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This article isreprintedfromCatalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you cansubscribe to the print editionofCatalystfor just $20.

Has the GOP become a working-class party? On its face, the question is absurd. Whatever the modern Republican Party is, its historical analogues are not the parties of the working class. The party has virtually nothing in common with the SPD (Social Democratic Party) of prewar Germany, the SAP (Swedish Social Democratic Party) of the Meidner Plan, or Lulas PT (Workers Party). Even the decrepit Socialist International, which once counted among its member parties Hosni Mubaraks National Democratic Party, would surely balk at extending admission to the Republican Party.

Yet many Republicans themselves are convinced that their party has indeed made a turn to the working class. The night of the 2020 election, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeted, We are a working-class party now. Thats the future. A few months later, Representative Jim Banks, chair of the influential Republican Study Committee, wrote a memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy making this case in more detail. Banks argued that the two parties were undergoing coalitional transformations, with the GOP becoming a party of the working class, and the Democratic Party becoming a party of professionals and the rich. The result was a historic opportunity for the Republicans to redefine themselves, and, in so doing, secure the permanent Republican majority the party has been chasing for the past two decades.

Liberals have also expressed worry over this prospect. Since at least the 1990s, liberal writers have sounded the alarm about the defections of white workers from the Democratic coalition. At different moments, liberal analysts have pointed to different causes for their alleged abandonment by the white working class. In the 1990s, Thomas and Mary Edsall identified the backlash to the partys embrace of civil rights. In the early 2000s, Thomas Frank highlighted Christianity and cultural conservatism. More recently, Thomas Piketty has argued that the Democrats are but one example of a broader phenomenon across the advanced capitalist world, in which educational polarization replaces class polarization, with the highly educated voting liberal and the less educated voting for various forms of conservatism. It is not only the hopeful right who sees the working class turning the wrong shade of red.

These arguments were, of course, given a healthy fillip by Donald Trumps election in 2016. And indeed, researchers have found real evidence that the white working class was quite important to Trumps victory. Mike Davis, writing in these pages, drew attention to the role of plant closings in key counties in pushing white workers toward Trump. Other researchers have found that white workers comprised a crucial portion of the bloc of 2012 Barack Obama supporters or nonvoters who went for Trump in 2016. Trump, in his own vulgar way, endorsed Pikettys argument about educational polarization, proclaiming, I love the poorly educated.

Yet for all the noise about the GOPs transformation into a working-class party, the claim has remarkably little basis in fact. Examination of survey data reveals that the working class has undergone a slight shift toward the Republican Party, but it is nothing resembling the kind of coalitional transformation claimed by party boosters. Similarly, there is no evidence that workers are today a more important constituency in the Republican Party than in the past. The GOP, simply put, is not transforming into a working-class party.

Theres no question, however, that it has become a different kind of party than American politics are accustomed to. Though complaints about political polarization in the United States are ubiquitous, it is by now widely accepted among political scientists that the main cause of polarization has been a move to the right by Republicans. In comparative perspective as well, the Republican Party stands out. Analysis of its 2016 platform by the Manifesto Project places the GOP closer to the far-right Alternative fr Deutschland than Angela Merkels CDU (Christian Democratic Union), and to the right even of Marine Le Pens Rassemblement National.

Moreover, the GOP has embraced politics that often run directly counter to the preferences of American capital. The government shutdowns it forced while in opposition in 199596 and 2013, and while holding the presidency in 201819, brought demand shocks and economic uncertainty with them, in the service of political goals (budget cuts, stopping Obamacare implementation, and a border wall with Mexico) that could hardly be said to be set in Fortune 500 boardrooms. Tensions between the party and the corporate power elite reached new levels in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, when the bulk of congressional Republicans still refused to disavow Trumps claims of election fraud. In response, a number of companies and the US Chamber of Commerce, vowed to withhold campaign contributions from Republicans who voted against certifying the election results. Although the boycott of election conspiracy pushers soon fell apart, it underscored the growing distance between the Republican Party and the business lobby.

This transformation in the party was not driven by a change in its voting base. Instead, it stems from the interaction of two transformations in American politics and society: the weakening of the parties since the 1970s, and the political disorganization of corporate America since the 1980s.

American parties have been institutionally weak by international standards since at least the early twentieth century. As ideologically undefined catchall parties, they existed more as confederations of local political machines than genuine national institutions. However, beginning in the 1970s, changes in party rules, congressional rules, and campaign finance law all combined to hollow out the parties even further. The result is that American political parties barely exist except as networks of funders, campaign services vendors, and candidates. Decisions such as candidate selection are instead outsourced to the primary system. This same system only magnifies the power of money in deciding party politics, since the parties possess few institutional resources for resisting it.

Weak parties themselves are insufficient to explain Republican radicalization, however. If the weakening of party institutions were the only dynamic, we might expect to see an ever-tightening link between Republican politics and the preferences of American business. Instead, we see growing autonomy and conflict. American business, it seems, is no longer as capable of setting the partys agenda as it once was. This incapacity stems from the increasingly disorganized character of American business politics. While in the 1970s business mounted a spectacular mobilization against the New Deal order, by the early 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, businesss enemies in the state and the unions had been defeated, and business unity began to unravel. At the same time, the reorganization of corporate America via mergers, acquisitions, and consolidation inclined corporate managers away from long-term, policy-oriented political activism and instead toward narrow defenses of the rents and privileges of their respective economic sectors. This kind of activism has often proven compatible with the Republican Partys long march to the right, as the party has been only too happy to oblige corporate Americas preferences for anti-labor, anti-regulatory judicial appointments and tax breaks. The structure of political action by the American ruling class, in other words, has evolved away from the kind of coordinated, long-term action that would be necessary to successfully discipline the Republican Party.

Together, weak parties and elite disorganization have cleared the way for right-wing political entrepreneurs to push the party further and further to the right. A kind of dialectic has ensued since the 1980s, in which party insurgents come to power, fail in their goals, and are replaced by a more establishment power bloc, whose failures then open the door for a new group of insurgents.

These structural transformations, and not a turn to the working-class, are what have remade the Republican Party. This article will begin by examining the evolution of the Republican Partys support base and demonstrating that claims of the partys new working-class base are very much exaggerated. It will then develop the alternative explanation, centered in the weakening of the parties and the changing nature of corporate political action. Finally, it will offer a narrative of GOP history since the 1980s, illustrating how these forces have produced a party of a new type on the American scene.

Though the cultural image of working-class Republicanism is ubiquitous, more rigorous investigation of the partys class composition is considerably rarer. Analyzing such a composition is a fraught endeavor. There are many methodological choices to be made, and these choices can have dramatic impacts on the resultant findings. This section will present one such analysis. In the interest of readability, the methodological choices will be described briefly. The reasons for such choices, and the reasons alternative approaches were decided against, are available in an online methodological appendix.

In what follows, I analyze data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been asking consistent questions of a representative sample of Americans for almost fifty years. To measure survey respondents class positions, I employ an occupational definition of class. Essentially, nonprofessional occupations, from laborers to white-collar workers doing semi-routine tasks, are classified as working class. Additionally, I include teachers and nurses in this group, as their incorporation in a category alongside doctors and lawyers has grown increasingly implausible. To measure partisanship, I use the GSS party identification variable, which simply asks respondents which party they identify with.

With the preferred measures of class and partisan political behavior defined, there only remains to be specified conceptualizations of partisan change. Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, in an earlier study of class and partisanship, provide a useful schema. Drawing on a venerable tradition in American political science, they distinguish between critical realignment, secular realignment, and electoral shifts. Critical realignment, a term first proposed by V. O. Key in the 1950s to understand the coming of the New Deal, describes when a voting bloc, such as workers, decisively shifts partisanship during a single election.

For Key and many subsequent scholars, the 1932 election is the paradigmatic example of such a realignment. Key also suggested that groups sometimes undergo secular realignment, when a clear partisanship shift occurs over the course of several elections. The move of Southern whites away from the Democrats and toward a solidly Republican partisan identity after the civil rights movement is a good example of such a transition. Finally, an electoral shift is when existing partisan attachments of a group intensify or weaken, without decisively shifting. For example, women have been more Democratic than Republican for a long time, and this attachment has grown stronger since the 1990s.

With these concepts in hand, some hypotheses can be formulated corresponding to the various claims made about changes in the Republican Party. First, it may be the case that there has been either a critical or a secular realignment among workers from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Second, it may be the case that the Republican coalition has become increasingly working class in composition. Both these hypotheses, as it turns out, are false.

Figure 1 looks at partisan identification among working-class respondents in the GSS. While there has been an electoral shift away from the Democratic Party, and Republicans have gained, there has been no decisive realignment. Indeed, among workers, the rise in independent identification has been steeper than the rise in Republican identification. These results are not sensitive to the inclusion of teachers and nurses among workers; estimates excluding them from the working class show the same trends.

Even looking at occupational subcategories of the working class, the story does not conform to a working-class GOP. Figure 2 looks at partisan identification among the lowest three categories of manual workers: agricultural and primary production workers, semiskilled workers not in agriculture, and skilled manual workers. Workers in these occupations are significantly less likely to possess a college degree (in 2018, about 6 percent of workers in these occupations had a college degree or higher, while about 20 percent of the broader working class did) and, as such, these would be the occupational categories most likely to shift toward the GOP as educational polarization progresses.

Among all three groups, there has been a precipitous decline in identification with the Democratic Party. At the same time, however, the independent category has been the main beneficiary of this decline. The rise in Republican identification has been much more modest and has been greatest among skilled manual workers.

Figure 3 examines the political identification of white and nonwhite workers, broadly defined. As has been found in much previous work, there has been a strong swing away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans among white workers. Interestingly, the bulk of this swing happened between 1970 and 1990, with little change since then. While white workers were once decisively Democratic, for the last three decades, there has been no clear preference among them. While nonwhite workers have also seen a dealignment from the Democratic Party, the result has been increased independent identification, with little gain for the Republicans.

Among working-class Americans as a whole, there has been no realignment, either critical or secular. While Democrats once claimed an overwhelming majority of American workers, their advantage has eroded considerably. Only a portion of that has led to increased Republican identification, however, and among workers as a whole, over the last decade, Democratic identifiers have outnumbered Republican identifiers by 15 to 20 percentage points. Among manual workers, the Republican gain has been greater (particularly among skilled workers) but still falls short of a clear majority. Even among white workers, there has been clear class dealignment, but nothing resembling the emergence of a stable Republican majority. (Indeed, one of the most striking facts about the racial trends is the overall similarity among white and nonwhite workers in disaffiliating with the Democratic Party. Among white workers, Democratic identification dropped by an average of 0.46 percentage points per year. Among nonwhite workers, it dropped by about 0.41 percentage points per year.) Of course, its possible that these shifts are incomplete and, within a few years, a secular realignment will be visible. But in the aggregate, and even among white workers, the trends suggest that Republican gains have actually been stagnant for some time. The overall story is one of class dealignment rather than realignment.

The other possibility is that, instead of workers becoming decisively Republican, the Republican coalition has become more working class, perhaps caused by the well-documented exodus of professionals and the highly educated from the party. Figure 4 charts the class composition of Republican identifiers. Far from becoming more working class, the Republican coalition has become less working class over time. Again, the overall trend is class dealignment. Where the Democratic Party was once far more class-polarized than the Republican Party, both parties have become less working class over time, such that the degree of class polarization in both parties is approaching equal. Independents, meanwhile, remain highly class-polarized, with little change over the past half-century.

However the Republican Party has changed since the 1980s, the driving force has plainly not been the rise of working-class Republicanism. The Democrats, it is true, have experienced near-catastrophic levels of working-class exit. But the Republicans have not, in the main, reaped the gains of this. Partisan polarization within the working class has diminished, with the result being that no party commands a clear majority of working-class support. Similarly, within the Republican Party, the share of the party made up of workers has actually diminished over the last few decades. The arguments of Republicans like Hawley and Banks appear to be more advertising than analysis. Explanations of the partys extraordinary move to the right must look beyond class voting patterns for their mechanism.

