Election Updates: A Georgia bill could complicate voting for the state’s homeless people. (2024)

Today’s Quinnipiac poll is positive news for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who polled at 16 percent, higher than what he typically garners. Kennedy supporters in the poll were more likely to favor Trump in a two-way race — 47 percent would vote for Trump, and 29 percent would vote for Biden — suggesting that he is gaining support among Trump voters.

The anti-Trump Lincoln Project disclosed that it lost $35,000 in an email hacking scam involving a vendor, which it did not identify. The group said it made two payments in February to what it believed to be the vendor after receiving invoices from the vendor’s email account that were fraudulent. It was not clear whether the organization’s criticism of the former president had motivated the hackers.

President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump were deadlocked at 46 percent in a head-to-head poll of registered voters released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University. They were still tied, at 37 percent, when third-party candidates were included. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was at 16 percent.) When voters were asked about Trump’s New York criminal trial, 46 percent said they believed he’d done something illegal.

Votes for candidates like Nikki Haley who have dropped out the race — sometimes called zombie votes — are not new. According to a Times review of contested primaries since 2000, sizable shares of the electorate routinely choose someone other than the eventual nominee, even after all other serious contenders have dropped out. The zombie vote against Donald Trump this year has been low by historical standards.

“Donald Trump’s vision of America is one of defeat and retribution,” President Biden says to a friendly audience of union members at the Washington Hilton. “He looks down on us.” Biden then tells the crowd to think of the people they want to get in a corner and confront, but in clarifying his remarks he seemed to refer to his rival as still in office. “I’m not suggesting we hit the president,” he said.

President Biden just got the loudest applause of his speech after he mentioned former President Donald J. Trump’s suggestion that the public inject themselves with bleach to protect against Covid-19. “He said just inject a little bleach in your veins,” Biden said. “He missed it. It all went to his hair.”

Biden, who in recent weeks has become more aggressive in his personal attacks of Trump, is framing himself as the champion of blue-collar workers, saying this election is “Scranton values versus Mar-a-Lago values.” “He never built a damn thing, nothing,” Biden says over Trump’s failure to pass an infrastructure package. “The guy has never worked a day.”

President Biden just took the stage at the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ U.S. Legislative Conference in Washington, fresh off earning the endorsem*nt of the 250,000-member union. He starts his speech by promising to make former President Donald J. Trump “a loser again,” and then moves to promoting his efforts to invest in union labor.

The North America’s Building Trades Union didn’t so much endorse President Biden's re-election as deliver a scorching repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump. The endorsem*nt video released by the union castigates Trump for his failures to protect worker pensions and secure a major infrastructure bill, as well as for what the unions see as the threat he poses to democracy.

The Biden campaign will keep using TikTok, campaign officials said, even after President Biden on Wednesday signed a law that could ban the social media app because of its ties to China. Yesterday, the campaign’s TikTok account posted a video of Biden at an event in Florida. Many of the comments from users urged the president to “keep TikTok” instead of banning it.

The North America’s Building Trades Unions, flush with work from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, will endorse President Biden’s re-election on Wednesday, and promise a major campaign to deliver the votes of its 250,000 members in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. However, the Teamsters, a part of the building trades umbrella, remain coy, abstaining from the union board vote, CNN reported.

George Conway, a conservative lawyer and fierce critic of Donald Trump, will headline a fund-raiser today for the Biden Victory Fund. Conway, the former husband of Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump adviser, told CNN why he gave the maximum $929,600 to the fund: “Yeah, it’s going to come out of my kids’ inheritance. But the most important thing they can inherit is living in a constitutional democracy.”

An interesting data point from yesterday’s elections in Pennsylvania: Nikki Haley, who ended her campaign seven weeks ago, received more than 16 percent in the Republican presidential primary, including around 25 percent in some suburban counties around Philadelphia. If a chunk of Republicans remain unwilling to support Donald Trump, that has the potential to be significant in November.

Trump again compares campus protests to the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

The current campus protests, while resulting in hundreds of arrests, have had no reports of significant violence.

