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  • Warnock honored 5 civil rights ‘martyrs’ in his victory speech. Here are their stories | CNN

    Warnock honored 5 civil rights ‘martyrs’ in his victory speech. Here are their stories | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Raphael Warnock’s re-election is being celebrated by supporters across the nation with many political observers crediting the work of voting rights groups for the consequential win.

    Warnock delivered a victory speech to a fiery crowd in Atlanta on Tuesday night that touched on the power of faith, his deep Georgia roots and the perseverance of voters in the face of Republican-led voter suppression efforts. Election officials said a record number of voters showed up for early voting last week. And Black voters have been largely credited for Warnock’s win, signaling that Georgia is no longer a reliably red state.

    In his speech, Warnock also honored the Black and White unsung heroes of the civil rights movement who died fighting for equal voting rights, making wins like his possible.

    “Tonight, I want to pay tribute to all those, over so many years, who have put their voices, and their lives on the line, to defend that right,” Warnock said. “Martyrs of the movement like (Michael) Schwerner, (James) Chaney and (Andrew) Goodman, Viola Luizzo, James Reeb. And those who stood up and spoke up like Fannie Lou Hamer. John Lewis, who walked across a bridge knowing that there were police waiting to brutalize him on the other side. Yet, by some stroke of destiny mingled with human determination he walked across that bridge in order to build a bridge to a more just future.”

    While Hamer and Lewis have been widely discussed by historians and journalists, Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, Luizzo and Reeb are lesser known. But that doesn’t negate the significance of their work toward equality. All of them were killed by white supremacists or Ku Klux Klan members.

    Here is what you should know about five “martyrs” of the movement:

    Liuzzo was a 39-year-old wife and mother of five of from Detroit who was killed by Ku Klux Klansmen in Selma on March 25, 1965.

    Historical records show Liuzzo, a White woman, had been committed to fighting for economic justice and civil rights.

    She was an active member of the Detroit NAACP chapter and the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit. Family members say she decided to travel to Selma in 1965 after seeing televised news reports of peaceful protesters being beaten and tear-gassed by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

    In Selma, Liuzzo marched and helped transport demonstrators in her car. She was ambushed and shot to death by KKK members while driving Leroy Moton, a Black man, to Montgomery. Within 24 hours of Liuzzo’s death, President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrests of the KKK members. They were all acquitted by Alabama courts, however a federal grand jury found them guilty of violating Liuzzo’s civil rights and they were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

    In 1991, a marker honoring Liuzzo was erected at the site where she was killed on U.S. Highway 80, about 20 miles east of Selma

    Rev. James J. Reeb, 38, was attacked by a White mob in Selma in 1965 and he died from his injuries days later.

    Reeb, a White Unitarian minister who lived in Boston, died after traveling to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to answer Martin Luther King Jr’s call to clergy to join demonstrations for voting rights in the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday.”

    The 38-year-old minister was beaten by a group of White men on March 9, 1965 as he and two other White clergymen left an integrated Selma restaurant after having dinner. He was hit in the head and died two days later at a Birmingham hospital.

    His killing gained nationwide attention, prompted vigils in his honor and is believed to have contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    “The world is aroused over the murder of James Reeb. For he symbolizes the forces of goodwill in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers,” King said as he delivered a eulogy for Reeb in 1965.

    Three White men were indicted with murder in Reeb’s killing but their cases resulted in acquittals.

    Andrew Goodman, left, James Chaney, center, and Michael Shwerner, right, were killed in the summer of 1964.

    Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. The killings were among the most notorious of the civil rights era, and were the subject of the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

    The three men, who registered African Americans to vote, had just visited the victims of the burning of a Black church in Neshoba County when a sheriff’s deputy took them into custody for speeding. The men were driving a car with license plates registered to the Congress of Federated Organizations (COFO), one of the most active civil rights groups in Mississippi, according to an FBI file on the case.

    After their release from the county jail, a Ku Klux Klan mob tailed their car, forced it off the road and shot them to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam, after an extensive FBI investigation.

    Chaney was a 21-year-old Black volunteer with COFO. Goodman, a White 20-year-old, was a college student and new volunteer from New York. Schwerner, a White 24-year-old former social worker, was an established civil rights organizer who was “particularly reviled by the Klan for his work,” according to the FBI file.

    The killings fueled the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year.

    In 1967, prosecutors convicted eight defendants for violating the federal criminal civil rights conspiracy statute, namely the victims’ right to live. None served more than six years in prison.

    No murder charges were filed at the time but nearly 40 years later, Edgar Ray Killen, a part-time Baptist minister and the plot leader, was found guilty of manslaughter in 2005 and sentenced to three consecutive 20-year sentences. Killen died in 2018.

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  • Trump’s slow 2024 start worries allies | CNN Politics

    Trump’s slow 2024 start worries allies | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Back in 2015, Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in Iowa as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination came just 10 hours after he declared his candidacy in New York. The following day, he was across the country in New Hampshire, with plans to visit South Carolina before the end of his first week.

    But seven years later – and nearly three weeks into his 2024 presidential campaign – Trump has yet to leave his home state or hold a public campaign event in an early voting state.

    Trump’s disengaged posture has baffled former and current allies, many of whom experienced firsthand the frenetic pace of his two previous White House bids, and who now say he’s missed the window to make a splash with his 2024 rollout. The uninspiring launch of his supposed political comeback comes as his campaign appears to be operating on auto pilot, with few signs of momentum or enthusiastic support from donors or party heavyweights.

    “I don’t know why he rushed this. It doesn’t make sense,” one Trump adviser said of his lackluster announcement speech last month, which came one week after Republicans delivered an underwhelming performance in the midterm elections and as the rest of the party turned its attention to the Senate runoff contest in Georgia.

    Trump’s announcement was roundly panned for lacking zest, so much so that some audience members attempted an early exit, and his recent hosting of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and embattled rapper Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago only further galvanized GOP opposition against him. A person familiar with the matter said Trump spent the Sunday after Thanksgiving asking people around him if they thought the backlash to his private dinner with Ye and Fuentes was truly damaging.

    “So far, he has gone down from his bedroom, made an announcement, gone back up to his bedroom and hasn’t been seen since except to have dinner with a White supremacist,” said a 2020 Trump campaign adviser.

    “It’s 1000% a ho-hum campaign,” the adviser added.

    The only other notable event to occur since Trump announced he was running again was both unintended and dreaded for weeks by the former president’s attorneys. Just three days after Trump launched his campaign, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee two ongoing criminal investigations into the 45th president and his associates.

    While some Republicans long speculated that Trump entered the presidential race early to inoculate himself from further legal peril, his candidate status instead appeared to serve as the catalyst for Garland’s announcement.

    A Trump campaign spokesman said the former president has held “multiple events since he announced,” noting his remote appearance at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition summit last month, video remarks to a conference for conservative activists in Mexico, a Patriots Freedom Fund event, his remarks at two separate political events held at Mar-a-Lago, and a tele-rally Monday night for Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker. None of these events were billed as campaign events.

    Trump’s current campaign trajectory has left both allies and Republican opponents wondering if he will flip a switch in 2023 or fail to adapt to a different political environment. Even as the GOP’s undisputed 2024 frontrunner, some of his closest allies say he simply cannot afford to take his position for granted at a moment when influential Republicans appear exceedingly interested in dislodging him from his influential perch.

    “If Trump was working in a lush jungle environment in 2016, he is in a desert today,” said a Republican close to the former president. “The political landscape has totally changed. He was irresistible because no one understood him but now everybody knows how to deal with him, so the question is, can he recalibrate?”

    Some sources said Trump’s first-out-of-the-gate strategy, which was said to be partly aimed at clearing the GOP primary field, already looks poised to fail.

    “You know what it’s done to dissuade people from getting in? Nothing. He hasn’t hired anyone. He hasn’t been to the early states,” said the 2020 campaign adviser.

    Trump’s lack of impact was on display a week after his announcement, as other 2024 Republican hopefuls took the stage in Las Vegas for the annual RJC summit. Some attacked the former President, while others, once allies of Trump, indicated they were ready to take him on in 2024.

    Just days before the event, Trump’s team announced plans for him to address the group remotely. Two people familiar with the matter said his virtual address was organized by aides at the last minute after he grew agitated upon realizing the event was a cattle call for Republican presidential prospects and he was not on its original list of speakers. The Trump campaign spokesman disputed this account, saying Trump’s remote remarks were planned “many weeks prior to the event.”

    Other sources who for months harbored concerns that Trump wasn’t as enthusiastic about running as he was letting on in public appearances now say his inactivity has increased their worry. Apart from a planned fundraising appearance for a classical education group in Naples last weekend, the former president has yet to announce any events before the end of the year. A person familiar with the matter said Trump’s team is toying with a pre-Christmas event of some kind, though his campaign has not yet finalized any travel. In a statement last week panning a move by Democratic officials to put South Carolina first on the party’s primary calendar, Trump appeared to tease a visit to Iowa, currently the first state to cast votes in both parties’ presidential nominating contests, “in the very near future.”

    “I can’t wait to be back in Iowa,” he said.

    Inside Trump’s campaign, sources said his current approach is entirely intentional, dismissing concerns that he has forfeited the spotlight at a critical time but acknowledging that Trump is currently working with a bare-bones staff.

    The campaign “is doing exactly what everyone always accuses [them] of not doing – taking a breather, planning and forming a strategy for the next two years,” said one source familiar with Trump’s operation said.

    Senior staff are holed up working on a plan,” this person added, noting that Trump’s campaign travel is expected to begin early in the new year, right as possible rivals who have taken the holidays to mull their own political futures may start launching their own campaigns or exploratory committees.

    And while some Trump allies have been surprised by his lack of a hiring spree right out of the gate, his campaign has been content to maintain a lean operation while he’s the only candidate in the field. The former president is not expected to tap a formal campaign manager, instead elevating three trusted advisers – Susie Wiles, Brian Jack and Chris LaCivita – to senior roles, but allies said he will likely need to build out his on-the-ground staff in early voting states in the months to come, as well as a robust communications operation if he finds himself in a competitive primary.

    While those hires don’t need to happen immediately, people close to Trump said his early entry into the 2024 race does raise questions about how he will sustain campaign-related costs over a longer period than other candidates who declare later, including chief potential rival Ron DeSantis. CNN has previously reported that the Florida governor, should he decide to take on Trump, would announce next May or June, after the conclusion of his state’s legislative session and just months before the Republican party could host its first primary debate, according to a party official involved in debate planning.

