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Tag: voters and voting

  • How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics

    How an old debate previews Biden’s new strategy for winning senior voters | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    In pressing Republicans on Social Security and Medicare, President Joe Biden is reprising one of the most dramatic moments of his long career.

    During the 2012 vice-presidential debate, Biden engaged in a nearly 11-minute exchange with GOP nominee Paul Ryan over Republican plans to reconfigure the two massive programs for the elderly, several of which Ryan had authored himself.

    Biden and many Democrats felt he had won the argument on stage. Yet on Election Day, Ryan and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney routed Biden and President Barack Obama among White seniors, and beat them soundly among seniors overall, exit polls found.

    That outcome underscores the obstacles facing Biden now as he tries to recapture older voters by portraying Republicans as threats to the two towers of America’s safety net for the elderly. While polls consistently show that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to safeguard the programs, GOP presidential nominees have carried all seniors in every presidential election back to 2004 and have reached at least 58% support among White seniors in each of the past four contests, exit polls have found. Democrats have likewise consistently struggled among those nearing retirement, older working adults aged 45-64.

    Those results suggest that for most older voters, affinity for the GOP messages on other issues – particularly its resistance, in the Donald Trump era, to cultural and racial change – has outweighed their views about Social Security and Medicare. Those grooves are now cut so deeply, over so many elections, that Biden may struggle to change them much no matter how hard he rails against a range of GOP proposals that could retrench or restructure the programs.

    Biden’s charge that Republicans are threatening the two giant entitlement programs for the elderly – which triggered his striking back and forth exchanges with GOP legislators during the State of the Union – fits squarely in his broader political positioning as he turns toward his expected reelection campaign.

    As I’ve written, the 80-year-old Biden, at his core, “remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands.” As president he’s expressed that inclination primarily through what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” – the planks in his economic plans, such as generous incentives to revive domestic manufacturing, aimed at creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree. Politically, Biden’s staunch defense of Social Security and Medicare, programs critical to the economic security of financially vulnerable retirees, represents a logical bookend to that emphasis.

    “We all know that whose side you are on is a critical debate point for every election and this debate over Social Security and Medicare really helps crystallize whose side Biden is on versus whose side Republicans are on in a very effective way for him,” said Democratic pollster Matt Hogan, who helped conduct an extensive series of bipartisan polls during the 2022 campaign measuring attitudes among seniors for the AARP, the giant lobby for the elderly.

    From Franklin Roosevelt through Hubert Humphrey and Tip O’Neill, generations of Democrats have framed themselves as the defenders of the social safety net for seniors against Republicans who they say would unravel it. Biden showed how comfortable he was stepping into those shoes during his 2012 vice-presidential debate with Ryan, then a young representative from Wisconsin who Romney had selected as his running mate.

    Nearly 30 years Biden’s junior, Ryan was an unflinching advocate of restructuring Social Security and Medicare to reduce costs over time. In particular, Ryan was the principal supporter of a conservative plan to convert Medicare, the giant federal health insurance program for the elderly, into a system called “premium support.” Under that proposal, Medicare would be transformed from its current structure, in which the government directly pays doctors and hospitals who provide care for beneficiaries, into a voucher (or “premium support”) system, in which the government would provide recipients a fixed sum to purchase private insurance. Ryan had also drafted proposals to partially privatize Social Security by allowing workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts, a change that would have reduced the tax dollars flowing into the system and eventually required substantial cuts in guaranteed benefits.

    For nearly 11 minutes during the debate in October 2012, moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC skillfully guided Biden and Ryan through a heated, but civil and substantive, discussion of Social Security and Medicare’s future. Ryan insisted that changes were needed to preserve the programs’ long-term viability and that current seniors and those near retirement would not see their benefits reduced.

    Biden appealed openly to the Democrats’ historic image as the programs’ protectors and condemned Ryan and the GOP for wanting to partially privatize them. At one point in the debate, Biden declared: “we will be no part of a [Medicare] voucher program or the privatization of Social Security.” A few moments later, he insisted: “These guys haven’t been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they’ve always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this?”

    At the time, Democrats felt Biden had at least held his own, restoring the party’s momentum after Obama’s surprisingly listless performance eight days earlier in his first debate against Romney. And Democrats through the rest of the campaign railed against the Republican ticket as a threat to Social Security and Medicare.

    But on election day, those arguments did not translate into gains for Obama and Biden among seniors or the older working adults (aged 45-64) nearing retirement. As Hogan noted, the newly passed Affordable Care Act, which generated some of its funding through savings in Medicare, was extremely unpopular at the time among older voters. Obama and Biden not only lost seniors and the older working age adults, but actually ran slightly more poorly among both groups in 2012 than they did in 2008.

    In fact, no Democratic presidential nominee since Al Gore in 2000 has carried most seniors in a presidential campaign; Obama in 2008 was the only one since Gore to carry most of the older working age adults. Among older Whites, the Democratic deficit is even more pronounced: the Republican presidential nominee has carried around three-fifths of both White seniors and those nearing retirement in each of the past four elections. Biden in 2020 slightly improved on Hillary Clinton’s anemic 2016 performance with both groups, but still lost to Trump by 15 percentage points among White seniors and by 23 points among the Whites nearing retirement, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Biden performed especially poorly among older Whites without a college degree – an economically stressed group heavily reliant on the federal retirement programs.

    Estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, and the Pew Research Center likewise found that Trump in both 2016 and 2020 beat his Democratic opponents among both seniors and the older working adults. Like the exit polls, the Catalist data show the Republican nominees carrying about three-fifths of White seniors and older working adults in each of the past three presidential elections.

    The story is similar in congressional contests. In House elections, the exit polls found Republicans winning all seniors and older working adults comfortably in the 2014 and 2022 midterm campaigns and narrowly carrying them even in 2018 when Democrats romped overall. In all three of those midterm congressional elections, Republicans carried about three-fifths of the near retirement White adults, while they also reached that elevated threshold among White seniors in both the 2014 and 2022 campaigns.

    Republicans have maintained these advantages with older voters despite polls showing that most Americans trust Democrats more than the GOP to protect Social Security and Medicare, and that most Americans, especially seniors, oppose the intermittently surfacing GOP proposals to partially privatize both programs.

    Politically, “Democrats have used Social Security and Medicare really a lot over the past two or three decades, maybe four decades,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “The payoff has been a lot less than Democrats have generally thought it would be.”

    Could this time be different for Biden and the Democrats? Congressional Republicans have certainly provided plenty of evidence for his claim that they still hope to restructure the programs. The proposed 2023 budget by the Republican Study Committee, the members of which include about three-fourths of House Republicans, reprises the ideas of converting Medicare into a premium support system and establishing private investment accounts under Social Security, while also raising the retirement age for both programs and reducing Social Security benefits over time. And although Florida Sen. Rick Scott renounced the idea late last week, his “Rescue America” agenda did include a proposal to require Congress to reauthorize all federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare, every five years.

    These ideas have precipitated an unusual degree of open Republican dissension. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly, and unreservedly, denounced the Scott plan until the Florida senator backed off. Trump recently released a video in which he declared the GOP should not cut “a single penny” of Social Security or Medicare benefits – which put him directly at odds with the three-fourths of House Republicans in the Republican Study Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, bending more toward Trump’s position, seems unlikely to incorporate into the GOP budget plans the RSC’s most sweeping changes in Social Security and Medicare.

    Kessler believes Biden may succeed where other Democrats have failed at hurting the GOP with the issue, and he argued that the conspicuous Republican infighting demonstrates they share that concern. “We are watching a high-profile battle that I’ve never really seen before on these issues in the Republican Party,” Kessler said. “And part of it is clearly they think it’s a problem when they didn’t years ago. If they think it’s a problem, maybe it’s a problem.”

    Stuart Stevens, who served as Romney’s chief strategist in the 2012 campaign but has since become a fierce critic of the Trump-era GOP, also believes the party could face more risk over its entitlement agenda than it did back then. The reason is that he thinks the idea of sunsetting Social Security and Medicare every five years, even if Scott is trying to jettison it, may prove more immediately tangible and understandable to voters than Ryan’s complex ideas of partially privatizing both programs.

    “The question I always ask myself in campaigns is ‘are you talking about something the other side doesn’t want to talk about?’” Stevens said. “That’s probably a good sign that they are losing on the issue.”

    Whether Biden proves more effective than other recent Democrats at attracting older voters around Social Security and Medicare will likely pivot on whether seniors believe the GOP genuinely would cut the programs if given the power to do so, argued Robert Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, who specializes in public attitudes about the social safety net. “If the senior community actually believes that it’s being threatened it really would affect their votes,” he predicted. But, he added, “as long as they are not threatened, the other values of seniors on top issues more and more correspond with Republicans.”

    There’s no doubt about the second half of that equation. Polling has consistently found that older Whites, in particular, are more receptive than their younger counterparts to hardline Trump-era GOP messages around crime, immigration and the broader currents of racial and cultural change: for instance, about half of Whites older than 50 agree that discrimination against Whites is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, a far higher percentage than among younger Whites, according to a new national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Older Whites are also more likely than younger generations to lack a college degree or to identify as Christians, attributes that generally predict sympathy for GOP cultural and racial arguments.

    Through the 21st century, those cultural and racial attitudes among older White voters have consistently trumped any concerns they may hold about the Republican commitment to Social Security and Medicare. Despite Biden’s impassioned articulation of the case against the GOP, that didn’t change even in 2012 when Republicans placed on their national ticket a vice presidential nominee who directly embodied the GOP aspirations to reconfigure and retrench those programs.

    Even small changes in seniors’ preferences could have a big impact in closely balanced states with a large retiree population like Arizona and Pennsylvania. But the entrenched GOP advantage among older voters over the past two decades suggests Biden’s hopes in 2024 may pivot less on improving with the “gray” than maximizing his vote among the “brown”: the diverse, younger generations that recoil from the same Republican messages on culture and race that electrify so many older Whites.

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  • Wisconsin voters head to polls for high-stakes state Supreme Court election | CNN Politics

    Wisconsin voters head to polls for high-stakes state Supreme Court election | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will cast their primary ballots in what’s turned into an expensive and high-stakes battle for control of the state Supreme Court in a key political battleground where power is divided between a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.

    Voters will narrow the field of candidates down to two, who will then advance to April’s general election for a seat on a court where conservatives currently hold a 4-3 majority. Although the election is technically nonpartisan – there are no party labels on the ballot – interest groups align, party operations mobilize and money flows into races for its seats as if they were partisan contests.

