first choice votes, the state then tabulates ranked choice results – dropping the last-place finisher and shifting those votes to voters’ second choices. If, after one round of tabulation, there is still no winner, the third-place finisher is dropped and the same vote-shifting process takes place.

    SE Cupp: Palin followed fame but Alaskans were turned off (September 2022)

    Peltola first won the House seat when a similar scenario played out in the August special election to fill the remaining months of the term of the late Rep. Don Young, a Republican who died in March after representing Alaska in the House for 49 years.

    Offering herself as a supporter of abortion rights and a salmon fishing advocate, Peltola emerged as the victor in the August special election after receiving just 40% of the first-place votes. This time, she has a larger share, while Palin’s and Begich’s support has shrunk.

    The House race has showcased the unusual alliances in Alaska politics. Though Peltola is a Democrat, she is also close with Palin – whose tenure as governor overlapped with Peltola’s time as a state lawmaker in Juneau. The two have warmly praised each other. Palin has criticized the ranked choice voting system. But she never took aim at Peltola in personal terms.

    The Republicans in the race, Palin and Begich, both urged voters to “rank the red” and list the two GOP contenders first and second.

    But Peltola had quickly won over many in the state after her special election victory – in part because she has deep relationships with a number of Republicans.

    Peltola told CNN in an interview that she and Palin had bonded in Juneau over being new mothers, and that Palin’s family had given Peltola’s family its backyard trampoline when Palin resigned from the governor’s office.

    At an Alaska Federation of Natives candidate forum in October, Palin effusively praised Peltola.

    “Doggone it, I never have anything to gripe about. I just wish she’d convert on over to the other party. But other than that, love her,” Palin said of Peltola.

    Peltola’s family was also close to the family of the late Young. Peltola’s father and Young had taught school together decades ago and were hunting buddies, Peltola said in an interview.

    In the race for Alaska’s Senate seat, Murkowski, a moderate Republican, was targeted by former President Donald Trump after she voted to convict him during his impeachment trial in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Murkowski also broke with Trump on a number of key votes during his presidency.

    Trump endorsed Tshibaka, and a cadre of former Trump campaign officials worked on her campaign. She was also endorsed by the Alaska Republican Party, which opted to back the more conservative candidate in a state Trump won by 10 percentage points in 2020.

    But Murkowski had built a broad coalition in a state where political alliances are often more complicated than they appear. She and Peltola, had publicly said they would rank each other first in their elections.

    Chesbro, the Democrat, was among the four candidates who had advanced to the general election. Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced, but dropped out and urged his supporters to vote for Tshibaka.

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  • Maricopa County elections official moved to undisclosed location on Election Day due to threats | CNN Politics

    Maricopa County elections official moved to undisclosed location on Election Day due to threats | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates was moved to an undisclosed location on Election Day due to threats to his safety, his spokesperson on Monday confirmed to CNN.

    Gates, a Republican, plays a prominent role in administering elections for Arizona’s largest county. During the midterms, he publicly pushed back against Republican suggestions that there were issues with the way the county conducted the election.

    Zach Schira, a spokesperson for Gates, told CNN the supervisor is also receiving increased security as he performs his official duties.

    Maricopa County spokesperson Jason Berry told CNN Gates was moved to an undisclosed location on Election Day after there was a specific threat made against Gates on social media. He was under the protection of the sheriff’s office and stayed at the undisclosed location for that one night.

    Berry said there was an uptick in threats against election workers and officials around the election as well as the primary earlier this year. Maricopa County became the center of the election conspiracy theory universe after then-President Donald Trump lost the state in 2020. 

    “The chairman has said before that the environment that we’re in, where people are spreading misinformation, certainly has not helped, and we’ve seen that over the last two years, not just this election, 2020 and then 2021 with the audit. So I think that, unfortunately, this has sort of been where we’ve been at for a couple years and it sort of ebbs and flows,” Berry told CNN.

    Katie Hobbs, the state’s Democratic governor-elect, reacted to the news on “CNN This Morning.”

    “We cannot tolerate it. This has to end,” Hobbs said. “I think we survived a lot in this last election. We helped save democracy but it’s not over. We have to continue to be vigilant and hold these folks accountable for dangerous political rhetoric that is causing this kind of threat.”

    The Republican candidates running for US Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state in Arizona made promoting lies about the 2020 election central parts of their campaigns. Senate candidate Blake Masters, gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem all lost their elections, and the race for Arizona attorney general remains too close to call.

    Gates has been publicly pushing back against false claims made by the GOP candidates in news conferences and media appearances. He has also posted several videos to Twitter answering questions about the elections process and explaining in more detail how ballots get counted.

    On Election Day there was a problem with printers at some Maricopa polling locations, and though Maricopa election officials explained the printer glitch would not stop anyone from voting, Republicans seized on the issue.

    A judge in Maricopa County who was asked to adjudicate on the issue said there was no evidence that anyone who wanted to vote was not able to. Voters were instructed to put their ballots into a secure ballot box to get counted instead of putting them into a machine because of the printer issue.

    Lake, who was backed by Trump, has not conceded in the race in the wake of her loss against Democrat Katie Hobbs and continues to make unfounded claims as she tries to raise doubts about the way the election was conducted in the state. Masters, also a prominent election denier supported by Trump, called Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly to concede but said there were “obviously a lot of problems with this election.” Finchem has not conceded, continues to spread lies about the election and has called for a new election to be conducted.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Paul Ryan invents a new category of anti-Trumpism | CNN Politics

    Paul Ryan invents a new category of anti-Trumpism | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    You know all about the “Never Trumpers” – that rump group of Republicans who have loudly spoken out against former President Donald Trump and what he has done to the GOP.

    Now meet the “Never-Again Trumpers.”

    That’s how former House Speaker Paul Ryan described himself in an interview with ABC News that aired over the weekend. Here’s what he said:

    “I’m proud of the accomplishments [during the Trump administration] – of the tax reform, the deregulation and criminal justice reform – I’m really excited about the judges we got on the bench, not just the Supreme Court, but throughout the judiciary. But I am a Never-Again Trumper. Why? Because I want to win, and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ‘20 and now in 2022.”

    Ryan, who left Congress in 2019, has grown increasingly outspoken about his feelings about Trump and the future of the Republican Party.

    Paul Ryan slams ‘horrifying’ end of Trump’s presidency (May, 2021)

    In late October, he told Fox Business Network that the “new swing voter in American politics is the suburban voter, and it’s really clear the suburban voter doesn’t like Trump, but they like Republicans.” And he added: “So I think anybody not named Trump, I think is so much more likely to win the White House for us.”

    (Worth noting: Trump won suburban voters over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost them narrowly to Joe Biden in 2020, according to the national exit polls. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans won suburban voters 52%-46%.)

    And back in June at an event for South Carolina GOP Rep. Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, Ryan was deeply critical of those within the GOP who didn’t vote that way. “There are a lot of people who say they’re going to vote their conscience, they’re going to vote for the Constitution, they’re going to vote for their convictions but when it gets hard to do that they don’t do it,” he said at the time. (Rice went on to lose the Republican primary in his district to a Trump-backed challenger.)

    Trump, as he does, has attacked Ryan in the past too. “As a Republican, having Paul Ryan on your side almost guarantees a loss, for both you, the Party, and America itself,” Trump wrote in a statement last year after Ryan gave a speech suggesting the party needed to move on from the former president.

    Attacks aside, Ryan’s position on Trump is an interesting one. It gives the former president credit for what he accomplished in office while suggesting he is neither the present nor the future of the GOP.

    Which is where, I think, some of the more serious challengers to Trump in 2024 will land. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, would do well to echo Ryan’s viewpoint – give Trump credit for what he did as president while making clear that his political appeal has shrunk to the point where it would be a mistake for Republicans to nominate him again.

    At the core of Ryan’s position as a “Never-Again Trumper” is something that I have often wondered doesn’t get more attention: Trump’s win-loss record.

    Trump famously bragged that “we are going to start winning again and we are going to win so much,” but the truth is that since the 2016 election, he has been much more closely identified with losing. In Trump’s time in office, Republicans lost control of the House and Senate. Republicans did retake the House majority in 2022, but their victory was far narrower than expected. And Democrats managed to hang on to their narrow Senate majority, with several Trump-backed candidates falling short in key races.