    “The question a lot of us have is can Trump sustain a campaign for two years. That’s the real difficulty here. The pacing we’re seeing right now is designed to do that,” said a person close to Trump.

    In addition to planning rallies and events and building momentum around the former President, the campaign staff is also looking at how to best insulate Trump after many were caught off guard learning of Trump’s dinner with Fuentes and West. The event, and the days of fallout and negative coverage, has expedited some of the campaign’s long-term plans, including ensuring a senior campaign staffer is always with the former president, a source familiar with the campaign said.

    Trump’s White House staff worked with resort staff during his presidency in a similar fashion to protect Trump from potentially “unsavory” guests of members, the source said. Those close to Trump blamed “low level staffers” for allowing Fuentes to slip into the resort without any flags being raised.

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  • Sky-high Black turnout fueled Warnock’s previous win. Will Georgia do it again? | CNN Politics

    Sky-high Black turnout fueled Warnock’s previous win. Will Georgia do it again? | CNN Politics


    Atlanta
    CNN
     — 

    Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young rode his scooter alongside Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, Martin Luther King III and a fervent crowd of marchers on a recent Sunday through a southwest Atlanta neighborhood. The group stopped at an early polling location to vote, forming a line with some waiting as long as one hour to cast their ballots.

    At the age of 90, Young says he is selective about public appearances but felt the “Souls to the Polls” event was one where he could motivate Black voters in Tuesday’s hotly contested US Senate runoff between Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker – a historic matchup between two Black men.

    Community leaders and political observers say the Black vote has consistently played a pivotal role in high-stakes races for Democrats, including in 2021, when Warnock defeated then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a runoff. Black voters likely to cast a ballot are near unanimous in their support for the Democrat (96% Warnock to 3% Walker), according to a CNN poll released last week that showed Warnock with a narrow lead.

    A second runoff victory for Warnock could once again hinge on Black voter turnout in a consequential race. If Warnock wins, it would give Democrats a clean Senate majority – one that doesn’t rely on Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote and allows Majority Leader Chuck Schumer more control of key committees and some slack in potentially divisive judicial and administrative confirmation fights.

    Voting, Young said, is the “path to prosperity” for the Black community. He noted that Atlanta’s mass transit system and economic growth have been made possible by voters.

    “Where we have voted we have prospered,” Young said.

    The rally led by Young, King and Warnock seems to have set the tone for many Black voters in Georgia. Early voting surged across the state last week with long lines reported across the greater Atlanta area. As of Sunday, more than 1.85 million votes had already been cast, with Black voters accounting for nearly 32% of the turnout, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. The early voting period, which was significantly condensed from 2021, ended on Friday.

    Billy Honor, director of organizing for the New Georgia Project Action Fund, said the Black turnout so far looks promising for Democrats.

    “When we get Black voter turnout in any election statewide that’s between 31 and 33%, that’s usually good for Democrats,” Honor said. “If it’s between 27 and 30%, that’s usually good for Republicans.”

    Honor added: “This has an impact on elections because we know that if you’re a Democratic candidate, the coalition you have to put together is a certain amount of college-educated White folks, a certain amount of women overall, as many young people as you can get to turn out – and Black voters. That’s the coalition. (Former president) Barack Obama was able to smash that coalition in 2008 in ways we hadn’t seen.”

    Young said he believes that Black voters are more likely to show up for runoff elections, which historically have lower turnout than general elections, when the candidate is likeable and relatable.

    Warnock is a beloved figure in Atlanta’s Black community who pastored the church once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He grew up in public housing and relied on student loans to get through college.

    Young said Warnock’s story is inspiring.

    “He is an exciting personality, he’s a great preacher,” Young said. “He speaks from his heart and he speaks about how he and his family have come up in the deep South and developed a wonderful life.”

    Young said some Black voters may also be voting against Walker, who has made a series of public gaffes, has no political experience and has a history of accusations of violent and threatening behavior.

    Last week’s CNN poll showed that Walker faces widespread questions about his honesty and suffers from a negative favorability rating, while nearly half of those who back him say their vote is more about opposition to Warnock than support for Walker.

    Views of Warnock tilt narrowly positive, with 50% of likely voters holding a favorable opinion, 45% unfavorable, while far more likely Georgia voters have a negative view of Walker (52%) than a positive one (39%).

    Still, Walker is famous as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star from the University of Georgia. And among the majority of likely voters in the CNN poll who said issues are a more important factor to their vote than character or integrity, 64% favor Walker.

    He campaigned on Sunday with, among others, GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, one of just three Black senators currently serving in the chamber. Scott tried to tie Warnock to President Joe Biden – who, like former President Donald Trump, has steered clear of the Peach State – and reminded voters in Loganville of the GOP’s losses in the 2021 runoffs.

    At the event, which began with prayers in Creole, Spanish and Swahili from speakers with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Walker encouraged getting out to vote more than he typically does.

    “If you don’t have a friend, make a friend and get them out to vote,” Walker said.

    Back at the “Souls to Polls” march, some Black voters said they were excited to show up and cast their early votes in the runoff race.

    Travie Leslie said she feels it is her “civic duty” to vote after all the work civil rights leaders in Atlanta did to ensure Black people had the right to vote. Leslie she does not mind standing in line or voting in multiple elections to ensure that a quality candidate gets in office.

    “I will come 12 times if I must and I encourage other people to do the same thing,” Leslie said Thursday while at the Metropolitan Library polling location in Atlanta. “Just stay dedicated to this because it truly is the best time to be a part of the decision making particularly for Georgia.”

    Martin Luther King III credited grassroots organizations for registering more Black and brown voters since 2020, when Biden carried the state, and mobilizing Georgians to participate in elections.

    Their work has led to the long lines of voters in midterm and runoff races, King said.

    King said he believes Warnock also appeals to Black voters in a way that Walker does not.

    “Rev. Warnock distinguishes himself quite well,” King said. “He stayed above the fray and defined what he has done.”

    The Black vote, he said, is likely to make a difference in which candidate wins the runoff.

    “Black voters, if we come out in massive numbers, then I believe that on December 6 we (Democrats) are going to have a massive victory,” King said.

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  • Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution is a fantasy, but it’s still dangerous | CNN Politics

    Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution is a fantasy, but it’s still dangerous | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s call for the termination of the Constitution is his most extreme anti-democratic statement yet and seems oblivious to the sentiments of voters who rejected election deniers in the midterm elections.

    It may also reflect desperation on the part of the former president to whip up controversy and fury among his core supporters in order to inject some energy into a so-far lackluster 2024 White House bid.

    Trump’s comments on his Truth Social network – which should be easy for anyone to condemn – are exposing the familiar moral timidity of top Republicans who won’t disown the former president. But his latest tirade also plays into the arguments of some Republicans now saying that it’s time to move on from Trump’s fixation with the 2020 election.

    And while it is far too early to write off his chances in the 2024 GOP nominating contest, Trump’s behavior since announcing his third presidential bid also suggests his never-ending quest to shock and to fire up his base now means going so far right he ends up on the extremist fringe and almost in self-parody. In the short time he’s been a candidate, he’s expressed support for rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and dined with a White nationalist Holocaust denier.

    Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s Secretary of State Office, chuckled at the incredulity of Trump’s claim about the Constitution when it was described by CNN’s Pam Brown on Saturday.

    “It’s ridiculous, it’s insane, to suspend the Constitution. Come on man, seriously?” said Sterling, a Republican who helped oversee Georgia’s election in 2020, when President Joe Biden carried the state. “I think more and more Republicans, Americans are saying, ‘Ok I am good, I am done with this now, I’m going to move on to the next thing.’”

    The most immediate question raised by Trump’s latest controversy is what it says about a presidential campaign that has been swallowed up by one far-right authoritarian sideshow after another.

    Far from barnstorming the nation, making a case on the economy, health care and immigration or outlining a program for the future, Trump has given comfort to zealots and insurrectionists.

    He hosted Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago last month, at a time when the rapper now known as Ye is in the middle of a vile streak of antisemitism and praising Adolf Hitler. The far-right Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was at also at that dinner. Trump claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was but the former president still hasn’t criticized his ideology. Last week, Trump, in a fundraising video, praised the mob that invaded the Capitol in the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, again promoting violence as an acceptable response to political grievances.

    His social media assault on the Constitution appears to be proving the point of the House select committee probing January 6, which has portrayed him as a clear and present danger to American democracy and met on Friday to consider criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

    Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the committee, tweeted on Sunday: “No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.” Trump’s latest wild social media post could even deepen his legal exposure as the Justice Department seeks evidence of his mindset as it investigates his conduct before the attack on the Capitol.

    Trump’s doubling down on authoritarianism also follows a moment when much of the country, at least in crucial swing states, rejected his 2020 election denialism and anti-democratic chaos candidates he picked for the midterms – with a final test on Tuesday in Georgia’s Senate runoff. It appears to make it even more unlikely that the ex-president, even if he wins the Republican nomination, will be the kind of candidate who could win among the broader national electorate. After all, his message failed in two consecutive elections in 2020 and 2022. And even in the wilder reaches of the GOP, which Trump has dominated since 2015, a call to simply trash the Constitution might seem a stretch – and reflect the former president’s increasing distance from reality.

    One could argue that the most prudent response to Trump’s latest radical rhetoric might be to ignore it and his bid for publicity.

    But even if his idea of crushing the Constitution looks far-fetched, his behavior needs to be taken seriously because of its possible future consequences.

    That’s because Trump remains an extraordinarily influential force in the Republican Party. His acolytes hold outsized power in the new House majority set to take over in January, which they plan to use as a political weapon to promote his restoration in the White House. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is appeasing this group in an increasingly troubled campaign for speaker. The California Republican also last week shielded Trump over criticism of the Fuentes dinner, saying that while such a person had no place in the party, Trump had condemned him four times – a false claim.

    Furthermore, in an electoral sense, the theory that Republican voters may be willing to move on from Trump – and to find a candidate who may reflect “America First” populism but not dine with antisemites – has not yet been tested. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen are still broadly accepted among GOP voters – only 24% of whom believe that Biden legitimately won in 2020, according to midterm election exit polls.

    And a GOP primary that includes multiple candidates competing with Trump for the presidential nomination could yet again splinter the vote against the former president and allow him to emerge at the top of a mostly winner-take-all delegate race, a vote that would put a prospective authoritarian who has already tried to dismantle the US system of democracy one step from a return to power.