    The departure of a conservative justice, Patience Roggensack, has given liberals an opportunity to seize the majority on a court that could decide on issues such as abortion, redistricting, and voting rights ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

    Conservatives have controlled the state’s high court for 14 years – a span in which the court has sided with Republicans’ union-busting efforts and affirmed voting restrictions, including ID requirements and a ban on ballot drop boxes.

    “This seat is crucial to the balance of the court, and the court is crucial to the balance of the state,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Elections Research Center.

    The candidates hoping to advance to the April general election are liberals Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, and Everett Mitchell, a circuit judge in Dane County; and conservatives Daniel Kelly, a former state Supreme Court justice, and Jennifer Dorow, a judge perhaps best known for presiding over the trial of a man convicted of killing six and injuring scores more in a 2021 attack on a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

    Outside money has flooded the race, surpassing candidate spending. As of Thursday afternoon, orders for TV and radio ads focused on the race had hit $7 million, according to advertising tracked by Kantar Media/CMAG for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. Experts say the spending on the race could smash the previous record – $15.2 million spent on a 2004 Illinois Supreme Court race, according to the liberal-leaning Brennan Center – for the most expensive campaign for a single state Supreme Court seat.

    The court could become the final arbiter on a host of critical issues in Wisconsin in the coming years – including the fate of the state’s 1849 law prohibiting abortion in nearly all cases. The US Supreme Court’s decision last summer ending federal legal protections for the procedure has super-charged the rhetoric – and spending – around abortion in the Wisconsin race.

    The state Supreme Court could also play a crucial role in the 2024 election. Wisconsin was a key location of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 loss, and the refusal of a conservative justice on the state Supreme Court to go along with an effort that year to toss out ballots in two heavily Democratic counties looms large in the rivalry between the two right-leaning candidates in this year’s race.

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  • Here are the Republicans considering 2024 presidential runs | CNN Politics

    Here are the Republicans considering 2024 presidential runs | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United States ambassador to the United Nations, launched her bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination Tuesday.

    But the primary is still in its early stages, and it could take months before the field fully rounds into form and candidates make more than occasional visits to states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that will kick off the GOP’s nominating process.

    Haley could stand alone for weeks or even months as the party’s only official rival to former President Donald Trump.

    Here’s a look at who’s in and who is considering a 2024 run for the Republican nomination:

    Donald Trump: The former president officially launched his campaign in November, days after the midterm elections. And he never really stopped running after 2020, continuing to hold campaign-style rallies with supporters.

    Nikki Haley: Haley launched her presidential campaign Tuesday. It was a shift from her previous insistence she would not run against Trump. “It’s time for a new generation of leadership to rediscover fiscal responsibility, secure our border and strengthen our country, our pride and our purpose,” she said in a video announcing her bid.

    Ron DeSantis: The Florida governor emerged as the top alternative to Trump in many conservatives’ eyes after his dominant reelection victory. A DeSantis announcement is likely months away, with Florida currently in the middle of its legislative session. But his memoir, accompanied by a media blitz, will drop at the end of February, and top advisers are building a political infrastructure.

    Mike Pence: The former vice president’s split with Trump over the events of January 6, 2021, kicked off a consistent return to political travel. He has made clear that he believes the GOP will move on from Trump. “I think we’re going to have new leadership in this party and in this country,” Pence told CBS in January.

    Tim Scott: The South Carolina senator would make a second Palmetto State Republican in the 2024 field if, as expected, he enters the race in the near future. Scott is building a political infrastructure, including hiring for a super PAC, and is set to visit Iowa for an event his team billed as focused on “faith in America.”

    Ted Cruz: The Texas senator and 2016 GOP contender has not ruled out another presidential bid. But he is also seeking reelection in 2024. “I think there will be plenty of time to discuss the 2024 presidential race. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” he told the CBS affiliate in Dallas in February.

    Glenn Youngkin: The Virginia governor’s 2021 victory offered Republicans a new playbook focused on parental power in education. His political travel, including stops for a series of Republican gubernatorial candidates last year, makes clear Youngkin has ambitions beyond Virginia. He faced a setback to his push for a 15-week abortion ban when Democrats won a state senate special election earlier this year, expanding their narrow majority.

    Chris Sununu: The New Hampshire governor’s timeline isn’t clear, but he recently established a political action committee that borrowed his state’s motto: “Live Free or Die.” He has positioned himself as a strong Trump opponent and alternative within the GOP. He would also start with the advantage of being universally known in an early-voting state. “I think America as a whole is looking for results-driven leadership that calls the balls and strikes like they see them and is super transparent,” Sununu told Axios this week.

    Kristi Noem: The South Dakota governor who won reelection in November has certainly cultivated a national profile, becoming a regular at conservative gatherings and donor confabs. But she hasn’t committed to a presidential run. “I’m not convinced that I need to run for president,” she told CBS in January.

    Greg Abbott: The Texas governor who cruised past a 2020 presidential contender, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, to win his third term in November is unlikely to make any official 2024 moves until his state’s legislative session wraps up at the end of May. He told Fox News in January that a 2024 run “is it’s not something I’m ruling in right now. I’m focused on Texas, period.”

    Larry Hogan: The former Maryland governor is another Trump opponent. He told Fox News he is giving a 2024 run “very serious consideration.”

    Chris Christie: The former New Jersey governor is one of several 2024 GOP prospects headed to Texas for a private donor gathering in late February, along with Pence, Haley, Scott, Sununu and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Christie said on ABC earlier this year he doesn’t believe Trump could beat President Joe Biden in 2024.

    Asa Hutchinson: The former Arkansas governor is a rare Republican from a deep-red state who has been willing to criticize Trump. Now weeks removed from office, he also doesn’t have the at-home responsibilities facing other governors. He told CBS that he’ll decide on a 2024 by “probably April.” He said he believes voters are “looking for someone that is not going to be creating chaos, but also has got the record of being a governor, of lowering taxes.”

    Mike Pompeo: Trump’s secretary of state and the former Kansas congressman said during a tour for his new book, “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” that he would decide on a presidential run in the coming months. He’s been among the Republicans most openly considering a run, traveling to early-voting states for more than a year.

    Liz Cheney: The former Wyoming congresswoman who emerged as the foremost GOP critic of Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud lost her House seat to a Trump-backed primary challenger. She launched a political action committee last year and made clear she intends to try to purge the GOP of Trump’s influence. But what that means in the context of a potential 2024 bid is not yet clear.

    Will Hurd: The former Texas congressman who represented a border district recently traveled to New Hampshire, an early-voting state, though it’s not clear whether or when he would enter the race. “I always have an open mind about how to serve my country,” he told Fox News.

    Others to keep an eye on: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who fended off a Trump-backed primary challenge on the way to reelection last year, has added political staffers and is sometimes mentioned as a vice presidential prospect. Florida Sen. Rick Scott and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley have both said they will not run for president in 2024 – but things can change, and both had also taken steps to build their national profiles. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has teased a run as a Trump foil.

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  • Democrats approve shake-up of 2024 calendar but it’s far from a done deal | CNN Politics

    Democrats approve shake-up of 2024 calendar but it’s far from a done deal | CNN Politics


    Philadelphia
    CNN
     — 

    The Democratic National Committee on Saturday approved a plan to shake up the 2024 presidential primary calendar and demote longtime early voting states Iowa and New Hampshire, but significant questions remain about how the new order will be implemented.

    The new calendar upends decades of tradition in which Iowa and New Hampshire were the first two states to hold nominating contests and moves up South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan. President Joe Biden has argued the new nominating order would better reflect the diversity of the nation and the Democratic Party.

    But the party’s early nomination calendar, which was approved Saturday at the DNC’s winter meeting in Philadelphia, is facing opposition from some impacted states and could remain unsettled for months.

    Under the new calendar, South Carolina would hold the first primary on February 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on February 6, Georgia on February 13, and Michigan on February 27. Any state can hold a nomination contest starting March 5.

    The changes reflect longstanding concerns from party leaders that the previous calendar, which featured Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina in early voting, prioritized two states that are largely White and don’t represent the diversity of the party. Iowa has gone first in the nominating process since 1972, while New Hampshire has held the first primary in the process since 1920.

    “This calendar reflects the best of who we are as a nation, and it sends a powerful message all across the country,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said Saturday. 

    The calendar passed with overwhelming support. However, while the DNC sets the rules for the party’s nominating process, state governments (or state parties) ultimately set the dates of their contests, and New Hampshire and Georgia likely won’t be able to comply with the assigned dates.

    The chairs of the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic parties objected to the calendar at Saturday’s meeting, noting that Democrats did not have the power in those states to unilaterally change their state laws. Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire control the office of the governor and both chambers of the state legislature.

    Rita Hart, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, argued, “Iowa has been put in a position that makes it impossible to comply with both DNC rules and our own state law, which has exactly zero chance of being changed by the Republican legislature.”

    Hart said, “Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in our part of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party.”

    Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said the DNC rules committee “knew that Republican leaders in the state would not bend to their will, and even knowing this, the RBC still decided that New Hampshire Democrats should be set up for failure,” referring to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.

    “Every vote matters in New Hampshire,” Buckley said. “Victories are determined by a small number of independent swing voters. Those voters are already being bombarded by the Republicans, who are saying that Democrats have abandoned New Hampshire.”

    New Hampshire has a state law that protects its first-in-the-nation primary status, while Georgia’s primary date is set by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and an early primary would open Peach State Republicans up to sanctions from their own national party.

    New Hampshire and Georgia now have until June to take steps toward scheduling their contests on the assigned dates. If they don’t, they won’t be able to hold primaries before March 5 without being penalized by the DNC.

    While Georgia would likely just hold its primary once any state is allowed to do so, a New Hampshire primary scheduled for “7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election,” as state law requires, could lead to delegate penalties for the state party.

    Additionally, any candidate who campaigns in or even has their name on the ballot in a noncompliant primary would be unable to receive delegates from that state and could face other penalties.

    Despite the implementation hurdles ahead, the calendar passed with overwhelming support, and several officials spoke in support of the new order. Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, who has been a leading advocate for her state to join the early-voting calendar, gave a fiery speech Saturday in support of the proposal, saying it would reflect the diversity of the country.

    “We are overdue in changing this primary calendar to ensure it reflects the range of ideas, thoughts and hopes of Americans throughout this country,” Dingell said.

    While the Democratic rules drop New Hampshire from the second contest (and first primary) into a tie for the second primary, fellow longtime early state Iowa has been removed from the early set entirely.