From the perspective of many other capitalist democracies, American political parties dont really exist. They have no membership lists, their platforms are largely built after their candidates are nominated, and, perhaps most important, the parties themselves have very little control over the nomination process. Thus, it is not unheard of for a Holocaust denier, for example, to win a Republican primary in a deep-blue district in which the party invests no resources, or for a member of the LaRouche cult to win a Democratic nomination in a deep-red district. Though in such cases the party will often denounce the candidate, it has no power to prevent them from running on its ballot line.

The weakness of American parties, which intensified after the 1970s, has had two results. First, the hollowing out of the parties removed one of the few counterweights to the power of money in American politics. Now, the power of money to decide matters of party direction, and thus ultimately of policy, is even more unmediated. Second, and related, the role of parties themselves changed, from institutions that determined key questions of party life, from platform to nomination, to candidate-service organizations whose main role is fundraising and providing access to vendors of campaign services.

From the countrys beginning, American political parties have been weak by design. Inheritors of the political thought of Georgian England, the authors of the Constitution were at best ambivalent about organized political opposition to the current government, seeing in such activity the seeds of civil war. To Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, parties were, in Richard Hofstadters words, sores on the body politic. Alexander Hamilton, who, like all of the Constitutional generation, used the terms faction and party interchangeably, argued that one of the chief virtues of the Constitution would be its role in suppressing parties. We are attempting by this Constitution, he told the New York state ratification convention, to abolish factions.

The Constitution designed by these men contemplated no role for parties. (The word party is only used in the Constitution in the sense of a party to a conflict.) Indeed, the cumbersome separation of powers system they designed was expressly intended to check parties. The presidency was envisaged not as a partisan office but as one whose inhabitant would have to stand above party. As parties did inevitably develop in the political conflicts that followed ratification, they grew as private organizations in constitutional interstices, without clear relation to the state itself.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, American parties became quite powerful entities, though they existed primarily on the local level. On the national level, the parties were unwieldy coalitions of regional power elites. Nonetheless, they were strong enough that, by the late nineteenth century, the parties themselves had become plausible scapegoats for any number of societal ailments.

In the thinking of Progressive reformers, parties were either the organs responsible for activating the baser instincts of the poorer citizens or the vehicles by which such citizens plundered their more industrious counterparts. Reformers accordingly bombarded them with a whole suite of new policies. Civil service reform targeted the parties by trying to deny them the ability to reward their patrons with government employment. One of its supporters went so far as to claim that the Merit System . . . will help to abolish partisanship. Numerous municipalities attempted to remove city government from the remit of political competition entirely through the city manager system or, barring that, by making local elections nonpartisan.

The reform with the biggest impact on American politics in the long term, however, was the direct primary. Its most important advocate was Progressive standard-bearer Robert LaFollette, who, as governor of Wisconsin in 1903, signed the nations first law forcing parties to conduct nominations for state-elected positions via primary elections. For LaFollette and his cothinkers, the entire point of direct primaries was to disempower the parties as institutions and empower voters as individuals. The direct primarys effects on parties were well described by V. O. Key more than half a century ago:

The adoption of the direct primary opened the road for disruptive forces that gradually fractionalized the party organization. By permitting more effective direct appeals by individual politicians to the party membership, the primary system freed forces driving toward the disintegration of party organizations and facilitated the construction of factions and cliques attached to the ambitions of individual leaders.

Direct primaries spread rapidly. Already by 1917, thirty-two of the forty-eight states required them for nomination to state offices.

Combined with the regionalization and elite orientation of the apparatuses, the primary only further fractured the party system. As a result, American parties exist more as semi-public agencies for the organization of elections than as private bodies (agencies of civil society) advocating particular programmes. State parties are compelled to hold primaries for elections they hope to contest. Courts in some states even went so far as to forbid state parties from endorsing a candidate within a primary, an unthinkable situation in comparable countries. The national party, meanwhile, can exert no real power over state parties in matters of program, candidate selection, or anything else beyond criteria for sending delegates to the national convention. Even on the national level, American parties existence is institutionally fractured. The national committees of the party exist mainly to oversee the presidential nomination process. The congressional parties each exist independently, with no institutional link to the national committees. Most staff are employed either by individual members of Congress or by the congressional caucuses, which are funded out of congressional operating expenses. In the United States, there does not exist an actual organizational analogue to the UK Labour Party or the Christian Democratic Union of Germany.

Until the 1960s, then, American parties were pointillist entities, appearing unitary only from a distance. From the late 60s onward, two changes took place. First, the parties sorted along an ideological axis, with the Republicans becoming the party of conservatives and the Democrats the party of liberals. Second, legislative and party reforms weakened the parties even further, combining with escalating campaign costs to define a new and even more unmediated role for money in determining questions of party leadership and direction.

These processes originated with the Democratic Party, and the struggle between its liberal and conservative wings. It had been clear since 1937, when Southern Democrats first turned against the New Deal, that the prominence of the undemocratic South in the party was a blockage to the ambitions of many elements (most notably African Americans and union members) within the Democratic coalition. Since the Southern Democrats never lost to Republicans, their average tenure in the House and Senate was longer than their Northern counterparts. And since committee assignments and leadership were distributed on the basis of seniority, Southern Democrats held outsize power in Congress, which they used to block liberal legislation.

Many in the party hoped that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be sufficient to displace the power of the old Dixiecrats. It was not. While Strom Thurmond famously left the Democrats for the party of Barry Goldwater in 1964, his was not the modal trajectory for his species of politician. James Eastland remained a Democratic senator until 1978, while Herman Talmadge served until 1981. In the House, John Conyers tried and failed in 1971 to strip the Mississippi Democrats of seniority, given that they remained members of a segregated Mississippi Democratic Party that was not recognized by the national committee.

Over the next few years, Democrats instead altered the rules by which committee leadership in Congress was distributed, weakening the role of seniority. Now, committee leadership assignment was in the hands of caucus leadership, creating more centralized congressional parties.

As John R. Wright has pointed out, liberal disaffection with Dixiecrat seniority was not the only force driving reform. The Democratic Party also confronted a money problem, and the congressional reforms it passed were one part of its solution to this problem. Since the Dixiecrats, even in the early 1970s, were still able to win largely noncompetitive elections, their campaign costs were considerably lower than other Democrats. And since these other Democrats were locked out of powerful positions by Dixiecrat seniority, there was a powerful incentive to either remove or dilute that seniority, in order to give other Democrats the congressional power that would bring donations along with it. As such, in addition to dethroning seniority as the sole criterion for committee leadership, congressional reforms in the early 1970s distributed power more widely among congressmembers, forming additional subcommittees and generally increasing the power of noncommittee members over legislation coming out of a given committee.

The impetus to increase the partys fundraising prowess was particularly pressing in the 1970s. Beginning in the mid-1960s, campaign costs had risen vertiginously. Driven by the increasing importance of broadcast (radio and television) advertising in political races, costs climbed ever skyward. From 1964 to 1968, total political spending jumped from $200 million to $300 million, a 50 percent climb in four years. In 1972, it reached $425 million, having more than doubled since 1964. Broadcast costs drove this increase. From 1966 to 1970, nonpresidential radio and television spending rose from $27.2 million to $50.3 million.

This explosion in campaign costs was bad news for Democrats. After the losing 1968 campaign, the Democratic Party was more than $6 million in debt. Since the mid-60s, Republicans had tapped into the small political donor market far more effectively than Democrats, using Richard Vigueries direct mail techniques to solicit money from hundreds of thousands of donors. At the same time, political action committees (PACs), pioneered by the CIO, were growing in importance.

This pressure combined with the long-standing liberal Democratic demand for congressional reform to create a powerful impetus for campaign finance reform. In 1972, the Democratic Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), and in 1974, it passed a series of amendments to the act that created a new legal environment for campaign spending.

FECA and its amendments brought a number of changes. First, they created a new legitimacy for PACs, whose legal status had previously been unclear. Labor unions in particular demanded PAC legalization as a way to protect their political work. Second, they introduced strict new disclosure requirements on campaign financing. Third, they instituted spending limits for presidential and congressional campaigns, as well as contribution limits for individuals. Fourth, they established a matching funds system, by which presidential candidates could receive public funding in return for keeping spending below a certain limit. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled inBuckley v. Valeothat the spending limits were an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech, but it affirmed most of the laws other provisions. Finally, in 1979, a further set of amendments created the category of soft money, funds spent by state and local parties on voter mobilization instead of a specific candidate.

The consequences of FECA, modified by the Supreme Court, were immense. The most immediate consequence was an explosion in PACs and their donations. In 1968, there were eighty-nine PACs. In 1982, there were 3,371. In 1968, PAC contributions to congressional candidates totaled $3.1 million. In 1982, the total was $83.1 million. Though labor had demanded PAC legalization, business was the real beneficiary.

Candidates soon began fundraising with the goal of redistributing money to their colleagues, thereby winning their support for key committee and caucus leadership positions. As with so much else in this story, Democrats led the way. In 1977, when Tip ONeill assumed his position as Speaker of the House, the race to serve under him as majority leader was conducted, for the first time, on the basis of who could redistribute most to their colleagues. Jim Wright of Texas won, setting himself up to become speaker after ONeills retirement a decade later. Two years after, Henry Waxman of California, a two-term representative, ascended to the chair of the Health and Environment Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee (on which he ranked fourth in seniority) by redistributing money to his colleagues. He founded a new PAC, the Friends of Henry Waxman, and directed $24,000 to his colleagues on the committee, who rewarded him with their votes. Seniority was, at long last, dead.

Others soon followed Waxmans example. In 1988, there were forty-five such leadership PACs, which existed to redistribute money among congressmembers. One new congressmember who proved a keen student of Waxmans approach was the representative from suburban Atlanta, Newt Gingrich. By 1998, freshmen congressmembers were launching leadership PACs before they had even been sworn into office.

In addition to initiating this orgiastic atmosphere of fundraising and redistribution, FECA cemented the weakness of American parties in another sense. By creating a campaign finance infrastructure that is completely candidate-focused, it reinforced the background role for parties as institutions. Candidates create campaign committees, and these organizations are the primary vehicles through which elections are contested. Parties hope to exercise influence on the margins.

In other words, parties didnt simply become weaker. The role they played in American politics changed. At the state level, parties are now decisively subordinate to candidates, whose nomination is not controlled by party organizations and who dont even rely on parties for fundraising or campaigning. Instead, state parties exist mainly to provide linkage with the increasingly well-funded national organizations. As one scholar, Gerald C. Wright, summed up the new role of state parties, they are no longer performing all or even most of the roles of recruitment, nomination, electoral support, and party discipline of elected officials. The activities of the formal state party organizations are more supplemental than controlling. At the national level, the story is much the same. Parties now exist primarily as networks of funders, external organizations, and campaign service vendors. Their role is to act as intermediaries between the candidates and the private market of campaign services, as political scientist John J. Coleman puts it.

The American party organizations, always weak, have become background players in American politics. They are, in the words of two prominent scholars, hollow parties, neither organizationally robust beyond their roles raising money nor meaningfully felt as a real tangible presence in the lives of voters or in the work of engaged activists. Without any real institutional powers of their own, they exist mainly as conduits through which political money can flow from source to destination.

As a consequence, the enfeebled Republican Party can exert little counterpressure against extreme candidates who run for nomination on its ballot line, particularly if they are well financed. Sometimes, as in the case of a Holocaust denier running in a deep-blue district, the only result is half a news cycle of bad press. In other contexts, however, it has cost the party wins. In 2010, Christine ODonnell, a Tea Party activist only marginally tethered to reality, beat the former Republican governor of Delaware in a Senate primary and proceeded to lose the general election by more than 15 points. In 2012, Tea Party Senate candidates in Indiana and Missouri handily won primaries against more establishment candidates and went on to lose winnable general elections, making a Republican seizure of the Senate that year all but impossible. Though these candidacies were opposed by many in the party leadership, the leaders now possessed few organizational resources with which to derail them.

Party enfeeblement is clearly not sufficient to explain the Republican Partys increasing distance from corporate political preferences. If money now rules the parties in a more unmediated fashion than ever before, one would expect the historically preferred party of American capital to be an even more servile supplicant to corporate boardrooms. Instead, the opposite has occurred. The partys steady march to the right has resulted in new levels of estrangement from capital. American capital has failed to discipline the Republican Party.