    Ignoring or downplaying public evidence of extremism and incitement only allows it to become normalized. There is already proof that the ex-president’s rhetoric can cause violence – after he told his supporters to “fight like hell” to save their country on January 6. And the rhetoric of people like West and Fuentes, with whom Trump has associated, risks normalizing odious forces in society that will grow if they are not challenged. Fuentes, after all, has appeared with Republican lawmakers like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – an increasingly influential voice in the House GOP conference.

    Years of norm crushing and acceptance of extremists by the twice-impeached former president never convinced the party to purge him or his views. Were it not for principled, conservative Republicans like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Trump’s election-stealing effort might have worked in 2020.

    As they work through an intense lame-duck session of Congress, Republican lawmakers are, for the umpteenth time, going to be asked this week about the tyrannical attitudes of the front-runner for their party’s presidential nod.

    One newly elected Republican, Michael Lawler – who picked up a Democratic-held House seat critical to the slim GOP majority – stood up for the Constitution on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

    “The Constitution is set for a reason, to protect the rights of every American. And so I certainly don’t endorse that language or that sentiment,” Lawler told Jake Tapper. “I think the former president would be well-advised to focus on the future, if he is going to run for president again.”

    Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said he “vehemently” disagreed with Trump’s statement and said his dinner with West and Fuentes was “atrocious” and that voters would take both incidents into consideration.

    But a fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. David Joyce, demonstrated the characteristic reluctance of members of his party to confront an ex-president who remains hugely popular among its grassroots. Regarding the threat to the Constitution, Joyce said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “You know he says a lot of things but that doesn’t mean that it’s ever going to happen,” adding that it was important to separate “fact from fantasy.”

    Joyce didn’t directly condemn Trump’s rhetoric and said he would support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2024. The fact that Republicans are open to a potential president – who would be called upon to swear to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution but who has already called for its termination – speaks volumes about how much the GOP is still in Trump’s shadow.

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

    CNN has reached out to the supervisors for comment.

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

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

    Disputes over the results have erupted elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    CNN has reached out to Judd for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Donald Trump is no Grover Cleveland | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump is no Grover Cleveland | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



    CNN
     — 

    It’s American carnage, round three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Georgia candidate makes history as first known Muslim and Palestinian woman elected to state House | CNN Politics

    Georgia candidate makes history as first known Muslim and Palestinian woman elected to state House | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Ruwa Romman remembers the sadness she felt as an 8-year-old girl sitting in the back of a school bus watching classmates point to her house and erupt in vicious laughter.

    “There’s the bomb lab,” they jeered in yet another attempt to brand her family as terrorists.

    On Tuesday, the same girl – now a 29-year-old community organizer – made history as the first known Muslim woman elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, and the first Palestinian American elected to any office in the state.

    After 10 months of relentless campaigning, the Democrat said she is eager to begin representing the people of District 97, which includes Berkeley Lake, and parts of Duluth, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners in Gwinnett County.

    As an immigrant, the granddaughter of Palestinian refugees, and a Muslim woman who wears the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, the road to political office hasn’t been easy, especially in the very Christian and conservative South.

    “I could write chapters about what I have gone through,” Romman told CNN, listing the many ways she’s faced bigotry or discrimination.

    “All the times I am ‘randomly’ selected by TSA, teachers putting me in a position where I had to defend Islam and Muslims to classrooms being taught the wrong things about me and my identity… it colored my entire life.”

    But those hardships only fueled her passion for civic engagement, especially among marginalized communities, Romman said.

    “Who I am has really taught me to look for the most marginalized because they are the ones who don’t have resources or time to spend in the halls of political institutions to ask for the help they need,” she said.

    Romman began in 2015 working with the Georgia Muslim Voter Project to increase voter turnout among local Muslim Americans. She also helped establish the state chapter for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.

    Soon after, Romman began working with the wider community. Her website boasts: “Ruwa has volunteered in every election cycle since 2014 to help flip Georgia blue.”

    She said her main focus is “putting public service back into politics,” which she intends to do by helping expand access to health care, bridging the economic opportunity gap, protecting the right to vote, and making sure people have access to lifesaving care like abortion.

    “I think a lot of people overlook state legislators because they think they’re local and don’t have a lot of impact, not realizing that state legislatures have the most direct impact on them,” Romman said. “Every law that made us mad or happy started in the state legislature somewhere.”

    Romman said she always wanted to influence the political process, but never thought she’d be a politician.

    The decision to run for office came after attending a Georgia Muslim Voter Project training session for women from historically marginalized communities, where a journalist covering the event asked if she wanted to run for office.

    “I told her no, I don’t think so, and she ended up writing a beautiful piece about Muslim women in Georgia, but she started it with ‘Ruwa Romman is contemplating a run for office,’ and I wasn’t,” Romman recounted. “But when it came out, the community saw it and the response was so overwhelmingly positive and everyone kept telling me to do it.”

    Two weeks later, Romman and a group of volunteers launched a campaign.

    She was surrounded by family, friends and community members who were rooting for her success. Together, they knocked on 15,000 doors, sent 75,000 texts, and made 8,000 phone calls.

    Her Republican opponent John Chan didn’t fight fair, she said.

    “My opponent had used anti-Muslim rhetoric against me, saying I had ties to terrorism, at one point flat-out supporting an ad that called me a terrorist plant,” she said.

    Flyers supporting Chan’s candidacy insinuated she is associated with terrorist organizations.

    Chan did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    It was the same type of bullying Romman faced as a schoolgirl, she said. Only this time, she wasn’t alone. Thousands of people had her back.

    “What was incredible is that people in my district sent his messaging to me and said ‘This is unacceptable. How can we help? How can we get involved? How can we support you?’ and that was such an incredible moment for me,” she said.

    Representative elect Ruwa Romman at the Georgia State Capitol for her new member orientation.

    It was also ironic, Romman added, because her passion for her community and social justice is rooted in her faith: “Justice is a central tenant of Islam,” she pointed out. “It inspires me to be good to others, care for my neighbors, and protect the marginalized.”

    It’s also rooted in her family’s experience as Palestinian refugees, who she said were banished from their homeland by Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

    “My Palestinian identify has instilled in me a focus on justice and care for others,” Romman said. “Everyone deserves to live with dignity. I hope that Palestinians everywhere see this as proof that consistently showing up and working hard can be history making.

    “I may not have much power on foreign policy, but I sincerely hope that I can at least remind people that Palestinians are not the nuisance, or the terrorists, or any other terrible aspersion that society has put on us,” she added. “We are real people with real dreams.”

    Romman joins three other Muslim Americans elected to state and local office in Georgia this election cycle, according to the Georgia Muslim Voter Project, but her win is particularly groundbreaking.

    “We’ve had Muslim representation at the state level in Georgia, but these wins take representation for Georgia Muslims further than ever before because now we have more gender and ethnic representation for Muslims,” the group’s executive director Shafina Khabani told CNN. “Not only will we have a representation that looks like us and aligns with our values, but we will have an opportunity to advocate and influence policies that impact our communities directly.”

    “Having diversity in political representation means better laws, more accepting leadership, and welcoming policies for all of Georgia,” she said.

    More than anything, Romman hopes her election points to a future free of hate and bigotry.

    “I think this proves that people have learned that Muslims are part of this community and that tide of Islamophobia is hopefully starting to recede,” Romman added.

    Looking back at her childhood, Romman wishes she could tell her younger self things would get better with time, and that one day she would not only make Georgia history, but hopefully a real difference in the world.

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  • Analysis: Democrats would have gotten crushed this election without young voters | CNN Politics

    Analysis: Democrats would have gotten crushed this election without young voters | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Democrats have done a lot better in the midterm elections than a lot of pundits and analysts had anticipated. They’re favored to hold on to the Senate and look to have kept their losses in the House to a minimum.

    In doing so, Democrats have defied historical precedent, which suggests the president’s party loses significant ground in midterm elections.

    President Joe Biden credited, in part, “historic” turnout by younger Americans for the strong Democratic performance.

    A look at the data suggests there probably wasn’t a surge of youth participation relative to the rest of the electorate. But it does suggest that Democrats defied election expectations this year because of a historically large age gap that saw young voters overwhelmingly back Democratic candidates.

    The lack of a youth surge becomes quickly apparent when you look at the exit polls. Voters under the age of 30 made up 12% of all voters. In every midterm in the last 20 years, this group has made up between 11% and 13% of the electorate.

    (Other data, too, shows that younger voters did not make up a significantly larger portion of the electorate compared with prior midterms.)

    Now, overall turnout is likely to be higher this year compared with most past midterms. It could therefore be argued that young voters did turn out in larger numbers than they have historically, but that is true of every age group.

    Interactive: Anatomy of a close election: How Americans voted in 2022 vs. 2018

    While they may not have made up a larger share of the electorate than normal, young voters still made their presence felt.

    Democrats would have gotten crushed without young voter support. Democratic House candidates won voters under the age of 45 by 13 points, while losing voters age 45 and older by 10 points.

    Breaking it down further, House Democratic candidates won voters under 30 by 28 points – that’s an increase from their 26-point edge with this group two years ago.

    This is significantly different from other age groups, the exit polls show. Democrats lost every age slice of the electorate 45 years and older by at least 7 points, including a 12-point loss among senior citizens (age 65 and older).

    What is perhaps especially interesting is that voters under 30 seemed to vote significantly more Democratic than those aged 30 to 39. Voters under 30 are partially Generation Z (those born after 1996) and partially the youngest millennials. Voters between 30 and 39 are the oldest millennials.

    These older millennials were the strongest supporters of Barack Obama during his 2008 primary campaign and eventual ascendency to the presidency. This year, they backed Democratic House candidates by only 11 points.

    Notably, today’s Democratic Party relies on the youngest of voters in a way that it historically hadn’t – at least not until the last few elections.

    Consider the first midterm (2006) when millennials made up a significant share of voters under 30. Democrats won 60% of their vote, which isn’t all that different from the 63% of voters under 30 they won this year.

    Remember, though, that Democrats easily won the House popular vote in 2006, while they’ll probably lose it by a couple of points this year. In fact, Democrats won every age group (under 30, 30-44, 45-65 and 65+) in the 2006 midterms. The difference in support for Democratic House candidates in 2006 between voters under 30 (60%) and those 65 and older (49%) was 11 points.

    This year that gap was 20 points (63% versus 43%).

    Going further back to 1990 (the last midterm when none of today’s voters under 30 were alive), there was basically no age gap. A similar percentage of voters under 30 and those 65 and older cast ballots for Democratic House candidates (52% and 53% respectively).

    When you look at these changes, you can see why Biden was so eager to praise young voters. He’s absolutely right that they’re a vital part of the Democratic coalition. Tuesday’s result, though, wasn’t because they showed up in larger numbers. It’s because those who did show up were so Democratic.