    Like New Hampshire, Iowa is largely White, but it’s also far less politically competitive – then-President Donald Trump won it by 8 points in 2020 – and uses a complex and less accessible caucus format.

    Iowa’s early caucuses are also protected by state law, and then-Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn said in December that the party would follow that law when planning its contest while also pledging to reform the process.

    The other three early states shouldn’t have a problem complying with the new schedule. In South Carolina, each state party chair has the ability to set the date of their presidential primary. Nevada’s new date matches the one set by state law in 2021, and Michigan this week enacted a law to schedule their primary for February 27 (although the state legislature will have to end its session a few weeks early for it take effect in time).

    The calendar approved Saturday applies only to the Democratic party’s nominating process. Republican early-voting states will be unchanged from recent years, with Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

    “The [Republican National Committee] unanimously passed its rules over a year ago and solidified the traditional nominating process the American people know and understand,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement Saturday. “The DNC has decided to break a half-century precedent and cause chaos by altering their primary process, and ultimately abandoning millions of Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

    The DNC changes could affect Republicans, especially in Michigan, where the new primary date violates national GOP rules. To avoid a delegate penalty, Michigan Republicans could use a party-run process at a later date.

    Ultimately, if Biden seeks a second term, he’s unlikely to face serious opposition, and the order of states would be largely irrelevant. However, the changes demonstrate that the party won’t be permanently attached to the traditional set of early states, and party leaders have already started to prepare to reexamine the schedule again after the 2024 election.

    In her speech, Dingell backed that idea: “No one state should have a lock. We do need to revisit this every four years.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Top Arizona election official requests investigation of Kari Lake for potential campaign violation | CNN Politics

    Top Arizona election official requests investigation of Kari Lake for potential campaign violation | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The top election official in Arizona has asked the state’s attorney general to investigate Republican Kari Lake, who lost her 2022 gubernatorial bid, for potentially violating state law by publishing voter signatures on her Twitter account.

    The request by Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat elected to the office last November, comes after Lake posted a tweet on January 23 that made an unfounded claim that 40,000 ballots didn’t match voter signatures that the state has on record. Lake posted a graphic that showed 16 voter signatures, alleging that they didn’t match with what Arizona has on file.

    In a letter to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Fontes requested “appropriate enforcement action against Kari Lake” for publishing those 16 voter signatures. Fontes cites a state law that prohibits reproducing voter signatures other than the voter or a legally authorized person. Fontes’ letter states that violation of that law is a felony.

    The office for Mayes, a Democrat who also was elected in 2022, confirmed receiving the letter but did not comment any further.

    Lake’s spokespeople did not reply to CNN’s request for comment.

    Lake lost the race for governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs last November by more than 17,000 votes. Since losing, Lake has continued to spout election lies on right-wing media and pursue legal remedy in the courts, legal efforts that have continued to fail.

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  • RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel elected to fourth consecutive term | CNN Politics

    RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel elected to fourth consecutive term | CNN Politics


    Dana Point, California
    CNN
     — 

    Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was elected to a fourth consecutive term Friday after winning the support of about two-thirds of the RNC members who gathered here for their winter meeting.

    McDaniel fended off a stronger-than-expected challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman from California and an attorney who has represented former President Donald Trump.

    The vote was conducted by secret ballot and McDaniel needed a majority of the members casting ballots to win. After just one round of voting, the parliamentarian announced that McDaniel had received 111 of the 167 votes cast. Dhillon received 51 votes and four ballots were cast for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a 2020 election denier and ardent Trump backer.

    Dhillon had argued the party needed to “radically reshape” its leadership amid recriminations about Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterm elections, which compounded disappointments over the results in the previous two cycles.

    After her win Friday, McDaniel invited Dhillon and Lindell onstage for a photo op, implicitly attempting to rebut criticism about the fractured nature of the party. “With us united and all of us going together, the Democrats are going to hear us in 2024,” McDaniel said.

    But moments later, Dhillon told reporters that GOP leaders would have to reckon with widespread distrust in the party among rank-and-file voters across the country – which she said was reflected in the support she garnered as she challenged McDaniel over the past two months.

    “The results were not what we or hundreds of thousands of supporters around the country were hoping for, and I think the party is going to have to deal with that fallout of being in a disconnect from the grassroots,” Dhillon told reporters outside the RNC’s general session at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach resort.

    “The party is not united, but it’s our job to try and unite the party, and that’s going to mean changes at the RNC,” Dhillon added.

    Both McDaniel and Dhillon have ties to Trump. The former president backed McDaniel when she first ran for party chair in 2017. Dhillon’s law firm represented Trump in his dealings with the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The RNC paid more than $1 million for the legal work.

    But Trump stayed neutral in the race for RNC chair, stating that McDaniel and Dhillon should “fight it out.” On Friday, he congratulated McDaniel on her “big WIN” in a post on his Truth Social platform.

    Trump’s likely rival in the 2024 contest for the White House, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, weighed in on the race in an interview that posted Thursday, telling Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a conservative web show host, that it was time for “some new blood in the RNC.” But the GOP governor stopped short of offering a formal endorsement of Dhillon.

    The feud between McDaniel and Dhillon has underscored the fractious nature of the Republican Party at this moment. There are broad disagreements among RNC members about how to steer the party back into a position of strength before the 2024 presidential election, with Trump already an announced candidate. Dhillon, for example, has said the party must do more to encourage early voting to compete with Democrats after years in which Trump has undermined that method of casting ballots in his quest to sow doubt in election results.

    During a speech at the beginning of Friday’s meeting, McDaniel implicitly pushed back at criticisms of her leadership record as she argued that the party must be united headed into 2024. “We’re working overtime to learn the lessons of the midterms – what went right and what went wrong,” she said.

    McDaniel won public commitments from more than 100 RNC members to back her before Friday’s secret ballot election that unfolded among other votes on party business and resolutions. Dhillon’s allies had suggested that many members would switch to the California committeewoman when the secret voting began, but that dynamic did not pan out.

    The race for RNC chair had grown increasingly contentious over the past two months with Dhillon allies raising questions about the compensation and benefits that McDaniel earned as party chair, and McDaniel supporters pointing to the lucrative payments Dhillon’s law group has received for representing both Trump and the RNC. Both women assured members that they would look closely the RNC’s spending on consultants and outside vendors as the party charts the course forward into the next cycle.

    As the GOP wrestles with how much influence Trump should exert over the party’s leadership and machinery, Trump’s candidates for RNC co-chair and treasurer were defeated during the voting on leadership positions by RNC members Friday afternoon in Dana Point, California.

    Trump’s endorsed candidate for RNC co-chair, North Carolina Republican Chairman Michael Whatley, withdrew after trailing South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick, who won after several rounds of voting. Trump had recently endorsed Whatley after crediting him with “leading North Carolina to tremendous success in the recent election” and said he was “MAGA all the way.” Trump’s choice for RNC Treasurer, Joe Gruters – the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida who had backed McDaniel in her run for a fourth consecutive term – also lost on Friday. Vicki Drummond of Alabama was reelected to a term as treasurer.

    RNC members also approved a resolution opposing “all forms of antisemitism, antisemitic statements and any antisemitic elements that seek to infiltrate the Republican Party.” The resolution explicitly condemned White supremacist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West – who have well-publicized antisemitic views and dined with Trump in November at his Mar-a-Lago estate – by name.

    The resolution approved by a voice vote Friday said that the Republican National Committee “formally condemns, denounces, censures and opposes Kanye West, also known as Ye, Nicholas ‘Nick’ Fuentes, Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and all others promoting their antisemitism beliefs.” It added that the Republican National Committee “affirms antisemitism has no place in our political party, American politics, or any political discourse.”

    Trump acknowledged that the dinner occurred in a post on Truth Social after the controversy erupted, stating that West had unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends “whom I knew nothing about” and described the dinner as “quick and uneventful.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Why a historically small presidential primary field is possible in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Why a historically small presidential primary field is possible in 2024 | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The 2020 presidential primary race was already in full motion at this point four years ago, with candidates jumping in left and right. The Democratic primary field, as well as the combined Democratic and Republican fields, were well on their way to being the largest in the modern primary era.

    We’re in a considerably different place today heading into the 2024 cycle. The only major candidate to declare is former President Donald Trump, and, while other candidates are entertaining bids, the field will almost certainly end up being much smaller than it was in 2020.

    Indeed, the 2024 primary field could be the smallest on record in the modern era – with an incumbent president running for reelection on the Democratic side and historically dominant front-runners on the Republican side.

    How small are we talking? The last time there was a combined primary field with fewer than 20 major candidates was 2012. The last time there was one with 10 or fewer was 1992. The record in the modern primary era (i.e., since 1972) is nine, in 1984.

    We could be heading toward 1984 or 1992 territory.

    Now, predicting who will and will not run for president in the early stages is somewhat of a fool’s errand. Two factors, though, suggest that many will pass on running.

    The first is that Democrats already have an incumbent in President Joe Biden, who seems geared to run for another term. Incumbents rarely face major primary challengers. Those who even get one do so because they’re not beloved within at least part of their party.

    Think of Trump’s biggest GOP challenger in 2020: William Weld. The former Massachusetts governor, who won a sole delegate in the primary and was polled many times, was a moderate, well-educated New England Republican. Trump’s approval rating among moderate or liberal Republicans with at least a college degree was only about 50% around the time Weld announced his candidacy.

    The last presidential incumbent to lose a state primary – Jimmy Carter in 1980 – had an approval rating south of 70% among Democrats overall. The same low overall approval rating was true for Gerald Ford among Republicans before Ronald Reagan took him all the way to the Republican National Convention in 1976.

    Biden doesn’t have any of those particular weaknesses in polling. His approval rating among Democrats in our most recent CNN/SSRS poll, for example, was 84%. There wasn’t a single segment that I could find within the Democratic electorate for whom Biden’s numbers were anywhere near where Trump was among moderate, college-educated Republicans at this point in the 2020 cycle. Biden polled well among younger and more liberal Democrats, who have traditionally been some of his weakest supporters.

    If Biden does end up running for reelection, I’m not sure there’s a single Democrat whom most would define as a major candidate who would try to take him on.

    The second factor that presages a smaller-than-usual 2024 field is the fact that most prominent politicians generally don’t run for president if they don’t think they can win. By winning, I mean earning the nomination and then the presidency itself. Biden, no doubt, is vulnerable in a general election, given that his overall approval rating is well below 50%.

