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Supreme Court clears way for Jan. 6 panel to access records of Arizona GOP chair

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to access phone records belonging to the Arizona Republican Party’s chairwoman.

The brief order was unsigned, but conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have granted the request for relief filed by Kelli Ward, the GOP chairwoman, and her husband.

The Jan. 6 panel — which has subpoenaed T-Mobile, Ward’s phone carrier — has expressed interest in her role as a phony pro-Trump elector following his loss in Arizona during the 2020 election.

Ward and her husband, Michael Ward, were among a group of 11 Arizonans who signed a fake election certificate purporting to show that former President Trump won the state.

The couple sought emergency relief in the Supreme Court after lower courts denied their bid to shield the records that congressional investigators are pursuing as part of their probe of last year’s pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.

The Jan. 6 House committee has described the multi-state attempt to put forth fake Trump electors as central to the effort to overturn Trump’s defeat, which eventually led to the riot.

The Wards, for their part, have portrayed the Jan. 6 investigation as politically motivated, and told the justices in court papers that their case carried “profound precedential implications” for the constitutional right to free political association.

Last month, a divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 to deny the Wards’ request for an order barring T-Mobile from complying with the Jan. 6 panel’s subpoena for records spanning the run-up to the Nov. 2020 election through January 2021.

Earlier in the case, a federal judge in Arizona rejected the Wards’ request to quash the subpoena, prompting their unsuccessful appeal.

This story was updated at 11:45 a.m.

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Pence: Trump 'decided to be part of the problem' on Jan. 6

Former Vice President Mike Pence said in a new interview that former President Trump’s tweet during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot attacking Pence was “reckless.”

“It angered me,” Pence told ABC’s David Muir. “But I turned to my daughter who was standing nearby, and I said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law, it takes courage to uphold the law.’ ”

“And the president’s words were reckless. It’s clear he decided to be part of the problem,” Pence added.

Pence’s remark came after Muir read Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet on Jan. 6 as rioters were storming the Capitol, with some threatening Pence. The tweet began, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Since leaving the White House, Pence has drifted away from Trump and urged Republicans to focus on the future and not the past, a veiled swipe at Trump’s preoccupation with false claims the 2020 election was stolen.

The former vice president is participating in a range of media appearances ahead of the release of his new memoir, “So Help Me God,” on Tuesday.

The full ABC interview will air later Monday. Pence will also join CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday evening for a televised town hall and sit down with CBS’s Margaret Brennan for an interview that airs on “Face the Nation” this Sunday.

The memoir’s release comes the same day as Trump is scheduled to hold a “special announcement” at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, which is widely expected to launch Trump’s rumored 2024 White House bid.

Pence is also seen as a potential presidential contender, and he has visited the early voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina.

He released a “freedom agenda” earlier this year for Republicans in advance of the midterms as he weighed his presidential ambitions.

During an event at Georgetown University last month, Pence, when asked if he would vote for Trump in 2024, said “there might be somebody else I prefer more.”

“All my focus has been on the midterm elections, and it’ll stay that way for the next 20 days. But after that, we’ll be thinking about the future,” Pence said at the event.

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Progressives eye new Congress emboldened by midterm wins

Progressives have finally found reason to celebrate. Now they just have to convince other Democrats to come to the party.

For months, moderates picked off primary challengers from the left ahead of the midterms, leaving just a handful of liberal candidates to compete against Republicans this fall.

But after a surprisingly strong night last Tuesday for Democrats, progressives are already suggesting ways they’d like to see members of Congress use their expanded bench — even as control of both chambers still hangs in the balance.

“It’s time for Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, to take attendance,” said Michael Starr Hopkins, a Democratic operative who’s been outspoken about what he sees as the party’s shortcomings. “They have power and they should use it to help their constituents. Period.” 

“There’s no question that this will be the most progressive Democratic caucus in decades,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said during a press conference on Sunday introducing new members of the group.

Voters delivered victories to progressives in districts across the country, including in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania and Vermont, creating a geographically diverse picture of where left-wing Democrats can win. 