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  • States are counting votes with key races still in play. Here’s what to know | CNN Politics

    States are counting votes with key races still in play. Here’s what to know | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    New batches of votes were reported late Thursday evening in Arizona and Nevada – states with key races that will determine control of the Senate – but it’s still not clear when enough of the outstanding hundreds of thousands of ballots will be counted to call the Senate and gubernatorial contests in those states.

    Control of the House is also still in the balance as ballots are counted in states such as California. Republicans appear to be inching toward a majority, though they have not yet secured enough wins to take control as more than two dozen congressional races remain uncalled. The closer-than-expected contest for the House has added serious complications to GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next speaker.

    Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, is expected to begin reporting votes from the critical batch of roughly 290,000 early ballots turned in on Election Day – and the partisan composition of those votes could determine who wins the state’s Senate and governor’s races.

    More votes are expected to be reported on Friday as counting continues. Here’s what to know about where things stand:

    The biggest reason the vote counting is taking so long is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.

    When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. Of course, the lag was anticipated – it took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner in the presidential race, following a massive increase in mail-in voting amid the pandemic.

    In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have yet to call the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, or the governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake.

    The CNN Decision Desk estimated there are roughly 540,000 ballots still to be counted, as of late Thursday evening. The majority of those, about 350,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

    The biggest chunk of uncounted ballots, about 290,000, are votes that were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day. A top official told CNN late Thursday that Maricopa County expects to start releasing the first results from those outstanding ballots Friday evening.

    “We should start to see those tomorrow, I believe – we’ll start seeing those come in,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

    Those ballots could be key in determining who will win the statewide races for governor and Senate. The mail-in ballots reported so far in Arizona lean heavily Democratic while Election Day ballots strongly favor Republicans – but it’s still too early to know which way the mail-in ballots turned in on Election Day will fall.

    In addition, Maricopa County has about 17,000 ballots that were not read by the tabulator on Election Day because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.

    Maricopa County updated an additional tranche of just over 78,000 ballots on Thursday night.

    In Pima County, Arizona’s second-most populous and home to Tucson, a new batch of 20,000 ballots was reported Thursday evening. Elections Director Constance Hargrove told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and John King that the county has been able to report batches of approximately 20,000 ballots per day, and anticipated another ballot drop of 20,000 on Friday.

    “We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.

    The delay in calling the races in Arizona have prompted criticisms and conspiracies – some of which are reminiscent of the wild and baseless allegations that were made in the state after the 2020 election, such as false claims about felt-tipped Sharpies.

    Elections officials in Maricopa County debunked false claims circulating on right-wing social media suggesting that a woman wearing glasses in the county’s counting facility livestream was Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee and current secretary of state.

    “Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” the official Twitter account of Maricopa County tweeted in response Thursday evening. “We can confirm this was a party Observer. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers who happen to wear glasses.”

    Lake, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who has embraced former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, said on Charlie Kirk’s right-wing talk show Thursday, “I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.” There is no evidence that the election officials were deliberately delaying the reporting of results.

    At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”

    Gates explained why it takes longer for Arizona to count ballots than states such as Florida, which reported most of its results on election night. He pointed out that Florida does not allow for mail-in ballots to be dropped off on Election Day, while Arizona does. This slows down the process because the hundreds of thousands of ballots need to be processed and go through signature verification before they can be counted.

    Florida also closes early voting the Sunday before Election Day, while ballots can be dropped off through Election Day in Arizona.

    “We have so many close races that everyone is still paying attention to Maricopa County. Those other states like Florida, those races were blowouts. Nobody is paying attention anymore,” Gates said.

    In Nevada, the CNN Decision Desk estimated there were about 95,000 votes outstanding as of Thursday evening.

    In Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, there are more than 50,000 ballots still to be counted, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Thursday.

    Nevada state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots to be counted. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.

    Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes for Washoe County, said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots on Thursday – about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received – because they were postmarked late.

    Washoe County, which includes Reno, still has about 22,000 ballots left to count, Rodriguez said, and the county expects to get through most of them on Friday.

    Clark County added around 12,000 votes on Thursday night. The county says it will provide an update Friday on its remaining ballots to count.

    Key races in the Silver State, including the Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt and the governor’s race between Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Republican Joe Lombardo, have not been called as of Friday morning.

    Control of the Senate – which will come down to Nevada, Arizona and possibly the December runoff in Georgia – was expected to be a toss-up going into Election Day. Republicans, however, anticipated winning the House, though the closer-than-expected contest for control of the chamber has made McCarthy’s quest for the speakership more difficult, even if Republicans do end up winning the majority.

    Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.

    McCarthy and his team are confident he will get the votes to be speaker. But conservative hard-liners are emboldened by the likelihood of a narrow House GOP majority and are threatening to force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, which he has long resisted.

    The ultimate makeup of the House is important for McCarthy because of the way the chamber elects a speaker: It requires a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, not just a majority of the party in control. If Republicans take power with a double-digit majority, McCarthy could afford to lose a few defectors. But a slim majority gives single members – and the Freedom Caucus – more power to make demands and threaten to withhold support.

    Many key House races have yet to be called, and some remain razor-thin and could head into recounts. One such race is in Colorado, where GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was ahead by just 1,122 votes as of 9 a.m. ET Friday. Votes are still being counted in the district.

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  • Voters in four states approve effort to wipe slavery and indentured servitude off the books | CNN Politics

    Voters in four states approve effort to wipe slavery and indentured servitude off the books | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Voters in five states on Tuesday were asked whether to update their states’ constitutions to remove slavery and indentured servitude as potential punishments.

    Although the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited slavery in 1865, it allowed an exception “for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” and the proposed amendments asked voters to either explicitly rule out slavery and indentured servitude as potential punishments or remove the terms from state law altogether.

    Voters in four states agreed to strike the punishment from the books, CNN projects, while the effort fell short in one.

    Voters in Alabama approved a ballot measure that will overhaul the state’s constitution to rid it of racist language and make the constitution more accessible to Alabama’s citizens, CNN projects. One of the revisions in the overhaul will remove an exception clause as it applies to slavery and indentured servitude, changing the text of the constitution from:

    That no form of slavery shall exist in this state; and there shall not be any involuntary servitude, otherwise than for the punishment of crime, of which the party shall have been duly convicted.

    To:

    That no form of slavery shall exist in this state; and there shall not be any involuntary servitude.

    Voters in Oregon approved a ballot measure to remove “all language creating an exception” and make “the prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude unequivocal.”

    As part of the initiative, the Oregon Constitution was amended to allow “programs to be ordered as part of sentencing,” such as ones for education, counseling, treatment and community service.

    Tennessee voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution to say slavery and indentured servitude shall be “forever prohibited,” CNN projects.

    In Vermont, a measure to amend the constitution passed, CNN projects.

    Although Vermont was the first state to outlaw slavery, the proposal sought to remove text that read “no person born in this country, or brought from oversea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person as a servant, slave or apprentice, after arriving to the age of twenty-one years, unless bound by the person’s own consent, after arriving to such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.”

    Louisiana voters rejected an amendment that would have changed the state’s constitution by explicitly prohibiting the punishments, CNN projects.

    Louisiana voters had been asked to mark yes or no to the question, “Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude except as it applies to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice?”

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  • Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN

    Opinion: A really bad night for some high-profile Trump-backed candidates | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    CNN Opinion contributors share their thoughts on the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a clear message to every Republican voter Tuesday night: My way is the path to a national majority, and former President Donald Trump’s way is the path to future disappointments and continued suffering.

    Four years ago, DeSantis won his first gubernatorial race by less than a percentage point. His nearly 20-point win against Democratic candidate Charlie Crist on Tuesday sent the message that DeSantis, not Trump, can win over the independent voters who decide elections.

    DeSantis’ decisive victory offers a future where the Republican Party might actually win the popular vote in a presidential contest – something that hasn’t been done since George W. Bush in 2004.

    Meanwhile, many of the candidates Trump endorsed in 2022 struggled, and it was clear from CNN exit polls that the former President – with his 37% favorability rating – would be a serious underdog in the 2024 general election should he win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time.

    My friend Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights tweeted a key observation: DeSantis commanded huge support among Latinos in 2022 compared to Trump in 2020.

    In 2020, Biden won the heavily Latino Miami-Dade County by seven points. DeSantis flipped the county on Tuesday and ran away with an 11-point win.

    In 2020, Biden won Osceola County by nearly 14 points. This time, DeSantis secured the county by nearly seven points, marking a whopping 21-point swing.

    DeSantis combined his strength among Latinos with his support among working class Whites, suburban white-collar voters and rural Floridians. That’s a coalition that could win nationally, unlike Trump’s limited appeal among several traditional Republican voting segments.

    Last year, it was Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of Virginia who scored an earthquake in a Biden state by keeping Trump at arm’s length and focusing on the issues. Tonight, it was DeSantis who ran as his own man (Trump rallied for Marco Rubio but not DeSantis at the end of the campaign) and showed what you can do when you combine the political instincts required to be a successful Republican these days with actual governing competence.

    DeSantis made a convincing case that he, rather than Trump, gives Republicans the best chance to defeat Biden (or some other Democrat) in 2024. With Trump plotting a reelection campaign announcement soon, DeSantis has a lot to think about and a solid springboard from which to launch a challenge to the former President.

    Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign adviser, is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky. Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

    Roxanne Jones

    Let it go. If election night confirmed anything for me it is this: We can all – voters, doomscrollers, pundits and election deniers included – stop believing every election revolves around former President Donald Trump. Instead, when asked in exit polls across the country, younger people, women and other voters in key demographics said their top concerns were inflation, abortion rights, crime and other quality of life issues.

    What a relief. It finally feels like a majority of voters want to re-center American politics away from the toxic, conspiracy theory-driven rhetoric we’ve experienced over the past several years.

    Yes, Republicans are still projected to take control of the House of Representatives, with a narrow (and narrowing) majority – but will that make much difference? Despite the advantage Democrats had in the chamber the past two years, President Joe Biden has still had to battle and compromise to get parts of his agenda passed. How the balance of power will settle in the Senate is unclear, with a few races in key states still undecided as of this afternoon. It will likely hinge, again, on Georgia, and a forthcoming runoff election between the incumbent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, and his GOP challenger, former football star Herschel Walker.

    No matter what party you claim, there were positive signs coming out of the midterms. My hometown, Philadelphia, and its surrounding suburbs, came up big in another election – rejecting the Trump-backed New Jersey transplant, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and helping to send Democratic candidate John Fetterman to the US Senate. Pennsylvania voters also rejected an election denier, Doug Mastriano, in the race for state governor, and made history by electing Democrat Summer Lee as the state’s first Black woman to serve in Congress.