    The problem for a lot of Republicans is they may ultimately decide that winning the nomination is going to be very difficult if your name isn’t Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Both Trump and DeSantis are each regularly polling above 30% among GOP primary voters. Trump, himself, is usually in the 40s if not 50s. No one else is close to 10%, with former Vice President Mike Pence leading this second tier of candidates.

    Trump and DeSantis combined are polling well into the 70s among Republicans nationally.

    A look at polling from years past reveals that this is the first time this early in the cycle that two presidential candidates in a primary without an incumbent were each polling above 30%, on average, at the same time.

    The only contest that looks anything like the Republican one right now is the 1980 Democratic primary, which featured an incumbent president, Carter. Then-Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts was his most prominent challenger. Both were polling above 30% at this point in the primary.

    Only four major Democrats – using the widest definition of “major” – ended up running for president in 1980.

    The 2024 Republican field will probably be larger than four candidates, though it’s not clear how much larger.

    I can think of only two other primary fields where the two leading candidates were combining for more than 70% of the primary vote this early on. Both were on the Democratic side: 2000 and 2016.

    Just five major Democrats ran in 2016, given how much Hillary Clinton looked like a juggernaut. The primary ended up being relatively competitive (with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders doing surprisingly well), but the result was never really in doubt.

    A mere two top Democrats ran in 2000, when Al Gore, the sitting vice president, was polling above 50%. His challenger, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, didn’t win a single state.

    We obviously don’t know how many Republicans or Democrats will end up running in 2024. Right now, by my count, about 10 candidates, including Biden, are getting regularly polled.

    Given the history, that strikes me as a fairly decent (if not a little bit high) place to start. Whether this 2024 field ends up being truly historic will ultimately depend on whether Biden, DeSantis and Trump can keep up their strong polling.

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  • Trump struggles with the new politics of abortion as a triumphant March for Life arrives in Washington | CNN Politics

    Trump struggles with the new politics of abortion as a triumphant March for Life arrives in Washington | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The anti-abortion “March for Life” for decades demonstrated to Republicans that they could not reach the Oval Office without the support of the anti-abortion movement.

    On Friday, marchers will gather in Washington with a decades-long mission accomplished, after the Supreme Court’s removal of a constitutional right to an abortion by overturning the Roe v. Wade decision last year.

    That means this year’s march will be a time for celebration but also of debate about where the movement goes next with some campaigners seeking to restrict the procedure everywhere. But such a refocused goal carries big risks. Democrats after all belatedly leveraged their own energy over abortion in the midterm elections in a backlash against the right-wing Supreme Court majority that helped stave off a big Republican midterm election wave.

    The March for Life also comes at an extraordinary moment when Donald Trump, the president who did more than any other to end Roe after a pact with social conservative voters that helped win him the 2016 GOP nomination, has launched an extraordinary attack on evangelical leaders he sees as insufficiently loyal, as CNN’s Gabby Orr, Kristen Holmes and Kaitlan Collins reported this week.

    “Nobody has ever done more for Right to Life than Donald Trump. I put three Supreme Court justices, who all voted, and they got something that they’ve been fighting for 64 years, for many, many years,” Trump said in an interview on Real America’s Voice Monday, referring to the overturning of federal abortion rights.

    “There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics and that’s a sign of disloyalty,” Trump told conservative journalist David Brody.

    The comment was a window into Trump’s psychology, revealing his transactional understanding of politics and his highly developed sense of fealty he sees owed to him.

    The former president is specifically angry over the failure to immediately endorse his 2024 White House bid by some evangelical leaders who remain influential figures in the conservative movement. Trump’s third White House run has so far failed to pick up significant energy.

    But Trump has also shown signs recently of questioning whether his purported greatest domestic achievement – the building of a generational conservative Supreme Court majority and its subsequent overturning of Roe – may end up hindering his hopes of a return to the White House in 2025. He wrote on his Truth Social platform earlier this month that the “abortion issue” had been poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those who insisted on no exceptions in the case or rape, incest or life of the mother, which he said “lost large numbers of voters.”

    The former president’s comments are backed by exit polls from November’s midterms that showed more than a quarter of voters listing abortion as a top issue. About 61% said they were unhappy with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and about 7 in 10 of those voters backed a Democratic House candidate.

    In his Truth Social comments, Trump appeared to be seeking to offload blame for the Republicans’ failure to win back the Senate and the party’s smaller-than-expected House majority. Trump took on waves of criticism after the election for promoting extreme, election denying candidates who often lost in swing states in the midterm elections.

    But it is notable seeing Trump navigate the shifting politics of abortion and apparently sizing up how it could affect his political prospects in future. After all, he was once unapologetically pro-choice before his foray into Republican politics dictated a shift in position and led to the bargain with evangelicals, which included an effective commitment to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court in return for the crucial votes of social conservatives.

    In the past, Trump has been a fixture of the March for Life rally, and in 2020, he became the first sitting president to attend in person as he geared up for his reelection race. He told marchers that “unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House.”

    There is no sign yet that he will call into Friday’s event, which will include a detour to the US Capitol on its usual route to the Supreme Court to underline how Congress is now a focus of the movement, as Democrats seek to codify Roe v. Wade protections into law.

    Trump’s comments on abortion and his feuding with evangelical leaders raise the question of whether the former president has made a tactical error and is harming his 2024 candidacy by targeting a critical GOP primary voting bloc at a time when there are growing questions over whether he is still the dominant force in Republican politics.

    Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told CNN that there is “no path to the nomination without winning the evangelical vote. Nobody knows that better than President Trump because, to the surprise of almost everyone, he won their support in 2016.”

    This question is especially acute in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucuses – for Republicans at least – in the 2024 primary season, which will be the first test of the ex-President’s hold over conservatives and evangelicals especially.

    Trump didn’t actually win in Iowa in 2016, coming second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and just beating out Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and the state has often not been a true barometer of how the GOP nominating contest will go.

    However, it will take on extra significance in 2024 and is likely to be seen as a strong indicator of Trump’s appeal to the conservative base. A loss there would create a painful narrative as he headed into subsequent contests – especially since he strongly carried the state in the general elections in 2016 and 2020.

    And it’s easy to come up with a list of potential GOP candidates that might have appeal in the state if they challenge Trump, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, former Vice President Mike Pence or Cruz once again. Only Trump so far is a declared 2024 Republican presidential candidate.

    Trump would be in an odd situation in 2024, in that he is in many ways effectively an incumbent given his strong support in the GOP and the fact that he didn’t go away after losing reelection. But at the same time, he’s not a sitting president and looks likely to face a contested primary and so may be more exposed in early contests.

    Still, while some conservative base voters might want to move on, there’s still strong goodwill among many toward Trump, gratitude for the change he brought during his term and admiration for his attitude.

    “Many people forgave him for his misstatements and his missteps because they generally liked his ability to fight, even if that became a cliché for some people, Trump’s detractors,” said Timothy Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa who is an expert on the state’s politics.

    This gets to point often missed about Trump. For many of his supporters, he offered an emotional as much as a political connection. His willingness to say what many grassroots conservatives thought and to assail institutions they despised, like the media or Washington experts and other elites, were as important as many of his often-ill-defined individual political positions.

    And it’s also often forgotten that evangelical voters in places like Iowa do not necessarily vote as a bloc, or according to what their leaders or pastors recommend and may prioritize issues such as taxes over social questions if a candidate is deemed to be generally acceptable. That may give Trump more leeway than more conventional candidates in departing from traditional conservative orthodoxy even over abortion.

    Still, Hagle said, even small numbers of disaffected Iowa voters could make a difference to Trump’s chances in the state if they don’t show up for him, as could more mainstream GOP caucus voters who may be taking a look at other aspects of his candidacy and those of potential rivals.

    “Are they going to support Trump because he fights, or because of his economic position or his position on the border?” Hagle said. “The abortion stuff may not be as important to them, or will they go a different direction at this point?”

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  • Biden delivers sermon drawing on legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King: ‘This is a time of choosing’ | CNN Politics

    Biden delivers sermon drawing on legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King: ‘This is a time of choosing’ | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Joe Biden delivered remarks Sunday from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, becoming the first sitting president to deliver a Sunday sermon from the historic church where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor until his assassination in 1968.

    “You’ve been around for 136 years – I know I look like it, but I haven’t,” Biden joked, calling King one of “my only political heroes” since entering public service.

    In remarks from the pulpit, the president referred to the current moment in American history “the time of choosing.”

    “Are we a people who choose democracy over autocracy? You couldn’t ask that question 15 years ago, right? You would’ve thought democracy was settled – not for African Americans, but democracy as an institutional structure was settled. But it’s not, it’s not,” he said.

    “We have to choose a community over chaos. Are we the people … going to choose love over hate? These are the vital questions of our time, and the reason why I’m here as your president, I believe. Dr. King’s life and legacy show us the way, and we should pay attention,” Biden said.

    He offered praise for King and his legacy, noting that the civil rights pioneer “was born in a nation where segregation was a tragic fact of life.”

    Biden’s visit came amid a steady drip of revelations tied to his handling of classified documents after his time as vice president. The White House has faced increasing criticism for its lack of transparency with the public over the finding of classified material at Biden’s home and his former private office. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to take over the investigation into the classified documents found at the two locations connected to Biden.

    Biden was invited to speak Sunday by the current pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, on what would have been King’s 94th birthday. Warnock was recently elected to a full six-year term following an election in which he distanced himself from Biden on the campaign trail in Georgia, where polling showed a majority of voters disapproved of the president’s job performance.

    At the church, Biden spoke about King’s legacy and a number of issues, including civil and voting rights.

    “He had every reason to believe, as others in his generation did, that history had already been written, that the division be America’s destiny – but he rejected that outcome,” Biden said. “So often, when people hear about Dr. King, people think his ministry and the movement were most about the epic struggle for civil rights and voting rights. But we do well to remember that his mission was something even deeper – it was spiritual. It was moral.”

    The speech also came as the president is set to make a decision about his political future with his advisers readying plans for a possible reelection bid. Biden narrowly flipped Georgia in 2020, buoyed by support from Black voters, and the state could prove critical in next year’s presidential campaign.

    Ahead of Biden’s trip to Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the White House senior adviser for public engagement, and former mayor of Atlanta, called the visit “an inflection point,” as the president’s voting rights agenda remains stalled in Congress.

    “If you’ve come through the East Wing, you’ve seen the pictures of Dr. King meeting with Lyndon Johnson, meeting with other civil rights leaders, hashing out voting rights in the White House – and so the fact that we are still here talking about this in 2023, I think really speaks to the fact that we need action, we need that action from Congress,” Bottoms said.