    That decided lack of winning seems to be a clear weak spot for Trump as he looks to rally support for his third presidential bid. And DeSantis already appears to be moving to exploit it. Following a crushing reelection victory this month, DeSantis said of his critics: “I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night.”

    Maybe DeSantis is part of the “Never Again Trump” movement too?

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  • Anti-abortion activists say Trump will still need to win them over in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Anti-abortion activists say Trump will still need to win them over in 2024 | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Anti-abortion proponents who believe Donald Trump’s crowning achievement was the overturning of Roe v. Wade say the newly declared 2024 contender will still have to earn their support in the upcoming Republican presidential primary – and he may be off to a rocky start.

    In his more-than-hour-long speech announcing his candidacy, the former president omitted any mention of his anti-abortion credentials or his appointment of three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who ultimately abolished federal abortion protections. Within hours, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group, released a statement pointedly dismissing candidates “who shy away from this fight.”

    Though the group did not mention Trump by name, its message was clear: No matter what he did to advance the anti-abortion cause during his first term, he must continue to prove his commitment as he seeks a second term or risk losing some conservative coalition support.

    Trump “raised the bar very high for what it meant to be a pro-life president,” SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser told CNN in an interview this week. For that reason, Dannenfelser said, she was “surprised” the former president didn’t do more to tout his anti-abortion bona fides in his campaign announcement.

    “It’s a deep moral failure not to step up in the most important moment for our movement and if you think you can breeze through Iowa and South Carolina without a strong pro-life national vision, you’re just wrong,” she said, naming two of the early voting states that can buoy or tank a presidential candidate’s bid.

    Others said Trump, who has confided to aides that he believes the abortion issue may be hurting Republican candidates, passed on a layup by touting some of his core achievements in the conservative policy sphere but declining to mention his first-term efforts to limit abortion access. Instead, Trump highlighted his deliverance of tax cuts and deregulatory and counterterrorism actions by his administration as he addressed throngs of loyalists in the ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday.

    “For sure it was a missed opportunity,” said Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life. “President Trump has done many, many things we are grateful for but regardless, whoever gets our vote will have to earn it.”

    “We expect to be courted in the primary process and the person we want to get behind will be unapologetic in speaking up to defend the pre-born and calling for federal protections,” Hawkins said.

    The demand among leading abortion opponents for unflinching advocates comes as Trump, whose muted reaction to the overturning of Roe did not go unnoticed among anti-abortion conservatives, is expected to face primary challengers whose advancement of anti-abortion efforts date much further back than his own and may be more willing to embrace more stringent restrictions on abortion access in the months to come, possibly at the federal level. Trump has also found himself weakened in the wake of midterm defeats as some deep-pocketed GOP donors and elected Republicans call for the party to move on from him, underscoring the importance of keeping the conservative grassroots in his corner.

    “He does not want to risk any loss in the pro-life, evangelical or Catholic spheres,” Dannenfelser said.

    “I think Republicans who are running away from the issue right now are wrong,” added Tom McClusky, director of government affairs at CatholicVote, an advocacy organization that opposes abortion and spent $9.7 million in the 2020 presidential contest to boost Trump over Joe Biden.

    Trump’s apparent lack of interest in promoting his anti-abortion achievements is not new, McClusky added, saying that “he didn’t mention all that unless prodded during his presidency.” After the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights this summer – kicking authority on the issue to state governments – Trump took a brief victory lap, declaring in a statement that the landmark ruling wouldn’t have happened without him “nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

    Meanwhile, other elements of Trump’s reaction to the ruling raised questions among abortion opponents about his support for new laws restricting the procedure, particularly after the former president had previously sidestepped questions about whether he supported a controversial Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for life-threatening medical emergencies.

    “This brings everything back to the states where it has always belonged,” Trump told Fox News in the wake of the June 24 Dobbs decision.

    At a September campaign rally in Ohio for then-Senate GOP hopeful J.D. Vance, Trump once again affirmed his believe that abortion rights or restrictions should be determined “in the states,” adding that “Republicans have to get smart with that issue.”

    “It’s turned over to the states and it’s working out… The places where it’s not working out, it will work out,” Trump said.

    But if he repeats that in the primary, Trump could land himself in hot water with anti-abortion groups that have been championing efforts to legislate abortion at the federal level.

    “One thing that will not be satisfactory and a disqualifier is any candidate who says this is a state issue,” said Dannenfelser, who has remained in touch with Trump since he left office.

    Others simply want to see Republican presidential candidates – including Trump – talking about abortion as much as possible in the months to come. Prior to the midterms elections, however, Trump expressed concern to advisers that the reversal of Roe would backfire on GOP candidates by injecting a jolt of energy into the Democratic base, according to two people familiar with his comments.

    One of those sources said Trump has since griped to aides that his prediction was right, partly blaming the GOP’s underwhelming midterm performance on the attention abortion received from voters. CNN exit poll data found that 61 percent of voters were displeased with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and about seven in 10 of those voters backed Democratic candidates running for Congress.

    A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

    “A lot of folks seemed skittish about talking about abortion immediately after Roe’s reversal. We believe that it’s dangerous for Republicans not when you talk about it but when you don’t talk,” said Hawkins.

    Democrats have similarly taken note of Trump’s caution around the abortion subject, noting that they will continue to highlight his record.

    “It’s no surprise Donald Trump is terrified about talking about his own record of paving the way for abortion bans across the country,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, adding that “Democrats will remind voters how [Trump] said there should be ‘some form of punishment’ for women who get an abortion’” during his 2016 presidential campaign.

    With Trump kicking off the 2024 primary earlier this week, several abortion opponents have said they have already been impressed with at least one of his potential rivals – former Vice President Mike Pence – and are closely watching to see how others handle the issue as they near possible campaigns of their own.

    That includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, potentially Trump’s leading foe if he mounts a campaign, who signed a 15-week abortion ban into law this past April but hasn’t committed to including additional legislative restrictions in an upcoming special session of the Florida state legislature, despite calls from abortion opponents to do so.

    “We would like to see him do more and see him speak more loudly,” said Hawkins, who remains hopeful that DeSantis’ sweeping reelection victory will embolden him “to take on additional measures in this coming legislative session.”

    Pence, for his part, has long charted a political identity with anti-abortion advocacy at its core since his days as a conservative congressman from Indiana. Just weeks after the Dobbs decision was handed down, the former vice president traveled to South Carolina to deliver a speech outlining a Republican policy blueprint for “post-Roe America.” He and his wife Karen have also been quietly raising funds for crisis pregnancy centers across the country and in keynote remarks at a gala for Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America in September, Pence also appeared to endorse Republican efforts to shepherd a national abortion ban through Congress.

    “I welcome any and all efforts to advance the cause of life in state capitals or in the nation’s capital,” Pence said at the time.

    At a CNN town hall this week, Pence praised the Dobbs decision, saying it gave “the American people a new beginning for life.” While suggesting that laws around abortion had been “returned to the states and the American people, where it belongs,” Pence also said he remains hopeful that all 50 states will eventually “stand for the sanctity of life.”

    Marc Short, a top adviser to the former vice president, said Pence will continue to train a spotlight on the issue whether or not he decides to run for president in 2024.

    “He’s always said we now have to take our case to the American people in a winsome way, while others have said, ‘just stop talking about it,’” Short said, adding that abortion “has never been a comfortable issue for President Trump and one he thinks of as a political loser.”

    While Pence’s intense focus on the issue has scored him points with abortion opponents, Short said it has also rankled some donors who don’t want to see third rail issues “highlighted as much [or] don’t necessarily agree with his position.” Pence, who is in the midst of promoting his new book “So Help Me God” that chronicles his time as vice president, has “loyal supporters who don’t necessarily share his views on life” but continue to support him because they consider him “a role model in public service,” Short said.

    After federal abortion rights were overturned, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – another possible 2024 contender – tweeted that conservatives would soon see “which politicians supported the pro-life cause to win elections, and which actually believed it.” But in a September interview with the Sioux City Journal during one of several visits he has made to Iowa, Pompeo also declined to offer support for Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’ push to outlaw abortion after six weeks in her state.