    Maryland voters, meanwhile, elected Democrat Wes Moore as their state’s first Black governor. And in New England, Maura Healey became Massachusetts’ first female governor. She’s also the first out lesbian to win a state governorship anywhere in the US.

    Democracy, freedom and equality also won out on ballot issues.

    In unfinished business, voters tackled slavery, permanently abolishing “involuntary servitude” in four states – Vermont, Oregon, Alabama and Tennessee. (Louisiana held on to the slavery clause under its constitution, however.)

    Despite efforts to limit voting rights across the nation, voters in Alabama approved a measure requiring that any change to state election law goes into effect at least six months before a general election. And, in Kentucky, voters narrowly beat back an amendment that would have removed constitutional protections for abortion rights – one of several instances in which voters refused to accept restrictive reproductive rights measures.

    Still, the highlight of my midterms night was watching 25-year-old Maxwell Frost win a US congressional race in Florida – holding a Democratic seat in a state whose 2022 results skewed red, no less. More and more, we are seeing young people energized, voting and stepping up with fresh ideas to lead this democracy. I’m here for it.

    Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD.

    Michael D'Antonio

    Voters made Tuesday a bad night for former President Donald Trump. Despite his efforts, many of his favorites not only lost but denied the GOP the usual out-party wave of wins that come in midterm elections. This leaves a diminished Trump with the challenge of deciding what to do next.

    In the short term, the man who so often returns to his well-worn playbook resumed his years-long effort to ruin Americans’ confidence in any election his team loses. “Protest, protest, protest,” he told his followers, even before all the polls closed. In a sign of his declining power, no mass protests ensued.

    Nevertheless, false claims of election fraud will likely be a major theme if he follows through on his loudly voiced hints that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024.

    To run or not to run is now the main question. It’s not an easy choice. Trump could end up like other one-term presidents he has mocked, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who retreated from politics and devoted themselves to new interests. However, he has other options. He could revive his television career – Fox News? – or return to his businesses. Or, he could develop a new role as leader of an organization that can exploit his prodigious fundraising ability, and give him a platform for grabbing attention, while leaving him plenty of time for golf.

    Running could forestall the various legal problems he faces, but he has lawyers who might accomplish the same goal. Fox News is unlikely to pay enough, and his businesses are now being watched by a court-appointed overseer. This leaves him with a combination of easy work – fundraising and pontificating – combined with his favorite pastimes: fame, money and fun. What’s not to like?

    Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success” and co-author, with Peter Eisner, of the book “High Crimes: The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.”

    Jill Filipovic

    Democrat Kathy Hochul won the New York State gubernatorial race, and thank goodness. Her opponent, Lee Zeldin, is not your typical moderate Republican who usually stands a chance in a blue state. Instead, he’s an abortion opponent who wanted voters to simply trust he wouldn’t mess with New York’s abortion laws.

    Zeldin was endorsed by the National Rifle Association when he was in Congress. He is a Trump acolyte who voted against certifying the 2020 election in Congress, after texting with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and reportedly planning to contest the outcome of the 2020 election before the results were even in.

    New Yorkers sent a definitive message: Our values matter, even in moments of profound uncertainty.

    Plus, Hochul made history as the first woman elected to the governor’s office in New York.

    This race was, in its final days, predicted to be closer than it actually was. Part of that was simply the usual electoral math: The minority party typically has an advantage in the midterms, and Republicans are a minority in Washington, DC, with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress. And polling in New York state didn’t look as good for Hochul as it should have in a solidly blue state: Voters who talked to pollsters emphasized crime fears and the economy; abortion rights were galvanizing, but didn’t seem as definitive in an election for a governor vastly unlikely to have an abortion criminalization bill delivered to her desk.

    The polls were imperfect. It turns out that New Yorkers are, in fact, New Yorkers: Not cowed by overblown claims of crime (while I think crime is indeed a problem Democrats should address, New York City remains one of the safest places in the country); determined to defend the racial, ethnic and sexual diversity that makes our state great; and committed to standing up against the tyranny of an anti-democratic party that would force women into pregnancy and childbirth.

    However, Democrats shouldn’t take this win for granted. The issues voters raised – inflation, crime – are real concerns. And the reasons many voters turned out – abortion rights, democratic norms – remain under threat.

    Hochul’s job now is to address voter concerns, while standing up for New York values: Openness, decency, freedom for all. Because that’s what New Yorkers did today: The majority of us didn’t cast our ballots from a place of fear and reaction, but from the last dregs of hope and optimism. We voted for what we want. And we now want our governor to deliver.

    Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter.

    Douglas Heye

    North Carolina’s Senate race received less attention than contests in some other states – possibly a result of the campaign having lesser-known candidates than states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

    In the waning weeks of the race, multiple polls had the candidates – Democratic former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley and Republican US House Rep. Ted Budd – separated by a percentage point or less.

    Perhaps more than in any other Senate campaign, the issue of crime loomed large in North Carolina, with Budd claiming in his speeches that it had become much more dangerous to walk the streets in the state. That talking point, along with his focus on inflation, appeared to help propel him to victory in Tuesday’s vote.

    Beasley, by contrast, focused much of her attention on abortion, making it a central plank of her campaign that she would stand up not just for women’s reproductive rights, but workplace protections and equal pay.

    The two candidates were vying for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr. Despite being seen as a red state – albeit that is less solidly Republican than neighboring southern states – North Carolina has elected Democrats as five of the last six governors and two of the last six senators.

    Former President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 but lost it in 2012 by one of the closest margins in the nation. And while Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020, he never received 50% of the vote.

    Douglas Heye is the ex-deputy chief of staff to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a GOP strategist and a CNN political commentator. Follow him on Twitter @dougheye.

    Sophia A. Nelson

    Many of us suspected that Democratic Florida Congresswoman and former House impeachment manager Val Demings would have an uphill battle unseating incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio, and weren’t entirely surprised when she lost the race. With 98% of the vote counted, Rubio won easily, garnering 57.8% of the vote to Demings’ 41.1%.

    As it turns out, Tuesday was a tough night all around for Black women running statewide. Beyond Demings’ loss, Judge Cheri Beasley narrowly lost her Senate bid in North Carolina.

    And in the big heartbreak of the night, Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor’s race to Gov. Brian Kemp – a repeat of her defeat to him four years ago, when the two tangled for what at the time was an open seat.

    Abrams shook up the 2018 race by expanding the electoral map, enlisting more women and people of color who turned out in record numbers – but she fell short of punching her ticket to Georgia’s governor’s mansion. And on Tuesday she lost to Kemp by a much wider margin than in 2018.

    Had Abrams succeeded, she would have been the first Black woman to become the governor of a US state. After her second straight electoral loss, America is still waiting for that breakthrough.

    Meanwhile, an ever bigger winner of the night was Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, who handily defeated Democrat Charlie Crist.

    DeSantis’ big night solidifies what some feel is a compelling claim to front-runner status for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, on what turned out to be a strong election night for Republicans in the state.

    It’s hard for a Democrat to win statewide in the deep South. And as Demings, Beasley and Abrams have shown, it’s particularly tough for a Black woman to win statewide in the region: In fact, it’s never been done.

    All three women were well-qualified and well-funded stars in their party. But, when we look at the final vote tallies, it tells a familiar story. Take Demings, for example, a former law enforcement officer – she was Orlando’s police chief – and yet, she did not get the big law enforcement endorsements. Rubio did, although he never wore the blue.

    That was a big red flag for me, and it showed how much gender and race still play in the minds of male voters and power brokers of my generation and older. For Black women, a double burden of both race and gender at play. It is the nagging story of our lives.

    As for Abrams, I think Kemp was helped by backing away from Trump and modulating his campaign message to appeal to suburban women and independents.

    Abrams, meanwhile, just didn’t have the same support and enthusiasm this time around for her candidacy. And that is unfortunate, but for her to lose by such a big margin says much more.

    At the end of the day however, these three women have nothing to regret. They ran great campaigns, and they created great future platforms for themselves. And they each put one more crack in the glass ceiling facing candidates for the US Senate and governors’ mansions.

    Sophia A. Nelson is a journalist and author of the new book “Be the One You Need: 21 Life Lessons I Learned Taking Care of Everyone but Me.”

    David Thornburgh

    Reflections on the morning after Election Day can be a little fuzzy: Chalk it up to a late night, incomplete data and a still-forming narrative. Still, as a longtime Pennsylvania election-watcher, I see three clear takeaways:

    1) Pennsylvanians don’t take to extreme anti-establishment candidates. The GOP candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, broke the mold of just about any statewide candidate in the last few decades.

    The state that delivered wins to center-right and center-left candidates like my father Gov, Dick Thornburgh, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov, Tom Ridge gave establishment Democrat Josh Shapiro a wipeout double-digit victory.

    2) “You’re not from here and I am” and “Stick it to the man” proved to be sufficiently powerful messages for alt-Democrat John Fetterman to win his Senate race, albeit by a much smaller margin.

    Amplified by more than $300 million in campaign spending (making PA’s the most expensive Senate race in the country), those two simple themes spoke to the quirky, stubborn authenticity that is a longstanding strand of Pennsylvania’s political DNA.

    3) In the home of Independence Hall, independent voters made a significant difference. Pretty much every poll since the beginning of both marquee races showed the two party candidates with locked in lopsided mirror-image margins among members of their own party.

    Over 90% of Democrats said they’d vote for Shapiro or Fetterman and close to 90% of Republicans said the same of Mastriano or Oz. The 20 to 30% of PA voters who consider themselves independent voters may have been more decisive than most tea-leaves readers gave them credit for.

    Most polls showed Shapiro and Fetterman with whopping leads among independent voters. They may not have been the same independent voters: Shapiro’s indy supporters could be former GOP voters disaffected by Trump, and Fetterman’s indy squad could be young voters mobilized by the abortion rights issue (about half of young voters are independents nationally).

    The growing significance of this independent vote in close elections may increase pressure on both parties to repeal closed primaries so that indy voters can vote in those elections. Both parties will want to have more time and opportunity to court them in the future.

    With Florida ripening to a deeper and deeper Red, Pennsylvania may loom larger and larger as the most contested, consequential swing state in the country: well-worth watching as we move inexorably to 2024.

