Russell Berman

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.

Shortly after 4 p.m. this afternoon, the sunburned visage of Steve Bannon popped up on a projector screen inside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist was sitting in what appeared to be a holding cell in lieu of a courtroom, wearing an open-collared shirt, a white mask, and handcuffs.

Barack Obama didn’t try to inspire Americans tonight: He wanted to scare them.There were no thousand-watt smiles or soaring rhetoric from the former president as he exhorted voters to elect Joe Biden and warned them about the perils of giving Donald Trump another four years in the White House.

The opening night of the Democrats’ virtual convention was the beginning of a coronation for Joe Biden, but it was also a victory march for Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor and a supposed hero of the coronavirus pandemic. “For all the pain and all the tears, our way worked,” Cuomo declared in his five-minute speech. “And it was beautiful.

House Democrats have been waiting for more than a year to grill Attorney General Bill Barr, a man they’ve accused of all manner of professional misconduct—including repeatedly and inappropriately intervening to protect President Donald Trump and deploying federal agents to incite violence in American cities.Today they finally had their chance, as Barr testified, at long last, before the House Judiciary Committee.

Forget Bernie Kerik, Scooter Libby, Michael Milken—even Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This was the presidential reprieve President Donald Trump’s critics feared most.Trump’s move tonight to commute the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone, nearly five months after a federal judge sentenced him to more than three years in prison, was surely the least surprising of his many high-profile acts of executive clemency.

House Democrats have already impeached President Donald Trump. Now they’re going after the man they call his new “fixer,” Attorney General Bill Barr.Barr, however, is proving to be a more slippery target than the president, both physically and politically.This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the alleged “politicization” of the Justice Department featuring alarming whistleblower testimony.

Rarely has a single campaign rally drawn as much hype as the one President Donald Trump held Saturday night at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma—a relaunch of his reelection bid that, according to the president himself, more than 1 million people had requested tickets to attend. Rarely has a presidential event endangered the public health of the community it was held in. And rarely has a spotty crowd made such a statement.

David Dee Delgado; John Lamparski / Getty; Paul Spella / The AtlanticThe clash between police and protesters that, once and for all, seemed to sever Bill de Blasio from the city that twice elected him mayor occurred on a Brooklyn street corner just over a mile from where he used to live.