    “Iowa will sort through it for itself, the state of Kansas will sort through it for itself,” said Pompeo, a former congressman from Kansas, which earlier this year rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment that could have paved the way for a statewide ban on abortion. Pompeo described the vote as “very confusing.”

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  • Fact check: Trump responds to special counsel news with debunked claim about Obama and the Bushes | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump responds to special counsel news with debunked claim about Obama and the Bushes | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    In former President Donald Trump’s first extended response to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Friday announcement that he had appointed a special counsel to oversee the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention of government documents after he left office, Trump defended himself with dishonesty – repeating his false and thoroughly debunked claims about how other ex-presidents handled official records.

    Trump, speaking Friday night at a gala at his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence, asked why there is not an investigation into “all of the other presidents that preceded me,” including but not limited to Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He claimed that these previous presidents “kept documents,” and he continued: “In one case, they had it in a Chinese restaurant with broken windows. And in another case they had a Chinese restaurant connected to a bowling alley. This is where the documents were kept. They took documents with them. President Obama took documents.”

    Merrick Garland announces special counsel to oversee Trump investigations

    Facts First: Trump’s claims are, again, false – and they have been debunked by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) itself. As NARA explained in an August statement, Barack Obama did not take the presidential documents Trump claimed Obama had taken. Rather, NARA itself moved documents from the Obama administration to a NARA-managed facility in the Chicago area, near where Obama’s presidential library is being built. NARA similarly explained in a statement in October, after Trump added other past presidents to the baseless narrative, that neither of the Bushes took the documents Trump claimed they had taken. Again, it was NARA that took the Bushes’ presidential documents to facilities that NARA managed near the future locations of their presidential libraries.

    In other words, there is no equivalence between Trump’s situation – in which he allegedly took hundreds of classified documents, plus numerous other presidential records, to the Mar-a-Lago resort and residence – and the situations, or really non-situations, of his predecessors.

    Trump used the Friday speech to deliver a variety of other criticism of Garland’s decision to appoint the special counsel, veteran prosecutor Jack Smith. Smith will also oversee a second criminal investigation that involves Trump, that one into whether anybody “unlawfully interfered” with the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election or with the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College “on or about” January 6, 2021. (Smith won’t oversee the investigations or prosecutions of people who physically breached the Capitol that day.)

    Trump’s suggestion that past presidents’ documents were stored in an insecure manner is also false.

    The facility where George H.W. Bush’s presidential documents were temporarily stored, in College Station, Texas, was indeed a former bowling alley connected to a former Chinese restaurant. But by the time Bush’s records arrived, the building had been turned by NARA into a professional archiving facility with extensive security measures and no more bowling lanes or equipment.

    Though Trump has repeatedly claimed or suggested that the College Station facility was not secure – this time he said it had “broken windows” – this narrative is baseless, too. In its October statement, NARA said that all of the temporary facilities where it stored past presidents’ documents “met strict archival and security standards.” NARA said that “reports that indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office, or that the records were housed in substandard conditions, are false and misleading.”

    You don’t have to take NARA’s recent word for it. The Associated Press reported in 1994: “Uniformed guards patrol the premises. There are closed-circuit television monitors and sophisticated electronic detectors along walls and doors. Some printed material is classified and will remain so for years; it is open only to those with top-secret clearances.”

    Finally, it is not a revelation that the facility had a colorful past as a restaurant and alley; NARA officials publicly joked about this at the time. It’s normal for NARA to lease large buildings that formerly had some other purpose. The Washington Post reported in 1993: “There aren’t any lanes anymore. No gutters, no pins, no beer. Thanks to a rush remodeling job after last November’s election, there are a few simple offices, a massive, fire-resistant vault and row after row of steel shelves filled with cardboard boxes and wooden crates.”

    Trump has continued making these false claims about his predecessors not only despite the NARA statements debunking them but despite numerous fact-checks from major media outlets. He also made the claim about Obama supposedly taking documents in the Tuesday speech in which he announced his 2024 presidential candidacy; CNN fact-checked it then, too.

    PALM BEACH, FLORIDA - NOVEMBER 08: Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media during an election night event at Mar-a-Lago on November 08, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump spoke as the nation awaits the results of voting in the midterm elections. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    Legal experts in new report conclude there’s a ‘strong basis’ to charge Trump

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  • Asia must not become arena for ‘big power contest,’ says China’s Xi as APEC summit gets underway | CNN

    Asia must not become arena for ‘big power contest,’ says China’s Xi as APEC summit gets underway | CNN


    Bangkok, Thailand
    CNN
     — 

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping has stressed the need to reject confrontation in Asia, warning against the risk of cold war tensions, as leaders gather for the last of three world summits hosted in the region this month.

    Xi began the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit in Bangkok by staking out his wish for China to be viewed as a driver of regional unity in a written speech released ahead of Friday’s opening day – which also appeared to make veiled jabs at the United States.

    The Asia-Pacific region is “no one’s backyard” and should not become “an arena for big power contest,” Xi said in the statement, in which he also decried “any attempt to politicize and weaponize economic and trade relations.”

    “No attempt to wage a new cold war will ever be allowed by the people or by our times,” he added in the remarks, which were addressed to business leaders meeting alongside the summit and did not name the US.

    Xi struck a milder tone in a separate address to APEC leaders on Friday morning as the main event got underway, calling for stability, peace and the development of a “more just world order.”

    Leaders and representatives from 21 economies on both sides of the Pacific meeting in the Thai capital for the two-day summit will grapple with that question of how best to promote stability, in a region sitting on the fault lines of growing US-China competition and grappling with regional tensions and the economic fallout of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    Those challenges were palpable Friday morning, as North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the second weapons test by Kim Jong Un’s regime in two days amid increased provocation from Pyongyang.

    US Vice President Kamala Harris gathered on the sidelines of the summit with leaders from Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to condemn the launch in an unscheduled media briefing.

    In a speech Friday to business leaders, Harris said the US had a “profound stake” in the region, and described America as a “strong partner” to its economies and a “major engine of global growth.”

    Without mentioning China in her address, she also promoted American initiatives to counter Beijing’s regional influence, including the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, launched by Washington earlier this year, and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.

    “The US is here to stay,” said the vice president, who is representing the US at the summit after US President Joe Biden returned home for a family event after attending meetings around the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the G20 summit in Bali in recent days.

    Despite the US-China rivalry, the three summits have also brought opportunities to defuse rising tensions and strained communication between the world’s top two powers.

    US-China relations have deteriorated sharply in recent years, with the two sides clashing over Taiwan, the war in Ukraine, North Korea, and the transfer of technology among other issues.

    In August, following a visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, China fired multiple missiles into waters around the self-governing island and ramped up naval and warplane exercises in the surrounding area. Beijing claims the democratic island as its territory, despite never having controlled it, and suspended a number of dialogues with the US over the visit.

    A landmark meeting between Xi and Biden on the sidelines of the G20 in Bali on Monday – the leaders’ first since Biden took office – ended with the two sides agreeing to bolster communication and collaborate on issues like climate and food security.

    After landing in Bangkok Thursday, Chinese leader Xi sat down with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in the first meeting between leaders of the two Asian countries in nearly three years. Both sides called for more cooperation following a breakdown in communication over points of contention from Taiwan to disputed islands.

    At stake in the broader meeting, however, is whether leaders can find consensus on how to treat Russia’s aggression in a concluding document, or whether differences in views between the broad grouping of nations will stymie such a result, despite months of discussion between APEC nations’ lower-level officials.

    In an address to business leaders alongside the summit Friday morning, French President Emmanuel Macron, who was invited by host country Thailand, called for consensus and unity against Moscow’s aggression.

    “Help us to convey the same message to Russia: stop the war, respect the international order and come back to the table,” he said.

    Macron also called out the US-China rivalry, warning of the risk to peace if countries are forced to choose between the two great powers.

    “We need a single global order,” Macron said to applause from business leaders.