    “The President has done and will continue to do all that he can do in his executive powers, but there’s only so much that he can do. We need Congress to act,” she added.

    A Democratic-controlled House passed a voting rights bill in 2021, but attempts by Senate Democrats to change filibuster rules to pass the legislation were unsuccessful amid opposition from moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Sinema has since become an independent, while continuing to caucus with Democrats, and Republicans won control of the House following the November midterm elections, further dashing hopes of finding compromise on voting rights.

    Bottoms defended the administration’s handling of the voting rights issue, telling reporters Friday that the Biden White House has “done all that we can do from the executive branch,” but if there were additional steps that would further the issue, “we welcome these suggestions.”

    While in Atlanta, Biden was expected to meet with members of the King family and civil rights organizations, the White House said.

    King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 at age 39.

    On Monday, when the nation honors King on his eponymous holiday, Biden will deliver the keynote address during the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Breakfast in Washington, DC, on the invitation of Rev. Al Sharpton.

    This story has been updated.

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  • Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics

    Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden is heading back to Georgia. On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he’s visiting Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the civil rights pioneer once preached. The trip makes a lot of sense, not just to pay tribute to King, but also because King helped lead the drive for equal voting rights for Black Americans.

    The Peach State is in many ways the place where the political importance of Black voters is clearest. They are one of the biggest reasons Georgia has swung from a red state to a purple one.

    The current list of swing states in American politics mostly features places where Black voters don’t play an outsize role – states such as Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. Even in swing states where Black voters make up at least 10% of the voting public (e.g., Michigan and Pennsylvania), the Black portion of the electorate in the 2020 election was comparable to what it was nationwide (12%).

    Georgia is the big exception. According to US Census data, 33% of 2020 presidential election voters in the state were Black. That ranked second nationally behind deep-red Mississippi. Georgia’s own records show that a slightly smaller 29% of 2020 voters whose race was known were Black (or 27% when we include voters for whom race was unknown). That’s still the highest percentage in any swing state by far.

    Not only that, but the Black portion of the electorate is growing in Georgia as their percentage of the population has risen. State records show that Black adults made up 23% of voters in the 2000 election – which indicates a 6-point increase in the Black portion of the presidential electorate (whose race was known) from 2000 to 2020. There was an uptick of 1 point nationally over the same time span.

    To put into perspective how important this shift has been to Democratic fortunes, consider this math of the 2020 election results. Black voters in Georgia favored Biden by 77 points, according to the exit polls. Non-Black voters as a group (led by White voters) backed then-President Donald Trump by about 30 points. If Black voters had made up the same 23% of presidential election voters they did in 2000, Trump would have won the state by 6 points.

    Instead, Biden won Georgia by less than a point and became the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1992.

    (Keep in mind, other datasets suggest that Biden won Georgia’s Black voters by an even larger margin, so this math may, in fact, underestimate how important Black voters were to Biden’s win.)

    There are other factors as to why Biden won Georgia when Democrats before him had failed. The state’s Asian and Hispanic populations are also way up from where they were 20 years ago. At the same time, White voters with a college degree in Georgia have shifted well to the left, matching recent national trends.

    All that said, Black voters are a huge reason why only a handful of states have swung more Democratic in presidential elections since 2004 than Georgia, which has moved 17 points more Democratic. None of the seven states with bigger Democratic swings had elections that were anywhere as close as Georgia’s was in 2020.

    Of course, it’s not just in presidential elections where the voting power of Black Georgians is felt.

    Both of Georgia’s US senators are Democrats, including the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church himself, Raphael Warnock. Without Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrats would be in the Senate minority instead of holding 51 out of 100 seats.

    Neither Warnock nor Ossoff would be in the Senate without Black voters. I’m not only talking about the fact that Black Georgians overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Ossoff and Warnock in twin Senate runoffs in 2021 or about the rise in the percentage of Black voters in the state since the beginning of the century.

    I’m talking about factors unique to the 2021 runoffs. Historically, Black turnout had dropped in general election runoffs in Georgia. That was not the case in 2021, when both Ossoff and Warnock scored narrow wins.

    Black voter turnout (relative to voters as a whole) was actually up in the 2021 runoffs compared with the November 2020 general election. Moreover, those who turned out were more Democratic-leaning than Black voters who had voted in the general election.

    Many of these same Black voters backed Warnock in huge numbers again in his victorious bid for a full six-year term in December’s Senate runoff.

    With the 2024 election around the corner, Georgia’s electoral fate depends on Black voter turnout and whether Democrats continue to win them in large numbers more than any other state. Expect Biden to be back in the Peach State rallying Black voters, if he runs for a second term.

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  • Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A federal appeals court appears open to further shrinking the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a case that could lead to another major Supreme Court showdown over voting rights.

    The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals at a hearing on Wednesday considered whether private entities – and not just the US Justice Department – can bring lawsuits under a key provision of the law. Two of the three members of the appellate panel asked questions suggesting they were leaning against the idea that the provision, known as Section 2, could be enforced with private lawsuits.

    If those seeking a narrowing of the VRA are successful, it would significantly diminish the use of the law to challenge ballot regulations and redistricting maps that are said to be racially discriminatory.

    A vast majority of the cases that are brought under the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits election rules that have the intent or effect of discriminating on the basis of race – are brought by private plaintiffs, with the Justice Department facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of VRA cases it files to, at most, a few each year.

    Last year, however, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas – running counter to decades of legal practice – said that private parties do not have the ability to sue under the Section 2.

    During arguments Wednesday about whether the judge’s ruling should be upheld, Circuit Judges Raymond Gruender and David Stras questioned the attorney arguing in favor of a so-called private cause of action whether the parts of Supreme Court and 8th Circuit opinions that her clients were leaning on were “dicta,” i.e. statements that are not binding on lower courts.

    “I am dubious whether that is a holding,” Gruender, an appointee of former President George. W. Bush, said of an 8th Circuit case that ACLU attorney Sophia Lin Lakin argued pointed to the more robust interpretation of VRA enforcement.

    Stras, a Trump-appointee, grilled Lakin on more recent cases from the Supreme Court that scaled back private causes of action in other laws.

    A decision that blocked private parties’ path to court under the VRA would be a “radical” one, said David Becker, an alum of the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

    “It absolutely means it’s more likely that there will be potential partisan mischief that could negatively impact the voters who are protected by the Voting Rights Act,” Becker, who signed a friend-of-the court brief favoring the broader interpretation, told CNN.

    A decision from the 8th Circuit is unlikely to come for at least several weeks.

    The February 2022 ruling by US District Judge Lee Rudofsky that private parties could not sue under Section 2 is believed to be a first-of-its-kind decision. It emerged from a VRA challenge brought by the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP to Arkansas’ state House map.

    Critics of Rudofsky’s ruling noted that it flew in the face of decades of judicial practice – including in multiple Supreme Court cases – where courts considered and decided Section 2 cases brought by private parties. They point to a 1996 Supreme Court case where five justices sanctioned the practice. They also stress that, since it was passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act has been reauthorized and amended numerous times, and never once has Congress weighed in to say that courts were getting it wrong by hearing Section 2 lawsuits brought by private individuals and organizations.

    However, those in favor of reading the VRA more narrowly have seized on a concurrence by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a 2021 VRA case that called it an “open question” whether the provision has a private cause of action. Only Justice Clarence Thomas signed on to Gorsuch’s concurrence, but it provided Rudofsky with a jumping off point to conclude the answer was no.

    The office of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is defending Rudofsky’s ruling, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Her briefs argue that Congress intended only for attorney general to bring Section 2 lawsuits and there is a lack of textual support in the Voting Rights Act for a private cause of action for the provision.

    “Despite what the practice has been, when you look at the text of the statute there is a real question as to whether there is a private right of action,” Jason Torchinsky – a GOP election law attorney who represented Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing against a private cause of action – told CNN.

    At Wednesday’s 8th Circuit hearing, Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith – a George W. Bush appointee who is the chief judge of the appellate court – showed the most skepticism of Arkansas’ arguments against a private cause of action, though Stras also pushed back on some of the more sweeping claims made by Arkansas Solicitor General Nicholas Bronni.

    Those against a private cause of action argue the current interpretation of the law has spawned an ever-increasing amount of private VRA litigation that is overburdening election administrators and injecting chaos into their planning.

    “Courts have essentially assumed that there is this private right of action,” Honest Election Project executive director Jason Snead told CNN.

    “But it’s never actually been determined that there is, and in the absence of the expressed decision by Congress to create a private right of action and put it in the text of the law, courts are not empowered to create one,” said Snead, whose group favors stricter voting laws and filed a friend of the court brief supporting Arkansas.

    Without a private cause of action, enforcement of the Voting Rights Act would shrink drastically. Over the last four decades, private litigation has consistently made up the bulk of the successful Section 2 lawsuits, according to briefs filed in the case, and the number of Section 2 cases brought by the DOJ has trended downward, with the Trump administration bringing just one new lawsuit under the provision.

    Even as the judiciary – and particularly the US Supreme Court – was yanked further to the right under Trump’s makeover of the federal bench, many legal experts are viewing Arkansas’ arguments as a longshot. That the argument is being put forward is nonetheless a sign of how far conservative opponents of the VRA are willing to push the envelope in this legal environment, according to Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA School of Law.

    “In any fair reading of the Voting Rights Act, this argument is an easy loser, but we’ll see,” Hasen told CNN. “I don’t count anything out these days.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Jack Ma to relinquish control of Ant group | CNN Business

    Jack Ma to relinquish control of Ant group | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Chinese billionaire Jack Ma will no longer control Ant Group after the fintech giant’s shareholders agreed to reshape its shareholding structure, according to a statement released by the company on Saturday.

    After the adjustment, Ma’s voting rights will fall to 6.2%, according to the statement and CNN calculations.

    Before the restructure, Ma possessed more than 50% of voting rights at Ant via Hangzhou Yunbo and two other entities, according to its IPO prospectus filed with the exchanges in 2020.

    Ant added in the statement that the voting rights adjustment, a move to make the company’s shareholder structure “more transparent and diversified,” will not result in any change to the economic interests of any shareholders.

    Ant said its 10 major shareholders, including Ma, had agreed to no longer act in concert when exercising their voting rights, and would only vote independently, and thus no shareholder would have “sole or joint control over Ant Group.”

    The voting rights overhaul came after Chinese regulators pulled the plug on Ant’s $37 billion IPO in November 2020, and ordered the company to restructure its business.