    David Thornburgh is a longtime Pennsylvania civic leader. The former CEO of the Committee of Seventy, he now chairs the group’s Ballot PA initiative to repeal closed primaries. He is the second son of former GOP Governor and US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

    Isabelle Schindler

    The line of students registering to vote on Election Day stretched across the University of Michigan campus, with students waiting for over four hours. There was a palpable sense of excitement and urgency around the election on campus. For many young people, especially young women, there was one motivating issue that drove their participation: abortion rights.

    One of the most important and contentious issues on the ballot in Michigan was Proposal 3 (commonly known as Prop 3), which codifies the right to abortion and other reproductive freedoms, such as birth control, into the Michigan state constitution. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many Michiganders have feared the return of a 1931 law that bans abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and contains felony criminal penalties for abortion providers.

    Though the courts have prevented that old law from taking effect, voters were eager to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution, and overwhelmingly voted in favor of Prop 3 with over 55% of voters approving the proposal. This is a major feat given the coordinated campaign against the proposal. Both pro-life groups and the Catholic Church strongly opposed it, and many ads claimed it was “too confusing and too extreme.”

    The issue of abortion was a major focal point of the gubernatorial campaign between Gov, Gretchen Whitmer and her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon. Pro-Whitmer groups consistently highlighted Dixon’s support of a near-total abortion ban and her past comments that having a rapist’s baby could help a victim heal. Whitmer’s resounding win in the purple state of Michigan is certainly due, in part, to backlash against Dixon’s extreme positions on the issue.

    After the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, so many young voters felt helpless and despondent about the future of abortion rights. However, instead of throwing in the towel, Michigan voters showed up and displayed their support for Whitmer and Prop 3, showing that Michiganders support bodily autonomy and the right to choose.

    Isabelle Schindler is a senior at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. She is a field director for College Democrats on her campus and has worked as a UMICH Votes Fellow to promote voting.

    Paul Sracic

    From the beginning, the US Senate race in Ohio wasn’t expected to be close. In the end, it wasn’t – with author and political newcomer J.D. Vance defeating Rep. Tim Ryan by over six percentage points.

    Republicans also swept every statewide office in Ohio, including the elections for justices on the Ohio Supreme Court who, for the first time, had their political party listed next to their names on the ballot. This will give the Republicans a dependable majority on state’s highest court, which is significant since there is an ongoing unresolved legal battle over the drawing of state and federal legislative districts.

    It is now safe to say that Ohio, for so long the quintessential swing state, is a Republican state. What happened is simple to explain: White, working-class voters have become a solid part of the Republican coalition in the Buckeye State. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump convinced these voters that the Democratic Party had abandoned them to progressive and internationalist interests with values they did not share. This shift was symbolized by the movement of voters in the former manufacturing hub of Northeast Ohio, once the most Democratic part of the state, to the GOP.

    The question going into 2022 was whether the Republicans could keep these voters if Trump was not on the ballot. The Democrats recruited Rep. Tim Ryan to run for the Senate because he was from Northeast Ohio, having grown up just north of Youngstown. They hoped that he could win those working-class voters back, and Ryan designed his campaign around working-class economic interests, distancing himself from Washington, DC, Democrats and even opposing President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Once the votes were counted, however, Ryan performed only slightly better than Biden had in Northeast Ohio. In fact, he even lost Trumbull County, the place where he grew up and whose voters he represented in Washington for two decades.

    Ohio Democrats will face another test in two years, when the Democratic Senate seat held by Sherrod Brown will be on the ballot. Brown won in 2018, but given last night’s result, the Republicans will have no problem recruiting a quality candidate to run for a seat that, right now, at least leans Republican.

    Paul Sracic is a professor of politics and international relations at Youngstown State University and the coauthor of “Ohio Politics and Government” (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @pasracic.

    Joyce M. Davis

    Pennsylvanians clearly rejected the worst of right-wing extremism on Nov. 8, sending a strong message to former President Donald Trump that his endorsement doesn’t guarantee victory in the Keystone State.

    Trump proved to be a two-time loser in the commonwealth this election cycle, despite stirring up his base with screaming rallies for Republican candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano and Rep. Scott Perry.

    And a lot of people are breathing a long, hard sign of relief.

    Mastriano, who CNN projects will lose the race for the state’s governor to Democrat Josh Shapiro, scared many Pennsylvanians with his brash, take-no-prisoners Trump swagger. He inflamed racial tensions, embraced Christian nationalism, and once said women who violated his proposed abortion ban should be charged with murder. On top of all that, he’s an unapologetic election denier.

    Dr. Oz, meanwhile, couldn’t shake his carpetbagger baggage, and Oprah’s rejection – on November 4, she endorsed his rival and now-victorious candidate in the Senate race, John Fetterman – seems to have carried more weight than Trump’s rallies, at least in the feedback I’ve received from readers and community members.

    All of this should compel some serious soul-searching among Republican leadership in Pennsylvania. What could have they been thinking to place all their marbles on someone so outside of the mainstream as Mastriano? Did they think Pennsylvanians wouldn’t check Oz’s address? Will they rethink their hardline stance on abortion?

    In a widely-watched House race, Harrisburg City Councilwoman Shamaine Daniels made a valiant Democratic effort to unseat GOP Rep. Scott Perry, after the party’s preferred candidate pulled out of the race. But her lack of name recognition and inexperience on the state or national stage impacted her ability to establish a base of her own. So the five-term incumbent, who played a role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, will return to Washington – though perhaps with a clipped wing.

    Many Pennsylvanians may be staunch conservatives, but we proved we’re not extremists – and we won’t embrace Trump or his candidates if they threaten the very foundations of democracy.

    Joyce M. Davis is outreach and opinion editor for PennLive and The Patriot-News. She is a veteran journalist and author who has lived and worked around the globe, including for National Public Radio, Knight Ridder Newspapers in Washington, DC, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.

    Edward Lindsey

    In the last two years, President Joe Biden, Sen. Jon Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock, all Democrats, won in the Peach State. There has been a raging debate in Georgia political circles since then as to whether these races signal a long-term left turn toward the Democratic Party, caused by shifting demographics, or whether they were merely a negative reaction to former President Donald Trump. Tuesday’s results point strongly to the latter.

    Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who had rebuffed Trump’s demand to overturn the 2020 presidential result, cruised to a convincing reelection on Tuesday with a pro-growth message by defeating the Democrats’ rising star Stacey Abrams by some 300,000 votes. His coattails also propelled other Republican state candidates to victory – including the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who had also defied the former President – and helped to keep the Georgia General Assembly firmly in GOP hands.

    However, before sliding Georgia from a purple political state back into the solid red state column, we still have one more contest to look forward to: a runoff for the US Senate, echoing what happened in Georgia’s last set of Senate races.

    Georgia requires candidates to win over 50% of the vote and the presence of a Libertarian on the ticket has thrown the heated race between Warnock, the incumbent senator and senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgia football great Herschel Walker into an overtime runoff campaign to be decided on December 6.

    Both Walker and Warnock survived November 8 to fight another day despite different strong headwinds facing each of them. For Warnock, it has been Biden’s low favorability rating – hovering around 40% nationwide, and only 38% in Georgia, according to Marist. For Walker, it has been the steady drumbeat of personal allegations rolled out over the past few months, some admitted to and others staunchly denied.

    Warnock has faced his challenge by emphasizing his willingness to work across the aisle on some issues and occasionally disagreeing with the President on others. Walker, who is backed by Trump, has pulled from the deep well of admiration many Georgians feel for the former college football star.

    Both of these strategies were strong enough to get them into a runoff, but which strategy will work in that arena? The answer could be crucial to determining which party controls the US Senate, depending on the result of other races that have yet to be called. Stay tuned while Georgians enjoy having the two candidates for Thanksgiving dinner and into the holiday season.

    Edward Lindsey is a former Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives and its majority whip. He is a lawyer in Atlanta focusing on public policy and political law.

    Brianna N. Mack

    In his bid to win a seat in the US Senate, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan tried to appeal to working class voters who felt abandoned by establishment Democrats. Those blue collar voters – many of them formerly members of his party – overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

    Unfortunately for Ryan, his strategy failed. He lost to J.D. Vance by a decisive margin, according to election projections.

    It was, perhaps, a predictable ending for a candidate who threw away the traditional approach of rallying your base and instead courted the almost non-existent, moderate Trump voter. And it’s a shame. Had Ryan won, Ohio would have had two Democratic senators. The last time that happened was almost 30 years ago, when Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn represented our state.

    But in wooing Republicans and right-leaning moderates, Ryan abandoned many of Ohio’s left-leaning Democrats who brought him to the dance.

    That approach was perhaps most evident in his ads. In a campaign spot in which he is shown tossing a football at various computer screens showing messages he disapproves of, he hurls the ball at one emblazoned with the words “Defund the Police” and dismisses what he disdainfully calls “the culture wars.”

    Another ad showed Ryan, gun in hand, hitting his mark at target practice, as the words “Not too bad for a Democrat” appear on the screen. To imply you’re pro-gun rights when majority of Americans support gun control legislation – and when your party explicitly embraces a pro-gun control stance is bewildering. Ryan’s ads on the economy began to parrot the anti-China rhetoric taken up by Republicans. And when President Joe Biden announced his student debt plan in an effort to invigorate the Democratic bringing economic relief to millions of millennial voters, Ryan opposed the move.

    As a Black woman living in a metropolitan area, I would have liked to see him reach out to communities of color, perhaps by making an appearance with African American members of Ohio’s congressional delegation Rep. Joyce Beatty or Rep. Shontel Brown. But I would have settled for one ad addressing the economic or social concerns of people who don’t live in the Rust Belt.

    Ryan might have won if he’d gotten the kind of robust backing from his own party that Vance got from his – and if he’d courted his Democratic base.

    Brianna N. Mack is an assistant professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University whose coursework is centered on American political behavior. Her research interests are the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities. She tweets at @Mack_Musings.

    James Wigderson

    Wisconsin remains as split as ever with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers surviving a challenge from businessman Tim Michels and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson barely holding off a challenge from Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

    In late February, Johnson, who Democrats hoped might be a beatable incumbent, was viewed favorably by only 33% of Wisconsin’s voters, according to the Marquette University Law School poll. He was viewed unfavorably by 45% of the electorate with 21% saying they didn’t know what to think of him or hadn’t heard enough about him. He finished the election cycle still seen unfavorably by 46% with 43% of the voters holding a favorable view of him.