But standing outside a Manhattan courthouse on Thursday, Mr. Trump said, “Charlottesville was a little peanut and was nothing compared — and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here. This is tremendous hate.” Of President Biden, he added, “We have a man that can’t talk about it because he doesn’t understand it.”

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, said in a statement that “minimizing the antisemitic and white supremacist poison displayed in Charlottesville is repugnant and divisive.” He added: “That moment compelled President Biden to run in 2020, because he has fought antisemitism and hate his entire life.”

Mr. Trump had used that same characterization about Charlottesville only a day earlier in a post on his social media site. The former president diminished the violence at the far-right rally, calling it “like a ‘peanut’” compared with the campus protests against the war in Gaza, which he distorted as “riots and anti-Israel protests.”

Mr. Trump also in that post repeated an attack on President Biden, saying that he “HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people,” while adding “the problem is that he HATES the Palestinians even more, and he just doesn’t know what to do!?!?” Mr. Trump has repeatedly insulted Jews who vote for Democrats and for Mr. Biden, saying that they hate their religion and Israel.

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump — who also presided over civil unrest set off by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in May 2020 — sought to downplay a chapter of his presidency that garnered widespread outrage and criticism.

In Charlottesville’s aftermath, Mr. Trump repeatedly drew a moral equivalency between the white supremacists — who brandished swastikas, Confederate flags and “Trump/Pence” signs — and peaceful counterprotesters, asserting that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Underpinning the Charlottesville gathering of neo-Nazis, antisemites and white supremacists was a racist conspiracy theory, called the great replacement theory, which says that elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, seek to “replace” and disempower white Americans. The growing prominence of the theory in far-right circles has incited racist terror attacks across the world, including several mass shootings in the United States.

Mr. Biden has in recent months faced protests and opposition to his presidential campaign from Americans who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and angry at the United States for arming Israel in the fighting in Gaza. Mr. Trump’s social media post on Wednesday sought to portray many of these protesters as a riotous mob, while also seeking to stoke protesters’ anger by claiming that Mr. Biden hates the Palestinians.

Some of the campus demonstrations have included hate speech and expressions of support for Hamas, the militant group in Gaza that carried out attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people. In response to those attacks, Israel has waged a war on Hamas in Gaza, killing more than 34,000 people, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. This week Mr. Biden condemned demonstrations that he said veered into antisemitism, but he also expressed sympathy for the Palestinians.

“I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Mr. Biden told reporters on Monday. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Homeless Georgians could face hurdles to voting under new legislation.

There are thousands of voters like Mr. Dupree across Georgia and the country, those experiencing homelessness who are able to vote with the proper identification. They receive election related-mail at shelters, relatives’ addresses, temporary locations or P.O. boxes, and the vast majority vote in person.

A single-sentence provision in a new election bill in Georgia could complicate voting for some of the state’s homeless population. The bill, which has passed both chambers of the State Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature, would require all election-related mail for those “homeless and without a permanent address” — such as registration cards, sample ballots and absentee ballots — to be sent to the county registrar office.

The full impact of the change is unclear. Under the bill, voters who are homeless would need to go to the county registrar’s office to see if their registration was up-to-date, to learn about a change in a polling location or request and receive an absentee ballot. Voters with a permanent residence would receive information like this at their homes.

If there were no changes or additional documentation required for their registration, they would still be able to vote in person. It was unclear whether the changes applied to people in domestic abuse shelters or other temporary housing.

For many homeless voters, an additional trip to the government office can constitute a heavy burden, voting rights groups and homeless activists say. It could create unnecessary and long travel times, taxing an already chronically poor population, and cause confusion for voters who have a low voting propensity and an even lower access to news and information.

“I think it would make it incredibly difficult for many in the homeless population, because of transportation and where those facilities might be located,” said Donald H. Whitehead Jr., the executive director for the National Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit group. “A lot of shelters are in rural locations with limited transportation, so if someone was needing to go to this one specific location, it is really problematic.”