    As part of the company’s restructuring, Ant’s consumer finance unit applied for an expansion of its registered capital from $1.2 billion to $2.7 billion. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission recently approved the application, according to a government notice issued late last week.

    After the fund-raising drive, Ant will control half of its key consumer finance unit, while an entity controlled by the Hangzhou city government will own a 10% stake. Hangzhou is where Alibaba and Ant have been headquartered since their inceptions.

    Ant Group is a fintech affiliate of Alibaba, both of which were founded by Ma.

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  • Stabenow’s retirement gives Republicans an opening in Michigan. But will they take it? | CNN Politics

    Stabenow’s retirement gives Republicans an opening in Michigan. But will they take it? | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Longtime Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow is calling it quits and will not stand for reelection in 2024.

    At a minimum, her decision makes Democrats’ already difficult job of retaining Senate control in 2024 even harder. Senators caucusing with the party hold 23 of the 34 seats expected to be up for reelection. Seven of them represent states Trump won at least once. This includes Michigan.

    Sen. Gary Peters – the last Democrat not named Stabenow to run for Senate in Michigan – won reelection by less than 2 points in 2020.

    Stabenow likely would have made Democrats’ job easier had she opted to run again. After narrowly unseating Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham in 2000, she has won reelection by at least 5 points in three subsequent contests.

    But Democrats now have a battle on the horizon in another state that flipped from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden four years later. Beyond Michigan, Democrats face a messy situation in Arizona with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema becoming an independent.

    With 51 senators now caucusing with Democrats, losses in Arizona and Michigan alone could be enough to flip the chamber to Republicans.

    Yet, Republicans’ ability to flip Michigan will be highly dependent on two important questions.

    First, what type of party do GOP primary voters want?

    And second, will Republicans in key Great Lakes battleground states continue to outperform national results if Trump isn’t on the ballot?

    In 2022, we saw GOP primary voters across the map select nominees who ended up being rejected by the general election electorate. Republicans underperformed the partisan fundamentals in a number of key Senate races, allowing Democrats to maintain control of the chamber while narrowly losing the House.

    There were several examples of this in Michigan last year. While there was no Senate race, the state held elections for key statewide offices, including governor, attorney general and secretary of state. The Republican candidates for these positions promoted false claims that Biden had not won the 2020 election legitimately.

    The result was that none of them came close to winning any of these races. This was most evident in the gubernatorial contest, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer turned what should have been a close race against Republican Tudor Dixon into a double-digit blowout.

    If Republicans are going to want to compete in Michigan in 2024 – or any swing-state Senate races in two years – primary voters will likely need to choose more mainstream candidates than they did in 2022.

    Of course, it won’t just be about individual candidates. It will be about regional trends as well.

    One of the biggest electoral changes in the past decade has been the Republican breakthrough in Great Lakes states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They went from voting to the left of the nation in the 2012 presidential election to voting to the nation’s right in 2016 and 2020. This was in large part because of Trump’s appeal to White voters without a college degree.

    But Trump may not be on the ballot in 2024, and it’s unclear whether the pro-Republican trend in these Great Lakes states will continue without him.

    Look at what happened last year. Michigan voted to the left of the nation in US House races. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voted basically in line with the nation, once you account for uncontested races.

    Indeed, it would not be surprising to see a shift in how states vote relative to the nation if Trump is out of the picture. This has happened every eight years in recent cycles (e.g., 1976, 1984, 1992, 2000, 2008 and 2016).

    And that would make Democrats less vulnerable in Michigan than you might think, even without Stabenow as their nominee. Keep in mind that Democrats haven’t lost a Senate race in the Wolverine State since 1994.

    A return to the pre-Trump era in Michigan and other key Great Lakes states may also mean that the advantage Republicans have held in the Electoral College relative to the popular vote in the two most recent presidential elections may not materialize in 2024.

    That’s something Democrats would certainly welcome going into 2024 after one of the closest midterm cycles of the past century.

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  • House adjourns for second day without electing a speaker with McCarthy’s bid in peril | CNN Politics

    House adjourns for second day without electing a speaker with McCarthy’s bid in peril | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Kevin McCarthy suffered yet another stinging defeat on Wednesday as he lost in the sixth round of voting to elect a speaker – a major blow that increasingly imperils his bid and heightens uncertainty over whether he can still secure the gavel or if a viable candidate will emerge as an alternative.

    The House voted Wednesday evening to adjourn until 12 p.m. ET on Thursday as Republicans scramble to find a path forward.

    The House GOP majority has been stuck at a contentious stalemate amid opposition to McCarthy from a group of conservatives. The fight, which began on the first day of the 118th Congress, has thrown the new House GOP majority into chaos and undercut the party’s agenda.

    The House will continue to be paralyzed until this standoff is resolved. The situation has grown dire for McCarthy’s political future as Republican allies are beginning to fear that the House GOP leader may not be able to pull off his gamble for speaker if the fight goes much longer.

    It’s not at all clear whether McCarthy and his allies will be able to lock down the votes – and the longer the fight drags on, the more imperiled his speakership bid has become. But there were signs Wednesday that negotiations are progressing.

    In a major concession, first reported by CNN, McCarthy has agreed to propose a rules change that would allow just one member to call for a vote to oust a sitting speaker, according to two sources familiar with the matter. McCarthy had initially proposed a five-member threshold, down from current conference rules that require half of the GOP to call for such a vote. Many members had been concerned about giving in to the far-right on this matter since it could weaken the speakership and cause chaos in the ranks.

    In two more concessions, he’s also agreed to allow for more members of the Freedom Caucus to serve on the powerful House Rules Committee, which dictates how and whether bills come to the floor, and to vote on a handful of bills that are priorities for the holdouts, including proposing term limits on members and a border security plan.

    Nothing is final, however, since the negotiations are ongoing.

    Republican sources say that even if McCarthy’s offer is accepted, it would still not get him the 218 votes he needs to be speaker. While these concessions could attract some new support, other opponents have raised different concerns that have yet to be fully addressed.

    After a series of failed speaker votes earlier in the day, the House adjourned for several hours as Republicans continued talks.

    Texas Rep. Chip Roy, one of the conservatives who has voted against McCarthy’s speakership bid, told GOP leaders that he thinks he can get 10 holdouts to come along if these ongoing negotiations pan out, according to GOP sources familiar with the internal discussions, and that there are additional detractors who may be willing to vote “present.”

    Sources said the talks Wednesday between McCarthy allies and holdouts have been the most productive and serious ones to date. And in one sign of a breakthrough, a McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats – one of the big demands that conservatives had asked for but that McCarthy had resisted until this point.

    “We’ve had more discussions in the last two days as a body sitting there, than we’ve done in frickin’ four years,” Roy said when leaving the Capitol Wednesday night.

    Still, even if these negotiations prove successful and 10 lawmakers do flip to McCarthy’s column – which is far from certain – that doesn’t get McCarthy to the 218 votes to win the speakership, so he would still have more work to do.

    Incoming House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said Wednesday evening that the negotiations over the next speaker have been “very, very constructive.”

    “There were a whole bunch of members that were involved in this and there are some folks now that are sitting down and talking about that discussion to see where they want to go with it next,” the Minnesota Republican said.

    House Republicans hold 222 seats in the new Congress, so for McCarthy to reach 218, he can only afford to lose four GOP votes. His obstacle is that he faces a small but determined contingent of hardline conservatives who have so far been successful in denying him the votes to secure the gavel.

    The group has used the leverage they have in the razor-thin Republican majority to extract concessions. McCarthy has already given in to a number of their demands, including making it increasingly easier to topple the sitting speaker, but so far his efforts have not been enough.

    The House convened on Wednesday to continue voting after three rounds of votes on Tuesday. McCarthy has come up short each time, failing to hit the majority threshold needed to secure the speakership.

    As the votes stretched on Tuesday, the situation appeared to become even more dire for McCarthy, as the vote count in opposition to his speaker bid grew.

    The tally for the first ballot in the speaker vote was 203 for McCarthy, with 19 Republicans voting for other candidates. The tally for the second ballot was 203 votes for McCarthy with 19 votes for GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. In the third round of voting, there were 202 votes for McCarthy and 20 votes for Jordan, with Rep. Byron Donalds joining the 19 GOP lawmakers who had voted against McCarthy in the first two rounds.

    It was the first time an election for speaker went to multiple ballots since 1923.

    “My vote yesterday was basically to break a deadlock, because we were deadlocked, and we were not getting anywhere,” Donalds, a Florida Republican, said Wednesday on “CNN This Morning.” “Right now, (McCarthy) doesn’t have a pathway to get there. If that reemerges, yeah, I can be there, that’s fine, but what’s necessary now is that Republicans come together and find a way to elect a speaker.”

    In the fourth round of voting, 20 Republicans voting together for Donalds as the group switched their collective support from Jordan to Donalds. Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana voted present, lowering McCarthy’s threshold to 217.

    Spartz told CNN she did so because she wanted to allow for more negotiations within the conference to address the concerns of the 20 members.

    The final tally for the fifth vote was again 201 votes for McCarthy, 20 for Donalds and one present vote.

    The final tally for the sixth vote was the same: 201 for McCarthy, 20 for Donalds and one present vote.

    Trump is watching closely as the dynamic plays out on Capitol Hill and his public support has been a key focus of McCarthy’s efforts.

    Two GOP sources familiar with the matter said McCarthy’s allies were panicking on Tuesday after the former president gave a tepid response to NBC News when asked about his support for McCarthy. The former president also declined to issue a statement Monday reiterating his endorsement of McCarthy despite a behind-the-scenes effort from several McCarthy allies to get Trump to do so, two sources said.

    One close McCarthy ally then began working behind the scenes to do clean-up duty and started pressing for Trump to put out a statement clarifying his support. McCarthy and Trump then connected by phone, where McCarthy said Trump expressed he was still committed to backing him. Trump put out a strong endorsement on Truth Social Wednesday morning, imploring Republicans not to “TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT & EMBARRASSING DEFEAT” and urging them to vote for McCarthy.

    Although Trump’s statement might not move the needle among the fiercest McCarthy foes, one of the sources said McCarthy world was worried about looking “weak” and like he was bleeding support, so they felt it was important to reverse the narrative.

    Gaetz, one of the House Republicans opposing McCarthy’s bid for speaker, dismissed Trump’s latest effort to help the California Republican as “sad.”

    “This changes neither my view of McCarthy nor Trump nor my vote,” Gaetz said in a statement to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, shortly after Trump came to McCarthy’s defense in the Truth Social post.