    However, Democrats decided to run possibly the worst candidate if they wanted to win against Johnson. At one point in August, the relatively unknown Barnes actually led Johnson by 7%. But familiarity with Barnes didn’t help him. Crime was the third most concerning issue for Wisconsin voters this election cycle, according to the Marquette University Law School poll, and Johnson’s campaign successfully attacked Barnes for statements in support of decreasing or redirecting police funding and for reducing the prison population. In the end, Johnson came out victorious.

    So, with Republicans winning in the Senate, what saved Evers in the gubernatorial race? Perhaps it was women voters.

    The overturning of Roe v. Wade meant Wisconsin’s abortion ban from 1849 went back into effect. Michels supported the no-exceptions law but then flip-flopped and said he could support exceptions for rape and incest. Johnson, for his part, successfully deflected the issue by saying he wanted Wisconsin’s abortion law to go to referendum.

    Another issue that may have soured women voters on Michels was the allegation of a culture of sexual harassment within his company. Evers’ campaign unsurprisingly jumped at the opportunity to argue that “the culture comes from the top.” (In response to the allegations against his company, Michel said: “These unproven allegations do not reflect the training and culture at Michels Corporation. Harassment in the workplace should not be condoned, nor tolerated, nor was it under Michels Corporation leadership.”) Michels’ divisive primary fight against former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch also didn’t help his appeal to women voters, especially in Kleefisch’s home county of Waukesha, formerly a key to a Republican victory in Wisconsin.

    If Republicans are going to win in 2024, they need to figure out how to attract the support of suburban women.

    James Wigderson is the former editor of RightWisconsin.com, a conservative-leaning news website, and the author of a twice-weekly newsletter, “Life, Under Construction.”

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  • Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics

    Democrats confront their nightmare scenario on election eve as economic concerns overshadow abortion and democracy worries | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

    Hopes that Democrats could use the Supreme Court’s overturning of the right to an abortion and a flurry of legislative wins to stave off the classic midterm election rout of a party in power are now a memory. Biden faces a dark political environment because of the 40-year-high in the cost of living – and his hopes of a swift rebound next year are clouded by growing fears of a recession.

    On the eve of the election, Democrats risk losing control of the House of Representatives and Republicans are increasingly hopeful of a Senate majority that would leave Biden under siege as he begins his reelection bid and with ex-President Donald Trump apparently set to announce his own campaign for a White House return within days.

    It’s too early for postmortems. Forty million Americans have already voted. And the uncertainty baked into modern polling means no one can be sure a red wave is coming. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

    But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of GOP momentum.

    A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

    That means Democrats are most exposed this time.

    If the president’s party takes a drubbing, there will be much Democratic finger-pointing over Biden’s messaging strategy on inflation – a pernicious force that has punched holes in millions of family budgets.

    Just as in last year’s losing off-year gubernatorial race in Virginia, which the president won by 10 points in 2020, Democrats are closing the campaign warning about democracy and Trump’s influence while Republicans believe they are addressing the issue voters care about most.

    “Here’s where the Democrats are: they’re inflation deniers, they are crime deniers, they’re education deniers,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

    Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic consultant, said on the same show that her party had misjudged the mood of the electorate.

    “I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

    “And this conversation is not going to have much impact on Tuesday, but I hope it has an impact going forward, because when voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them. Stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

    Rosen is not the only key figure on the left uneasy with the midterm strategy. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged the White House to do more to stress economic concerns in recent weeks even while acknowledging the crisis of democracy and the importance of abortion rights. In retrospect, it appears Democrats were slow to recognize that a favorable period over the summer, spurred by falling gasoline prices and a hot streak for the president in passing legislation, wouldn’t last long enough to compensate for a ruinous political environment caused by the economy.

    In effect, Biden’s stress on the threat to US political institutions posed by Trump essentially asks voters to prioritize the historic foundation of America’s political system over their own more immediate economic fears.

    It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. After all, Trump incited an insurrection that tried to thwart the unbroken tradition of peaceful transfers of power between presidents.

    But outside the Beltway bubble of politicians and journalists, democracy feels like a far more distant, esoteric concept than the daily struggle to feed a family and to be able to afford to commute to work. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, the return to normality after the Covid-19 nightmare that Biden promised remains elusive to many as the economic after effects of the once-in-a century health emergency linger.

    The impossibility of the political environment for Democrats was laid bare in a CNN/SSRS poll released last week. Some 51% of likely voters said the economy was the key issue in determining their vote. Only 15% named abortion – a finding that explains how the election battleground has tilted toward the GOP. Among voters for whom the economy is their top concern, 71% plan to vote Republican in their House district. And 75% of voters think the economy is already in a recession, meaning that Biden’s efforts to stress undeniably strong economic areas – including the strikingly low unemployment rate – are likely to fall on deaf ears.

    It’s too simple to say that Biden has ignored the impact of inflation, or doesn’t understand the pain it’s bringing to the country.

    The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. But the benefits from such measures will take years to arrive. And millions of voters are hurting now and haven’t heard a viable plan from the president to quickly ease prices in the short-term.

    There is no guarantee that plans by Republicans to extend Trump-era tax cuts and mandate new energy drilling would have much impact on the inflation crisis either. And divided government would likely mean a stalemate between two dueling economic visions. But the election has turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration, with no imminent hope that things will get better soon.

    Biden has resorted to highlighting bright spots of the economy – claiming to have reignited manufacturing, high job creation and a robust effort to compete with China. He’s now warning that Republicans would gut Social Security and Medicare on which many Americans rely in retirement.

    And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

    Inflation and high gas prices are also a global issue and have been worsened by factors beyond Biden’s control, including the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. At the same time, however, economists are debating the wisdom of Biden’s high-spending bills that sent billions of dollars into an overheating economy. And the White House’s repeated downplaying of the soaring cost of living as “transitory” badly misjudged the situation and was another thing that battered Biden’s credibility – on top of the confidence some voters lost in him during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

    The Republican Party also got exactly what it wanted as Trump has delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the midterms, depriving Biden of the opportunity to shape this election as a direct clash with an insurrectionist predecessor whom he beat in 2020 and who remains broadly unpopular. Such a confrontation might have enabled the president to dampen the impact of his own low approval ratings and win over voters who still disdain the twice-impeached former president.

    Ironically, Biden’s struggles in framing a believable economic message could bring about the very crisis of democracy that he is warning about.

    Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. And Tuesday’s election could usher in scores of election deniers in state offices who could end up controlling the 2024 presidential election in some key battlegrounds. GOP dominance of state legislatures could further curtail voting rights.

    High inflation has also always been a toxic force that brews political extremism and tempts some voters to be drawn to demagogues and radicals whose political creed is based on stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

    If Democrats do lose big on Tuesday night, Trump will be a beneficiary.

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  • Trump and other Republicans are already casting doubt on midterm results | CNN Politics

    Trump and other Republicans are already casting doubt on midterm results | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. “Here we go again!” he wrote. “Rigged Election!”

    Trump’s supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. Rather, the article baselessly raised suspicion about absentee-ballot data the article did not clearly explain.

    In 2020, Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was stolen. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

    Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state that could determine which party controls the US Senate.

    After Pennsylvania’s acting elections chief, Leigh Chapman, told NBC News last week that it could take “days” to complete the vote count, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said on a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization Media Matters for America: “That’s an attempt to have the fix in.”

    It isn’t. It simply takes time to count votes – especially, as Chapman noted, because the Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a no-strings-attached bill to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than the morning of Election Day.

    But other prominent Republicans piled on. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted a link to an article about Chapman’s comments and added: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”

    Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.

    Counties of all kinds across the country – including, as PolitiFact noted, some Republican counties in Cruz’s state of Texas – do not complete their vote counts on the night of the election. In fact, it is impossible for many counties to have final counts on election night.

    Even some of the country’s most Republican states count absentee ballots (or, in some cases, specifically absentee ballots from members of the military and overseas citizens) that arrive days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. And some states, including some led by Republicans, give voters days after Election Day to fix issues with their signatures or to provide the proof of identity they didn’t have on Election Day.

    American elections authorities do not declare winners or official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.

    The health challenges of the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, have also been used to cast preemptive doubt on the possible outcome.

    After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, some right-wing personalities insisted the election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate. On Fox last week, as Media Matters noted, prime-time host Tucker Carlson made a similar argument about Pennsylvania’s Senate race – suggesting people should not accept a Fetterman win because it would be “transparently absurd” for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking and auditory processing since a stroke in May to legitimately prevail.

    But there would be nothing suspicious about Fetterman winning in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

    The city of Detroit, like other Democratic-dominated cities with large Black populations, has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories from Trump and others. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.

    Less than two weeks before Election Day, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, filed a lawsuit asking a court to “halt” the use of absentee ballots in Detroit if they weren’t obtained in person at a clerk’s office and declare that only those ballots obtained via in-person requests can be “validly voted” in this election. That request would potentially mean the rejection of thousands of votes already cast legally by Detroit residents – in state whose constitution gives residents the right to request absentee ballots by mail.

    Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

    Nonetheless, the suit sets the table for Karamo, who is trailing in opinion polls, to baselessly reject the legitimacy of a defeat.

    Other Republican candidates have vaguely hinted at the possibility that Democrats might somehow cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.

    Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”

    The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told a similar story at an event in June.

    There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

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  • Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics

    Why 2022 may bring a new peak of political instability | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    All year, the principal question looming over the 2022 campaign has been whether Democrats could defy political gravity.

    As we’re nearing the end, the answer appears to be: no, or at least not entirely.

    Midterm elections have almost always been bad for the party holding the White House, and they have been especially bad when most Americans are dissatisfied with the economy and the president’s performance. Those conditions are present in force now, with polls showing that most Americans disapprove of how President Joe Biden has handled crime, the border, and especially the economy and inflation. Pessimism about the economy is pervasive. Historically such attitudes have generated big gains up and down the ballot for the party out of the White House – in this case, the Republicans.

    That may be how the election ultimately turns out, especially in House and state legislative races where the individual candidates are less well-known, and many voters are likely to express dissatisfaction with the country’s direction by voting against the party in power. The president’s party, in fact, has lost House seats in all but three midterm elections since the Civil War. If there is a surprise in the House, it’s less likely to come from Democrats maintaining their majority than the Republicans exceeding the average 26 seat midterm gain for the party out of power since World War II.

    But Democrats have remained unexpectedly competitive in the higher-profile Senate and gubernatorial races by focusing attention not only on what Biden has done, but what Republicans might do, with power. Many of these statewide contests have become a “double negative election”: while most voters in the key states consistently say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, most also say they hold negative personal views about the GOP candidates, many of whom were propelled to their nomination by support from Donald Trump. If Democrats hold the Senate, or hold their own in the top governor races, a principal reason will be the large number of voters who viewed GOP nominees as unqualified, extreme (particularly in their desire to ban or restrict abortion), a threat to democracy, or all of the above. The same dynamic could also save some House Democrats in districts where Biden has fallen well below majority support.

