| | | | |  | | By Zach Montellaro | Presented by Shut Down SHEIN | | 
Former U.S. President Donald Trump with fellow election denier and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake at a rally during her campaign in Mesa, Arizona. | Mario Tama/Getty Images | IN DENIAL — The 2022 election was cast as a defining moment for the future of American democracy, as ballots were filled with election conspiracy-minded candidates running for the offices that actually oversee elections.
Most of the focus — including from yours truly — was on the very top of the pyramid: secretaries of state, who in most states serve as the chief election official. A cadre of Trump-aligned election deniers ran for that position in battleground states across the country.
Every single one of them lost, either in a Republican primary or to a Democrat in November. At the time, it was framed as a big victory for “lowercase d” democrats — the collective wins of election officials who aren’t likely to entertain a Trumpian attempt to overthrow an election were viewed as a critical bulwark for the security of the 2024 results. Don’t be so sure. A new report shared first with Nightly from Informing Democracy — an under-the-radar research nonprofit of election experts, researchers, and lawyers — argues that while it was a normative good that those top-of-the-ticket candidates lost, people are missing the forest for a few particularly tall trees. In short, the report represents the pessimist’s case for the state of American democracy. Yes, some of the most notorious election deniers and conspiracists were defeated. But the true threat, the report argues, comes from the local level — from officials who are the ones literally counting the ballots and certifying elections, or state legislators in charge of making new election law. And so-called “anti-democracy” officials are thriving there. “The reality of how elections are run is that it's local officials at the county and municipal level who are the ones who actually have the most responsibilities around ensuring that votes are counted and that elections are run and decided properly. By and large, nobody was really thinking about that,” Peter Bondi, Informing Democracy’s managing director, told Nightly. “Now, we're seeing that trend spread and seeing these actors be emboldened by some of the obstructionist tactics that they were moderately successful with in the last election.” Informing Democracy focused on six swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and identified over 200 current officials “who provoke concern due to anti-democratic tendencies or actions.” That includes 110 state legislators, and 94 local officials with some role in the elections process, including those who oversee the all-important certification of the results. Perhaps the most concerning among that group are those who looked to stop certification in 2020 or 2022, or advanced misinformation about voting machines — obvious slam-dunk candidates to cause problems in the future. The report further states — though arguably in less convincing fashion — that officials who voted against things like expanded voting hours in local counties are at risk of sliding down that same anti-democratic slope, arguing they are “obstructing opportunities to vote.” Even if they aren’t grabbing headlines, recently there have been many ominous signs. Throughout the midterms, a handful of counties across the country threatened to not certify the election results for no good reason, with some only relenting after a court order. In some places, there is an ongoing push to hand-count ballots — something election officials of all stripes say results in costlier, slower, and less accurate elections. Experienced, apolitical election officials continue to resign or get pushed out of office, notably in Texas and in Virginia. The report notes that many of these local officials — the ones holding elected positions — don’t receive much political scrutiny, rarely even facing a primary or general election challenge. The good news? Even though threats to the elections system are still rampant, most local election officials — Republican or Democrat — are trying to hold fair elections. “For the officials that are really focused on [election conspiracies and denialism], we're not seeing momentum fade,” Bondi said. “But one thing that gives us hope is that this isn't a partisan issue.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at zmontellaro@politico.com or on Twitter at @ZachMontellaro.
| | A message from Shut Down SHEIN: SHEIN has become a nefarious, fast-fashion juggernaut that’s a major threat to U.S. national security. SHEIN is likely violating U.S. law, committing “crimes against humanity” through slave labor in China, and engaging in anti-competitive and insidious business practices – all while harvesting information on as many Americans as possible for the Chinese Communist Party. Learn why Washington must Shut Down SHEIN! | | | | | — House Republicans pass bill restricting transgender athletes from women’s sports: House Republicans approved their measure to restrict transgender students from playing on women’s sports teams on a 219-203 vote this morning. The legislation bars transgender women from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity and amends Title IX, the federal education law that bars sex-based discrimination, to define sex as based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth. The bill has no chance of becoming law as it is likely to stall in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and President Joe Biden has already announced that he would veto the bill if it were to reach his desk. — BuzzFeed News to shut down: BuzzFeed News is shutting down, the company’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, said today in a memo to employees. According to Peretti’s memo, shared with POLITICO, the move is part of a 15 percent reduction in BuzzFeed’s workforce — about 180 employees. BuzzFeed News launched in 2011. In 2021, BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize and was also named a Pulitzer finalist. — FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship craft after explosion minutes into launch: The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX’s Starship rocket today after it exploded on its first test flight and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket, powered by 33 Raptor engines, tumbled and came apart about four minutes after the launch in Boca Chica, Texas. Starship had no people or satellites on board. — Appeals court presses pause on House GOP subpoena to former Trump prosecutor: An appeals court temporarily halted a planned deposition of former Trump prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, delaying an effort by House Republicans to investigate the office of the Manhattan district attorney. The brief pause gives the court time to consider arguments from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that a subpoena for Pomerantz’s testimony is unconstitutional.
| | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | | HAMLET ON THE HACKENSACK — POLITICO’s Rachel Bade reports that a few weeks ago, Chris Christie called up a former Republican presidential candidate and asked for some advice: Should he mount a second presidential run in 2024 — facing off against former President Donald Trump for a second time — or was the idea just plain crazy? Taking down the most dominant Republican political figure in a generation, the 60-year-old former two-term New Jersey governor has calculated, requires taking direct aim at Trump’s weaknesses — his questionable character, his lack of discipline and, most of all, his losing record. It became perfectly clear over the course of a nearly hour-long interview that Christie is itching to launch a campaign — not only is he gleefully throwing haymakers to reporters, he’s already hosted one New Hampshire town hall this year and will host another Thursday. But as he mulls whether to make it official in the coming weeks, he says his decision comes down to: Can I actually win?
NO DEBATE — President Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t respond to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign kick-off because there still technically is no Biden campaign, reports CNN. What there is instead is an acceptance among most Democratic leaders that they may still have to wait a while for Biden to make it official — and a grudging embrace of that. To the confident advisers in the Biden orbit and their wider circle of supporters, the Kennedy challenge only serves to reinforce the president’s strength. Kennedy and spiritual author Marianne Williamson — mocked at a daily White House press briefing after her primary campaign launch — are the extent of the challenge Biden has drawn. The Democratic National Committee has made very clear, meanwhile, that the party apparatus is aligned with Biden. No plans for primary debates are underway.
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Turkey's main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and his wife Selvi Kilicdaroglu greet his supporters during a rally in Istanbul, Turkey. | Burak Kara/Getty Images | IDENTITY POLITICS — The man seeking to dislodge Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as Turkey’s leader has shaken up next month’s presidential elections by declaring his identity as an Alevi — a member of the country’s main religious minority, which has often suffered discrimination, writes Elçin Poyrazlar. The statement by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the joint presidential candidate backed by six opposition parties, came in a Twitter video viewed almost 20 million times in less than 24 hours. The tweet itself was viewed some 70 million times. While most Turks have long known that Kılıçdaroğlu hails from the Alevi minority, his decision to stress his identity is being widely viewed as a plea for pluralism and tolerance, and an attempt to strike a contrast with Erdoğan, who has based much of his political career on his mainstream Sunni identity. It is a significant step because Alevis — who worship on Thursdays rather than Fridays, and revere the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Imam Ali — have often tried to hide their identity in the Sunni Muslim majority country, despite representing, by some counts, about 20 percent of the population, and they aren’t officially recognized by the Turkish state.
| | | | GO INSIDE THE 2023 MILKEN INSTITUTE GLOBAL CONFERENCE: POLITICO is proud to partner with the Milken Institute to produce a special edition "Global Insider" newsletter featuring exclusive coverage, insider nuggets and unparalleled insights from the 2023 Global Conference, which will convene leaders in health, finance, politics, philanthropy and entertainment from April 30-May 3. This year’s theme, Advancing a Thriving World, will challenge and inspire attendees to lean into building an optimistic coalition capable of tackling the issues and inequities we collectively face. Don’t miss a thing — subscribe today for a front row seat. | | | | | | | | | | $1 billion The amount of money President Joe Biden pledged to a major international climate aid fund today, a move that seeks to burnish United States credibility after former President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans had zeroed out U.S. contributions for the program. The financial injection to the Green Climate Fund brings the U.S. contribution to a total of $2 billion, still short of former President Barack Obama’s initial $3 billion promise. | | | | FIT TO PRINT — When BuzzFeed published an unverified dossier from British spy Christopher Steele about Trump’s ties to Russia, the internet exploded. Thousands of liberal activists drummed up theories about what the dossier meant as regards to whether Trump was a Russian asset, without stopping to consider what the “unverified” warning that BuzzFeed attached meant. In The Atlantic, Ben Smith, then-BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, explains how they came to possess the dossier, the other media organizations that had it in their pocket, why they published it and whether he’d make the same decision again.
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On this date in 1999: Young women head to a library near Columbine High School where students and faculty members were evacuated after two gunmen went on a shooting rampage in the school in the southwest Denver suburb of Littleton, Colo. The perpetrators, 12th grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students and one teacher and subsequently committed suicide. | Kevin Higley/AP Photo | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
| | A message from Shut Down SHEIN: That form you fill out on international flights home stating you’re bringing less than $800 worth of goods into America? SHEIN fills it out for you when you order from them. SHEIN is a multi-billion-dollar Chinese company shipping billions of dollars of goods into America, exploiting a loophole meant to help American tourists traveling home.
Making American consumers, mostly young women, an importer of record facilitates SHEIN’s anticompetitive business model that uses forced labor and avoids billions in tariffs, all while crushing American businesses and making Americans unwitting accomplices.
Here are the facts:
· SHEIN uses slaves to pick cotton in China.
· SHEIN’s exploitation of the Section 321 loophole is costing the U.S. Treasury and American taxpayers billions of dollars annually, and shifts any legal responsibility to prove it is operating legally onto American consumers.
It’s time for Washington to Shut Down SHEIN and protect U.S. national security!
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