The roots of this failure lie in the transformation of US corporate political action. Compared to most other advanced capitalist countries, business is strikingly disorganized in the United States. In the 1970s, American business forged a new degree of political unity, as the economic turbulence of that decade provided both the means and the motivation to finally strike a decisive blow against the New Deal order. However, this unity quickly decayed in the absence of a powerful external foe. At the same time, changes in the structure of American corporate organization further disorganized corporate political life.

The result of these transformations has been the political fragmentation of the corporate elite. Corporate political action is now oriented less toward classwide concerns and more toward sectional and particularistic causes. Corporate managers are interested in protecting the short-term interests of their firm. They want legislation that will hurt them to be defeated, they want judges who will rule against labor and regulations to be appointed, and they want corporate prerogatives like executive pay to be untouched.

In the defense of these sorts of sectional interests, the radicalized GOP is an able partner. It also wants social welfare legislation defeated, plutocratic privileges defended, and a judicial bench stocked with reactionary jurists. However, the partys rightward peregrination has also produced quite a few negative externalities for capital, from needless uncertainty around the national debt to a devotion to minority rule that is threatening the legitimacy of a political system that has worked remarkably well for the corporate rich since the nineteenth century. The reorganization of corporate political action has left them with few resources for reducing these externalities.

American capital is unique among other advanced capitalist countries for its disorganized character. There is no national organization that is the primary representative of American employers. The roots of this go back, ironically, to the weakness of the American labor movement. Scholars of business organization noticed long ago that the organization of capital into business associations follows the organization of labor. Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal summed up the dynamic of organization in capitalist society as follows:

In all capitalist countries, the historical sequence is this: the first step is the liquidation of the means of production of small commodity producers and the merging of these into capitalist industrial firms; the second step is the defensive association of workers; and the third step is associational efforts that are now made on the part of capitalist firms who, in addition to their continued merging of capital, enter into formal organizations in order to promote some of their collective interests.

The United States has never had a dominant national business organization. The American labor movement, weak and sectional in the half-century following the decline of the Knights of Labor, never forced American business to organize. The absence of a strong socialist party similarly removed the threat of a hostile party coming into government. As a result, the first major organizations of American business, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, were organized externally, the first by William McKinleys 1896 presidential campaign, to promote its effort to rally all of American capital behind it, and the second by the William Howard Taft administration, as an effort to overcome the fragmentation of American business, which was making it harder for the administration to hear what capital wanted. In the United States, business has felt precious little pressure to organize itself.

The consequences of the resultant disorganization are considerable. As Cathie Jo Martin has argued, it is much harder for U.S. employers to think about their collective long-term interests than their counterparts elsewhere. As multiple organizations compete to represent business interests, business organizations have to themselves be concerned with their market share. They find it easier to voice short-term objections than to endorse positive policy change.

The economic crisis of the 1970s triggered a medium-term reversal of this tendency. In the late 1960s, as corporate profits began sagging, the efforts of American businesses to recoup them through intensified exploitation sparked a rank-and-file-led upsurge among American workers. At the same time, the American economy, more integrated than ever into the global economy, was falling behind its international competitors. Finally, beginning in the late 1960s, a new wave of regulatory bodies was created, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose new impositions on business could not have been, from the perspective of corporate managers, more poorly timed.

In response, American business began to organize itself with a new urgency. Two groups reacting to the economic advances of 1960s liberalism the Labor Law Study Committee and the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable had begun talks of a merger in the hopes of presenting a united business front capable of fighting not just on policies of particularistic interest to certain firms but on a classwide basis for business as a whole. In 1972, they merged to form the Business Roundtable, and the next year, the Roundtable absorbed the March Group, an informal association of big-business CEOs who began meeting in 1972 to coordinate political action.

The Roundtable was a new kind of organization for American business. Eligibility was limited to CEOs of the very largest American corporations. The Roundtable would not endorse candidates, nor would it hire lobbyists. Instead, it concentrated on building business unity and deploying it through the personal interventions of its CEOs with elected officials.

At the same time, the Chamber of Commerce was evolving. It created the position of a full-time president to run the group. In 1975, it hired Richard Lesher, who won the job primarily through his strident advocacy of free market economics. Lesher brought new life to the formerly sluggish Chamber, embarking on a dedicated recruitment campaign. In 1976, the organization had fewer than fifty thousand members. By 1980, it was closing in on a quarter of a million.

The result of this surge of business organization was a newly invigorated political voice for American business. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, Corporate leaders became advocates not just for the narrow interests of their firms but also for the shared interests of business as a whole. Though pluralist political theorists had spent much of the 1960s assuring their readers that American business had far too many cross-cutting divisions to achieve the kind of unity that would allow them to dominate politics, the 1970s unfolded as one long counterargument. Initially focused on defeating liberal legislation, such as labor law reform and consumer protection bills, American business had, by the time of Ronald Reagans election in 1980, moved to take the offensive, pushing for the rollback of long-existing elements of the New Deal order.

The very success of the business mobilization undermined its durability. By the 1980s, labor institutions were in shambles, and both parties had accepted a neoliberal policy agenda. Profits were on an upward trajectory again, and labor no longer posed a threat. In the absence of a unifying external enemy, capitalist class unity broke down. On the most basic level, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce had trouble selling membership while a friend of business like Reagan was in the White House. By the mid-1980s, Chamber membership was once again falling, dipping below two hundred thousand in 1985. One senior official explained, For the last six and a half years, youve had a President in the White House who said hed veto anything antibusiness. So why should business people bother to join? With the various threats of the 1970s receding in the rearview mirror, the divisions and disorganization that characterized American business associations for most of the twentieth century once again began to assert themselves.

Capitals victory wasnt the only cause of its disorganization. Changes in the political economy during the 1980s also worked to further fragment the American corporate elite. While many could be identified, from the shareholder revolution and the consequent decline in managerial tenure to the consolidation of interests via mergers and acquisitions, the changing place of banks in American corporate life stands out in importance.

One of the most-studied facets of American corporate life is the network formed by managers and board members of one corporation who sit on the boards of another. Since this network took shape in the late nineteenth century, banks have occupied a central place within it. Bank boards, in particular, have generally been larger than other boards and have been places CEOs and board members from other companies are gathered together. In this way, banks acted as an institutional site for the construction of classwide rationality.

Since the 1980s, however, the role of banks in the intercorporate network has changed as their role in the economy more broadly shifted. The rise of the commercial paper market, in which firms issued bonds of their own to raise capital rather than taking a loan, squeezed banks on the lending end. Consumers also increasingly had new options for savings, creating a second squeeze on the depositor end. The solution was for banks to turn to providing financial services for clients, rather than lending, to generate income. Even before the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act tore down the New Dealera prohibition on commercial banks partaking in investment banking, banks had begun to move into new activities like securities underwriting. One study of a leading bank in the late 1990s found that only about a quarter of their deals involved lending as a primary component. The goal of lending, now, was mainly to secure business in other financial services divisions.

As banks became less important as lenders, they also became less central in the intercorporate network. The average bank board size dropped by about a fifth in the 1980s. The number of directors connected to other firms dropped. Where banks were once reliably the most interlocked firms in the network, by the mid-1990s, only a minority of the most interlocked firms were commercial banks.At the same time, the corporate network as a whole became significantly less centralized. In the 1980s, Michael Useem described the inner circle of the corporate elite, comprised of those figures who sat on two or more corporate boards. This inner circle disappeared over the next few decades. In 2000, seven directors each sat on six or more boards, and forty-four sat on five. In 2010, not a single director sat on six or more boards, and only eleven sat on five or more. American corporations were becoming more isolated.

These processes were corrosive to the kind of classwide rationality American business had forged in the crucible of the 1970s. Without a common enemy, fractures among business opened back up. At the same time, the nations political economy was on a track, partially as a result of victories won by business mobilization, that further undermined businesss ability to forge a long-term, classwide perspective on politics and policy. The histories of the countrys two major business organizations, the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, both illustrate how business political action changed as a result.

The Business Roundtable had started experiencing severe internal divisions after the 1981 Reagan tax cuts blew a huge hole in the federal budget. Facing the 1982 and 1986 tax bills, the organization was divided and unable to exert significant pressure to preserve the tax provisions most favorable to business. As one Reagan administration official said of the business lobby at the time, They were brought down by the narrowness of their vision. Precisely because they defined themselves as representatives of single special interests, they failed to notice their collective power. Some issues, however, could still motivate decisive action. One such issue proved to be new Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) regulations that would have forced companies to treat stock options for executives as real costs to the business, rather than essentially free perks. The Roundtable moved swiftly into action to block the changes, inviting the FASBs research director to a private meeting with the chair of the groups accounting principles task force. The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later said he had to devote about a third of his time to this issue alone, and was constantly being threatened and cajoled by legions of businesspeople. The Roundtable had found an issue on which there was unanimity, but it was one that only confirmed how narrow and provincial corporate political action was becoming.

Over the course of the 1990s, the Roundtable went into organizational decline. To be sure, there were some key victories, as when it organized vigorously for the World Trade Organization and other free trade agreements. But observers in Washington noted that its influence was not what it once was. In 1997,Fortune magazine ran a story on its decline entitled The Fallen Giant, which noted the groups troubles achieving consensus. Around the same time, the groups president wrote a memo urging a tripling of its dues to finance more aggressive campaigning. But the move backfired, costing the group nearly a third of its membership.

In the decades that followed, the Roundtable continued to press for business-friendly policies like tax cuts and social security privatization. But the issue that spurred large-scale mobilization was, once again, a narrow question of corporate governance. This time, it was a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that would have made it easier for shareholders to elect different directors to a corporations board. In response, the Roundtable flew into action. President and CEO John J. Castellani declared, This is our highest priority. Literally all of our members have called about this. This mobilization wasnt enough, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, to kill the provision. It passed as part of Dodd-Frank. However, the Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce sued and succeeded in getting the rule removed. Researchers later estimated that the Roundtables success in protecting managerial autonomy against shareholder oversight wiped $70 billion off the value of public corporations. Once again, the Roundtables political activity focused on the narrowest and most provincial aspects of policy.

The Chamber of Commerces evolution has been even more bizarre than the Business Roundtables. The Chamber also faced significant internal dissension over Reagans deficits, and its consensus-seeking internal procedures prevented it from putting forward any plan for dealing with them. The political scientist Mark Smith provides a description of the Chambers decision-making during this period:

The organization probably could not survive without incorporating its members into decision-making. By involving its diverse membership in deliberations that set its positions, the Chamber can help avoid taking stands opposed by part of its constituency. The participation of members helps to ensure that the Chamber takes action only when there is a consensus within business. Even when decisions must be reached without large-scale consultation of the Chambers constituency, the policy committees, board of directors, and staff use available information and precedents to find the common ground supported throughout the business community.

This kind of procedure put the Chamber at a disadvantage in the increasingly fractious world of American business.

The Chamber had continued its decline from the mid-1980s until new management was brought in during Bill Clintons second term. Lesher retired and was replaced by Thomas Donohue, who pioneered a new model for the Chambers work. Rather than attempting to forge a consensus among a diverse group of companies, the Chamber would offer its resources to the highest bidder. Since the Chamber is a trade association, donations to it are not required to be disclosed. As such, it could act as a kind of shield for companies wishing to push unpopular causes that might damage their brands. Their donations to the Chamber would be secret, and the Chambers lobbyists and attorneys would be the ones to get their hands dirty. Donohue was explicit about the purpose of this business model, boasting I want to give them all the deniability they need.

This new business model was first piloted with the tobacco industry, who, as Thomas Ferguson has noted, lurks behind the scenes of many of the most important political fights of the 1990s. Facing significant pressure from Bill Clintons Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the industry needed a new strategy for fighting back, and it found the Chamber in the fight over a new cigarette tax being discussed in Congress. The Chamber offered its services to derail the bill, and Philip Morris poured over $200,000 into the Chamber in 1998 alone. As the Chamber pumped out ads opposing the bill and supplied a constant stream of lobbyists to oppose it on Capitol Hill, other tobacco companies took note of its good work and started kicking in funds. The Senate blocked the bill, and a new model of business advocacy (one can no longer call it organization) was born.