State Senator Max Burns, the Republican sponsor of the bill, did not respond to requests for comment. Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp, a Republican, said that the office was still reviewing the legislation.

It’s difficult to know how many homeless people typically vote in Georgia. One estimate by Fair Fight, the voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic state representative, there were roughly 7,500 people who had registered to vote using a homeless shelter as their address in the five biggest counties in the state. More than 1,500 of those voted in recent elections, the group found.

The 2020 presidential race in Georgia was decided by less than 12,000 votes.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that there were 582,500 people experiencing homelessness in 2022. A 2012 study by the National Coalition for the Homeless found that roughly 10 percent of registered voters who are homeless cast a ballot in that election. For comparison, 71 percent of adults over 65 voted in the 2012 election, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Aside from the homelessness provision, the new legislation largely focuses on election administration. It requires new voting technology and makes it easier for a voter to challenge another voter’s eligibility. Activists have criticized the bill as unnecessary and rooted in debunked theories about Democrats committing rampant voter fraud.

“It’s part of a time-honored tradition in Georgia: block the vote by any means necessary to hold onto power,” said Dr. Carol Anderson, a board member of Fair Fight Action.

Raphael Holloway, the chief executive at Gateway Center, said the organization encourages civil engagement, as part of its case management and care, “whether that’s through volunteerism, and or through civic engagement through becoming a registered voter.” He said the shelter had about 500 voters registered at its address.

William Dupree, a 70-year old Army veteran, is one of those. He became homeless in August after he, his wife and his grandchildren were priced out of their old apartment, he said. While at Gateway, Mr. Dupree has sought to stay engaged, tuning into a virtual town hall held by his congresswoman from the Gateway dormitory.

The new bill, he said, could make his civic participation harder.

“It would, it would,” he said. “Because they try to change everything, like every election, there’s a rule change. And the bigger the election, the more impact of a lot of the changes.”

Three takeaways from the primaries in Pennsylvania.

In the past two weeks, Mr. Biden has had the campaign trail largely to himself while Mr. Trump sits in a Manhattan courtroom for a felony criminal trial related to a 2016 campaign sex scandal cover-up. Wednesday, however, is a day off from the proceedings.

Mr. Biden plans to deliver remarks today at a conference for North America’s Building Trades Unions, an umbrella labor group. Vice President Kamala Harris will be in New York today to record an interview with Drew Barrymore for her television talk show. Tomorrow, Mr. Biden will head to Syracuse, N.Y., for a White House event, while Mr. Trump will head back to court.

In Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a long-awaited Senate matchup was officially set, as David McCormick and Senator Bob Casey won their uncontested primaries.

And Representative Summer Lee, a progressive first-term Democrat, fended off a moderate challenger who had opposed her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. While Mr. Biden has faced protest votes in a number of states, Ms. Lee’s race was one of the first down-ballot tests of where Democrats stand on the war.

Here are three takeaways.

‘Scranton Joe’ Biden sails to victory. Trump meets resistance from Haley holdouts.

Mr. Biden, who grew up in Scranton, Pa., took 93 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, scoring a yawning lead in a key battleground state. Representative Dean Phillips, who was on the ballot but dropped out of the race last month, got nearly 7 percent of the vote.

Mr. Trump also notched a decisive primary victory, but many Republican voters continued to express their discontent with the former president. At least 155,000 registered Republican voters cast ballots for Ms. Haley, who had been Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the primaries before dropping out of the race last month.

Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, did not endorse Mr. Trump in exiting the race, and the Pennsylvania vote reflected his continuing difficulties in wooing her supporters and in fully winning over the Republican electorate. Ms. Haley won small but significant protest votes this month in G.O.P. primaries in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York, capturing at least 10 percent of the vote in each state.

Mr. Trump has shown little interest in winning Ms. Haley’s endorsem*nt and has made few attempts to reach out to her supporters. It remains unclear whether his decision to bypass any reconciliation with Ms. Haley will matter as November approaches.