    Long a staunch Trump ally, Gaetz’s refusal to bow to Trump’s desire for a McCarthy speakership raises new questions about the former president’s dwindling influence over Republicans in the midst of his third presidential campaign.

    “If Matt Gaetz is ignoring you, that’s not a good sign,” said one Trump ally who is involved with his 2024 campaign.

    Trump has been making calls on McCarthy’s behalf over the last 24 hours in an attempt to break the conservative blockade against him, this person said, but his efforts have so far been fruitless.

    One lawmaker who spoke with Trump late Tuesday suggested the former president should run for speaker himself, according to a person briefed on the call. Trump demurred and continued to push this person to support McCarthy, claiming that he would be a solid “America First” supporter.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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  • The most underdiscussed fact of the 2022 election: how historically close it was | CNN Politics

    The most underdiscussed fact of the 2022 election: how historically close it was | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A lot of people have tried to draw lessons from the 2022 elections, which ended earlier this month. Whether it be Democrats’ historically strong performance for a party in power during a midterm or the lack of Senate incumbents losing, the takes have been aplenty.

    But perhaps the most important lesson as we head into the 2024 cycle hasn’t gotten enough oxygen: the closeness of the 2022 midterms. Indeed, an examination of the data reveals that 2022 was a historically close election in a historically divided era.

    Let’s start with seat counts in governorships and in the House and Senate. Post-election, neither party dominates. Republicans have maintained the thinnest majority of governorships (52%) and House seats (51%). Democrats will control the Senate with a bare majority (51% of the seats).

    It’s not unusual for any one of these (governorships, House seats or Senate seats) to be narrowly split. After all, we’ve just had two years in which each party has held 50 Senate seats.

    What is unusual is to have all three be so closely divided. By my count, this is apparently the first time since the popular election of senators (1914) when neither party will hold more than 52% of governorships, House seats or Senate seats.

    When you examine the vote counts from the 2022 election, the closeness becomes even more apparent. Republicans won the House popular vote by less than 3 points and would likely have won by about 2 points had both parties run candidates in every district. That would have been the second-closest midterm margin in the House popular vote in the last 70 years.

    The popular vote margins in governor’s and Senate races this year were even closer. There were 36 gubernatorial races in 2022, with Democrats winning more votes cast for governor in total than Republicans – by less than 0.3 points.

    That margin was the closest in midterm- or presidential-year gubernatorial races since at least 1990.

    The margin in Senate races was still tighter. Republican candidates for Senate won more votes than Democratic candidates – by 0.1 points. Democrats likely would have gotten more votes had they run a candidate in Utah instead of endorsing independent Evan McMullin.

    Still, the 0.1-point popular vote margin was the closest in Senate races in any election since at least before the beginning of World War II.

    Not every state held gubernatorial and Senate races this year, but those that did were well representative of the country as a whole when looked at together. They collectively voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin comparable with his actual national popular vote advantage.

    What makes the closeness of the 2022 elections especially notable is how it exemplifies an electorate that has been quite divided for nearly 35 years.

    We have not had a presidential election in which the popular vote was decided by double-digits since 1984. This streak of single-digit elections is the longest since most states began popularly electing presidents in the 1820s.

    The largest margin in the House popular vote since 1984 was the nearly-11-point win Democrats notched in the 2008 election. In fact, the last time the House popular vote margin was 11 points or more was 40 years ago, in 1982. We haven’t seen such a string of close results in the House popular vote in 200 years.

    Political scientists have debated the reasons for this tight set of recent elections. Arguably, the best explanation is political polarization. The era of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats is mostly gone now. The pool of swing voters has, accordingly, shrunk.

    But that hasn’t made swing voters any less valuable today. These voters, who go back and forth between the parties, remain highly sought after by Democrats and Republicans, and they can make all the difference. For instance, a number of purple states (such as Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) elected candidates of different parties for governor and senator this year.

    The 2024 election will undoubtedly see both parties trying to win over these swing voters. The early read suggests neither party can feel secure about their chances. You can find polls that have Biden (the likely Democratic nominee) and his likely Republican opponent (either former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) within a few points of each other among this group.

    The bottom line is: Neither party has a lasting majority from the public. That was true in the historically close election of 2022 and in the historically divided era of the last 35 years. And it could very well also be also true in the next presidential election.

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  • Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s election challenge and confirms Hobbs’ victory | CNN Politics

    Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s election challenge and confirms Hobbs’ victory | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.

    Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November, sued in an effort to overturn the election. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson allowed a two-day trial on some of Lake’s claims, which concluded late Thursday afternoon.

    The court ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, who built her candidacy on her support for former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She has since falsely claimed to have won last month’s election.

    Saturday’s ruling is also the latest blow for election deniers nationwide and harks back to the long stream of legal losses Trump suffered in 2020 as he sought to challenge his election loss.

    In a tweet after the ruling, Lake, who sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify, said she would appeal the decision “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”

    Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he permitted Lake an attempt to prove at trial the two remaining counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.

    The county, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the midterms and 2020 election.

    Technical experts who testified in support of Lake provided analysis that “does not nearly approach the degree of precision” needed to conclude that the election results were tainted,” Thompson said in his ruling.

    After the election, Lake falsely claimed that a mishap with some printers in Maricopa County was part of a deliberate effort to rig the vote against her. But the judge’s ruling noted that Lake’s “own witness testified before this Court that … printer failures were largely the result of unforeseen mechanical failure.”

    According to Thompson’s ruling, Lake’s team had to show that someone intentionally caused the county’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction – and as a result of that, enough “identifiable” votes were lost to change the outcome of the election.

    “Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence,” Thompson wrote.

    Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican who helps oversee elections, called the ruling “a win for Arizona voters and American democracy.”

    “Arizona courts have made it clear that frivolous political theater meant to undermine elections will not be tolerated,” Gates said in a statement Saturday.

    During the two-day trial, Lake’s legal team broadly criticized Maricopa County’s management of the election and claimed that long lines led Republican would-be voters to turn away on Election Day.

    Tom Liddy, a lawyer for Maricopa County, faulted Lake’s campaign and the Arizona Republican Party for casting doubt on the validity of early and mail-in votes, which left GOP voters bearing the brunt of minor issues on Election Day.

    “That’s political malpractice,” said Liddy, a Republican. “You reap what you sow.”

    Maricopa County elections co-director Scott Jarrett detailed the causes of printing problems in some polling places on Election Day that resulted in on-site ballot tabulators being unable to read some ballots.

    Jarrett said in some printers, toner wasn’t dark enough – a problem that resulted in voters whose ballots couldn’t be read having to place their ballots in “door 3,” a secure box used for ballots that would need to be counted later at a central location. Jarrett said about 17,000 ballots ended up in “door 3” boxes across the county.

    He also said that at three of the county’s 223 sites, “shrink to fit” settings were improperly selected on ballot printers by technicians who were attempting to solve those toner problems. That resulted in about 1,300 ballots being printed slightly too small for on-site tabulators to process.

    Those ballots were later duplicated by hand and then counted, he said.

    He said he had “no reason to believe” any of the problems were the result of intentional misconduct. All of those votes, he said, were ultimately counted after they were transferred to a bipartisan duplication board.

    Lake’s team had also claimed at the trial that employees at Runbeck, a Maricopa County ballot processing contractor, had improperly inserted their own ballots and those of family members into batches to be counted on site, rather than returning those ballots through proper channels.

    In response, Rey Valenzuela, the Maricopa County co-director of elections in charge of early voting, said that the county had never authorized Runbeck employees to deliver ballots directly to the Runbeck site and that he was not aware of the contractor’s employees ever having done so.

    Lake’s legal team has until Monday to respond. Hobbs is slated to be inaugurated as governor on January 2.

    This is story has been updated with additional details.

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  • January 6 panelist points to Electoral College reform as next priority to safeguard democracy | CNN Politics

    January 6 panelist points to Electoral College reform as next priority to safeguard democracy | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House January 6 select committee, said reforming the Electoral College to ensure the presidential winner reflects the outcome of the popular vote would be the next step to safeguard democracy.

    “The Electoral College now – which has given us five popular-vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone – has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people. It was a danger on January 6,” the Maryland Democrat said in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College, that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief. We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else. Whoever gets the most votes wins.”

    “The truth is that we need to be continually renovating and improving our institutions,” Raskin said, later noting that he supports the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which represents a pledge made by certain states and the District of Columbia to award their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote nationwide.

    Under the US Constitution, Americans don’t select their president directly. They vote for their state’s electors, who are then expected to carry out the will of the voters when they vote for president and vice president.

    Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 both won the national popular vote in their races but lost the Electoral College vote count. Other presidential nominees who lost after winning the popular vote included Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876) and Grover Cleveland (1888).

    “The framers [of the Constitution] were great, and they were patriots, but they didn’t have the benefit of the experience that we have lived, and we know that the Electoral College doesn’t fit anymore,” Raskin said.

    Included in the sweeping spending bill that Congress passed last week was a measure aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election. Raskin described the move, which would reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act, as “necessary” and “the very least we can do and we must do.”

    “But it’s not remotely sufficient,” he said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that Electoral College thing you have, that’s so great, we think we’ll adopt that too.’”

    Raskin’s remarks come just days after the select committee – which has investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol – issued its final report, a comprehensive overview of the bipartisan panel’s findings on how former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In a symbolic move, the committee in its last public meeting referred Trump to the Justice Department on four criminal charges.

    Raskin said the unprecedented referrals were necessary because of the “magnitude of the attack on democracy” on January 6. He also warned of a future coup attempt.

    Raskin talked about security threats members of Congress face amid rising partisan tensions.

    “There’s very dangerous rhetoric going on out there that’s a real break from everything we’ve known in our lifetimes,” he said.

    “What it means to live in a democracy with basic civic respect is that people can disagree without resorting to violence. But the internet has played a negative role, especially for the right wing, the extreme right, which now engages in very dangerous hyperbolic rhetoric that exposes people to danger.”

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  • Republicans won the popular vote, but they’re not used to this feeling | CNN Politics

    Republicans won the popular vote, but they’re not used to this feeling | 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
     — 

    The cruel truth of American democracy, usually experienced by Democrats, is that a political party can get more votes than the other without winning much power.

    This year, however, it’s Republicans who got more votes – more than 3 million more votes for GOP House candidates – and don’t have as much to show for it.