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  • Inside the White House’s months of prep-work for a GOP investigative onslaught | CNN Politics

    Inside the White House’s months of prep-work for a GOP investigative onslaught | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    More than four months before voters handed Republicans control of the House of Representatives, top White House and Department of Homeland Security officials huddled in the Roosevelt Room to prepare for that very scenario.  

    The department and its secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, had emerged as top targets of Republican ire over the Biden administration’s border security policies – ire that is certain to fuel aggressive congressional investigations with Republicans projected to narrowly reclaim the House majority and the subpoena power that comes with it.  

    Sitting around the large conference table in the Roosevelt Room, White House lawyers probed senior DHS officials about their preparations for the wide-ranging Republican oversight they had begun to anticipate, including Republicans’ stated plans to impeach Mayorkas, two sources familiar with the meeting said.  

    Convened by Richard Sauber, a veteran white-collar attorney hired in May to oversee the administration’s response to congressional oversight, the meeting was one of several the White House has held since the summer with lawyers from across the administration – including the Defense Department, State Department and Justice Department.

    The point, people familiar with the effort said, has been to ensure agencies are ready for the coming investigative onslaught  and to coordinate an administration-wide approach. 

    While President Joe Biden and Democrats campaigned to preserve their congressional majorities, a small team of attorneys, communications strategists and legislative specialists have spent the past few months holed up in Washington preparing for the alternative, two administration officials said.  

    The preparations, largely run out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House, are among the earliest and most comprehensive by any administration ahead of a midterm election and highlight how far-reaching and aggressive Republican investigations are expected to be.

    Along with Sauber, this spring the White House hired veteran Democratic communications aide Ian Sams as spokesman for the White House counsel’s office. Top Biden adviser Anita Dunn returned to the White House in the spring, in part to oversee the administration’s preparations for a GOP-controlled Congress.

    The Justice Department is also bracing for investigations, bringing in well-known government transparency attorney Austin Evers to help respond to legislative oversight. Evers is the founder of the group American Oversight and served as its executive director until this year, and previously handled the oversight response at the State Department.

     The White House is preparing to hire additional lawyers and other staff to beef up its oversight response team in the next two months, before the new Congress convenes in January, administration officials said. The hires will bolster Sauber’s current team of about 10 lawyers, a source familiar with the matter said.

    In piecing together GOP targets and strategy, the team has paid close attention to Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky, the two Republicans who are likely to lead much of the investigations under a GOP-controlled House and have spent months telegraphing their intentions in TV interviews and oversight letters.   

    Jim Jordan and James Comer.

    Their opening salvo came Thursday, when Comer and Jordan hosted a joint news conference to preview the various investigations into President Joe Biden’s family.  

    “In the 118th Congress, this committee will evaluate the status of Joe Biden’s relationship with his family’s foreign partners and whether he is a president who is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars and influence” said Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee. “I want to be clear: This is an investigation of Joe Biden, and that’s where the committee will focus in this next Congress.”

    Comer, flanked by Jordan and other Republicans on the Oversight Committee, said Republicans have made connections between the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and the president whom they believe requires further investigation. 

    The White House accused Comer of pursuing “long-debunked conspiracy theories.”

    Even though the Republican majority is poised to be much thinner than expected – with a likely margin of just a couple seats – all indications are that House Republicans are poised to push ahead with a wide-ranging set of investigations into all corners of the Biden administration, including the messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Covid-19 vaccine mandates and the Justice Department’s handling of the various investigations related to Donald Trump. 

    Republicans are also intent on investigating the president’s family, particularly his son, Hunter Biden. 

    With little chance of passing much legislation in a deadlocked Congress, investigations are shaping up to be the focal point of how a House Republican majority wields its power.  

    “You’re gonna have a bunch of chairmen who are totally on their own, doing whatever the hell they want without regard for what the national political implications are,” said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said he believes GOP leader Kevin McCarthy will have “very little leash” to rein in those investigative pursuits.  

    House Republicans have already sent over 500 letters to the administration requesting that they preserve documents, key committees have hired new legal counsels to help with investigations, and leadership has hosted classes for staffers on how to best use the oversight tools at their disposal.

    Meanwhile, McCarthy’s office has been working with likely committee chairs over the last several months to delegate who is going to be investigating what, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

    “It’s like a clearing house,” the source said. 

    But the GOP’s push for aggressive investigations could run into resistance from the moderate wing of the GOP, who want to use their newfound majority to address key legislative priorities – not just pummel Hunter Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci. While McCarthy has vowed to conduct rigorous oversight, he will have to strike a delicate balance between the demands of the competing factions in his party.

    White House officials believe Republicans are bound to overstep and that their investigative overreach will backfire with the American public. In the meantime, they are prepared to push back forcefully, believing that many proposed investigations are based on conspiracy theories and politically motivated charges.

    “President Biden is not going to let these political attacks distract him from focusing on Americans’ priorities, and we hope congressional Republicans will join us in tackling them instead of wasting time and resources on political revenge,” Sams, the spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement to CNN. 

    The House’s expected razor-thin majority is likely to make it more difficult to take steps like impeaching members of Biden’s Cabinet – or even the president himself. But that doesn’t mean, sources told CNN, they’re not going to try, particularly when it comes to the border and Mayorkas.  

    Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, on Capitol Hill on May 04, 2022.

    On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee provided a preview of what is to come. Over the course of a marathon four-hour hearing, Republican lawmakers grilled Mayorkas over the influx of migrants at the southern border, the number of people who evade Border Patrol capture, and encounters with people on the border who are on the terror watch list. 

    Throughout, Mayorkas stood his ground, maintaining that the border is “secure” and batting down criticism that it’s “open” as Republicans have claimed. 

    At one point, Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana foreshadowed more testimony next year, telling Mayorkas: “We look forward to seeing you in January.”  

    Mayorkas, officials said, remains undeterred by the threats of impeachment and intends to stay at the helm of the department, a point he reiterated Tuesday. Still, one person close to Mayorkas told CNN that the DHS chief is “nervous” about impending GOP investigations and the potential of being continually hauled before Congress by hostile Republican committee chairs. 

    “Don’t let the bastards win,” one US official familiar with Mayorkas’ thinking said when asked to sum up the DHS chief’s attitude toward potential GOP investigations on border issues and impeachment.   

    “We will respond to legitimate inquiries,” the official said. “We’re not going to feed into what might wind up as kabuki theater.”  

    DHS already responds to hundreds of congressional inquiries per month, according to a Homeland Security official, who added the department has been preparing for months for any potential increase in congressional activity. The department is also ready to “aggressively respond to attempts to mischaracterize the strong record” of the DHS work force, as well as “politically motivated attempts to attack the secretary,” the official said.

    DHS officials considered hiring outside legal counsel to prepare for the potential onslaught of Republican scrutiny but ultimately chose not to, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.   Ricki Seidman, a senior counselor to Mayorkas and former senior Justice Department official, has been involved in DHS’s preparation for the GOP oversight, the source added.

     Another Homeland Security official said that the Border Patrol along with Customs and Border Protection “are going to take the most heat.” 

    The most politically charged investigations next year are poised to be those into the president’s son Hunter Biden.  

    Top Republicans have largely been more than happy for Comer to take on the leading role of investigating Hunter Biden, multiple sources said.  Jordan does not plan to be intimately involved in the Hunter Biden probe but will provide public support for Comer, including appearing with him at the upcoming press conference.  

    “We’re going to lay out what we have thus far on Hunter Biden, and the crimes we believe he has committed,” Comer told CNN earlier this month just before the election. “And then we’re going to be very clear and say what we are investigating, and who we’re gonna ask to meet with us for transcribed interviews.”

    Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing in his business activities.

    Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, attends a ceremony at the White House on Thursday, July 7, 2022.

    Behind the scenes though, Jordan and other soon-to-be powerful Republican lawmakers – including likely chairman of House Intelligence Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio – have sought to distance their committees from the Hunter Biden investigation in favor of other investigative pursuits they deem to be “more serious,” the sources said. 

    The handling of Republican investigations related to Hunter Biden will fall to Hunter Biden’s own attorneys, while Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, will handle related matters related to Joe Biden’s personal capacity that do not touch on his official duties. Bauer, who is married to Dunn, and White House attorneys have already met to divvy up workflow over potential lines of inquiries to ensure there are clear lanes of responsibility between investigations that touch on Joe Biden’s official role as president and vice president and his personal life. 