Jayapal told reporters on Sunday that of the 18 candidates the Progressive caucus endorsed this cycle, 15 have won their races.

Among the most closely watched races, former Austin city council member Greg Casar won his election against Dan McQueen in Texas’s 35th District, while Delia Ramirez won in Illinois’s 3rd District.

Twenty-five-year-old progressive activist Maxwell Alejandro Frost won in Florida, putting him on track to become the first Gen Z member of Congress, while Summer Lee emerged from an unexpectedly stiff GOP challenge for a Pittsburgh-area seat.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which counts dozens of members in its ranks, will soon get several more lieutenants. And progressive Democrats are hoping the group’s gains will mean an emboldened liberal wing that isn’t afraid to flex its muscle within the party.

“Americans deserve to know where members of Congress stand on issues like protecting Social Security, access to affordable health care and body autonomy,” said Starr Hopkins. “Voters deserve to know which members of Congress are using their positions to lobby for fancy jobs on K Street and which members wake up every morning determined to better the lives of their constituents.”

“Progressives aren’t beholden to the establishment and certainly shouldn’t concern themselves with whether or not they are liked by the elite social circles that pollute D.C.,” he added.

For their part, moderate Democrats still see reasons to be skeptical of the left’s longevity and prominence. They note liberals did well mostly in places that President Biden had already won and cemented a blue footprint.

For example, Frost defeated his GOP opponent by nearly 20 points to represent an area in and around Orlando, but did so in a district Biden won by 25 points in 2020.

“I don’t know what they’re claiming credit for this cycle, but Greg Cesar’s TX-35 is Biden +45, Summer Lee’s PA-12 is Biden +20,” said Matt Bennett, who co-founded the centrist group Third Way.

While moderate Democrats were relieved to see Pennsylvania Sen.-elect John Fetterman (D) ascend to the upper chamber, some say centrists were the true heroes of the cycle, with their team overperforming more than many progressives.

“In the Blue Wall, mainstream candidates won their statewide races or made impossible races close,” Bennett said. “But anyone who could be tagged as a ‘woke socialist’ — unfairly, but potently — lost.”

While control of the Senate remains up in the air, Republicans are still favored to take the House, though by a small margin. And while progressives will have larger numbers come January, it’s unclear the level of influence the new lawmakers will have and how they’ll choose to wield their power.

When they were in the majority, liberals often rallied together to push Biden and fellow members to the left on key legislation — often with mixed success. They had a big hand in what ultimately became an executive action to forgive student loan debt, for example, and helped steer the success of the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Some progressives are hopeful incoming members will take the themes they campaigned on to rally additional support on Capitol Hill, even if they’re not in the majority.

“The progressives in the House that are now coming in, they do have — I wouldn’t call it a mandate — but maybe a fist bump from the American people,” said Douglas Wilson, a Democratic operative based in Charlotte, N.C.

Progressives — including incoming members — are taking that boost of confidence and running with it, eyeing a number of issues on their wishlists and arguing Democrats’ better-than-expected midterm performance can help carry legislation.

“There are lots of issues that we’re pushing for,” Lee told reporters on Sunday when asked what she will be advocating for in the first 100 days of the new Congress. She listed environmental racism, policing and a living wage.

“There’s a lot of places where you can start,” she said after the Progressive Caucus press conference, adding “So I guess I’ll figure out, kind of, where to take the first bite.”

Advocates outside the Capitol also said there’s plenty of work to be done.

“No matter what, progressives and Democrats must continue fighting for bold action on climate, even more significant student debt relief, good jobs, and policy that voters can see and feel in their lives,” said Varshini Prakash, who leads the Sunrise Movement as executive director.

“Look at Biden’s poll numbers from the spring to now. Young people were not excited to vote months ago, and after he passed a climate bill, a gun bill and canceled student loans, they improved significantly — and led to nearly record breaking turnout,” Prakash added. “Clearly, when Democrats fight for those things, voters respond.”