The results on Tuesday suggest that Mr. Biden is on surer footing with the Democratic base in Pennsylvania compared with other battleground states, like Michigan, where the president has faced significant numbers of protest votes focusing on his handling of the war in Gaza.

The Haley vote suggests Mr. Trump may have some work to do to bring her voters back to his side in the fall.

A progressive Democrat fended off a challenge that focused on her criticism of Israel’s military campaign.

Ms. Lee, a first-term progressive Democrat who represents a Pittsburgh-area district, was an early critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, where about 34,000 people have died since the war began six months ago. Ms. Lee’s stances against Israel’s military campaign drew a primary challenge from Bhavini Patel, a moderate Democrat who opposed Ms. Lee’s approach on the war.

But Ms. Lee emerged victorious, suggesting that public sentiment on the war, particularly among Democrats, has shifted significantly against Israel in the six months since the war began.

Trump shut McCormick out of his first Senate run. Now they share the Republican ticket.

Mr. McCormick won an unopposed Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania, pitting him against Mr. Casey, the Democratic incumbent. While Mr. McCormick had no rivals this time around, his victory represents something of a redemption arc after his defeat in his first Senate primary run in the state in 2022.

He is positioned with the best chance yet for Republicans to unseat Mr. Casey, an 18-year incumbent who has previously sailed to re-election. He defeated his previous Republican opponent in 2018 by 13 points, and an analysis by the Cook Political Report rates the race as leaning toward the Democrats.

Mr. Trump helped sink Mr. McCormick’s first run when he backed a rival candidate, the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz. In a race that hung on a knife’s edge, Mr. Trump’s backing of Dr. Oz, and his scorching attacks against Mr. McCormick, proved decisive — Dr. Oz eked out a win by fewer than a thousand votes.

Mr. McCormick has earned the endorsem*nt of Mr. Trump for the coming battle against Mr. Casey, and they will share adjoining places at the top of Pennsylvania’s ballot in November.

Summer Lee, ‘Squad’ member, wins Democratic House primary in Pennsylvania.

The congresswoman was winning by an overwhelming margin with counting nearly complete late Tuesday, underlining the strength of her position as an incumbent this year after she out-raised her opponent with widespread backing from Democratic officials.

Ms. Lee, who in 2022 was elected the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress and later joined the group of left-leaning lawmakers known as the Squad, defeated Bhavini Patel, a city councilwoman in Edgewood, Pa. Ms. Patel ran as a more moderate Democrat and tried to paint Ms. Lee as dismissive of voters who oppose her approach to the conflict in Gaza. The seat is considered safely Democratic in the general election.

A former state representative, Ms. Lee, 36, narrowly won a primary fight in the district two years ago against a centrist opponent favored by the party’s establishment. Her victory was heralded by left-leaning organizations and leaders as a win for the progressive movement.

This year, Ms. Lee, now the incumbent, garnered support across the Democratic spectrum. Her endorsers included Pennsylvania’s senators, House Democratic leaders, labor unions and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, which opposed her candidacy in 2022. Progressive groups spent large sums on her behalf, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, stumped for her in Pittsburgh on Sunday.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, she led Ms. Patel by more than 20 points. Ms. Lee played up that success as a testament that “our movement is growing” and denounced those who she said “wanted to make this a referendum on just one issue.”

“Our movement is expansive enough and big enough for each and every one of us, that each and every one of us can lay down our arms and cease fire so that we can have peace from Pittsburgh to Palestine,” she said.

In the fall, after Ms. Lee became one of the first Democrats to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, pro-Israel groups expressed interest in backing a challenger. But a serious opponent never materialized. AIPAC, the pro-Israel group that is supporting challenges to some left-wing candidates and that spent heavily against Ms. Lee in 2022, focused its attention elsewhere. Polls have shown that discontent with Israel’s military actions has been growing among Americans in recent months.

Still, Ms. Lee drew criticism in her district from some Jewish voters, who said in the days before the election that they were unhappy with her positions on Israel. Ms. Patel, 30, also tried to cast her opponent as insufficiently supportive of President Biden. Ms. Lee has pledged to rally her coalition to support Mr. Biden this fall in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state.