    Another key point of interest is likely to be the administration’s handling of the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which led to the death of 13 Marines and nearly 200 Afghans when a bomb exploded at the Kabul airport.  

    At the State Department, a small group of officials has already begun planning for the coming investigations into Afghanistan, officials said. While that group will work with Sauber’s team at the White House, State Department officials expect to take the lead in handling GOP inquiries into Afghanistan.     

    The department has not hired new people to work on these efforts, but certain officials who are already at the department expect to spend a lot more of their time responding to the congressional inquiries, officials said.  

    The Republican investigation into the withdrawal is likely to be led by Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs committee. McCaul and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have historically had a good relationship, which State Department officials are hoping will be an important factor.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021

    Administration officials said they plan to take McCaul’s inquiry seriously because they expect he will demonstrate a seriousness of purpose, instead of making bombastic demands like some other Republicans. And House Republican aides said they plan to explore the administration’s willingness to work with them before issuing subpoenas.

    “If they’ll meet us in the middle by giving us some documents instead of all documents, or agreeing to turn over certain individuals but not all of the individuals for interviews, then that’s a start,” said one of the GOP aides familiar with the plans. “But if they just want to be completely obstructive and say no to every single request, then you’ll see subpoenas fairly soon.”

    The department concluded its own review of the withdrawal in March, but the findings of that report have not been shared publicly, officials said. While it was expected to be put out earlier this year, State Department officials said the White House is making that determination, and they are unsure of where that decision stands. House Republicans want to see that report.

    At the Pentagon, officials are bracing for the possibility of public grilling at televised hearings on everything from Afghanistan to views about “wokeness” in the force and the discharging of troops who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine. 

    “We know it’s coming,” one administration official said. 

     Both Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose term expires at the end of September 2023, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who appears determined to stay until the end of the Biden administration, have faced sharp criticism from congressional Republicans and know the coming months may be a rough political ride, officials said.    

    Milley has been a particular target for Republicans for his well-known efforts to keep the final weeks of the Trump presidency from careening into a national security crisis. 

    Both Milley and Austin have pushed back forcefully on GOP accusations that the military is “woke,” a topic that’s likely to become a focal point for some Republicans in the coming months.

    “This is going to be a Congress under Republican control like no other,” said Rafi Prober, a congressional investigations specialist with the law firm Akin Gump who previously worked in the Obama administration.    

    Aaron Cutler, the head of the Washington government investigations group at law firm Hogan Lovells and a former Republican congressional leadership staffer, said the partisan investigations serve to “feed the base red meat.”

    But Cutler said he has heard from conservatives that the tepid result for Republicans in the midterm elections may translate to less “silliness in politics,” he said. “The American people are pushing back, and saying we want government to work.”   

    That is exactly the calculation the White House and congressional Democrats are making. A senior House Democratic source said that aggressive attacks on Biden’s son could backfire, adding that congressional Democrats were gearing up to defend the president by calling out “lies and hypocrisy.”

    Still, with the GOP investigations in mind, a team of White House lawyers has in recent weeks and months advised senior White House staff on how “not to be seen as influencing politically sensitive missions at (departments and agencies),” a source familiar with the matter told CNN.  

    Asked at his press conference last week about the prospect of GOP investigations, including into his son, Biden said: “I think the American people will look at all of that for what it is. It’s just almost comedy. … Look, I can’t control what they’re going to do.”

    This story has been updated with comments from Rep. Comer on Thursday.

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  • Nancy Pelosi announces she won’t run for leadership post, marking the end of an era | CNN Politics

    Nancy Pelosi announces she won’t run for leadership post, marking the end of an era | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that she will relinquish her leadership post, after leading House Democrats for two decades, building a legacy as one of the most powerful and polarizing figures in American politics.

    Pelosi, the first and only woman to serve as speaker, said that she would continue to serve in the House, giving the next generation the opportunity to lead the House Democrats, who will be in the minority next year despite a better-than-expected midterm election performance.

    “I will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress,” said Pelosi in the House chamber. “For me, the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect, and I’m grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.”

    Pelosi, 82, rose to the top of the House Democratic caucus in 2002, after leading many in her party against a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. She then guided Democrats as they rode the waves of popular opinion, seeing their power swell to a 257-seat majority after the 2008 elections, ultimately crash to a 188-seat minority, and then rise once again.

    Her political career was marked by an extraordinary ability to understand and overcome those political shifts, keeping conflicting factions of her party united in passing major legislation. She earned the Speaker’s gavel twice – after the 2006 and 2018 elections – and lost it after the 2010 elections.

    Of late, she has conducted a string of accomplishments with one of the slimmest party splits in history, passing a $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package last year and a $750 billion health care, energy and climate bill in August.

    Her legislative victories in the Biden era cemented her reputation as one of the most successful party leaders in Congress. During the Obama administration, Pelosi was instrumental to the passage of the massive economic stimulus bill and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which provides over 35 million Americans health care coverage.

    Over the past 20 years, the California liberal has been relentlessly attacked by Republicans, who portray her as the personification of a party for the coastal elite. “We have fired Nancy Pelosi,” said House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Fox News on Wednesday, after Republicans won back the chamber.

    In recent years, the anger directed toward her has turned menacing. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, pro-Trump rioters searched for her — and last month, a male assailant attacked Paul Pelosi, the speaker’s husband, with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco, while she was in Washington.

    Pelosi told CNN’s Anderson Cooper this month that her decision to retire would be influenced by the politically motivated attack. Paul Pelosi was released from the hospital two weeks ago after surgery to repair a skull fracture and injuries to his arm and hands.

    After thanking her colleagues for their well-wishes for Paul, the House chamber broke out into a standing ovation.

    Pelosi’s long reign became a source of tension within her own party. She won the gavel after the 2018 elections by promising her own party that she would leave her leadership post by 2022.

    Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who previously tried to oust Pelosi, told CNN it’s time for a new chapter.

    “She’s a historic speaker who’s accomplished an incredible amount, but I also think there are a lot of Democrats ready for a new chapter,” said Moulton.

    But some Democrats praised Pelosi and said they wished she would remain leader. Asked about her decision, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer clutched his chest and said he had pleaded with her to stay.

    “I told her when she called me and told me this and all that, I said ‘please change your mind. We need you here,’” Schumer said.

    House Democrats appear likely to choose New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, 52, to succeed Pelosi as leader, though Democrats won’t vote until November 30.

    After her speech, Pelosi wouldn’t tell reporters who’d she support. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn announced they would also step down from their leadership posts, and endorsed Jeffries to succeed Pelosi. Hoyer said Jeffries “will make history for the institution of the House and for our country.” Clyburn added that he hoped Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark and California Rep. Pete Aguilar would join Jeffries in House Democratic leadership.

    Before Pelosi’s announcement, Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told CNN that she expects her caucus to throw their support behind Jeffries, and help him become the first Black House Democratic leader.

    “If she steps aside, I’m very clear that Hakeem Jeffries is the person that I will be voting for and leading the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for,” said Beatty.”I don’t always speak for everybody, but I’m very comfortable saying I believe that every member of the Congressional Black Caucus would vote for Hakeem Jeffries.”

    Retiring North Carolina Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a former CBC chairman, told CNN that Jeffries “is prepared for the moment” if Pelosi steps aside. Butterfield said he thought Jeffries would run.

    The longtime Democratic leader told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that members of her caucus had asked her to “consider” running in the party’s leadership elections at the end of the month, adding: “But, again, let’s just get through the election.”

    Any decision to run again, Pelosi said, “is about family, and also my colleagues and what we want to do is go forward in a very unified way, as we go forward to prepare for the Congress at hand.”

    “Nonetheless, a great deal is at stake because we’ll be in a presidential election. So my decision will again be rooted in the wishes of my family and the wishes of my caucus,” she continued. “But none of it will be very much considered until we see what the outcome of all of this is. And there are all kinds of ways to exert influence.”

