What to Watch For in Today’s Primaries – The New York Times

In recent weeks, under a Trump campaign megadonor who was recently named the postmaster general, the Postal Service has cut back on overtime pay, prompting delays in deliveries and raising concerns that a similar slowdown this fall could affect the timing and integrity of election results.

On Tuesday, Mark Dimondstein, the president of the union that represents 200,000 postal workers and retirees, said the president’s claims about voting by mail and his suggestion that the election could be delayed had put the country on “a dangerous path toward dictatorship.” Since 2000, “more than 250 million votes have been cast by mail, including 31 million in the 2018 election, virtually absent of fraud,” Mr. Dimondstein added.

Even if Michigan’s primary election Tuesday wasn’t plagued by the long lines that hampered other states in 2020, there still are a number of things that keep Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson up at night.

“First, just preparing for November,” she said in a call with reporters Tuesday night. “Next, how many otherwise valid votes will be rejected because of significant increases in absentee voting.”

Ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but aren’t delivered to local clerks until after the election must be rejected. In Michigan’s March presidential primary election, 4,683 ballots were rejected for that reason. And she expects that there will be even more thrown out later this week when clerks receive tardy ballots from the U.S. Postal Service.

A record number of Michigan voters — more than 1.6 million — chose the absentee ballot route for Tuesday’s election. But 2,065,411 requested absentee ballots. It’s not clear if the gap was because of late mail service or people who chose not to cast their ballots.

But in a battleground state like Michigan, where the 2016 presidential election was decided in Mr. Trump’s favor by the narrow margin of 10,704 votes, Ms. Benson said it’s critical that all votes be counted.

She said there were a number of things that the federal and state governments could do to make it easier to run elections: The federal government should provide up to $15 million more in funding to pay for things like additional high speed tabulators for absentee ballots and fully fund the U.S. Postal Service to ensure timely delivery of the mail; the State Legislature should pass laws that would allow clerks to begin processing absentee ballots before Election Day and allow absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted.

“In November, we’ll have potentially three million ballots sent through the mail,” she said. “And we’ve essentially reached the limits of our system.”

While in-person voting went smoothly in Michigan, the surge in absentee voting will most likely result in delayed results, Ms. Benson said, as local clerks continue to count ballots through the night and into the day Wednesday.

“None of us want to be the last state to report our results in November,” she said.

Representative Rashida Tlaib marked her first day in Congress in January 2019 with an expletive-fueled call to impeach Mr. Trump. It made her an instant Democratic star as she became part of the four-member Squad, the group of progressive Democratic women who were elected to the House in 2018 and have come to embody the vanguard of the party’s liberal grass-roots energy.

While popular with the Democratic base, Ms. Tlaib’s broadside didn’t win her many friends in the party’s House leadership, which held off impeachment proceedings for months before allowing them to begin last fall.

It also fueled whispers back home in Detroit that Ms. Tlaib, a Palestinian-American who was one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, was more eager to advance a national profile and fund-raising network than she was in representing her predominantly Black district.

Now the most endangered member of the group, Ms. Tlaib faces a rematch with Brenda Jones, the Detroit City Council president she defeated in the 2018 primary. (In a separate contest held the same day, Ms. Jones eked out a two-point victory over Ms. Tlaib in a special primary election to serve out the remainder of the long-serving Representative John Conyers’s term after his abrupt resignation.)

Ms. Jones has now regrouped to challenge Ms. Tlaib, arguing that she has become too preoccupied with national issues.

Ms. Tlaib has raised far more money, $3 million, than Ms. Jones, who posted just $165,000 in her latest Federal Election Commission report.

And while she has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most muscular disrupters, Ms. Tlaib retained the endorsement last week of its most significant establishment figure: Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since the 1930s. But for months, Republicans in Washington and in the state have feared that if Mr. Kobach wins the party’s Senate primary, a traditionally safe seat will be endangered — and so will the Senate majority.

Mr. Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is an incendiary figure in state politics, known for his hard-line views on immigration and voting rights, and his 2018 loss in the governor’s race to Laura Kelly, a Democrat.

Top Senate Republicans, long wary of Mr. Kobach and his 2018 performance, have pleaded with Mr. Trump to endorse Representative Roger Marshall, whom they see as the strongest general election candidate in a crowded field. But the president has remained on the sidelines, stoking tensions between Senate Republicans and the White House.

The winner of Tuesday’s primary is expected to face Barbara Bollier, a Democratic state senator who was until recently a Republican herself.

A statewide race remains a challenge in Kansas for any Democrat, regardless of the Republican nominee. But as Mr. Trump’s faltering approval ratings have endangered Republican candidates in down-ballot races across the country, there is a growing sense that the outcome even in deep-red Kansas is no sure bet.

The results on Tuesday may help determine just how competitive the state is come November.

An increasingly bitter Democratic primary in St. Louis between the activist Cori Bush and Representative William Lacy Clay, a 20-year incumbent with the party establishment’s full backing, will be one of the most significant tests this summer of the power of the resurgent progressive wing of the party.

Mr. Clay and his father, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, have held the seat in Congress for more than 50 years, and the congressman had routinely sailed to re-election until Ms. Bush challenged him in 2018.

He prevailed then by about 20 points, and this time around, Mr. Clay wants to make a show of blunting the progressive movement against primary incumbents like himself.