    Republicans actually lost ground in the Senate, where Democrats will have a slim 51-49 majority. The GOP House majority, while an important check on the White House, is small and spread across a broad enough ideological spectrum that it will be difficult for potential House speaker Kevin McCarthy, or whoever is ultimately able to win that position, to use the majority to act decisively.

    “Simply put, Republicans picked up the votes they needed, just not where they needed them most. Clearly something or someone intervened, affecting the outcome of the election in the places that mattered,” Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook wrote in November.

    Votes at that time were still trickling in from California and Washington, and the margins have thinned, but Cook argued that Republicans’ edge should have gained them 20-30 seats and a larger majority than the 222-212 margin they’re going to have in the House in January. There will be one House vacancy.

    Instead of suffering massive losses, Democrats lost a net of nine seats. It cost them the House majority, but at the same time made President Joe Biden appear strong. Presidents usually lose scores of seats in the House.

    Republicans’ failure in the Senate has been attributed to poor statewide candidates who were sidetracked by personal issues and former President Donald Trump’s election fantasies.

    The GOP frequently, in recent years, gets more power even with fewer votes.

    Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000 both won the White House with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents. Democrats won substantially more votes than Republicans in 2012, when they reelected then-President Barack Obama, but Republicans kept the House majority.

    The 2022 midterm is the first election in which Republican candidates got more votes than Democrats since 2014, when the GOP picked up House seats and the Senate majority.

    Not everyone in a congressional district can vote, and not everyone did.

    There was extremely good turnout in certain states, like Georgia, which featured hotly contested Senate and governor’s races and set records for midterm turnout, according to the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

    Turnout was down in places like California, which featured statewide races that were not so hotly contested. The California Secretary of State’s office pegs turnout at 50.8% of voters, far below the more than 64% turnout it reported in the last midterm in 2018, but above the 42% turnout in 2014.

    RELATED: See how your votes aren’t equal

    Republicans can also be frustrated that they failed to gain control of any new state legislatures.

    On the one hand, it’s a historic failure by Republicans – the first midterm election since 1900 when the party out of power nationally did not gain control of at least one state chamber, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    On the other hand, Republicans still control a majority of state houses after focusing on making gains in state politics for the past decade-plus. Republicans will still control both legislative houses in 27 states, compared with Democrats, who will control both houses in 19.

    The overall US turnout rate for the 2022 midterm was 46.8% of the voting eligible population, according to the US Elections Project, which is run by the political scientist Michael McDonald at the University of Florida.

    That’s down from more than 50% in 2018, but well above the 36.7% recorded by the project in 2014.

    There is going to be a lot of debate about how controversial voting laws in key states like Georgia and Texas may have kept some people from voting. Read more on that from CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, who covers voting rights.

    In a separate report, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere notes that Black voter turnout was down in 2022, which has alarmed Democratic operatives as they look ahead to the coming presidential election.

    The New York Times analyst Nate Cohn wrote this week that turnout was much higher in predominantly White areas than it was in predominantly Black and Hispanic areas. This could explain how Republicans got so many more votes without getting many more House seats. In many states, redistricting can clump like voters together, creating safe districts.

    It’s also important to note here that while American voters have gotten more tribal in recent years, split-ticket voting is an important feature of the system.

    More voters chose Republicans in House races, but a lot of voters supported both parties on their ballots.

    Georgia, most notably, picked a Republican governor and a Democratic senator. But it wasn’t the only state to do so – Vermont, New Hampshire and Nevada also chose Democratic senators and a Republican governor.

    Maryland and Massachusetts went the other direction in 2022, replacing Republican governors with Democrats to match their senators. Kansas and Wisconsin chose Republican senators and Democratic governors.

    The national popular vote is an interesting side note, but doesn’t mean much, as Republicans will tell you this year.

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  • North Carolina voter ID law had racially discriminatory intent, state Supreme Court says | CNN Politics

    North Carolina voter ID law had racially discriminatory intent, state Supreme Court says | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court ruling that struck down the state’s 2018 voter ID law, agreeing with the lower court that it had been passed with the intent of targeting Black voters who were unlikely to vote for Republicans.

    “We hold that the three-judge panel’s findings of fact are supported by competent evidence showing that the statute was motivated by a racially discriminatory purpose,” the Democratic-majority court said, adding that the lower court also correctly applied the relevant precedent.

    The state Supreme Court’s three Republican members dissented from the ruling Friday.

    The law, known as SB 824, was passed in 2018 after Republicans lost their supermajority in the legislature but before the new legislature took over. The law was put on hold under a preliminary injunction, after North Carolina’s Court of Appeals said in 2020 that voter ID provisions could negatively impact Black voters. A three-judge state court panel then permanently blocked the law in September 2021.

    Republicans will regain control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in the coming weeks, after the party flipped two seats on the court in last month’s midterm elections.

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  • Strong midterm turnout in Georgia sparks new debate about a controversial election law | CNN Politics

    Strong midterm turnout in Georgia sparks new debate about a controversial election law | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The strong turnout in Georgia’s runoff election that cemented Democrats’ control of the US Senate is sparking fresh debate about the impact of the state’s controversial 2021 election law and could trigger a new round of election rule changes next year in the Republican-led state legislature.

    Voters showed up in droves for the midterms, with more than 3.5 million casting ballots in the December 6 runoff – or some 90% of the general election turnout, a far higher rate than typical runoffs. And top Republicans in Georgia, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, argued those numbers refute claims that the 2021 law was designed to suppress votes in this increasingly competitive state.

    “There’s no truth to voter suppression,” Raffensperger said in an interview this week with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, a day after Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock secured reelection in the first federal election cycle since Georgia voting law took effect.

    Georgia Democrats and voting rights groups, however, continue to criticize the 2021 law – enacted in the wake of Democratic gains two years ago – as erecting multiple barriers to voting. And the surging turnout, they said, masked extraordinary efforts by voters and activists to overcome both new and longstanding obstacles to the franchise in this once deep-red state.

    “Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long … doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist,” Warnock said during his victory speech Tuesday – echoing a theme he made repeatedly on the campaign trail. “It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

    Warnock’s victory Tuesday solidified Georgia’s standing as a battleground state and comes after Warnock and fellow Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff won runoffs in the 2020 election cycle. In that election, President Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the Peach State in nearly three decades.

    Voting rights activists said the 2021 law made it harder to cast a ballot in myriad ways: It limited the number and location of ballot drop boxes, instituted new ID requirements to vote by mail and shortened the window for a runoff from the nine weeks in the 2020 election to four weeks, contributing to long lines during the early voting period.

    Additionally, the voter registration deadline fell on November 7 – the day before the general election and before Georgians knew for certain that the contest would advance to a runoff because neither Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker had surpassed the 50% threshold to win outright in the general election.

    In the 2020 election cycle, at least 23,000 people who registered after Election Day went on to vote in the Senate runoff in January 2021, according to an analysis of Georgia’s Secretary of State data by Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit issue-advocacy organizations.

    And only an 11th hour court victory for Warnock and Democrats paved the way for counties to hold early in-person voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. State election officials had opposed casting ballots on that date, saying Georgia law prohibited voting on a Saturday if there is a state holiday on the Thursday or Friday before.

    “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Kendra Cotton, CEO of the voting rights group New Georgia Project Action Fund, said of the new restrictions. “They are not trying to hit the jugular, so you bleed out at once. It’s these little nicks, so you slowly become anemic before you pass out.”

    “It’s a margins game,” she added. “I wish folks would stop acting like the purpose of SB202 was to disenfranchise the masses. Joe Biden won this state by a little less than 12,000 votes. I can guarantee you that there are more than 12,000 people across this state who were eligible to vote in this election and they could not.”

    Even Cotton’s 21-year-old daughter, Jarah Cotton, became ensnared.

    The younger Cotton, a Harvard University senior, said she had planned to vote absentee in November’s general election – but misunderstood a new requirement of Georgia’s law: that she print out her online application for absentee ballot, sign it “with a pen and ink” and then upload it.

    In the runoff, Jarah Cotton said she successfully completed her application for an absentee ballot but did not receive it before she returned home to Powder Springs, Georgia, for the Thanksgiving holiday.

    The court ruling permitting voting the Saturday after Thanksgiving allowed her to cast an in-person ballot in the runoff – but only after her family paid $180 to delay her return flight to Boston by a day.

    “I don’t think it should be this hard,” Jarah Cotton said of her experience. “It should be more straightforward, but I think that’s reflective of the voting process in Georgia.”

    Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, said too many critics of the state’s voting process are comparing the 2022 election with the ease of voting during the height of the pandemic in the 2020 election cycle when election officials across the state “moved heaven and earth” to guarantee the franchise.

    That so many people voted in a four-week runoff shows “the system works really well,” he told CNN in an interview Friday. “The problem now is that it that is has become so politicized. I’ve been saying now, for 24 months, that both sides have to stop weaponizing election administration.”

    Voting rights activists say the state’s runoff system, first enacted in 1964, itself is a vestige of voter-suppression efforts from the state’s dark past. Its original sponsor sought to guarantee that candidates backed by Black Georgians could not win outright with a plurality of the vote.

    Most states decide general election winners based on which candidate gets the most votes, unlike Georgia, where candidates must win more than 50% of the votes cast to avoid a runoff.

    Runoffs also are costly affairs.

    A recent study by researchers at Kennesaw State University estimated that the Senate runoffs in the 2020 election cycle had a $75 million price tag for taxpayers.

    In the CNN interview earlier this week, Raffensperger suggested that the Republican-controlled General Assembly might revisit some of the state’s election rules, including potentially lowering to 45% the threshold needed to win a general election outright.

    He also said he wanted to work with counties to guarantee more polling places are available to ease the long lines voters endured during the early voting window in the runoff.

    And Raffensperger said lawmakers might weigh a ranked-choice instant runoff system. In so-called instant runoffs, voters rank candidates by order of preference. If one candidate doesn’t receive more than 50% of the vote, voters’ second choices would be used to determine the winner, without the need to hold a second election.

    Given the shortened runoff schedule in Georgia, state lawmakers instituted the instant runoff for a narrow slice of voters – those in the military and overseas – in this year’s midterms.

    “There will be a push for this in the upcoming legislative session,” said Daniel Baggerman, president of Better Ballot Georgia, a group advocating for the instant runoff.

    “It’s asking a lot from voters” to show up again for a runoff “when there’s a simple way that achieves the same outcome,” he said.

    Sterling agreed that there “needs to be a discussion about general election runoffs,” but he said he worries that moving to an instant runoff system risks disenfranchising a wide swath of Georgians who might not understand the process without “a tremendous amount of voter education.”

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