    Pelosi is a towering figure in American politics with a history-making legacy of shattering glass ceilings as the first and so far only woman to be speaker of the US House of Representatives.

    Pelosi was first elected to the House in 1987, when she won a special election to fill a seat representing California’s 5th Congressional District.

    When she was first elected speaker, Pelosi reflected on the significance of the event and what it meant for women in the United States.

    “This is an historic moment,” she said in a speech after accepting the speaker’s gavel. “It’s an historic moment for the Congress. It’s an historic moment for the women of America.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments Thursday.

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  • Divided government is more productive than you think | CNN Politics

    Divided government is more productive than you think | CNN Politics

    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Now that CNN has projected Republicans will win the House of Representatives, it’s time to consider a Washington where both parties have some control.

    Despite underperforming on Election Day, the GOP gains will have a major impact on what’s accomplished in the coming two years.

    Additional climate change policy? Don’t count on it. National abortion legislation? Not a chance. Voting rights? Not likely.

    Plus, Republicans have indicated they will use any leverage they can find – including the debt ceiling – to force spending cuts.

    While you might immediately think this is all a recipe for a stalemate in Washington, I was surprised to read the argument, backed up by research, that the US government actually overperforms during periods of divided government.

    Those periods are coming more and more frequently, by the way. While there used to be relatively long periods of a decade or more during which one party controlled all of Washington, recent presidents have lost control of the House.

    Barack Obama, Donald Trump and George W. Bush each saw their party lose the House. President Joe Biden will join that club.

    The two Republicans in the ’80s and ‘90s – Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – both had productive presidencies and never enjoyed a sympathetic congressional majority. The last president to enjoy unified government throughout his presidency was Democrat Jimmy Carter, and voters did not look very kindly on him in the final analysis.

    What’s below are excerpts from separate phone conversations conducted before the midterm election with Frances Lee and James Curry, authors of the 2020 book, “The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era.” Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, and Curry is a political science professor at the University of Utah. What led me to them was their 2020 argument that divided government overperforms and unified government underperforms expectations.

    What should Americans know about divided government?

    LEE: It’s the normal state of affairs in our politics in the modern era. Since 1980, something like two-thirds of the time we’ve had a divided government.

    And yet you think about all the things that government has undertaken in the years since the Second World War. The role and scope of the US government is so much greater now than it was then. And a lot of that happened in divided government. Most of that has been under divided government time. …

    Unified government usually results in disappointment for the party in power, which is just exactly what we’ve seen here in (this) Congress. Democrats were unable to deliver on their bold agenda, and that’s not different than what Republicans faced when they had unified government and couldn’t pass repeal and replace of Obamacare.

    Now hold on. Republicans passed a massive tax cut bill with unified government. Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included spending to address climate change. Those are the major accomplishments of recent years, no?

    CURRY: I think we’re making a mistake when we say that those are the three biggest things that have happened. For instance, earlier you talked about the American Rescue Plan (another Covid relief bill passed with only Democratic support) – it is not as significant as the CARES Act, which was the first major Covid relief legislation passed by Congress. It passed in March of 2020, and it passed on an overwhelming bipartisan basis.

    A lot of what was included in the American Rescue Plan were things that were initially set out under the CARES Act. Arguably the CARES Act was the single most important legislative accomplishment that we’ve had in this country in several decades.

    And there are other examples too … things like criminal justice reform that was passed with bipartisan support in 2018, and many others things that are just as significant from a public policy standpoint, including also the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed last year.

    They don’t have as much political significance, foremost because they were passed on a single-party basis. But I don’t think you can make the case that they’re necessarily more significant in terms of policy consequences for the country.

    (In a follow-up email, Curry said that Congress often flies its bipartisanship accomplishments under the radar as part of larger bills, which means they don’t get as much attention. He pointed to big-ticket items that passed quietly in 2019 as part of larger spending bills, including raising the age to buy tobacco to 21, pushing through the first major pay raise for federal employees in years and repealing unpopular Obamacare taxes. He has similar examples for each recent year. But if they are not contentious, they get less attention, he said.)

    Your argument is counter to the current narrative of American politics – that parties enact more on their own. Is that a media problem? A partisanship problem?

    LEE: I’m still blown away by how much was done on Covid. Basically the United States government spent 75% more in 2020 than it spent in 2019. All that was Covid.

    You’re talking about New Deal levels of spending and yet people just didn’t even seem to notice it because it was done on a bipartisan basis. We basically had a universal basic income in response to Covid and all the small business aid – it’s just extraordinary – and yet, it just seemed to pass people by as though nothing important occurred.

    I don’t think it’s just a media story. The media wrote stories about the Covid aid bills, but it just didn’t capture people’s attention.

    And I think that’s because it didn’t cut in favor of or against either party. When you don’t have a story that drives a partisan narrative, most people are just not that interested in it. Most people that pay attention to politics are not that interested in it. It lacks a rooting interest.

    What about the big things that need action? Immigration reform has eluded Congress for decades and climate change is an existential threat. How can divided government be preferable if Congress can’t come together to address these problems?

    CURRY: I’m not saying divided government is preferable, which I think is important. I’m just saying it doesn’t make that big a difference on a lot of these issues.

    So we’ve seen that list of issues you just mentioned – climate change, immigration, etc. These are issues that Congress has equally struggled to take big, bold action on under divided or unified government.

    On climate change, for instance, Democrats want to do big, bold things, but they aren’t able to go as far as they want to, because not only are there disagreements between the parties on how to address climate change, there are disagreements among Democrats about the best way to address climate and environmental legislation.

    On immigration, you have clear divisions across party lines, but also divisions within each party.

    LEE: Congress can pass legislation spending money or cutting taxes. The problem is it’s difficult to do things that create backlash. It’s hard to do serious climate legislation without being prepared to accept a backlash.

    Isn’t this just a structural problem then? If there was no requirement for a filibuster supermajority, couldn’t a simple majority of lawmakers be more effective?

    LEE: On the two examples that you just put forward – on immigration and climate – the filibuster has not been the obstacle to recent efforts.

    In immigration reform that Republicans attempted to do (under Trump), they couldn’t get majorities in either the House or Senate. Democrats were way short of a Senate majority when they tried to do climate legislation under Obama. They barely got out of the House.

    (Curry and Lee’s research shows the filibuster is not the primary culprit standing in the way of four out of five of the priorities that parties have failed to enact since 1985.)

    CURRY: We found a more common reason why the parties fail on the things that can be accomplished is because they are unable to unify internally about what to do. The filibuster matters, but it is far from the most significant thing.

    But certainly the legislation that passes under divided government is different than what would have passed under a unified government. The parties must compromise more. Whether the government is unified or divided matters, right?

    CURRY: It makes a difference certainly for precisely what is in these final policy bills. It certainly makes a difference for the politics of the moment. It really makes a difference for each side of the aisle in terms of being able to say, we got this much done or that much done that matches my hopes and dreams as a Democrat or a Republican.

    But it’s just sort of an overstated story that unified government means big, bold things happen and divided government means they don’t.

    Wouldn’t Washington work better if one party was more easily able to deliver on its goals when voters gave it power?

    CURRY: Whether it would be better if we had a situation like you have in more parliamentary-style governments where a party takes control, they pass what they will and stand to voters, I think it’s just in the eye of the beholder.

    On one hand, potentially, yes, because it’s very clear and clean from a party responsibility or electoral responsibility standpoint, where parties pass things and then voters can hold them accountable or not. On the other hand, then you would see more wild swings in policy from election to election.

    Does the growing number of swings in power in Congress mean American voters consciously prefer divided government?

    CURRY: I don’t think that Americans necessarily have a preference for divided government. That’s something that people sometimes say. It sounds nice.

    But the reality is that roughly since the 1980s and early 1990s, it’s been the case that electoral margins are really tight – you have relatively even numbers of Americans that prefer Democrats and Republicans. And so from election to election, based on turnout and swings back and forth, you get this constant back and forth of our electoral politics where one party is in control for two to four years and then the other party is in control.

    That’s really important because it has massive implications for our politics. If you have a political system and political dynamic like we have today, where each party thinks they can constantly win back control or lose control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, it ups the stakes for every single decision that’s going to be made.