One major challenge facing progressives is at the negotiation table, after liberals lost out of much of what they wanted in prior caucus debates, including around the massive social safety net and climate package known as Build Back Better.

They also already saw the limits of some of their priorities, with a big one stifled in court. On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled against Biden’s order on student loans, providing a major blow to one of progressives’ biggest successes.

Wilson, the North Carolina-based Democratic operative, said that while progressive policies usually poll well with the public, liberals need to be careful about how they craft their messaging inside Congress.

The influx of infighting over parts of Biden’s agenda created confusion at times around what Democrats stood for.

“I think if we can change the way we articulate those policies, we will continue to win elections probably at a larger portion [rather than] just these small tight races,” he said. 

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Herschel Walker has a problem: Kemp’s not on the December ballot

Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker has a Kemp problem: Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who rolled to a big victory in Tuesday’s midterms, won’t be on the ballot in next month’s Senate runoff election.

That’s a big issue for Walker, who should have been helped by Kemp’s presence on the ballot on Tuesday.

Kemp easily topped the 50 percent threshold in his reelection effort against Stacey Abrams, while Walker finished a little more than 48,000 votes behind Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), with neither getting above 50 percent.

Kemp outran Walker by 210,000 votes, putting the GOP Senate candidate behind the eight ball heading into the runoff.

“Given the events of this week, he starts as an underdog,” said one GOP operative involved in the midterms, who listed Kemp’s absence as a big problem for Walker.

While Kemp is not on the ticket, he is by no means sitting the race out.

Last week, the governor loaned his formidable political apparatus to the Senate Leadership Fund, a group run by allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

Under the deal struck between the two sides, the governor will temporarily hand over his door-knocking, data analytics, phone-banking and microtargeting program to the McConnell group, which will bankroll the operation at a cost north of $2 million.   

“Governor Kemp wrote the playbook for how to win big in Georgia, and we are thrilled to partner with his top-notch team to elect Herschel Walker to the Senate,” Steven Law, the Senate Leadership Fund’s president, said in a statement. 

Kemp launched the operation following the 2020 election in part because he believed some of the loyalties at the state party sided with former Sen. David Perdue (R), who Kemp eventually handily defeated in a primary battle. 

For years, runoffs — which are common in the South — had tended to give the upper hand to Republicans in Georgia.

But that changed in 2020, when Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) defeated former Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Perdue, respectively. Both Warnock and Ossoff were buoyed by Abrams’s turnout operation. 

Heading into the runoff, Republicans are preaching relentlessly that this race is about turnout more than anything. 

“Runoffs are all about ruthless and effective targeting and then turning out your voters,” said Chuck Clay, a former GOP state senator in Georgia. “Republicans always had an advantage in runoffs, but Ossoff and Warnock turned the tables. … I don’t know that that’s changed the rules.”

The big issue facing Walker, according to Clay, is turning out the base once again in rural counties and attempting to cut into the vote tallies in suburban Atlanta that gave the incumbent Democrat the advantage on Tuesday.

“It’s more about the machinery than it is about the issues,” Clay said. “Getting your universe right. That’s the key.”

A second national GOP operative said the Republican’s biggest challenge will be winning over suburbanites.

In garnering 210,000 fewer votes than Kemp, Walker clearly lost some suburban voters who voted for a Republican governor but a Democratic senator in Warnock.

A Walker spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Kemp’s impact. 

Another question looming in the race is whether Trump or other high-wattage Republicans will appear on the trail for Walker in the coming weeks.

The former president is expected to announce a third bid for the presidency on Tuesday, which some think could hurt Walker’s chances.

“I don’t know,” Clay said when asked if Trump would be helpful to Walker at this stage. “Georgia’s been the outlier going back to the primary. Trump did everything he could to take out Brian Kemp and Perdue got annihilated.”

“I don’t want to say amongst GOP faithful that he can’t be effective,” Clay continued. “I’d find that universe very much galvanized by the former president, I’d target them a bit under the radar.”

Clay added that he wasn’t sure whether an appearance by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) would be beneficial at this stage for Walker.