Over the next decade and a half, the Chamber would offer its reputation-laundering services to a number of different industries. When Congress considered new auto safety regulations in the wake of the Ford and Firestone recall in 2000, GM, Toyota, Ford, and Chrysler pumped over half a million dollars into lobbying to remove criminal penalties for auto executives from the legislation. Eleven pharmaceutical companies contributed over a million dollars each for a campaign about prescription drug pricing. The tidal wave of cash the insurance industry sent toward the Chamber in 2009 and 2010, however, dwarfed what had come before. In 2009, Americas Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, donated more than $85 million to the Chamber, which came to 42 percent of its funds that year. These funds allowed the insurance industry to play a double game, pledging support for reform efforts in public, all the while funding the Chambers scorched-earth campaign against a public option or any meaningful regulations on the industry. Throughout all this, Donohue continued to insist to journalists that donations to the Chamber were unrelated to its decisions to get involved in different political causes. The group was selling plausible deniability so rapidly, it seemed, it had forgotten to save any for itself.

In the three decades that followed Reagans administration, American businesss form of political action changed drastically. The united fight to tear down the remnants of New Deal liberalism was over, and business had won. Its victory, however, undermined the very conditions that had made such unity possible. Now exercising an unquestioned dominance over American politics, business found itself rent by the kinds of divisions that had seemed insignificant in the 1970s. They became, once more, as Karl Marx described, a band of warring brothers.

In this new environment, the leading organizations of American capital could no longer operate in the same way. They stopped trying to forge a classwide perspective and ceased seeking consensus. Instead, they attached themselves to the most narrow and sectional concerns of business, whether that meant shielding the tobacco industry from liability or doing everything possible to preserve managerial autonomy.

For these sorts of endeavors, a Republican Party moving ever further to the right was a profitable partner. The Republican right could be counted on to fight against any real penalties for business malfeasance, to back the most brutal slashing of the tax code, and to support judges who would maintain a ceaseless hostility toward labor unions and regulations. What Richard Lachmann describes as the autarkic orientation of American capital fit perfectly with the party becoming more and more conservative.

With the party institutionally enfeebled and corporate America more focused than ever on the narrowest, most sectional forms of political action, the way was cleared for Republican political entrepreneurs seeking to pull the party right. Even in the heyday of moderate Republicanism, during the Dwight Eisenhower administration, there was a strong constituency in the party trying to pull it further to the right. Through a combination of canny organizing, luck, and convention-rigging, these forces managed to win the party nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater, of course, proceeded to a crushing defeat at Lyndon B. Johnsons hands, an outcome many thought had sealed the fate of the party. Reagans eventual victory in 1980 proved that rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated.

Yet, once ensconced in the White House, Reagan was an inconsistent force for party conservatism. His victory in the primaries had depended on winning support from some of the partys biggest corporate funders, who had little interest in movement conservatisms various social issue obsessions. George H. W. Bushs presence on the ticket was testimony to the continuing power of this wing of the party. As noted above, after his tax cuts sent the federal deficit skyrocketing, Reagan enacted the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, greatly dispiriting his free market fundamentalist backers. But most important of all, Reagan was not much of a party builder. While he campaigned hard for GOP congressional candidates in 1982, 1984, and 1986, his 1984 campaign in particular undercut the partys efforts. His campaign was, after all, almost entirely image-based and carefully avoided ideological or partisan appeals. In 1986, the White House even ordered the Republican National Convention to avoid a partisan campaign. Moves like these did little to pull the party to the right in the way Reagans original backers had hoped he would.

That task would fall to a former history professor from suburban Atlanta: Newt Gingrich. A former Rockefeller Republican, Gingrich came to Congress in 1978 and quickly realized two things: that the old party establishments were weaker than they looked, and that his route to power meant following the money. Most accounts of Gingrichs rise in the House focus on his battles with Democratic speaker Jim Wright, whom Gingrich successfully brought down over ethics violations in 1989. Catching Wright was certainly important, but what happened behind the scenes, when the cameras werent rolling, is what allowed Gingrich to do it.

From early in his career, Gingrich was a conservative institution builder. In 1983, he founded the Conservative Opportunity Society, a strategy group for conservative congressmembers. In 1986, he took over GOPAC, a fundraising body set up by Delaware governor Pete du Pont to help maintain a healthy stable of state and local Republican candidates who could move up to higher office. Gingrich had first encountered GOPAC in 1985. He later described its impression on him, saying, There was a high dollar fun fundraiser in 1985 and I walked in and saw the amount of wealthy friends that Du Pont had. I saw so much potential that this organization and this wealth could provide.

Gingrich turned GOPAC into a force in Republican politics. He continued Du Ponts work of training candidates, sending out ideologically rigorous audio tapes candidates could listen to in their long car rides crisscrossing their districts. Over the next nine years, GOPAC would raise over $15 million, much of it from conservative business owners, to train and fund future GOP congressmembers. By the time Gingrich ascended to the office of Speaker in 1995, he estimated that 75 percent of GOP freshmen had received his largesse. As Henry Waxman had discovered a few years earlier in the Democratic Party, in the postreform Republican Party, power followed money.

Gingrichs greatest triumph, of course, came in 1994, when, under his leadership, Republicans took back the House for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. Though many observers (and, of course, Gingrich himself) attributed the victory to Gingrichs leadership and agenda, which he called the Contract with America, the evidence for his popularity is thin. In fact, 71 percent of voters reported they had never heard of the Contract, and 68 percent said they were not familiar with Gingrich (of those who were, more had an unfavorable opinion than a favorable one). Instead, as Thomas Ferguson has argued, Gingrich rode a wave of business money to victory. The Clinton administration, despite Goldman Sachs alum Robert Rubins leadership on economic policy, had managed to alienate large sections of capital. The Brady Bill stirred up the gun industry, proposed energy taxes agitated oil, and the administrations intimations about regulating hedge firms even pushed Wall Street away. Most consequentially of all, the attempt to regulate the tobacco industry through the FDA prompted a Jesse Helms protg to appoint Ken Starr (himself a lawyer for a tobacco company) to the position of special prosecutor investigating, at first, the Whitewater scandal. These companies directed a massive amount of money into the Republican Party and its candidates, which Gingrich expertly doled out to the races where it would be most impactful.

Gingrich received a unanimous Republican vote to become speaker. His time on top, however, was not to last. Mistaking the campaign funds that brought him to power for a popular mandate for conservatism, he immediately launched a budget battle with the Clinton administration, demanding cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and education spending. Gingrich refused to give Clinton a bill he would sign, prompting two government shutdowns that sent Gingrichs poll numbers through the floor.

Gingrichs defeat on the budget dealt a blow to the partys radicals. Their momentum, seemingly unstoppable a few months earlier, had been broken. The more moderate wing of the party, grouped around figures linked to the Bush administration, was ready to seize the advantage. They coalesced quickly around Bob Dole as their choice to challenge Clinton in 1996. Dole had long-standing links to the party establishment, including running as Gerald Fords vice presidential candidate in 1976. Among the partys right wing, however, Dole was viewed as Senator Straddle. To placate them, Dole selected supply-side guru Jack Kemp as his running mate and tacked right throughout the campaign.

Doles backers in the party by this point viewed Gingrich and his horde as a problem to be managed. Allies of Bush, in particular, still smarted at the memory of Pat Buchanans 1992 RNC speech calling for aKulturkampfagainst homosexuality and feminism, which many viewed as mortally wounding Bushs reelection chances. They intended to take no chances in 1996, and GOP figures from Reagan administration veterans to current governors spread the word that theatrics from the partys insurgent conservatives would not be tolerated at the convention.

Doles subsequent defeat did little to improve the party establishments position vis--vis the insurgents. Moreover, Doles decision to resign from the Senate during the campaign meant that Trent Lott, who had been a key Gingrich ally in the House, would become Senate majority leader. In the House, a chastened Gingrich moved to a more collaborative position with the Clinton administration, working quietly behind the scenes on a plan to implement cuts to Social Security and Medicare. However, the Republican Revolution was beginning to devour its own. The freshmen representatives Gingrich had brought in had already begun to turn on him for insufficient conservatism. One Clinton administration official remarked that the freshmen had become Newts Frankenstein monster.

Gingrichs freshmen were joined by Tom DeLay, a former exterminator from Texas. DeLay had won the position of majority whip after the 1994 election, and he had won it by running against Gingrichs preferred candidate. DeLay managed this upset by redistributing money throughout the House on a scale grander than even Gingrich had imagined. A lobbyist for the brewing industry made the game plan explicit: Wed rustle up checks for the guy and make sure Tom got the credit. After winning the whip position, DeLay only intensified his fundraising efforts. He hired an experienced tobacco lobbyist to run his leadership PAC, and the tobacco industry responded by contributing generously.

It was DeLay, not Gingrich, who led the Republican charge to impeach Bill Clinton. Ironically, Gingrich himself paid the price for that gambits failure, resigning shortly after the GOP lost seats in the 1998 elections. The new speaker of the House would be Dennis Hastert, whom DeLay had elevated as deputy whip in 1995. (In fact, DeLay, Dick Armey, and John Boehner had actively been plotting to remove Gingrich and replace him with one of their own.)

As the party headed into the 2000 election, then, a sort of stalemate existed between its establishment and the insurgents. The establishment had lost two presidential elections in a row, but the insurgents had led the party into two debacles the government shutdowns and the impeachment. Moreover, the insurgents had few candidates who could credibly run in 2000.

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For Republicans, There Will Be No Return to Normal - Jacobin magazine

So much of the discussion of Trumps failed coup attempt against democracy is about learning its many details. It is like putting together all the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. Understanding is very important but I think less attention has been paid to what the coup attempt means for the future.

On TV, I saw the historian Timothy Snyder explain that a failed coup is practice for a successful coup. The coup plotters and the Republican Party have been studying why the coup in 2020 failed. They are taking steps now to ensure the next coup in 2024 will be successful.

The Democrats appear asleep at the switch. They are not recognizing or responding to the magnitude of the anti-democratic threat. In their desire to normalize and be bipartisan, they want to believe both sides play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

The autocratic threat has multiple dimensions and tracks. I would mention the role of state legislatures, intimidation of poll watchers and state election officials through threats and physical pressure, replacing state election officials or stripping them of their powers and destroying faith in democracy. All these dimensions are in play.

Although Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin of over seven million votes, the currency Republicans are more concerned about is electors. In 2020, Trump needed 38 electors to reverse Bidens victory in the Electoral College. Much of the Trump teams efforts between November 2020 and January 2021 was directed at inducing Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to switch and appoint Trump electors. The vote in the Electoral College was 306-232 in Bidens favor.

Under our constitution, states appoint electors. States have always respected and deferred to the will of the voters. Electors have reflected the majority vote. What the Republican partisans are engineering is a plan to fire the voters and replace them with Trump acolytes in key state legislatures they control. That way even if the Republicans lose the popular vote, a state legislature can appoint electors they desire.

The theoretical underpinning to justify the legal argument is the independent state legislature doctrine, a favorite construct of far-right lawyers and jurists. The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the sole authority to set all election rules. What if state legislatures believe they can throw out electors and de-certify election results?

In his article in the Atlantic, Trumps Next Coup Has Already Begun, Barton Gellman looks at strategies state legislatures are already pursuing to politicize, criminalizeand interfere in election administration. In a broad way, this is about putting in places of power and decision-making proponents of the Big Lie of election fraud so that next time ballots will not decide elections.

Gellman cites examples from Georgia, Michigan and Arizona. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, found no fraud and was censured by the Republican Party and is being primaried by Jody Hice, a U.S. Congress member, promoted by Trump. The Georgia legislature stripped Raffensperger of power as chief election officer. Raffensperger famously would not find 11,780 votes for Trump.

Trump also pushed former Senator David Perdue to primary the Georgia sitting governor, Brian Kemp. Trump had urged Kemp to use nonexistent emergency powers to overturn Bidens Georgia win. Kemp refused and Trump found him insufficiently loyal.