    Everything is considered through a lens of how will this affect our partisan fortunes in the next election, and that makes things just naturally more contentious.

    Can we agree that ours is not a very effective way to govern?

    CURRY: It is certainly the case that Congress does not pass every single thing that every person wants it to. But I don’t think that is ever true of any government. Nor do I think that’s a reasonable bar to set a government against.

    The reality is Congress does a lot of stuff and does a lot more than people give it credit for, but it also fails to take action on a lot of policies. I think that’s just politics. That’s just government. It’s not just an American problem, and it’s not just a facet of our specific political system.

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  • Donald Trump faces billionaires in retreat and tabloid trolling a day after campaign announcement | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump faces billionaires in retreat and tabloid trolling a day after campaign announcement | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A day after Donald Trump announced his third bid for the presidency, he faced public defections from billionaire backers and vicious trolling from a once-friendly New York tabloid – underscoring his early challenges in mounting a political comeback nearly two years after the end of his divisive presidency.

    Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone and a one-time Trump ally, announced Wednesday that he would not support Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination, saying it’s time “for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of leaders.”

    A spokesman for another billionaire supporter – cosmetic heir Ronald Lauder – confirmed to CNN on Wednesday that Lauder would not back Trump’s bid to become only the second US president elected to two nonconsecutive terms.

    And in another sign that the once-supportive conservative media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch has moved on from Trump, the New York Post on Wednesday topped its story of his campaign announcement with a brutal headline, “Been there, Don That.” (By contrast, a front-page Post headline last week heralded Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “DeFuture,” after the Republican cruised to a second term.)

    The pullback by some donors shows that some of the party’s elite figures are open to alternatives two years out from the next presidential election. Trump, who has relied on a small-donor base to fuel his political ambitions, remains a formidable fundraising force. In an unprecedented move, he never stopped fundraising after leaving the White House, and his array of political committees has amassed more than $100 million in cash reserves.

    Trump is the first major Republican candidate to announce his candidacy. Over the weekend, DeSantis – a potential rival for the nomination – is slated to address one of the Republican Party’s most influential donor groups when he delivers a speech at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala dinner. Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, another Republican viewed as a possible presidential contender, also is slated to speak at the Saturday night event in Las Vegas.

    Trump remains a “big factor” in Republican politics and has earned accolades from coalition members for his staunch support of Israel, said Matthew Brooks, RJC’s executive director.

    But “people are window-shopping right now,” Brooks added. “There are people who are asking if we need a new direction and a new face.”

    Brooks said Trump was invited to the RJC gathering but had a scheduling conflict.

    CNN has reached out to Trump aides for comment.

    Schwarzman’s retreat from Trump is particularly significant because he’s one of the biggest donors in Republican politics and contributed $3 million in 2020 to a super PAC supporting Trump’s unsuccessful reelection campaign.

    In the midterms alone, Schwarzman donated more than $35 million to Republican candidates and groups active in federal elections, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit group that tracks political money.

    “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” Schwarzman said in his statement, first reported by Axios. Schwarzman said he would support one of the GOP’s “new generation of leaders” but did not say whom he is considering backing.

    Another Republican megadonor, Citadel’s Ken Griffin, recently indicated he would back DeSantis in 2024, should the Florida governor seek the GOP nomination.

    Lauder, a long-time Trump friend and financial supporter of Republican candidates and causes, has not indicated who would win his support.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Donald Trump is no Grover Cleveland | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump is no Grover Cleveland | CNN Politics

    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump wants to do a full Grover Cleveland and match the only US president to lose a presidential election and then rise from the ashes to regain the White House four years later.

    Other examples of former presidents trying to regain power have gone poorly. Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive rebellion split open a schism in the GOP; neither Herbert Hoover nor Martin Van Buren could get nominations from their parties after previous losses.

    With the announcement of his third White House run, Trump is trying to emulate Cleveland, who won, lost and then won the White House in 1884, 1888 and 1892.

    In many other ways, Trump, a native New Yorker, and Cleveland, the only president born in New Jersey, have little in common. Most of what’s below comes from reading about Cleveland at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and also the University of California Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project.

    Trump, a Republican, lost the popular vote twice. He lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote to Joe Biden in 2020, but Trump also got fewer popular votes compared with Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and first lady, when he beat her in the Electoral College in 2016.

    Cleveland, a Democrat, won the popular vote three times. He got more popular votes than his opponent when he won the White House in 1884 and 1892, and while he lost the Electoral College vote to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Cleveland beat him in the popular vote. Regardless of the popular vote, Cleveland’s first win in 1884 was thanks to an extremely narrow 1,200-vote margin that delivered him New York’s decisive electoral votes.

    Trump rejected his loss. The former president skipped Biden’s inauguration, still won’t admit he lost in 2020 and has infected the Republican Party with a vein of denialism.

    Cleveland held the umbrella as his opponent became president. At a rainy inauguration in March 1889, Cleveland held an umbrella over Harrison’s head as the latter took the oath of office.

    Trump is one of the oldest presidents. Seventy when he took office in 2017, Trump would be 78 if he wins and takes office again in January 2025. That would make him the second-oldest president after Biden.

    Cleveland was a young president. Just 47 when he first took the oath of office, Cleveland was 55 when he won reelection. Cleveland died at 71, an age at which Trump was in the first half of his term.

    Trump revels in the campaign. He lives for winding speeches eaten up by adoring crowds.

    Cleveland barely campaigned. Candidates of the day didn’t campaign as much, but when he first won the White House in 1884, Cleveland gave just two campaign speeches.

    He was similarly disinterested in campaigning four years later, which could explain his defeat in 1888, but doesn’t explain how he won again in 1892.

    Trump is famous for denying scandals. One example: He disputed paying hush money to women who alleged affairs with him despite the confirmation of his former attorney Michael Cohen, who set up the payments.

    Cleveland admitted an affair. Attacked by Republicans in 1884, Cleveland admitted he may in fact have fathered an illegitimate child with a woman later sent to an insane asylum.

    “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa,” went the attack ad of the day. Cleveland turned honesty into a campaign attribute and urged supporters to tell the truth.

    Trump imposed tariffs. One of Trump’s lasting policy legacies are the tariffs he imposed on China and other countries.

    Cleveland fought tariffs. A reason he lost in 1892 was Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs, an unpopular position exploited by Harrison.

    There are, however, some other similarities between Trump and Cleveland.

    Cleveland and Frances Folsom's wedding in June of 1886 was the only marriage of a sitting president in the White House. She was 21 and had been his ward.

    They both married younger women. Melania Trump is 24 years younger than her husband, Donald. Cleveland married his wife Frances during his first term in the White House, still the only marriage of a sitting president conducted at the White House. Frances Cleveland was 21 at the time and had been Cleveland’s ward after her father, Cleveland’s former law partner, died.

    They both considered using troops on Americans. Trump considered calling out the military on protesters in front of the White House, and some of his advisers considered trying to impose martial law as they sought to overturn his defeat in 2020.

    Cleveland called out federal troops to put down the Pullman railcar strike, a controversial and unprecedented use of force against striking workers.

    (Related: Today, the odds of a railroad union strike are on the rise after a third union rejected a proposed contract. Read more.)

    They both promised to clean up Washington. Trump won in 2016 promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, and Cleveland’s main issue was to put corrupt Republicans in check, something that resonated with anti-corruption Republicans known as the “Mugwumps.”

    They both cut down on some immigration. The issue that most animated Trump was building a wall at the southern border. He also curbed legal immigration to the US and imposed a travel ban on certain countries. Cleveland renewed the Chinese Exclusion Act and prevented Chinese laborers from returning to the US. But Cleveland rejected a law that would have imposed a literacy test on immigrants.

    They both relied on the South. Trump could not win his home state of New York like Cleveland did, but both men relied on a southern base of support for their political power.

    Joshua Zeitz wrote for Politico recently that when Cleveland ran in 1892 after losing in 1888, it was largely out of boredom. Trump, meanwhile, seems to be more interested in revenge for what he falsely calls a fraudulent election.

    CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct Martin Van Buren’s political party. He was a Democrat.