Trump has launched a series of verbal attacks on DeSantis, who has not responded in kind. It’s possible a DeSantis appearance could anger Trump voters who Walker needs to turn out.

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Low-income voters may have bolstered Democrats’ surprising 2022 performance

Low-income workers who saw a substantial spike in wages amid the pandemic may have helped bolster Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections after they were predicted to endure large losses in Congress.   

From early the first quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2022, wages for low-income earners far outpaced inflation, according to a new analysis from University of Massachusetts Amherst. The study, based on census data, showed that gains were highest for the people earning the least. 

For the bottom fifth percentile of earners over that period, nominal wages grew nearly 11 percent, smashing the 6-percent annualized inflation rate by nearly 5 percentage points. 

For the bottom 10th percentile, the nominal gains were 9.5 percent for a 3.5-percent growth in real wages. 

Economists say that this lower-end growth may have contributed to Democrats’ surprising performance in the midterm elections, when control of Congress was expected to flip, and by a large margin.  

As the results stand, control of both chambers of Congress is still unknown. And though it appears that the GOP will likely take control of the House, it will likely be by a much thinner margin than the “red wave” many expected.  

Democrat John Fetterman also pulled out a victory in Pennsylvania, notching a key seat for his party to replace retiring Sen. Pat Toomey (R). Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Ga.) race against Herschel Walker will go into a runoff. The 2022 results show Warnock leading Walker, but not more than the majority threshold needed to claim victory.  

“In the last two years, many voters have seen their incomes go up, even after adjusting for inflation. Most of these voters are people who had lower income pre-pandemic. While these voters might still list ‘inflation’ or ‘the economy’ as one of their top concerns in polling, they are still better off than they were two years ago, so the electoral blowback was minimal,” Matt Darling, a fellow in employment policy at the Niskanen Center, said in a message to The Hill. 

Exit polling from Election Day showed that inflation and abortion were the top issues for voters in the midterms.  

But analysts say that the overall condition of the economy, which has a tight labor market that’s generally favorable to workers, shouldn’t be overlooked. 

“There’s a lot of factors in this election, it’s a very unusual election,” Shawn Fremstad, director of law and political economy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), said in an interview.  

“But I would definitely say that the strong recovery, nearly full employment, people moving into higher paying jobs at the lower end — I definitely think that all added up to something that was important in terms of the election.” 

University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman said in an online forum that the lower-end wage growth was a big deal. 

“It’s hard to overstate how big of a change this is, compared to the previous 40 years of quasi-stagnation for low wages (and abysmal recovery from the Great Recession),” he wrote. “And, as far as we can tell, this real growth of low wages is continuing to this day.” 

“Growth has been much stronger for the working class: 10.5 percent for the bottom 50 percent,” he wrote, referring to real income growth since January 2021. 

The UMass Amherst analysis also shows that while those at the bottom gained the most over the course of the pandemic, people at the top of the earnings spectrum lost the most, coming in 2 percentage points below inflation. This is a phenomenon called “wage compression,” and it took economists by surprise. 

“We’ve seen an unexpected compression in wages, where those who lost the most jobs during the pandemic saw the biggest wage gains in the past two years,” Dube wrote online. 

Dube also noted that people have been quitting their jobs more readily in response to changes in pay, indicating a higher degree of worker freedom to pursue better jobs. This was especially true for younger workers without a college degree. 

Wage compression “was driven by a sharp rise in quits, and the elasticity of quits to wages, especially for those under 40 without BA degree,” Dube wrote. 

Youth turnout for the midterm was the second-highest in the last 30 years, with an estimated at 27 percent of people aged 18 to 29 casting their ballot, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRLCE), which is affiliated with Tufts University. 

“… it’s clear that young people had a major impact on the 2022 midterms,” researchers for CIRCLE wrote. 

While wage growth among low earners may have played into the youth vote, CEPR’s Fremstad said that there are many issues in Tuesday’s election that are important to young people.

“You have other factors playing in with young people,” he said. “The abortion issue is an important driver for young people.” 

Other data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also shows that income levels for lower earners have been surging since the pandemic began. 

