Russell Berman

The people who fear the most for the future of American democracy weren’t watching the election returns in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this month for clues about next year’s midterms. These voting-rights advocates didn’t pay much attention to who won mayoral or school-board races. Instead, they’ve spent the past two weeks trying to discern how many Donald Trump loyalists captured control of elections in a pivotal 2024 swing state: Pennsylvania.

The progressives blinked.For months, the feisty left flank of the House Democratic Caucus insisted it would not provide the votes to pass Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package until the Senate first approved the rest of the president’s economic agenda.

The progressives blinked.For months, the feisty left flank of the House Democratic Caucus insisted it would not provide the votes to pass President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package until the Senate first approved the rest of the president’s economic agenda.

The Democratic Party’s push to protect future American elections from GOP suppression and subversion is once again largely in the hands of the moderate senator from West Virginia. For the second time this year, Republicans today unanimously blocked voting-rights legislation from coming up for debate in the Senate. Democrats have the ability to pass the legislation on their own, but only if Manchin—among others—will allow them to do so.

The Democrats, you may have heard, are in disarray. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and his expansive economic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill. Opposition from progressives forced House leaders to scrap a planned vote Thursday on the president’s lone bipartisan success in the Senate, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. That failure, and the ensuing finger-pointing, threatens to drive the party’s warring wings even further apart.

In an Oval Office meeting with House progressives last week, Joe Biden made a joke about how much had changed in his long career: “I used to be called a moderate,” the president mused. He was, at that moment, trying to mediate a Democratic Party struggle between the left-wing lawmakers sitting before him and the moderates he had hosted a few hours earlier. When the meeting ended, Biden pulled aside Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington State.

Losing a war undermines the public’s trust in any leader. But the setback causing the most damage to Joe Biden’s political standing likely isn’t the U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan—it’s the frustrating home-front struggle against the resurgent coronavirus pandemic.Support for Biden’s performance as president has tumbled in the most recent batch of polling.

Until Andrew Cuomo actually uttered the words “step aside” shortly after noon today, the prospect that he might resign seemed hard to fathom.

The moment the gavel came down on the Senate’s passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act today, the bipartisan bill began a new life as a 2,700-page legislative hostage.For President Joe Biden, securing the votes of well over a dozen Senate Republicans on one of his top legislative priorities is an achievement that many doubted was possible.

The much-ballyhooed bipartisan infrastructure agreement was always a shaky proposition. When President Joe Biden announced the accord last month—“We have a deal,” the beaming president proclaimed outside the White House, flanked by 10 beaming senators—all the negotiators had agreed to was an outline, a three-page sketch of how to spend $1.2 trillion on roads, bridges, rail, and broadband, and a list of “options” of how to pay for it.

To many Americans, Brad Raffensperger is one of the heroes of the 2020 election. Georgia’s secretary of state, who is a conservative Republican, refused then-President Donald Trump’s direct pleas to “find” the votes that would overturn his defeat in the state. “I’ve shown that I’m willing to stand in the gap,” Raffensperger told me last week, “and I’ll make sure that we have honest elections.

Democrats have cast in dire terms their push to protect and expand voting rights before the next national elections. “Failure is not an option,” Senate Majority Chuck Schumer has repeatedly declared, making the oft-broken vow that leaders in both parties assign to their tippy-top priorities. This afternoon, Schumer brought up his party’s broad election-reform bill for an initial procedural vote, and it failed.

The announcement seemed to catch everyone off guard: Early Thursday afternoon, the government told Americans that if they were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, they did not need to wear a mask—indoors or outside, in groups small or large.People who have gotten their shots, Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, said at a White House press briefing, “can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.

One of the many Republican principles that Donald Trump obliterated was what was known as Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Like several of the stone-tablet dictates (the prohibitions on committing adultery and bearing false witness come to mind), this directive was lightly followed and rarely enforced—politics is a rough sport.

To hear Democratic leaders decry gerrymandering as part of their current bid to enact landmark voting-rights legislation, you’d think the centuries-old practice was a mortal threat to the republic. But political necessity could soon demand that Democrats drop their purity act. To keep their narrow House majority, they might have to deploy the tactic everywhere they can, and every bit as aggressively as Republicans do.Nowhere are the stakes higher for Democrats than in New York.