    So many races are so close – within the margin of error in public polls – that the results Tuesday could range from a true red wave to a Democratic sigh of relief. The scary precedent for Democrats is that in wave years almost all of the close races often tip in the same direction – toward the party out of power. A reason for Democratic hope is that in the final surveys, their candidates are consistently running better among all registered voters than among those the pollsters consider most “likely” to vote. That means the party could outperform expectations if even slightly more of its key constituencies (particularly young people) show up than pollsters anticipate – an outcome that groups such as the powerful union Unite Here is trying to achieve with 1,000 canvassers knocking on doors each day in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. “We are in the battle every place,” says Gwen Mills, the union’s secretary-treasurer. “All of [these races] are within the margin of effort.”

    If Republicans take back either chamber this week, it would mark the fifth consecutive election in which a president who went into a midterm with unified control of government had it revoked by the voters. That happened to Donald Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994.

    No president, in fact, has successfully defended unified control of Congress through a mid-term since Jimmy Carter in 1978 – and he was insulated by the huge Congressional margins Democrats had amassed after Watergate, as well as his party’s strength in what was then still a “solid South” for Democrats. (The sole asterisk on this pattern is that Republicans under George W. Bush regained unified control of Congress in the 2002 midterm held a year after the September 11 attacks after a party switch by a Republican senator in early 2001 flipped control of the chamber to Democrats and broke the GOP’s unified hold on Congress.) A Republican takeover of either or both chambers would extend one of the defining trends of modern politics: Neither party has held the White House and Congress for more than four consecutive years since 1968. That’s a stark departure from most of the 20th century when each side, at different times, cemented lasting control for as long as 14 consecutive years.

    No matter what happens Tuesday, most experts don’t anticipate either party shattering this fragile modern stand-off to establish a lasting edge. “I don’t see either side getting a durable advantage,” says Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science emeritus at the University of California at San Diego. “They are highly polarized parties, and they are very closely balanced overall.”

    From that angle, Republican gains Tuesday would simply continue a long-standing tendency toward instability in our political system, with the initiative rapidly shifting back and forth between the parties. But the election could also ratchet that instability to a combustible new level. The strong tide behind Republicans virtually guarantees victories for some, maybe many, of the hundreds of candidates who have embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections and signaled that they will seek to tilt the electoral rules toward the GOP or simply deny future wins by Democrats. Some of those candidates, if they lose this week, seem likely to emulate Trump after 2020 and refuse to concede, claiming fraud. (Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have each suggested as much already.) The most important legacy of this week’s voting may be the beachhead inside the electoral system it will likely establish for Republican officeholders untethered to America’s democratic traditions as we have known them.

    In more conventional political calculations, Tuesday’s results seem likely to resurface debates, that had somewhat receded during the Trump years, over the structural electoral challenges Democrats face in the battle to control Congress.

    The modern period of Congressional elections arguably began in 1994, when Republicans captured both the House and Senate in the backlash against Bill Clinton’s chaotic first two years. That ended an era in which Democrats had held the House majority for 40 consecutive years, and controlled the Senate, usually by wide margins, for all but six years over that long span.

    Since 1994, though, Republicans have controlled Congress more often than Democrats. The GOP has held the Senate for about 16 and a half years (counting the roughly half year before the party switch cost them their majority in 2001) and Democrats for only about 11 and a half years. The imbalance in the House has been even more lopsided: Republicans have held it for 20 of these past 28 years, and Democrats for just eight. Especially ominous for Democrats is that if they lose the House on Tuesday, it would mark the second consecutive time they have surrendered their majority only four years after regaining it. (The previous case came when they were swept from the majority by the Tea Party uprising in 2010, just four years after they recaptured the chamber in 2006.) By contrast, Republicans held the House for 12 consecutive years from 1994 through 2006, and then for eight from 2010 through 2018.

    What makes this disparity especially striking is that it has come even as Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections since 1992 – something no party has done since the formation of the two-party system in 1828. (No Republican candidate has reached even 51% of the presidential popular vote since 1988.) These results clearly suggest the modern Democratic electoral coalition, on a nationwide basis, is larger than the Republican coalition. And yet, Republicans, more often than not, have controlled the Congressional majorities in this era anyway.

    Aggressive GOP gerrymanders partly explain that difference in the House. But that doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s House advantage and it isn’t a factor at all in the party’s Senate edge. Instead, the Republican Congressional success largely reflects geographic and demographic limitations of the Democratic coalition that almost certainly will be evident again this week.

    Tuesday’s election is likely to remind Democrats again that they are competing in too few places to establish a durable majority in Congress. In the House, Republicans have established such an overwhelming hold on rural and exurban districts that Democrats must win a very high share of urban and suburban districts to reach a majority. In a good year, like 2018, Democrats can meet that test. And even now, the continued resistance of college-educated suburban voters to the Trump-era Republican Party has provided Democrats a chance to hold down their losses in white-collar districts. But ceding so many rural, exurban and small-town seats leaves Democrats too little cushion to lose some of their suburban seats – as they inevitably will when discontent over the economy, and secondarily crime, is this high even in those places.

    If anything, the Democrats’ geographic challenge is even greater in the Senate. A dominant trend in modern US politics is that both parties are winning virtually all the Senate seats in states that typically support their presidential candidates. The challenge for Democrats is that, despite their repeated victories in the popular vote, slightly more states reliably lean Republican than Democrat in presidential races. Democrats already hold 39 of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states that voted against Donald Trump both times (Susan Collins in Maine is the only exception). But 25 states voted for Trump both times, and they provide Republicans an even larger Senate contingent, with the GOP holding 47 of their 50 seats. Democrats have squeezed out their precarious 50-50 Senate majority only by capturing eight of the ten seats in the five states that flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia).

    This geography is what makes this week’s Senate elections so crucial to Democrats. This year’s key races are occurring almost entirely in states that Biden won, albeit mostly narrowly, with Democrats defending seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado and Washington, and targeting Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (With longer odds, Democrats have also mounted serious challenges to Republicans in Ohio and North Carolina, two states that twice voted for Trump.) Given that map, Democratic strategists recognize it’s critical for the party to expand, or at least maintain, its Senate margin now.

    After this year, the Senate terrain will rapidly become more foreboding for Democrats. In 2024, they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the two-time Trump states (Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana), as well as seats in half a dozen other swing states that could go either way in a presidential contest (including Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.) If most of the toss up Senate races fall to the Republicans on Tuesday, those gains, combined with the 2024 map, could put the GOP in position to dominate the upper chamber throughout this decade. “If Republicans take the Senate, I don’t see in our immediate lifetime how Democrats are going to take back” the majority, says Doug Sosnik, a senior White House political adviser to Bill Clinton.

    Much of the Democrats’ Senate problem is rooted in the constitutional provision that provides two Senate seats to every state. That magnifies the influence of sparsely populated, rural and strongly Republican interior states. There’s no political repositioning that is likely to provide Democrats a realistic chance any time soon to win Senate seats in Wyoming and Idaho or North and South Dakota.

    But many Democratic strategists argue that the party must expand its map in the Senate by finding ways to attract more non-college and non-urban voters, especially with white people, but across racial lines, in at least a few more states. That list of potential targets includes places like Ohio, Iowa and Florida where Democrats competed much more effectively as recently as under President Barack Obama. Rebuilding the party’s competitiveness in those states could take years and likely require a significant change in its positioning and message.

    Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, points out that while the party’s modern coalition of young people, racial minorities and college-educated whites has allowed it to effectively contest the presidency, it doesn’t represent a winning majority in enough states to reliably hold the Senate. “When you look at the electoral college, college educated [and diverse] America is close to enough to elect you president,” Kessler says. “But it is not close to getting you a majority in the Senate.”

    Tuesday’s election could also demonstrate the reemergence of a second demographic challenge for Democrats in the battle for Congress, what analysts in the past have called the “boom and bust” nature of their electoral coalition. The biggest remaining uncertainty for Tuesday’s election may be how many young people, who polls show continue to back Democrats in large proportions, turn out. Usually, turnout falls more for young people than for older generations between presidential and midterm elections (hence the “boom and bust” risk). But in 2018, robust youth turnout helped power the Democratic gains.

    Large-scale polls focused particularly on young adults (such as the Harvard Institute of Politics survey) have found them expressing levels of interest comparable to 2018. Yet their participation in early voting has been lackluster, and several recent national surveys (such as CNN’s poll last week) found their engagement lagging. If turnout among young adults disappoints on Tuesday, it will strengthen those Democrats who argue the party must prioritize regaining ground among middle-income, middle-aged voters, especially those without college degrees. (That includes non-college Latinos, particularly men, who may continue to drift away from Democrats at least somewhat this week.) The sharpest post-election debates among Democrats are likely to revolve around whether the party must embrace more conservative approaches on crime and immigration, two issues Republicans wielded to powerful effect, in order to earn a second look from more non-college educated voters across racial lines.

    History says that a bad result on Tuesday need not panic Democrats about 2024 (though, in practice, it probably will). Midterms have not had much value forecasting the result of the presidential election two years later. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush had relatively good first-term midterms and then lost their reelection races. The president (or his party) did lose the White House two years after bad midterms in 1958, 1966, 1974 and 2018. But Harry Truman in 1948, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012 all won reelection, usually convincingly, two years after stinging midterm losses. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has built models that project presidential outcomes based on economic and public opinion data, says the results of the midterm add literally no predictive value to the forecasts.

    The 2024 presidential election will begin almost immediately after Tuesday – probably before all the last votes are counted. Though midterm gains are the rule for the party out of power, Trump is likely to interpret GOP victories as a clarion call for his return; aides say he could announce a 2024 candidacy as soon as this month. White House officials believe Biden is certain to run if Trump does because he views the former president as an existential threat to American democracy. On Election Day 2024, the combined age of these two men will be nearly 160 years. Polls show that one of the few areas of broad public agreement is that most Americans do not want either to run again.

    Yet, long before any newly elected officials take office, or any gavels in Congress change hands, the first consequence of Tuesday’s bitterly fought election may be to place America more firmly on the path toward exactly such a rematch. And this time, such a confrontation could occur with the electoral machinery in decisive states under control of Trump allies who share his willingness to tilt or even subvert the system. Whatever storms rattle the political system this week, the real tempest won’t arrive until 2024 – and it may bring the greatest strain on the nation’s fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.

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