Wages for workers in the production and nonsupervisory leisure and hospitality sector — which are typically some of the lowest paying jobs in the economy — have increased around 5 percent in real terms since the pandemic started. 

“So many employers are hiring because it’s so hard to find workers and that’s because they all have jobs. As a result, we’ve been seeing wages bid up. So the longer-term trend of college grads seeing their wages go up, while nobody else’s do — that’s being kind of reversed over the last year, year-and-a-half,” Niskanen’s Matt Darling said.

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Republicans eye Manchin as top target in 2024

Senate Republicans say Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) will be a top electoral target in 2024, even though he has voted with them more often than any other Senate Democrat and helped Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) block an effort to reform the chamber’s filibuster rule.  

Smarting from the disappointing failure to retake the Senate majority in this year’s midterms, Republican strategists predict that McConnell will pour millions of dollars into West Virginia next cycle to flip Manchin’s seat.  

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, one of several Republicans who could challenge Manchin in 2024, said the centrist Democrat will pay a political price for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which included major components of President Biden’s agenda such as tax reform, prescription drug reform and hundreds of billions of dollars to fight climate change.  

The bill passed the Senate in August by a straight-party line vote in the 50-50 Senate.  

“Sen. Manchin deeply disappointed West Virginians and let them down tremendously when he supported the ‘Build Back Broke’ bill last summer. That legislation really hit our state very hard. You can dress up the pig anyway you want but most people in West Virginia understand that that bill is going to hurt us,” Morrisey told The Hill in an interview.  

“He let the air out of his balloon and it’s not going to be so easy to pump it back up,” he said.  

Morrisey, who is “evaluating options” about what to do in 2024, said “we’re looking very closely at the Senate race.”  

He and his allies believe they will have at least $12 million to spend on a Senate Republican primary alone.  

Morrisey narrowly lost his bid to unseat Manchin in 2018 by 3 percentage points or about 19,000 votes, which turned out to be closer than what the polls indicated before Election Day.  

“I learned a lot from a past experience in a terrible political environment. The environment in 2024 is going to be much, much stronger” for Republicans, he predicted  

Other Republicans who could challenge Manchin include Gov. Jim Justice (R) and Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.). 

Manchin, who is 75 years old, won’t say whether he’ll run for a fourth Senate term but West Virginia political experts say he is showing every sign of gearing up for another run.  

But he may decide to retire when he reflects on just how bruising a battle he will face in a state that former President Trump won with 68 percent of the vote in 2016 and 69 percent of the vote in 2020.  

When asked about Republican plans to knock Manchin out of office, a spokeswoman for the senator said her boss doesn’t shy away from debate.  

“A robust democratic process has never been more important to our country and Sen. Manchin encourages every candidate who values public service to enter the race,” said Sam Runyon, an aide to Manchin.  

Manchin defended his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act by saying it would give energy companies “the certainty they need to increase domestic energy production” and would lower health care costs and reduce the deficit.  

Republicans say they feel extra motivated to oust Manchin after he surprised them in July by announcing a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to raise corporate taxes and spend $370 billion on programs to fight climate change.  

Senate Republicans were furious the deal on the Inflation Reduction Act was announced only a few hours after 17 of them voted to pass to pass a $280 billion bill to help the domestic semi-conductor manufacturing industry. The voted for the Chips and Science Act only after feeling assured that Manchin would not agree to any tax reform and climate deal.  

“That guaranteed that he will be a target,” said a Senate GOP advisor. “I just know that there’s no way that he’ll get a pass after what he did with the reconciliation package,” referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, which required big, profitable businesses to pay more in taxes.  

Another Senate Republican strategist predicted a deluge of money into West Virginia in 2024 to defeat Manchin if he runs for re-election.  

“I expect a lot of money to pour into West Virginia to try to beat him. It’s by no means a gimme but given the makeup of the state, given Manchin’s record, I expect to see the [National Republican Senatorial Committee] spend big and I’d expect a lot of outside money to pour into the state,” said the strategist. “It would be malpractice not to at least try to take him out.” 