If Mr. Clay loses, he would be the first Black congressman to fall to a challenger backed by the Justice Democrats, a progressive national group that helped fuel the rise of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. So far, the long-serving House members, like Eliot L. Engel and Joseph Crowley in New York, who Justice Democrats-backed candidates have succeeded in upsetting have all been white, in many cases representing racially diverse districts.

Ms. Bush, an activist who jumped into the political arena after the police shooting of Michael Brown six years ago, responded in a recent interview with The Times to Mr. Clay calling her a “prop” for the Justice Democrats.

“I had no title, no name, came out of the Ferguson uprising and people know who I am across the world,” Ms. Bush said. “Not because I took money from some group — none of that. It is because I stayed true to a message of change for real people.”

Four years and two electoral defeats since he last held office, Joe Arpaio is asking Republicans in Maricopa County, Ariz., to return him to his former role as sheriff of the state’s largest jurisdiction.

But Mr. Arpaio, 88, is no longer the towering local figure who had forced inmates to wear pink underwear, castigated illegal immigration and who, well after former President Barack Obama left office, continued insisting the 44th president wasn’t born in Hawaii.

Mr. Arpaio lost a 2016 re-election bid to Paul Penzone, a Democrat, then finished a distant third in the state’s 2018 Senate primary, winning just one of the state’s 15 counties. His comeback bid, like his Senate race, is fueled more by his name recognition and repeated attempts to tie himself to Mr. Trump than it is by any sense of how he would run the sheriff’s office.

Now, Mr. Arpaio is involved in a three-way race that includes Jerry Sheridan, his former chief deputy. But it is Mr. Penzone, the Democrat, who has the support of the state’s Republican establishment figures, who find Mr. Arpaio’s antics generally embarrassing and hurtful to Arizona’s business climate.

What Republican voters in Phoenix and its suburbs will decide Tuesday is whether the best way to help Mr. Trump carry a key battleground state is by putting one of his most enthusiastic supporters on the ballot — or if the party’s fortunes can be improved without Mr. Arpaio, a candidate guaranteed to mobilize the state’s ascendant Latino population.

Mr. Trump played down the accomplishments of Representative John Lewis, the recently deceased civil rights icon, and criticized him for not attending the Trump inauguration in January 2017.

The comments from Mr. Trump, in an interview with “Axios on HBO” that aired Monday night, were unsurprising, given his penchant for grievance. But they were nonetheless stunning for the degree to which Mr. Trump refused to view Mr. Lewis’s life and legacy in terms beyond how it related to Mr. Trump himself.

“I never met John Lewis, actually,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK. That’s his right.”

Asked to reflect on Mr. Lewis’s contributions to the civil rights movement, Mr. Trump instead talked up his own record.

“Again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have,” he said. “He should have come. I think he made a big mistake.”

Senator Kamala Harris of California, a Democrat being seriously considered as a former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, said Mr. Trump’s comments proved he was “petty” and unfit to serve.

“There’s nothing about Donald Trump that is generous; he’s generous to himself, but he has no generosity toward an icon, a hero who has been described as a saint, John Lewis, or the American people, quite frankly,” she said in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump declined to say whether he found Mr. Lewis’s life story “impressive.” He seemed indifferent to renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., after the congressman. The bridge, named after a former Confederate general, Grand Dragon in the K.K.K. and senator, was the site of a turning point in the civil rights movement that became known as Bloody Sunday.

On that day, March 7, 1965, Mr. Lewis suffered a cracked skull during a march across the bridge when a state trooper clubbed him and beat him to the ground. The moment was a defining one in his life and in the civil rights movement. Mr. Trump, in the Axios interview, suggested there “were many others also” whose work should be praised.

Election integrity experts told Congress on Tuesday that without an immediate, substantial infusion of federal funds to help administer November’s general election, many voters — particularly Black and other minority voters — could be disenfranchised.

“With less than three months until the November election, Congress must act now so states have enough time to make the necessary changes and plans, recruit and train workers, buy equipment, and do outreach to the public about new voting processes,” Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said in written testimony to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Primary elections around the country this year — plagued with long lines, polling place closures and high rates of ballot rejection — have exposed “significant barriers to voting for certain individuals, especially Black and brown voters,” Ms. Albert said in her written testimony.

“Longstanding disparities, including long lines, the ballot rejection rates, particularly of Black and brown communities, are now exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic,” she said Tuesday. “The chasm of those with access is growing larger. Voters of color are on the losing end.”

Several states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Indiana, saw voting machine glitches and other failures that contributed to long waits.

“Without proper funding, the problems seen in previous elections are going to be just the tip of the iceberg this November,” she testified.

David Levine, an elections integrity fellow with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told the panel that many states and counties lacked the resources needed to offer alternatives for safe and secure elections amid the pandemic, like “robust voting by mail, early voting, and Election Day options.”

The stimulus law enacted in March provided $400 million to states for administering elections, but one study said the need was 10 times that. In May, the Democratic-controlled House passed another pandemic relief bill that would provide $3.6 billion in additional election funding, but that plan has run into a brick wall in the Senate, where there is little appetite among Republicans for such spending.

The dispute is one of the issues fueling a stalemate between the White House and congressional Democrats on a sweeping economic recovery package. Mr. Trump has cast doubt on the idea of expanding mail-in voting to make it safer for Americans to cast ballots during the pandemic, saying that it would lead to widespread fraud. But there is no evidence that the practice leads to higher incidence of voter fraud.