A few months after losing the White House, Republicans across the country have had a revelation: The Electoral College could use some improvements. The problem is that they have contradictory proposals for how to fix it—and contradictory arguments for why those proposals would help Americans pick their president. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers want to award Electoral College votes by congressional district, just like Nebraska and Maine currently do.

Every other January, the 435 members of the House of Representatives convene in the Capitol and determine, as their first order of business, who will lead them for the next two years. The roll is taken, and one by one, each member says aloud their choice for speaker. In 2015, nearly every Democrat cast their vote for Nancy Pelosi, the longtime party leader. Not Kyrsten Sinema.

In the view of the Oregon Republican Party, what transpired on January 6 was not an insurrection and the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol were not supporters of Donald Trump. Rather, the uprising that the world witnessed that day was a “false flag.” Its aim, according to the party, was to discredit Trump and “advance the Democrat goal of seizing total power, in a frightening parallel to the February 1933 burning of the German Reichstag.

The nation’s most ambitious police reform starts today.Few states made concrete and comprehensive changes in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis—in part because the politics of doing so are usually difficult. But Gurbir Grewal, the 47-year-old Democrat who was appointed New Jersey’s attorney general in 2017, doesn’t have to worry about persuading recalcitrant legislators or winning reelection.

Inside the headquarters of the Department of Commerce in downtown Washington, D.C., just around the corner from the White House, sits an expansive suite of offices reserved for the American government-in-waiting.

For the past three presidential elections, New York’s Twenty-First Congressional District—a humongous swath of rural, mountainous territory known as the North Country that’s closer to Canada than to the Big Apple—has voted along with the nation: Its constituents backed Barack Obama twice before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016.

President Donald Trump tonight raised the threat of a constitutional crisis to a new level. He issued an extraordinary series of baseless charges about the election he is on the verge of losing—that Democrats were stealing the vote, that the media had deliberately released “phony polls” to suppress Republican turnout, that “corrupt” officials in Detroit and Philadelphia were finding Democratic ballots to whittle away his supposed lead.

President Donald Trump likes to dabble in conspiracy theories, and he does not like to contradict his base. So it should come as no surprise that the president tonight refused to denounce the warped conspiracy-theory movement known as QAnon, which posits that a global cabal is torturing children, and which exalts Trump as its savior.Yet if Trump no longer has the power to surprise, he still has the power to shock.

In perhaps the most chaotic week of a chaotic presidency, what was most surprising about tonight’s vice-presidential debate was how oddly normal it felt.Five days ago, the president of the United States was hospitalized after contracting a virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans. There were legitimate questions about whether Donald Trump could execute the powers of his office.

September 26 was a festive day for Republicans in Washington. Under overcast skies, President Donald Trump strode to a podium in the White House Rose Garden to introduce Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

President Donald Trump’s grand plan to demolish Joe Biden at tonight’s first presidential debate was shockingly simple: He merely wouldn’t let the former vice president complete a sentence.Trump talked over his Democratic challenger—and the frustrated moderator, Chris Wallace—from the opening moments of the debate, bullying Biden with a barrage of personal attacks (“There’s nothing smart about you, Joe”) and outright lies.

Updated on September 18, 2020, at 8:47 p.m. ET.A furious battle over a Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the last thing the United States needs right now.The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today represents a devastating loss for feminists who held up the 87-year-old as an icon of women’s rights, and as a bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court.

For the better part of a year, Senator Edward Markey was a legislator spiraling toward a forced retirement, a veteran progressive whose legacy in Massachusetts would soon be reduced to a footnote in the latest chapter of the Kennedy dynasty. Polls taken last fall showed Representative Joe Kennedy III trouncing Markey in a Democratic primary; at the height of the coronavirus pandemic this spring, it was unclear whether Markey could even muster enough signatures to get on the ballot.

Never has the simple tense of a verb revealed so much about a political party—or seemed so plainly out of touch with reality.“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention.

Yes, the mail really has slowed down recently. No, the delays are not part of a dastardly plot to steal the election on behalf of President Donald Trump.That was the two-pronged message that Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general, delivered this morning to the Senate—and, by extension, American voters—as he confronted a national uproar over whether the Postal Service can, and will, handle a surge in mail-in balloting this fall.