Ms. Lee and her allies seized on Ms. Patel’s support from Jeff Yass, a prominent Republican donor in Pennsylvania who gave significantly to a super PAC supporting moderate Democrats. The group ran ads on behalf of Ms. Patel, who disavowed Mr. Yass and his support.

Ms. Patel said in a statement on social media that “we did not get the result we wanted tonight, but this race was far from a loss.” “While our campaign may end tonight, our cause continues on,” she added.

During the primary, Ms. Lee often promoted her record in Congress, including having brought federal dollars to the district, and framed her candidacy around supporting a more diverse Democratic Party and fighting Trump-aligned Republicans. She vastly out-raised Ms. Patel. In the last fund-raising quarter, Ms. Lee collected more than three times as much money as Ms. Patel did.

Speaking to an energetic crowd in downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday night, Ms. Lee also pledged to support her fellow Squad members facing challenges nationwide.

“We’re going to send a message to our Congress, and we’re going to send a message to our nation, that the direction that we want our country to go in — our coalition — is the coalition of now and the coalition of the future,” she said.

George Santos decides not to run for Congress again, after all.

Less than seven weeks after announcing he would try to return to the House of Representatives, Mr. Santos, the fabulist ex-congressman from New York who is facing federal charges, said on Tuesday that he would end his latest congressional bid.

In a turn perhaps befitting of Mr. Santos, whose loose association with the truth has been extensively documented, he offered two distinct reasons for his exit from the race.

In a social media post, Mr. Santos said he was worried that he and Representative Nick LaLota, the Republican he was running to unseat, might split conservative votes. “I don’t want to split the ticket and be responsible for handing the House to Dems,” he wrote.

Mr. Santos, who has made questionable claims of Jewish ancestry and invented ties to the Holocaust, said he was particularly concerned given “the rise of antisemitism in our country.”

Minutes after Mr. Santos’s post, the talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw shared a clip of an interview conducted earlier in the day in which Mr. Santos stated more pragmatic reasoning.

“There’s no way for you to be successful with an independent campaign,” said Mr. Santos, no stranger to shifting explanations. (A spokesman said the interview would air in full next month on “Dr. Phil Primetime.”)

Mr. Santos’s decision abruptly ends a long-shot bid to return to Washington; it was never even clear if he intended to mount a serious challenge.

The former congressman lost all standing among local political leaders and most voters, who associate him more with his bold prevarications about his career than with any particular political views.

And Mr. Santos, who has been accused of defrauding donors, was expected to face difficulties raising campaign funds. According to campaign finance reports, the former congressman — who faces charges tied to falsifying campaign finance reports — did not raise any money in the initial sprint after he announced his campaign.

Mr. LaLota, an incumbent running in a right-leaning district, never took the threat of Mr. Santos’s campaign seriously.

Shortly after Mr. Santos said he was ending his bid, Mr. LaLota replied on social media, “Chat GPT translation: He’s taking a plea deal.”

Mr. Santos last year became the sixth member of the House to be expelled in that body’s history. His removal, which came in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, came after a House Ethics Committee report found “substantial evidence” that Mr. Santos had broken federal laws, depicting his time in politics as a grift he had used to get richer.

Mr. Santos is currently facing 23 federal felony charges that include money laundering, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors have accused him of swindling donors, filing false campaign finance documents and collecting unemployment checks while he in fact had a job.

The House Ethics report also found that he had spent campaign funds on Botox, designer goods and a website known for explicit content.

After his expulsion last year, Mr. Santos bitterly vowed he would never come back. Months later, he had gone back on his word, traveling to the Capitol for the State of the Union address and then announcing his intention to return to the House.

Mr. Santos’s criminal trial is scheduled for September. In his social media post, he did not rule out a return to the political arena, saying his decision was limited to “THIS YEAR!”

“It’s only goodbye for now,” Mr. Santos wrote. “I’ll be back.”