In Michigan, the Republican Party removed Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican, from the board of state canvassers because he rejected false and unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. Van Langeveldes crime was that he voted to certify Bidens win.

In Arizona, Trump endorsed Kari Lake for governor over the current Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, because Ducey also certified Bidens win. Without evidence and after multiple recounts, Lake, a former TV anchor, called the 2020 election shady, shoddy, and corrupt.She earned the Trump nod by saying she would not have certified Bidens win. The Arizona legislature is currently debating a bill to strip the Democratic Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, of her ability to defend election lawsuits.

Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have terrified U.S. election workers. There are many examples. One Republican city commissioner on the Philadelphia Board of Elections, Al Schmidt, received this threat:

Tell the truth or your three kids will be fatally shot,along with the names of his children, his address and a photo of his home.

Schmidt received other messages: Cops cant help you,Heads on spikes and perhaps cuts and bullets will soon arrive at (his address). Schmidt had defended the vote-counting process in the face of unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia by Trump.

Rick Barron, the director of voting and elections in Fulton County, Georgia has been subject to a barrage of threats including a voicemail,you will be served lead.

Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of Milwaukees election commission has received email threats saying she deserved to go before a firing squad and she was called treasonous. Woodhall-Vogg left the state for ten days and put in extra security at her home.

According to an April 2021 survey by the Brennan Center, nearly one in three election officials feel unsafe in their job. Many non-partisan election officials are choosing to leave the profession, creating openings for the inexperienced. These code red level threats are a new 2020 phenomenon attributable to pro-Trump fanatics.

Law enforcement has largely failed to respond to the threats. A Reuters investigation in September found 102 threats of violence or death against election officials in key battleground states. Reuters could only document four instances in which someone was charged.

In August, John Keller, a senior attorney in the Department of Justices Public Integrity Section told a meeting of secretaries of state, The response has been inadequate.

Instead of responding to the threats, Republican legislators have created new laws that impose tough penalties for election officials who violate rules. In Iowa and Texas, election officials who commit technical infractions can suffer big financial penalties.

One of the worst harassment episodes was Trumps baseless attacks on two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea Moss. Trump and Rudy Giuliani falsely and repeatedly accused them of pulling false ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center. Trump slanderously called Freeman a professional vote scammer and a hustler.

The two African-American women received hundreds of death threats and racist taunts. Harassing strangers showed up at Freemans house. Even though local and state officials definitively disproved the fraud allegations, Freeman had to go into hiding.

Trump-aligned social media demonized the two women. The most recent bizarre revelation was about how Kanye Wests publicist pressed Freeman to confess to Trumps voter fraud allegations. Freeman was told she would go to jail if she did not confess.

Make no mistake,2020 saw a deliberate effort to overturn a fair and free election. The Republican Party has degenerated into believing, without evidence, that Biden cheated. Even worse, in key battleground states, they have put into important positions proponents of the Big Lie while purging non-believers in the fantasy. They have gotten zealous buy-in from tens of millions. The coup almost succeeded in installing Trump as a dictator.

The Trump forces are destroying public faith in democracy. In their world, if fraud won, then democracy is already dead and it doesnt matter what you do to win.

Gellman says the next coup will rely on subversion, not violence. If state legislatures can override voters, a far-right Supreme Court can put the seal of legality on that.

I wish I saw the Democrats as up to the challenge but they are failing. To say their response has been muted is generous. President Biden has not used his bully pulpit to fight aggressively and consistently for voting rights and the Democratic Party remains divided, without clarity of focus or message. They passively watch the fascists advance. Maybe there will be a voting rights bill but who knows.

At the same time, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have shown little inclination to go after big fish in the criminal coup. That is a failure of leadership that will come back to bite all people who support democracy.

Gellman says there is a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. We need an immediate and urgent response.

(Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.)

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Jonathan P. Baird: The Republican and Democratic response to the 2020 election raises concern for 2024 - Concord Monitor

Washington, D.C., is now the epicenter of the pandemic.

As of Dec. 23, it had 158 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents, a 541% growth in cases over the last two weeks. This was much more than Alabama, Mississippi or South Carolina, all of which had cases in the 20s or below per 100,000.

Is this because D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser cares less about controlling the virus than the governors of those three Southern states? No, if anything shes been overly zealous. Its just that the omicron surge has hit at a time when the winter season means that places like D.C. and especially the Northeast are particularly susceptible.

Other jurisdictions that have seen big increases include Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

The omicron wave should finally put paid to the perfervid fantasy, a staple of center-left thinking, that the coronavirus is somehow primarily a red state phenomenon, fueled by Republican recklessness and heartlessness.

Its been obvious for a long time that theres an enormous seasonal element to COVID-19 and that the virus itself has the most influence on the patterns of its spread and severity. The South got slammed last summer by the hard-hitting delta surge and now omicron which, hopefully, will be milder is roaring through blue states.

Of course, this context doesnt make for a useful political narrative, so the media and the left have ignored it in a hunt for cartoon villains. Last August, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman slammed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his states surge and unfavorably compared it to low numbers in New York. Of course, at other junctures of the pandemic he easily could have done the opposite.

Krugman said that DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, a charge widely lodged against him and other GOP governors supposedly responsible for running a death cult.

DeSantis has never been anti-vaccine, but has opposed vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and masking in schools. Even if one stipulates for the sake of argument that DeSantis has been wrong about all of these policies, it is ridiculous to suggest Florida would have been spared the ravages of the delta variant if he had come down differently. A New York Times analysis of vaccine mandates concluded that they have not provided the significant boost to state and local vaccination rates that some experts had hoped for.

As it happens, positions that once were characterized as the height of Republican irresponsibility opposition to lockdowns and closing schools are now such a matter of consensus that even President Joe Biden takes them for granted.

Biden more than anyone should realize that the facile belief that Donald Trump or other Republicans had it within their power to shut down the pandemic at any point was partisan opportunism and tripe.

By the unreasonable standards he and others created over the last 18 months, he stands exposed as a miserable failure. On Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was inaugurated, there had been roughly 25 million cases of the coronavirus in the United States; now there have been 50 million. On January 20, 2021, roughly 415,000 Americans had died; now, more than 800,000 have.

The truth is, even though DeSantis and Bowser have different philosophies and a different willingness to let individuals make their own risk calculations in dealing with the virus, neither wants their residents to get infected or die, and neither is responsible for a highly transmissible variant of virus hitting their jurisdiction at a time of maximum seasonal vulnerability.

Back in August, when everyone was saying he had blood on his hands, DeSantis noted that the virus was here to stay, and vaccines and treatments not ham-fisted restrictions were the best weapons against it. The virus is now hitting a different part of the country hardest, but this view remains the correct one.

(Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.)

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There never was a Republican death cult | Opinion | bradfordera.com - Bradford Era

Michael Gableman, the former Wisconsin state Supreme Court justice leading the Wisconsin legislatures Trumpified investigation into the 2020 election, is calling on the lone elected Republican who criticized him to resign.

State Sen. Kathy Bernier (R), a member of the chambersRepublican leadershipand chair of the Senates elections committee, said last month that Gablemans investigation was headed nowhere, and suggested it was a threat to democracy.

My advice would be to have Mr. Gableman wrap up sooner rather than later, because the longer we keep this up, the more harm were going to do for Republicans, she said, speaking on a panel alongside elections experts including prominent Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who has also been a critic of Trump-inspired efforts to endlessly revisit the last election.

Bernier also described this constant drumbeat of all the massive voter fraud as a charade.

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But it was another comment that attracted Gablemans attention: Berniers said that she would carry a concealed weapons permit with her when she went to see Gableman speak publicly because his investigation keeps jazzing up the people who think they know what theyre talking about,and they dont.

Gableman responded to Bernier last week while speaking at a Republican event in her home county.

If youre an elected official and youre so afraid of your constituents that you think you have to bring a firearm to see them, you should take a long hard look at what youve been doing, he said, speaking to the Chippewa County Republican Party.

And then, frankly, resign, he added.

Video of the event was first flagged by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

He is the last person on Earth who should call for anyones resignation,Bernier shot back in comments to the newspaper.

Gableman has made a practice of appearing at Republican events while conducting his investigation, including one at which he endorsed a Republican candidate for governor, Rebecca Kleefisch. He has aligned himself with election truthers, using statefundsto visit the Arizona audit as well as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindells Cyber Symposium. His investigation has apparently ramped up in recent weeks, with threats to jail the mayors of large Democratic cities.

In fair warning,I am about to start spending more money, Gableman said at the Republican event last week.

Bernier, herself a former clerk, was not always a critic of efforts to investigate the 2020 election. When the state legislature hired two former police officers to look into it, she celebrated.

This is great! she wrote on Twitter. If there is nothing to see here, that is fine, but if there is, then we should specifically address the issues.

Asked this month about the apparent shift in perspective by TPMs Matt Shuham, she replied that due diligence had been done and it was time to move on.

The evidence has been pretty clear, and is pretty clear, that there is not organized voter fraud, she said. We have enough evidence now to provide that we can have a lot of confidence in our election.

We need to move on for the greater good, she added.

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Wisconsin GOP's Election Investigator Calls On Republican Who Criticized Him To Resign - TPM

Dear Readers,

The New Year is upon us, and along with it come those resolutions. There is room for improvement in all our lives, right? As many as 70% of Americans will resolve to eat healthier in 2022. Others will set a goal to exercise regularly. And, of course, many will seek to lose weight.

Eating healthier is a lifestyle change; its as simple as that. There is no such thing as magic. There are no pills to melt fat away and no diets to trick your body into burning calories more efficiently. We have to change our habits and our thinking around food. Here are some recommendations to get you on the right track.

Eat a variety of foods. Your plate should be half filled with fruits and vegetables. Choose lean proteins, whole grains, and dont forget low-fat dairy products to fulfill your calcium needs. Eliminate fast food, junk food, and snacks after the evening meal. Save dessert for a once-a-week treat.

Calories in, Calories out. If weight loss is your goal, you simply have to burn more calories than you consume. Keep it simple. A healthy weight loss calorie level for women is 1500-1800 calories per day; for men, 1800-2000 calories a day. These levels vary according to age, weight, and physical activity.

Create a food plan. When you have a plan, you are less likely to grab something unhealthy when hunger pangs hit. Plan your meals ahead of time and write them down. Pack a lunch for work, and plan healthy snacks. A good snack consists of protein and carbohydrates, such as an apple with one oz. of cheese or one tablespoon of peanut butter, a low-sugar Greek yogurt, or cup nuts with raisins. Keep snacks to 100-200 calories each, and have 1-2 per day.

Dont get too hungry. This is perhaps the most important guideline. Many diets fail because they are too restrictive in calories or eliminate an entire food group. In this case, you may feel deprived, overcompensate, and find yourself bingeing on a pint of ice cream or a family-size bag of chips. You may feel like you have failed, making it difficult to get back on track.

Journal. Record your food intake; it helps to see it in black and white. Journaling can also help you get in touch with your feelings when you eat out of emotion instead of physical hunger.

Set realistic goals. A realistic goal for weight loss is one pound per week. The diets that claim you will lose 5-7 pounds the first week do this by depleting glycogen stores in your body. Glycogen is an intermediate energy source made up of carbohydrates. When these storage fuels are depleted, water is released with them. Hence, the rapid weight loss.

Find emotional support. Have a buddy system or join a weight loss support group like TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly). Those who join a support group have greater success rates than those who go it alone.

Finally, be patient. Habits are hard to change, and it takes time. If you follow the new health plan as best you can (not perfectly) for 30 days, you will be well on your way. By this time, you will start to see results, which will motivate you to keep up the good work.

I wish you all a happy, healthy New Year!

Leanne McCrate, RD, LD, CNSC, is an award-winning dietitian based in Missouri.

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Healthy lifestyle for the New Year | News, Sports, Jobs - Marshalltown Times Republican

Kevin S. Carpenter| St. Cloud

Minnesota Republican state legislator Peggy Bennett (District 27A)wrote a letter dated Dec. 8to the boss of some Minnesota health care workers, challenging the employers requirements for employees getting vaccinated and wearing masks, and threatening to refuse to support future state funding for this clinic. 37 other Republican state legislators added their signatures to the letter, including St. Cloud-area representatives Tama Theis and Shane Mekeland.