The full-scale assault on Manchin in the next election cycle could complicate efforts to work with him on major bipartisan deals, such as proposals to extend the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, which Manchin said this month he wanted to pursue.  

“If we don’t look at the trust funds that are going bankrupt, whether they be Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, highway, all the ones — these are tremendous problems right now,” Manchin said at a Fortune CEO conference when asked about where he sees areas of potential compromise in the next Congress.  

Jonathan Kott, a former senior aide to Manchin, predicted that his former boss will keep on trying to hammer out deals with Republicans, even if he knows they’re trying to knock him off in the next election.  

“Manchin works in bipartisan way because he thinks it’s good for West Virginia and the country. I don’t think he cares about politics at all,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect him to change at all… I think he’ll be the same bipartisan guy in 2023 and 2024. 

“When we figure out what the Senate looks like, he’ll work in a bipartisan way to get the most done,” he added.  

Manchin showed this week that he’s still willing to buck the Democratic leadership on big votes even though he may need tens of millions of dollars in spending from Democratic-allied groups to survive a tough re-election race in 2024. 

The West Virginia senator revealed through his spokeswoman this week that he is “not comfortable holding a hearing” on confirming Richard Glick, a Biden nominee, to serve another term on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Manchin as significant power over that agency as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.  

Republicans felt much more positively about Manchin after he stopped President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in 2021 by declaring in a December Fox News interview that he just couldn’t support the White House’s $1.75 trillion legislative framework. 

Republicans at the time sang Manchin’s praises, with McConnell declaring it was a “great shot in the arm for the country” and “exactly what the country needed at this particular time.”  

McConnell urged members of his conference in 2021 to say nice things about Manchin and fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), knowing he needed their support to keep Biden’s agenda in check and preserve the filibuster in the 50-50 Senate.  

The GOP leader also praised Manchin’s “courage in defending the Senate as an institution.”  

But Senate Republicans say they’ll be gunning for him next year and in 2024.   

“It’s a good map in 2024 for Republicans,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the incoming chairman of the NRSC told The Hill.  

He noted that “West Virginia is a state that voted for Trump by 38 points in 2020, by 40 points in 2016.”  

“Every county in West Virginia has voted for a Republican president on the ballot for a number of cycles. So it’s a state that’s become increasingly more red [like] Montana and Ohio. And so of course we look at every race,” he said. “We’ll see who’s in the race.”  

The 2024 cycle will be a tough one for Senate Democrat who need to defend 23 seats, including incumbents in states that Trump won in 2016 and 2020, such as Ohio, where Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) faces re-election, and Montana, where Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is up.  

Sinema is also up for re-election in a state that Biden barely won by about 10,000 votes.  

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Juan Williams: GOP's extremism could fuel 'Blue Wave' in 2024

You are now warned.

Next year there will be even more Republicans in Congress who deny that President Biden won the last presidential election.

Yes, there will be more 2020 election deniers on Capitol Hill than the current 139 in the House and 8 in the Senate. 

Almost half of voters in the midterm elections, 44 percent, told Fox News Voter Analysis that their top concern is the threat to democracy.

That high level of fear for American democracy is second only to the 51 percent of voters who labeled inflation their prime concern. 

The threat to democracy is a bigger fright for voters than the 24 percent of voters who said the most important factor shaping their vote was the Supreme Court’s June decision overturning the right to have an abortion.

One cause of the alarm over the future of democracy is the nearly 300 midterm candidates who campaigned for House, Senate or key statewide offices as “election deniers.” Those candidates have “denied or questioned the outcome” of the 2020 presidential election, according to a survey by The Washington Post.

On the campaign trail, many of those Republicans pledged to use their position to stop any Democrat from winning the next presidential election. 

The growing presence of election deniers in Congress is evidence that the threat to free and fair elections did not end with the GOP’s failure to get a “red wave” of Republican wins last week. 

Voters who viewed the threat to the foundation of American democracy as their single most important issue voted about 60 percent for Democrats, according to the Fox analysis.