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  • Trump offers a dark vision voters have already rejected as he launches his 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

    Trump offers a dark vision voters have already rejected as he launches his 2024 campaign | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    It’s American carnage, round three.

    Ex-President Donald Trump on Tuesday dragged Americans back into his dystopian worldview of a failing nation scarred by crime-ridden cities turned into “cesspools of blood,” and swamped by immigrants. He added a scary new twist at a time of global tensions, claiming the country was on the verge of tumbling into nuclear war.

    Launching his bid for a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, Trump conversely painted his own turbulent single term, which ended in his attempt to destroy democracy and a mismanaged pandemic, as a “golden age” of prosperity and American global dominance.

    The new Trump – for the 2024 campaign – is the same as the old Trump.

    He pounded out a message of American decline, highlighted raging inflation and slammed President Joe Biden as aged, weak, and disrespected by US enemies, while highlighting his own chummy ties with global dictators, like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who seek to weaken American power.

    When the 76-year-old former property tycoon, reality star and commander in chief promised a new “quest to save our country,” he encapsulated the challenges that his new campaign poses for his own party and the rest of the United States.

    To begin with, in the gold-leafed ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump steered clear of the election denialism that helped doom multiple Republican nominees in the midterm elections and that has inspired skepticism of his viability among GOP lawmakers in Washington.

    But as usual, his self-discipline didn’t hold, as he descended further into his personal obsessions the longer he went on, portraying himself as a “victim,” raising new suspicion about the US election system and slamming ongoing criminal probes against him as politicized and deeply unfair. The speech lacked the riotous nature and energy of his campaign rallies. But Trump’s material was a familiar rhetorical cocktail of grievance certain to enthuse his base supporters.

    However, it may have come across to many of the swing voters in the states that he lost in 2020 as authoritarian demagoguery. Many of those voters deserted Republicans yet again last week, as the party failed to win back the Senate and as it still waits to confirm it will win only a slim majority in the House. Many GOP lawmakers squarely blame the lack of a red wave on Trump – for foisting extreme, election-denying candidates on the party in key states. That’s why there is increasing interest in potential alternative candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who roared to reelection last week, and has recently proved, unlike Trump, that he can build a broad coalition with Trump-style policies but without the chaos epitomized by the 45th president.

    And yet by launching his campaign so early – before the 2022 election is even finalized – the ex-president is seeking to freeze the GOP field. And there is so far no evidence that his devoted supporters will desert him.

    What could be the opening acts of a new election clash between Trump and Biden unfolded over multiple time zones. As Trump was speaking, the current president – who confounded historic expectations of a midterm election drubbing – was at another beach resort, in Bali, Indonesia.

    Biden spent the moments leading up to Trump’s speech huddled with other world leaders seeking a united response to a possibly alarming escalation in the war in Ukraine after an explosion on the territory of NATO ally Poland. There was some irony to the fact that Biden was leading the same Western alliance at a moment of peril that Trump frequently had undermined while in office. (Biden said after a day of rising global tensions that first indications were that the missile that fell onto a Polish farm, killing two people, did not originate in Russia.)

    Epitomizing the gulf between a president’s duties and the frivolity of the campaign trail, Biden, when asked if he had a comment on Trump’s launch, replied: “No, not really.”

    Trump referred briefly to the FBI search of his home at Mar-a-Lago for his hoard of highly classified documents and subpoenas sent to his family members. It was a reminder that his campaign raises the extraordinary scenario of a candidate for president running for a new term while facing multiple criminal investigations and the possibility of indictment by the Justice Department. Trump, who has not been charged with a crime, is being investigated over the classified documents, the run-up to the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and in Georgia over his attempt to steal Biden’s win in the crucial swing state in 2020.

    Trump has already claimed that he is being persecuted because Biden wants to stop him from becoming president again – an accusation likely to be embraced by his millions of supporters. Thus, the clash between his campaign and various investigations into his conduct promises to inflict even more damage on political and legal institutions that he kept under continuous assault as president.

    One thing noticeably missing from Trump’s speech was acknowledgment of his unprecedented attempt to interrupt 250 years of peaceful transfers of power between presidents. But the Capitol insurrection is an indelible stain that is sure to haunt his campaign. CNN has exclusively reported that top DOJ officials have considered whether a special counsel would be needed during the Trump campaign to avoid potential political conflicts of interest.

    Trump is trying to pull off a historic feat accomplished by only one previous president – Grover Cleveland, who became the only commander in chief to serve nonconsecutive terms after he won a return to the White House in 1892.

    A Trump victory in 2024 would represent a stunning rebound given that he is the only president to have been impeached twice – once for trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden, and secondly for inciting the mob attack on the Capitol, one of the most flagrant assaults ever on US democracy.

    A return to the Oval Office for Trump would stun the world. His record of disdaining US allies and coddling dictators such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un fractured decades of US foreign policy and made the United States – long a force for stability in the world – into one of its most erratic powers.

    Trump left office in disgrace in 2021, after the assault on the Capitol, not even bothering to attend the inauguration of his successor and insisting ever since that the election was corrupt – despite no evidence and against the findings of multiple courts and his own Justice Department.

    Ever since, the ex-president has made his lies about the 2020 election the centerpiece of a political movement that still has millions of followers – as was seen with the primary victories of some of his handpicked candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

    But many Trump-backed candidates failed to win competitive general elections. And Trump’s 2024 campaign will test whether there are Republicans who, while they may be drawn in by Trump’s bulldozing style and populist, nationalist instincts, will tire of the drama and chaos that surround him. It will also pose a question of whether a new generation of Republicans, who have tapped into his political base and the “America first” principles of Trumpism – like DeSantis, for example – are ready to challenge the movement’s still wildly popular founder.

    Trump was already rejected by a broad general election audience once – he lost by more than 7 million votes in 2020. The same pattern appeared to exert itself as the GOP fell short of expectations in the midterms, which ironically will give Trump-aligned lawmakers strong leverage in what’s likely to be a narrow House Republican majority.

    And even if he secures the nomination again, it’s an open question whether he’ll be able to recreate his 2016 winning coalition after alienating moderate and suburban voters or whether a combination of motivated base voters and previously disaffected Republicans returning to the fold will be able to make up the difference.

    Trump’s first term between 2017 and 2021 was one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history.

    He shattered the traditions and restraints of his office, subjecting political institutions – designed by the Founders to guard against exactly his brand of autocratic egotism – to their ultimate test.

    The 45th president’s reputation was also stained by his negligent denial and mismanagement of a once-in-100-years pandemic. He skipped over his failed leadership in the emergency during his speech on Tuesday night.

    Trump’s flouting of science and public health guidelines came back to haunt him as he contracted Covid-19 in the fall of 2020. He survived a serious bout with the help of experimental drugs before theatrically ripping off his mask in a White House photo op when he returned from the hospital.

    One important aspect of his pandemic strategy was a success, however. An early White House bet to invest big in vaccine development by private firms and scientists, under the title of Operation Warp Speed, put the US in better position than many other industrialized nations.

    The coronavirus destroyed the roaring economy Trump had hoped to ride to reelection, leaving as his most important achievement the shaping of a conservative Supreme Court majority, which has already dramatically altered American society with its overturning of Roe v. Wade and could last a generation.

    But history will most remember him for his two impeachments, both following abuses of power designed to manipulate the free and fair elections that are at the root of America’s democratic system in order to prolong his tenure in office. 

    The House select committee investigating the insurrection has uncovered damning evidence in Trump’s inner circle about his behavior in the run-up to January 6 and during the insurrection. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, for instance, testified that chief of staff Mark Meadows said Trump thought Vice President Mike Pence deserved the calls for him to be hanged by insurrectionists. There was also evidence of Trump’s vicious pressure on local officials and election workers in states such as Georgia.

    Yet there remain questions about whether the committee will be able to hold accountable a man who has always dodged responsibility in a wild and whirling life in business, reality television and politics.

    Even if the committee advises the Justice Department that prosecuting Trump is merited, it’s unknown whether the evidence it has collected would be sufficient to secure a conviction. And Attorney General Merrick Garland would be faced with a massive dilemma given the extraordinary implications of bringing criminal charges against an active presidential candidate.

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