The letter can be found at: https://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/goppdf/KjjzzR9JvE2GyqQV2Nc_eA.pdf.

The letter was addressed to Dr. Gianrico Farrugia, CEO & President of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

In an interview about the letter, author Bennetts answers to questions reflected that the letter was based on anecdotal information rather than statistics and science.

This is so sad. First, party members of the supposed party of less government, in their roles as government representatives, decided to interfere in the business of Minnesotas largest employer.

Second, these legislators demonstrated that they do not understand that the Mayo Clinic, like most employers in Minnesota, is not democratic; it is autocratic. The leaders have to make decisions that they feel are best for the company, including its employees and, in this case, its patients. The Mayo Clinic employs 71,350 in all its locations and sees more than 1 million patients from around the world every year.

Third and foremost, these 38 Republicans decided to challenge the worlds most renowned experts in medicine on their stand on a medical issue. When faced with a serious medical condition, how many people consult the Republicans in the MN State House of Representatives rather than the Mayo Clinic?

I suggest that these Republicans work on their research skills. They should begin by reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Kevin S. Carpenter

St. Cloud

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Republican legislators come to the aid of health care workers: Letter - SC Times

The clock on congressional redistricting in New Jersey for 1972 began in 1970 when Gov. William Cahill was trying to clear the field for GOP State Chairman Nelson Gross to run for the United States Senate.

Republicans thought they could beat two-term incumbent Harrison Williams with Gross, who had served as an assemblyman from Bergen County and had close ties to President Richard Nixon. Standing in his way was State Sen. Joseph Maraziti (R-Boonton), a longtime Morris County legislator who wanted to run for the U.S. Senate.

Cahill and legislative leaders offered Maraziti a deal: in exchange for dropping his U.S. Senate bid, he would chair the committee that would redraw New Jerseys fifteen congressional districts for the 1972 election. Maraziti took the deal; Gross lost his race by twelve points.

Jersey style, Maraziti drew a district for himself.

Maraziti eliminated one of the two Hudson County congressional seats, putting Democrats Dominick Daniels (D-Jersey City) and Cornelius Gallagher (D-Bayonne) into a primary fight.

The new 13th district was hugely Republican. It started East Hanover and went through northern Morris County, picked up all of Hunterdon, Sussex and Warren counties, and ended in northern Mercer. In the 1968 presidential election, the towns in the new 13th had given Richard Nixon a 55%-36% win over Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

Not all Republicans were thrilled with the map. Assembly Speaker Thomas H. Kean (R-Livingston) and State Sen. James H. Wallwork (R-Short Hills), both potential congressional candidates in the future, saw their hometowns put into a district that went through Morris and Somerset counties into Princeton.

The map went to federal court and a three-judge panel upheld it they tinkered with the plan by moving the boundary between two Bergen-based districts so that South Hackensack wasnt split.

The new map put the entire city of Newark into the 10th, a move designed to make the 11th district seat of five-term Rep. Joseph Minish (D-West Orange) more competitive. The candidate the map was draw for was former State Sen. Milton Waldor (R-South Orange), who had lost his Senate seat in 1971 by 908 votes to Essex County Freeholder Wynona M. Lipman. (Lipman, who would later move from Montclair to Newark to survive 1973 legislative redistricting, became the first Black woman to serve in the New Jersey Senate and remained there until her death in 1999.)

Maraziti faced a primary challenge from two assemblymen, Walter Keough-Dwyer (R-Vernon) and Karl Weidel (D-Pennington), and Delmar Miller, Sr., a political newcomer from Ewing who ran under the slogan Speaking for the Silent Majority. Maraziti won big: a 7,491 vote, 50%-25% victory over Keough-Dwyer, with Weidel finishing third with 17% and Miller getting 8%.

Three Morris County candidates sought the Democratic nomination: Joseph P. ODoherty, Jerome Kessler and Norma Herzfeld. ODoherty won the nomination by 1,248 votes over Kessler, 43%-35%, with Herzfeld receiving 22%. (Kessler and Herzfeld both won Democratic legislative primaries in 1977 but lost the general election.)

During the primary, Herzfeld filed a lawsuit challenging ODohertys constitutional eligibility to run for Congress, alleging that the Irish-born Chester resident had not become a U.S. citizen until 1967.

ODoherty dropped out of the race a week after the primary.

Democratic State Chairman Salvatore Bontempo convinced former New Jersey First Lady Helen Meyner to become the replacement candidate. The wife of former Gov. Robert Meyner and the cousin of former Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, Meyner lived in Princeton but had a home in Phillipsburg, where her husband had served as a state senator.

In the general election, Maraziti defeated Meyner by 25,154 votes, 56%43%. Nixon carried the 13th by a 70%-40% margin over Democrat George McGovern.

Under a Republican-drawn map, Democrats won eight of the states 15 House seats, a net pickup of one.

Republicans held the open seat of retiring eight-term Rep. Florence Dwyer (R-Elizabeth), with State Sen. Matthew Rinaldo (R-Union) defeated former State Sen. Jerry Fitzgerald English by 27 points.

The closest an incumbent came to losing was in the Middlesex-based 15th when newcomer Fuller Brooks held five-term Rep. Edward Patten to a 52%-48% win. Nixon won the district by 22 points.

In a Camden-Gloucester district, three-term Rep. John Hunt (R-Pitman) defeated 35-year-old Assemblyman Jim Florio (D-Runnemede) by a 52.5%-47% margin. Nixon carried the 1st, 60%-40%.

Four much-heralded GOP challengers fell way short: former Nixon White House aide Bill Dowd, making his second bid to unseat four-term Rep. James Howard (D-Spring Lake Heights), received 47% of the vote. Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-Trenton) won his 9th term by a 58%-42% margin against Assemblyman Peter Garibaldi (R-Monroe); Assemblyman Alfred Schiaffo (R-Closter) lost to four-term Rep. Henry Helstoski (D-East Rutherford), 56%-44%; and Minish beat Waldor 18 points. Nixon carried all four of these districts by double-digit margins.

Daniels won the Hudson Democratic primary with 51% against West New York Mayor Anthony DeFino (32%), Gallagher (1%) and former Rep. Vincent Dellay (2%0. He received 61% in the general election.

Republican Map Flips to 12-3 Democratic

Even though Republicans drew the new congressional map, the Watergate scandal resulted in the loss of four seats in the 1974 mid-term elections that came three months after Nixon resigned the presidency.

Florio ousted Hunt by 19 points, 57.5%-38.5% in the 1st district. The GOP has never been able to win that seat back.

In the 2nd district, four-term Rep. Charles Sandman (R-Erma), the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 1973, lost his seat to former Cape May County First Assistant Prosecutor William J. Hughes by 16 points.

Democrats flipped the Bergen County-based seat of 12-term Rep. William Widnall (R-Ridgewood) by five points. The winner was Democrat Andrew Maguire, who had served in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Local newspapers aimed considerable coverage at Maraziti, whose seat on the House Judiciary Committee put him on national television as Nixons defender. He voted against all three articles of impeachment.

Maraziti also became bogged down in a scandal as he faced a rematch with Meyner.

Meyner had to first win a Democratic primary. She faced ODoherty, who now met the citizenship requirement, former Hunterdon County Prosecutor Oscar Rittenhouse, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Bernard Reiner.

Her 47% -26% win in the Democratic primary was unimpressive. She defeated ODoherty by just 3,801 votes, with Rittenhouse finishing third with 18% and Reiner at 9%. Meyner won everywhere but Hunterdon, where Rittenhouse defeated her, 49%-36%.

Maraziti put his 35-year-old girlfriend, Linda Collinson, on his congressional payroll in a no-show job while she continued to work at Marazitis Morris County law firm.

Collinson was outed after she applied for a loan with the House Credit Union. A staffer in Marazitis Washington office told the credit union that she had never heard of Collinson.

Reporters later discovered that Maraziti owned the house Collinson lived in.

Maraziti was also damaged by reports that a Warren County newspaper fired their managing editor, Donald Thatcher, after learning that he was also on Marazitis congressional payroll. Later, news broke that Nicholas DiRienzo, the general manager of two New Jersey radio stations, was also on the congressmans staff.

Meyner became one of the Watergate Babies, defeating Maraziti by a 57%-43% margin. She carried Mercer with 65%, Warren with 61%, Hunterdon with 58%, Morris with 56%, and Sussex with 51%.

There was one open seat in 1974: Rep. Peter Frelinghuysen (R-Harding) retired after 22 years in Congress. Republican Millicent Fenwick (R-Bernardsville) defeated Kean by 83 votes in the GOP primary a little more of Essex under the Maraziti map would have sent Kean to Congress. She won the general election by a 53%-43% margin against Fred Bohen, a former Johnson White House staffer.

GOP Gains

By the end of a map drawn by the GOP, Republicans had picked up just two of the seats they lost in Watergate, plus two more. In a decade, the map went from 9-6 Democratic to 8-7 Democratic. During the decade, six incumbents lost re-election.

In 1976, Republicans flipped the Bergen-Hudson 9th district seat after six-term incumbent Henry Helstoski became embroiled in a scandal. The winner, by a 53%-44% margin, was former State Sen. Harold Hollenbeck (R-East Rutherford).

Meyner held the 13th seat by 5,241 votes, 50%-48%, in 1976 against former State Sen. William Schluter (R-Pennington). President Gerald Ford had carried the district that year by a 50%-41% margin against Democrat Jimmy Carter.

But 1978, Carters mid-term election, Meyner lost.

After his close call, Schluter sought a rematch against Meyner in 1978. This time, Schluter faced a strong primary opponent, Assistant Warren County Prosecutor Jim Courter. Courter beat Schluter by just 134 votes in a campaign managed by Roger Bodman, who would go on to run Keans campaign for governor and later serve in his cabinet. Courter unseated Meyner that year by a 52%-48% margin.

Ford had also carried the 7th, 58%-42%, but Maguire defeated Republican James Sheehan, a Wyckoff township committeeman, by 13 points to secure a second term.

The Republican challenger against Maguire in 1978 was Marge Roukema, a former Ridgewood school board member.

Roukema won the primary, 39%-32%, against a well-known name in the Republican primary: Joseph Woodcock (R-Cliffside Park), who served 12 years as an assemblyman and state senator, four years as the Bergen County prosecutor, and was briefly a candidate for the 1977 Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Maguire won by six points but lost a 1980 rematch to Roukema

The Republicans also picked up the 4th district. Thompson, a 26-year incumbent and the chairman of the House Administration Committee, was implicated in the FBI sting operation known as Abscam, when an undercover agent pretending to be an Arab sheik offered the congressman a cash bribe to help him circumvent federal immigration laws.

Republican Christopher Smith was the 25-year-old executive director of New Jersey Right to Life when he challenged Thompson in 1978. He lost by 24 points.

But with Thompson under indictment, Smith beat Thompson by 26,967 votes, a 47%-41% margin. Hes held the seat for the last 41 years.

Hughes held the 2nd district seat in 1976 against the strongest possible Republican challenger, Assemblyman James Hurley (R-Millville). He won 62%-38% in a district where Carter beat Ford by two points.

In the 15th district, Republicans nearly unseated Patten.

details began emerging about Pattens involvement in the Koreagate scandal. Lobbyist Tongsun Park was charged with using funds provided by the government of South Korea to bribe six congressmen as part of a bid to ensure that the United States kept their military presence there.

The allegation against Patten was that he solicited an illegal campaign contribution from Park, including funds that found their way into the account of the Middlesex County Democrats. Patten allegedly took cash contributions from Park and then wrote personal checks to the county organization.

A 30-year-old Edison attorney, George Spadoro, challenged Patten in the Democratic primary and held him to 59% of the vote, a 6,323-vote plurality. (Spadoro would later become the mayor of Edison and an assemblyman.)

Summer headlines on Koreagate dominated the summer news, as well as Pattens testimony before the House Ethics Committee. Patten steadfastly proclaimed his innocence. In October, the Ethics panel voted unanimously to clear him of the charges. And the Friday before the election, state Attorney General John Degnan announced that he had cleared Patten of any wrongdoing in Koreagate, which had become a state issue since some of the contributions had come to the county party organization.