And if former President Trump, the man who started the “Big Lie” of election fraud, is back on the presidential ballot in 2024, the threat from those lies will continue to grow larger.

Trump remains for now the most likely Republican nominee for president, even after the poor performance of his endorsed candidates last Tuesday.

When Trump’s control of the party is challenged, he will test the loyalty of congressional Republicans by insisting they more loudly repeat his lies about election fraud.

Trump advised his losing Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters, to not “go soft” on claims that the 2020 election “was rigged and stolen.”

That kind of corrupt advice will hang over every Republican in the new Congress.

The likely next Speaker of the House, current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will feel the pressure, too. 

Trump has consistently attacked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for backing bipartisan votes on some legislation.

Both McCarthy and McConnell are already hearing voices of dissent about their leadership from the Trump-loving hard right of their party, including the House Freedom Caucus. 

In the next two years, the inflated number of congressional Republican election deniers, combined with a likely narrow GOP House majority, gives Trump added leverage to demand a complete end to bipartisan deals. 

Trump’s plan will be to obstruct all congressional legislation. He wants the country to be politically polarized because his priority is making Biden look ineffective. 

Trump will demand blind loyalty from election deniers in Congress to the most intransigent, extreme, MAGA agenda. His goal is to prevent Congress from meeting the call from those Americans — more than half of voters, according to the Fox News poll — who feel “the government should do more to solve problems.”

That means Trump will be busy with non-stop bullying of election deniers in Congress to get them to support him by engaging in political mischief aimed at Biden. 

Election denial is key to Trump’s strategy to increase polarization, and produce more discontent with Biden, Democrats, McConnell and the whole American experiment in political compromise and deal-making. 

McCarthy is already busy placating Trump by promising endless investigations to embarrass Biden’s family — payback for the investigations and impeachments of Trump when he was in office. 

Biden can see the ongoing threat that springs from the lies about election fraud.

“Our democracy has been tested in recent years, but with their votes, the American people have spoken and proven once again that democracy is who we are,” Biden said at a White House news conference after last week’s election.

He correctly noted that “while the press and the pundits are predicting a giant red wave, it didn’t happen…We lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than any Democratic president’s first midterm election in the last 40 years.”

Last week, a right-winger asked me if I really think it is dangerous for him to repeat the lie that election fraud is behind Biden’s 2020 election win.

I explained that election deniers are a danger because trust in elections is the foundation of government of the people, by the people, and for the people – not by a dictator.

If Trump continues to dominate the GOP with lies, it’s time to start talking about a “Blue Wave” for the Democrats in 2024.  

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Hobbs lead over Lake narrows with 93 percent of votes counted  

Democrat Katie Hobbs’ lead over Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s gubernatorial race has narrowed to just 1 percentage point with 93 percent of the state’s vote tallied.

The two candidates are now separated by just 26,000 votes, five days after last week’s election. Hobbs’ lead stood at about 36,000 votes earlier in the day.

Despite the gain, Lake’s window for victory appears to be closing.

Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report said after the latest vote drop Sunday that it’s “extremely tough to see how Kari Lake (R) wins now.”

Lake gained ground in Maricopa county with 54 percent of the nearly 100,000 votes reported Sunday evening, but that’s not by a wide enough margin to close the gap with Hobbs. As of Sunday night, Lake needs 58 percent of all remaining votes to win, according to AZ Central.

As the state continues processing mail-in ballots in the close race, Arizona officials have said the ballot-counting could stretch into next week. The majority of those uncounted votes are in Maricopa county.

Lake has called Arizona’s elections system a “laughingstock” and accused officials of intentionally slowing down the process. 

Maricopa’s head of elections, Bill Gates, has called Lake’s claims “offensive.” 

“I understand that Kari Lake wants us to move quickly and a lot of people do, but you know what’s more important? That this is done accurately,” Gates told CNN earlier this week.

Lake has long cast doubt on the integrity of Arizona’s election system and has parroted former President Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020, raising fears that she will refuse to concede even if she loses.

Source: TEST FEED1