Patten also faced allegations that he failed to disclose his assets as required by House rules. Patten had filed a financial disclosure saying that he had no personal assets; he eventually announced that all his assets were in his wifes name.

The scandal took its toll on Patten. He won re-election, but just narrowly 48%46%, with a plurality of only 2,836 votes, against Republican Charles Wiley, a conservative radio commentator from Sayreville.

New Jersey lost one congressional seat after the 1980 census.

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The time NJ Republicans won the congressional map but lost the election - New Jersey Globe | New Jersey Politics

Looming over the Democratic primary is a political environment likely benefiting Republicans amplified by the GOPs victory in neighboring Virginia last month. One of the Democratic hopefuls told POLITICO he thinks 2022 could be the most difficult election for his party in a half-century.

The roster of candidates includes King, who is Afro-Latino; former Prince Georges County executive Rushern Baker and author Wes Moore, who are both Black; former DNC chair Tom Perez, the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic; and former Obama administration official Ashwani Jain, who is Indian American.

Among the white candidates are longtime state Comptroller Peter Franchot and former state Attorney General Doug Gansler, as well as nonprofit executive Jon Baron; and Jerome Segal, who unsuccessfully tried to primary Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin in 2018.

The demographics of the state are a key factor: Maryland is among the most racially diverse states in the country, and white people make up only roughly 4-in-10 voters in the Democratic primary.

According to the Census Bureaus Diversity Index a formula that measures the probability that two people chosen randomly will be from different ethnic or racial groups Maryland saw the largest gain of any state in the U.S. since 2010.

Moore, the only one of the Democratic candidates who lives in Baltimore, thinks the party should lean into the history-making nature of its field.

It's not lost on me that we've only had two African Americans elected as governor in this country's history, Moore said.

The reason that people become so excited about the history-making fashion of this is there is hope that [Maryland] can cross this hurdle is something that people think is real in our campaign, said Moore, a first-time political candidate and former CEO of the anti-poverty organization Robin Hood, who has picked up endorsements from several state and local lawmakers as well as two former state party chairs.

Staffers and candidates in the state caution that the race is still in its infancy. No candidate has launched a TV ad yet for the late-June primary, and candidates cant file to officially get on the ballot until mid-February. Operatives point to a Jan. 20 campaign finance report deadline as an early first barometer for the seriousness of candidates.

Party leaders in the state project optimism despite the crowded field, with no clear-cut frontrunner at this early stage. I think it actually helps the party because it brings in a variety of perspectives, said Yvette Lewis, the state Democratic Party chair. That speaks to who we are as Democrats.

Yet recent history has not been kind to Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidates, either. After Martin OMalley scored back-to-back terms in 2006 and 2010, Democrats lost subsequent governor elections to Hogan.

He trounced former NAACP CEO Ben Jealous in 2018, in a year that was otherwise a wave year for Democrats nationally. Four years earlier, Hogan shocked pundits by toppling a Democrat Anthony Brown, who was OMalleys lieutenant governor and seen as the favorite to be the states first Black governor.

In 2014, we were coming off of an eight-year run of almost annual tax increases, said Brown, who is now a member of Congress and is running for state attorney general in 2022.

While he feels this was the right approach in the years immediately following the great recession, Brown says a tax weary electorate took a chance on Hogan, who painted himself as a Republican businessman who would roll back taxes.

So a personal narrative is going to be important in 2022. But we're also going to have to make sure that we are speaking directly to issues that Marylanders are focused on, Brown said. And that means speaking to pocketbook issues.

Two Democratic candidates who came up short in previous gubernatorial bids say theyve also learned from past races.

Gansler, the former state attorney general who is running in the more moderate lane of the gubernatorial primary, said that Democrats recent losses in the state coupled with an expected tough political climate for the party nationally are why the party should nominate a candidate best suited to win the general election.

We have the most Democratic state in the country yet we lost three of the last five elections, said Gansler, who also finished second in the 2014 primary. Looking forward to next year, were staring at headwinds of what appears to be the biggest Republican year in the last 50 years.

The idea that somebody that might come out of the Democratic primary thats never held a political office and then try to take on the Hogan machine in an incredibly Republican year is myopic, he said.

Baker, who finished second in the Democratic primary in 2018, is also leaning on his tenure in government as the selling point this cycle. He ticked off three issues around which hes framing his campaign: health care, crime and education.

Asked about his loss to Jealous in the 2018 primary, Baker said his campaign was too focused on his home base in majority-Black Prince Georges County, at the expense of voters in and around Baltimore City, who didnt get a chance to know him. Of Marylands 24 counties, Baker carried only Prince Georges and neighboring Calvert, and was blown out in other parts of the state.

I tried to run a race where everyone told me I was in the lead at that time and everyone said, 'Here's what you do: You play it safe.' And that's a mistake," Baker said.

And Franchot, who has been the states chief financial officer since 2007, is also leaning on his campaign experience. The path to victory is that I have a base, and I have four statewide elections under my belt, he said. The rest of the field is fractured by very impressive, well-financed folks, but the path to victory is pretty clear.

He, too, sold himself as a strong general election candidate, and said he had no regrets, no doubts at all, about his non-endorsement in the 2018 race where he declined to back Jealous against Hogan, whom he has praised and any potential blowback this year.

For his part, King is leaning into his bailiwick: education. To bolster his liberal bonafides, then-President Barack Obamas final education secretary launched a digital ad this month challenging national Republicans characterizations that critical race theory is bigoted and racist.

The framework of the theory, developed by Black legal scholars in the 1970s, is based on the idea that race and racism are ingrained in American institutions since slavery and Jim Crow. Its become a hot-button issue in recent elections as some Republican-backed state houses have sought to ban its teaching in schools, even in jurisdictions where its not part of school curricula.

Some far-right politicians want to erase my story, says King says in the ad, who can trace his family lineage back to slavery in Gaithersburg, in now-suburban Montgomery County.

Perez the former DNC chair who also served as both the federal and state labor secretary and recently secured the endorsement of House Speaker and Baltimore native Nancy Pelosi says he plans to lean into unions for support.

"I'm proud of the support I've had in labor," Perez said, citing the role public- and private-sector unions played in helping New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy secure a second term last month, even as Democrats lost Virginia.

The race also includes two other candidates: Nonprofit executive Jon Baron; and Jerome Segal, who unsuccessfully tried to primary Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin in 2018, both of whom are white.

Marylands demographic shifts may be a boon for Democrats heading into 2022. The state saw jumps in its Asian and Hispanic populations, while the white population fell to 47 percent in 2020, down from 55 percent a decade earlier.

Black residents still make up the largest minority population, but their 29 percent of the state population remained unchanged from the 2010 census.

For Maryland Republicans seeking to retain the control of the governors mansion, the states Black population holding steady could be seen as a positive.

Mileah Kromer, the director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics at Goucher College which conducts polling in the state, says that Hogan was able to attract about 30 percent of Black voters in 2018.

But it's not clear his brand of moderate Republicanism is transferable to other candidates.

There has not been any evidence of Hogan coattails in the state, Kromer told . So that leads to the discussion of whether Hogan is a unique entity and whether that sort of brand can be run on again.

Republican Kelly Schulz, the state commerce secretary, could make history of her own by becoming the first woman to serve as Maryland governor.

She is facing state Del. Daniel Cox, who has the backing of former President Donald Trump. Schulz sidestepped questions about Trumps endorsement and its effect on the race, while highlighting Hogans support of her candidacy. She cast her candidacy as one of continuity of the popular outgoing governors tenure.

My campaign is the only campaign that is going to continue to move Maryland in the direction that Marylanders are very, very comfortable with right now."

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Dems face off in Maryland primary in an incredibly Republican year - POLITICO

Democrats are defending the narrowest of Senate majorities in 2022 as Republicans look to fight their way back into power after a series of crushing defeats.

While Democrats are going on offense in a handful of states where GOP incumbents are retiring, the party is also facing strong national headwinds in their bid to hold onto the Senate. The party of a new president in this case President BidenJoe BidenThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Bidens: Desmond Tutu's legacy will 'echo throughout the ages' Media love bad news; you don't have to MORE almost always loses ground in Congress in midterm elections.

Given Democrats slim Senate majority, control of the upper chamber is likely to come down to just a handful of states. Here are the 10 races that will decide the Senate majority next year:

Pennsylvania

With President Bidens narrow victory in the state last year and the coming retirement of Sen. Pat ToomeyPatrick (Pat) Joseph ToomeyMeet Washington's most ineffective senator: Joe Manchin Black women look to build upon gains in coming elections Watch live: GOP senators present new infrastructure proposal MORE (R-Pa.), Pennsylvania may well offer Democrats their best chance to pick up a new Senate seat in 2022.

So far, more than half a dozen Democrats have entered the race to succeed Toomey, including Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Montgomery County Board of Commissioners Chair Val Arkoosh.

And while the Democratic primary field has yet to yield a clear front-runner, the Republican field is just as fluid.

Sean Parnell, who had won former President Donald TrumpDonald TrumpThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority How American conservatives normalize anti-Semitism VP dilemma: The establishment or the base? MOREs endorsement and was seen as the likely GOP front-runner, dropped out of the race last month amid a series of personal controversies, leaving a vacuum on the Republican side. The entrance of celebrity physician Mehmet OzMehmet OzThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority McCormick drawing support from Trump alumni ahead of Pennsylvania Senate bid McCormick moves closer to Senate run in Pennsylvania MORE into the GOP primary in late November only served to shake up the race further.

Georgia

Sen. Raphael WarnockRaphael WarnockThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Democrats set for showdown over filibuster, voting rights History shows only a new Voting Rights Act can preserve our fragile democracy MORE (D-Ga.) is heading into 2022 fresh off a history-making victory in a January runoff, making the 2022 Senate contest in Georgia a test of whether Democrats can maintain their momentum in a state that has only recently become a battleground.

Republicans argue, however, that the state still leans in their direction, especially in a midterm year that is expected to be unfriendly for Democrats.

Former football star Herschel Walker, who has high name recognition in the state as well as Trumps endorsement, has emerged as the favorite for the GOP nomination. And while he still faces some primary opposition, top Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Let's be honest: 2021 wasn't all bad Your 2021 holiday dinner political survival guide MORE (Ky.) have coalesced around Walker, seeing him as the best candidate to oust Warnock next year.

Given both Trumps involvement in the race and Democrat Stacey Abramss entrance into the contest for Georgia governor, the 2022 Senate election in Georgia is quickly emerging as the epicenter of the battle for control of the upper chamber.

Arizona

Like Warnock, Sen. Mark KellyMark KellyThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Senate Democrats press for info on nursing home boosters Democrats mull hardball tactics to leapfrog parliamentarian on immigration MORE (D-Ariz.) is heading into his 2022 reelection bid having just run a competitive race in 2020, and hes among the GOPs top targets in the Senate.

But before they can take on Kelly directly, Republicans will first have to resolve a relatively crowded primary.

While polling shows state Attorney General Mark Brnovich leading his rivals for the GOP nomination, Trump has somewhat complicated that picture by publicly taunting Brnovich for not doing more to reverse Bidens win in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election. Trump also appeared at a fundraiser for another GOP candidate, Blake Masters, at Mar-a-Lago last month.

The eventual winner of the Republican primary will have to contend with Kelly, one of the most prolific fundraisers in the Senate, in the 2022 general election. Still, with Democrats facing tough national headwinds next year, Kellys seat is far from safe.

Wisconsin

Sen. Ron JohnsonRonald (Ron) Harold JohnsonThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Ukraine president, US lawmakers huddle amid tensions with Russia The Memo: Nation's racial reckoning plays out in 2021's big trials MORE (R-Wis.), one of the most despised figures by the left, hasnt yet said whether he will seek another term in the Senate in 2022, leaving Wisconsin Republicans in limbo for the time being.

The field of Democrats vying to take Johnson on, however, is vast. So far, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes has led his top primary rivals in fundraising, while also picking up high-profile endorsements from the likes of Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Cardin on future of Biden spending bill: 'A lot of us are gonna be disappointed' Elizabeth Warren goes to war against SpaceX's Elon Musk MORE (D-Mass.).

Still, Wisconsin wont hold its primaries until August, leaving the nominating contest far from settled. Meanwhile, Johnson indicated last month that he will make a decision on his political future soon. If Johnson chooses to seek another term, hell be the only GOP Senate incumbent to seek reelection in a state that Biden won in 2020.

Nevada

Former Nevada state Attorney General Adam Laxalt is the likely GOP favorite to challenge Sen. Catherine Cortez MastoCatherine Marie Cortez MastoThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Democrats mull hardball tactics to leapfrog parliamentarian on immigration Senate parliamentarian rejects Democrats' third immigration offer MORE (D-Nev.) next year. Hes already picked up the support of both Trump and McConnell, and has the benefit of already having run statewide, both successfully and unsuccessfully.

Democrats have been eager to cast Laxalt as a Trump acolyte who has backed the former presidents false claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Theyre also quick to note that Laxalt lost his 2018 bid for the Nevada governors mansion.

Still, theres little doubt that Nevada is in play for the GOP. Trump lost the state last year by only 2 points. At the same time, Republicans picked up some support among Latino voters in 2020, which could give Democrats a rockier path to victory next year.

North Carolina

Despite Trumps victories in the state in 2016 and 2020, North Carolina remains nearly evenly split between the two parties statewide. At the same time, Sen. Richard BurrRichard Mauze BurrThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Pelosi faces pushback over stock trade defense Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 MOREs (R-N.C.) decision to retire after his current term expires in 2023 has created a classic battleground scenario.

While 2020 proved disappointing for North Carolina Democrats Trump narrowly carried the state, while Sen. Thom TillisThomas (Thom) Roland TillisThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority North Carolina Democrat Jeff Jackson drops out of Senate race The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Uber - Senate debt limit drama ends; Trump legal troubles rise MORE (R-N.C.) beat Democrat Cal Cunningham in a hotly contested Senate race the party is hoping to make a comeback in 2022, even in the face of national challenges for Democrats.

For now, the Republican primary field is mired in division. Trump has endorsed Rep. Ted BuddTheodore (Ted) Paul BuddThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 North Carolina Democrat Jeff Jackson drops out of Senate race MORE (R-N.C.) for the GOP Senate nomination, but former Gov. Pat McCrory is putting up a tough fight. Another GOP candidate, former Rep. Mark WalkerBradley (Mark) Mark WalkerThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority North Carolina Democrat Jeff Jackson drops out of Senate race Democrat Jeff Jackson set to exit North Carolina Senate race: report MORE (N.C.), is considering a possible run for the House instead, though he has said he will remain in the Senate contest for the time being.

Former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley is the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. State Sen. Jeff Jackson exited the Democratic field earlier this month and threw his support behind Beasley.

Ohio

Democrats, for the most part, have rallied around Rep. Tim RyanTimothy (Tim) RyanThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Democrats confront rising retirements as difficult year ends Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 MORE (D-Ohio) as their choice to succeed retiring Sen. Rob PortmanRobert (Rob) Jones PortmanThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Ukraine president, US lawmakers huddle amid tensions with Russia Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 MORE (R-Ohio) next year, seeing him as the kind of candidate capable of replicating the success of Sen. Sherrod BrownSherrod Campbell BrownThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Ukraine president, US lawmakers huddle amid tensions with Russia Equilibrium/Sustainability New life blossoms in Antarctic ice shelf MORE (Ohio), the last remaining statewide elected Democrat in Ohio.

In the Republican field meanwhile, the candidates have lurched to the right in an effort to capitalize on Trumps success in the state in 2016 and 2020.

The former president has yet to endorse in the contest, but that hasnt stopped several of the top candidates including former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, entrepreneur and author JD Vance and former state GOP Chair Jane Timken from fighting over their loyalty to Trump.

Still, Democrats have had a tough run in Ohio in recent years, leading some to question its status as a political battleground, and for now, its still seen as leaning in the GOPs favor in 2022.

New Hampshire

Republicans were dealt a blow last month when New Hampshire Gov. Chris SununuChris SununuThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Sunday shows - Manchin says he cannot back Biden spending plan Sununu won't say if he would support a Trump 2024 run MORE announced that he would seek reelection next year instead of challenging Sen. Maggie HassanMargaret (Maggie) HassanThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Don't just delay student debt, prevent it Democrats set for showdown over filibuster, voting rights MORE (D-N.H.), denying Senate GOP leaders one of their top recruits of the 2022 elections.

Still, Republicans are bullish about their chances of ousting Hassan next year, even without Sununu in the race, arguing that she remains one of the most vulnerable Democratic Senate incumbents in the country. A University of New Hampshire poll conducted in October found Hassans favorability underwater at 33 percent to 51 percent.

Nevertheless, Republicans have yet to coalesce around a single candidate to take her on. Another potential heavyweight contender, former Sen. Kelly AyotteKelly Ann AyotteThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Manchin, Sanders will oppose Biden FDA nominee Califf Sununu setback leaves GOP scrambling in New Hampshire MORE (R-N.H.), also announced in November that she would not run.

Florida

Rep. Val DemingsValdez (Val) Venita DemingsThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 Key centrist Democrat Stephanie Murphy won't seek reelection MORE (D-Fla.) has emerged as the leading candidate to take on Sen. Marco RubioMarco Antonio RubioThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Biden signs bill punishing China for Uyghur abuses Equilibrium/Sustainability New life blossoms in Antarctic ice shelf MORE (R-Fla.), giving Florida Democrats a high-profile name on the ticket in 2022.

But beating Rubio isnt going to be an easy task. For one, Democrats have been dealt a series of stinging defeats in Florida in recent years, most recently in 2020 when Trump carried it by a more-than-3-point margin a relative landslide by Sunshine State standards.

And for the first time in modern history, Republican registered voters now outnumber Democrats.

Still, Demings is a prolific fundraiser, raking in nearly $8.5 million in the third quarter of 2021 alone. And despite the GOPs newfound voter registration advantage, Republicans say theyre taking the Senate race seriously, well aware of how expensive and unpredictable Florida can be.

Missouri

Missouri has, for the most part, become safe territory for Republicans, handing Trump a 15-point win in the 2020 presidential election.

While theres a crowded field of Republicans seeking the nomination to succeed retiring Sen. Roy BluntRoy Dean BluntThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Blunt blasts Democratic 'gimmicks' in Build Back Better as bill's future remains in jeopardy Sunday show preview: Omicron surges, and Harris sits for extensive interview MORE (R-Mo.) next year, many GOP operatives remain concerned that the state could become competitive for Democrats if disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens wins the Republican nod.

Trump hasnt endorsed in the Senate race yet, though he hasnt ruled out the possibility of backing Greitens, who resigned from the governors mansion in 2018 following an investigation into allegations of sexual and campaign misconduct.

There are still a handful of other Republicans seeking their partys nomination to succeed Blunt, including Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Reps. Vicky HartzlerVicky Jo HartzlerThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Photos of the Year Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 MORE (Mo.) and Billy LongWilliam (Billy) H. LongThe 10 races that will decide the Senate majority Members of Congress not running for reelection in 2022 Republicans fret over Trump's influence in Missouri Senate race MORE (Mo.).

Democrats are also contending with a primary of their own. Who emerges from the two nominating contests could determine just how competitive the Senate race in Missouri will be.

--Updated on Dec. 27.

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The 10 races that will decide the Senate majority | TheHill - The Hill

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin Editorial Board| Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Voting is the beating heart of democracy, the way we claim control of this government ofthe people. But in Wisconsin, an infection in the bloodstream of the body politicis threatening our ability to be self-governing.

Donald Trumps repeated lies about the 2020 election over the past year have put our democracy at grave risk, but he has not done this alone. His enablers, from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, haverefused to stand up to a dangerous man.

If they wont do their duty, then citizens must: TellJohnson, Vos and the rest to stop undermining confidencein Wisconsin elections.

EDITORIAL: Ron Johnson's dangerous shilling for Donald Trump makes him unfit to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate

EDITORIAL: Ron Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany should resign or be expelled for siding with Trump against our republic

EDITORIAL: Michael Gableman's sham investigation is a threat to democracy. A Republican leader just called him out.

Here are the facts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote in Wisconsin by about 20,600 votes; he lost nationally by 7 million. Recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties last year confirmed that he lost. Courts repeatedly threw out ludicrous challenges by Trump backers.

A legislative audit found nothing that would call the results into question.

A conservative group found no widespread fraud.

And an Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states that the former president complained about foundfewer than 475 votes in dispute.Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; thedisputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his margin in those states.

In other words, there was no steal and nothing to investigate. Just lies.

But the Republican sycophants in Wisconsininsist on appeasing Trump.

After Trump hectored him last summer for not doing enough to investigate and spread the former presidents lies, Vos launched a partisan review with former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman at the helm. Gableman bungled it, choosing to talk to more conspiracy theorists than electionexperts. His work has been anembarrassment to the state,even to many Republicans.

In November, Johnson literally called for the takeover of federal elections by the partisans in the Wisconsin Legislature. In other words, his own party. Johnsonsaidlocal officials should ignore the bipartisan Elections Commission that his own party set up six years ago.

Thestench of racism permeates much of this, especiallyefforts by Republicans to clamp down on access to voting. People of color are likely to be most affected.

But the lying also corrodes trust in the most basic act of democracy.

A wide majority of Republicans 68% nationwide according to a Marquette University Law School Poll in November dont have confidence in the 2020 election.

This growing lack of trust opens the door for more problems in 2024. If every election a politician loses is now somehow rigged, then the very idea of elections is suspect.

This breakdown in faith could lead to what Trump falsely claims happened to him: a stolen election.

Imagine if in 2024 a Democrat once again carries the popular vote in Wisconsin in a close presidential election, but the Republican-dominated Legislature chooses to certify an alternative slate of electors to cast the state's 10 electoral votes. It could make the chaos following the 2020 vote look like child's play.

Johnson would be happy to take the first step toward such a corruption: He would seizecontrol of election oversight taking that job away from a bipartisan commission. Similar efforts are ongoingin other battleground states.

Laura Thornton, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, has seen it all before. The German Marshall Fund is a non-partisan policy organization that advocates for democracy and human rights around the world.

I spent more than two decades living and working overseas to advance democracy and credible elections giving me plenty of opportunity to see the lengths to which autocrats will go to gain power,"Thornton wrote of Wisconsin recently.

"Even so, the proposed Wisconsin power grab is shocking in its brazenness. If this occurred in any of the countries where the United States provides aid, it would immediately be called out as a threat to democracy.

RELATED: Why international election observers would give Wisconsin a failing grade

We believe the state should do all it can to make it easier for everyone to vote. With that in mind, we supported drop boxes and other outreach, especially with a deadly pandemic raging. But there is also no doubt that the conduct of elections can be improved.

Installing cameras to monitor drop boxes strikes us as a reasonable idea. Beginning the counting of absentee ballots before election night so the final results can be learned earlier is another.

EDITORIAL: Wisconsin should allow clerks to start counting absentee ballots before Election Day

Unfortunately, instead of actually caring about improvingelections, Johnson,Vos,and others in the Legislature have chosento pander to Trump.

Citizens canstill have the final say, but they mustband together now to protest this nonsense. Now is the time not next year, not the year after.

Now is the time to tell these so-called leaders to find their backbones and stand up to Trump.

To tell them to cut offGablemans $676,000 taxpayer-funded budget.

To tell them towork with Gov. Tony Evers on constructive changes that strengthensthe electoral process for all Wisconsinites.

To tell them to let the Elections Commission do its work.

And, perhaps most important,to insist that they respect the results of elections.

When leaders are so willingto put at risk the most successful democratic experiment in human history, the beating heart of democracy is in danger.

But it's not too late to defend it.

Editorials are a product of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin editorial board, which operatesindependently fromthe network's news departments. Email:jsedit@jrn.com

Why we write editorials. Meet theeditorial board.

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Democracy is at risk from repeated Republican lying about the 2020 election. You can stop this nonsense. - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel