Category: Politics

HOUSTON — House Republicans’ slim majority will be even leaner after Saturday, when Democrats vote to fill the Texas seat left open when Rep. Sylvester Turner unexpectedly died last year.

But the vote will just be the next step in choosing who ultimately represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District for a full two-year term — and sets up the next generational change debate that has roiled the party nationwide.

Just five weeks after Saturday’s special election runoff, voters in this Democratic hub of Black political power will return to the polls for a March primary to pick someone to represent the district after the seat was redrawn as part of Texas’ redistricting.

On Saturday, voters are choosing between Harris County attorney Christian Menefee, 37, or former Houston City Councilmember Amanda Edwards, 44, to fill the current seat. The pair emerged as the top two vote-getters in a crowded 16-person primary in November, with Menefee finishing ahead of Edwards by 3 percentage points.

The winner will then hold the incumbency for just a few weeks before challenging activist icon Rep. Al Green, 78. That March election, all three candidates argue, is about choosing the best fighter to stand up to House Republicans, the Trump administration and the Texas GOP, which has been encroaching on Houston’s autonomy in recent years as Republicans try to weaken Democrats’ influence in the one of the nation’s largest cities.

“It’s going to be a fight between generations,” said Marc Campos, a longtime Democratic consultant in Houston, who is unaffiliated with any campaign.

Saturday’s oddly timed runoff is occurring after months of delays by Gov. Greg Abbott, who didn’t call for the special election to fill the seat until eight months after Turner’s death. Turner, in 2022, revealed he had been recovering from bone cancer and his family said he died from “enduring health complications.” He had been elected to replace former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died in office in 2024 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She served the district for nearly three decades.

Abbott justified the special election hold up by saying he didn’t trust Harris County to conduct a swift and valid election. The governor, who has set his sights on flipping the county in November, has claimed for years that there are widespread problems with electoral administration in Houston.

Texas Democrats said Abbott’s foot-dragging to fill the seat — which has advantaged House Republicans’ paper-thin majority in Washington — is another example of GOP meddling with Democratic power in major cities. Republicans’ off-cycle redistricting last year scrambled Democratic seats in Houston, Dallas and Austin. Green, a towering figure in Houston political circles, jumped into the race for the newly gerrymandered 18th seat after the neighboring district he held for more than 20 years was carved up by the GOP.

In another sign of how redistricting has muddled campaigns, Menefee and Edwards are running in Saturday’s runoff under different lines from the upcoming March primary — forcing the pair to run simultaneous campaigns with two overlapping but not identical sets of voters. Early voting in the March primary begins in two weeks.

“This is a microcosm of forced redistricting,” said Odus Evbagharu, a Menefee aide. “It’s something that got forced down our throats, and now we just have to live with that.”

During the final stretch of the runoff, candidates crisscrossed both the old and new 18th districts, an area of central Houston with a large Black population. About a quarter of the district’s current constituents live within its new iteration.

At a candidate forum held in a Catholic church on Thursday evening, Green, Menefee, Edwards and a fourth candidate running in the primary with little name recognition, newcomer Gretchen Brown, quickly rattled off their biographies and what they would bring to Washington.

For Green, it wasn’t an introduction as much as a reminder to the audience that he has represented many of them for two decades. A significant share of Green’s constituents in the new 18th district were shuffled over from Green’s old district.

“It is important for people to understand that I’m not moving into a new congressional district,” Green said while taking the microphone and brandishing his signature gold-capped cane. “I am not. The congressional district moved to me.”

In this era when Democrats are eager to forcefully counter Republicans, voters here have a choice: Support a trusted figure who can navigate Washington or take a chance on a younger representative seen as the future of the party. It’s an urgent debate within the party as Democrats plot their strategy for regaining power, and is playing out in primaries across the country. Some other top Democrats facing generational primaries, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California and Steny Hoyer of Maryland, opted not to run again.

“Al Green has a great name,” said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who endorsed Menefee in the runoff but has not weighed in on the primary. “But then, on the other hand, whoever wins [the runoff] will get a bump of celebrity status.”

Menefee made local history as the youngest elected Harris County attorney — the first Black person in the job — and has built his reputation on going head-to-head with Abbott, suing the governor’s ban on mask mandates and challenging his demands to audit local elections. It’s his first stint in public office after he ran a surprise campaign ousting the three-term incumbent in 2020.

Menefee — who is running ads playing on 90’s millennial nostalgia — has racked up endorsements from organizations like Leaders We Deserve and Houston Black American Democrats, more than a dozen labor groups, and prominent figures like Rep. Jasmine Crockett and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

Edwards draws on broad support from women and from her years as an attorney and at-large member of the city council. She won the endorsement of past opponent Jolanda Jones, a state representative who has served as a main Menefee antagonist, criticizing him for continuing to collect his government salary while campaigning.

Edwards is also a familiar face on campaign mailers: She ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2020, Houston mayor in 2023 and U.S. House in 2024. Her career in politics began when she was a congressional aide for Lee as a recent college graduate.

Menefee and Edwards dismiss the idea that the primary will be a referendum on age, seeing it instead as an expression of voters’ desire to see broad change in Congress.

“What I think people want is something new,” Menefee said in an interview. “They want new strategic thinkers who are going to come in and have a plan for opposition against the president.”

Edwards argues it’s also an issue of continuity. A Green victory would mean that some constituents living in the district will have been represented by four lawmakers in three years. “They want to pass that torch forward and this is an opportunity to do that,” she said. “It’s not a question of age. It’s a question of succession.”

Green, in an interview, said he expects people will vote for him if they primarily value experience and accomplishments, ticking off his leadership on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees, along with the billions he has steered toward his district and recommendation of three judges confirmed during the Obama administration.

“I bring to the table traditionally what people have looked for when they were trying to make a decision,” he said. “So we’ll find out whether tradition continues or whether we’ll have a different circumstance.”

​Politics

Immigration enforcement is sowing chaos in Minneapolis and across the country. Democrats, elections officials and civil rights groups fear it could interfere with this November’s elections — and are scrambling for a response.

They’re warning that the White House’s deployments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents could act as a voter suppression tool should armed officers conduct raids at or near polling locations, scaring citizens into staying home.

“You have to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a pretext to rig the election,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It stands to reason that this private police [force] that he’s building is, in part, to be used to try to suppress turnout in the election.”

Senate Democrats considered a requirement banning ICE agents from polling sites as part of their demands in negotiating the Homeland Security funding bill, according to Murphy and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). But that policy was not included in Senate Democratic appropriators’ final list of demands to avoid a partial government shutdown, leaving voting rights advocates and Democratic state election officials on edge about what’s to come.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called fears of voter suppression “Democrat conspiracies” with “no basis in reality.”

“President Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections — and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our elections,” Jackson said in a statement. “These Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn’t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media. ICE is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from [the] country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.”

ICE’s aggressive crackdowns have already led to citizens hiding at home, and election officials worry that fears of harassment and arrest could keep them from exercising their right to vote.

“In Maine, we saw people were afraid to leave their homes for groceries, to go to work or to go to school, because of fear of wrongful arrest and imprisonment,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who’s running for governor, told POLITICO on Thursday. “If people are too afraid to go to the grocery store because armed ICE agents are patrolling the streets, that may increase fears about going to vote.”

Bellows said her office is preparing for next month’s special legislative election by ensuring voters are comfortable with absentee voting procedures, especially those in areas with large immigrant populations that have been impacted by ICE’s recent crackdown in the state.

Immigration enforcement activity near polling locations could dissuade those with noncitizen family members or voters of color, who fear being racially profiled, from turning out. And widespread deployments of immigration officers to battleground districts could cause chaos in key races and swing close elections.

The Trump administration dispatched about 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to apprehend non-citizens in an operation that many in the state and elsewhere consider heavy-handed and excessive. The president and senior officials have indicated that the operation is about more than just law enforcement.

President Donald Trump called the Minnesota operation a “day of reckoning and retribution” and has tied the operation to welfare fraud in the state. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanding he turn over the state’s voter rolls, an action lawyers for the state of Minnesota described as a “shakedown” and a “ransom note.”

“The demand for the voter rolls tells you what this is really about,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who oversaw California’s elections for six years as secretary of state, told reporters Wednesday. “It’s about trying to rig the next election, and a desperate attempt to hold onto power.”

Federal law is explicit in banning “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” unless to “repel armed enemies of the United States[.]” Many local election officials also take great care to avoid spooking voters by placing law enforcement at polling places, and some states even have laws regulating this. Voter intimidation is illegal across the entire country.

But Trump has falsely and repeatedly claimed for more than a decade that millions of illegal immigrants vote in the U.S., arguing that was one factor in his 2020 loss. He also pledged before the 2020 election to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” to polling places.

Some Trump allies have openly described the possibility of deploying immigration enforcement officers to polling sites to ensure non-citizens do not vote.

“They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said during his show last August. “You’re damn right. … We’re not going to allow any illegal aliens to vote.”

Civil rights groups are preparing for the possibility that Trump exercises emergency powers to allow such a move.

Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, told reporters this week that the Trump administration is “using these violent ICE operations as a weapon” for political ends.

“[Trump] might try to use an executive order or his emergency powers in the 11th hour to interfere with the upcoming election, which is, of course, something that no president in American history has ever done, but something that we need to be prepared for,” Lydgate said Monday during a press briefing.

The Trump administration has continued its focus on election administration. On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta. Last week, the Justice Department revealed that DOGE employees were secretly communicating with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states” and may have used Social Security data to match voter rolls. Last week in Davos, Trump suggested prosecutions are forthcoming related to the 2020 election.

State election officials in both parties are anxious to see why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi will address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday. A DHS spokesperson didn’t respond to request for comment for this story.

Nonprofit legal groups are already gearing up to challenge any efforts to intimidate voters around the November midterms, said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.

“Litigation is going to remain an incredibly important guardrail,” said Perryman, whose nonprofit led one of the lawsuits against DOGE’s access to voter information. “And there are many cases that can be swiftly filed on an emergency basis, or even potentially proactively, in order to try to keep the communities as safe as possible.”

David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, warned that election officials across the country — from secretaries of state to local officers — are seeing “a level of federal interference in their work which is unconstitutional and unprecedented.”

“I want to stress how unusual this is,” Becker, a former DOJ civil rights attorney, told POLITICO. “County election officials shouldn’t have to be thinking about what the president of the United States might say about elections.”

Those elections officials are working to instill trust in the electoral process, Becker said, and will encourage voters to utilize a variety of alternative ways to cast a ballot, such as early voting or voting by mail, depending on the state.

An attempt to heighten immigration enforcement before the election could just as easily backfire for Republicans. Trump is now under water on the immigration issue, with polls showing a majority of voters believe his deportation push went too far and want to see it reined in. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on democracy and voting rights, pointed to high turnout in this week’s special elections for Minnesota legislature seats in Democratic-heavy districts, where Democrats romped.

“In places where there might be disruption, Minnesota is proving that you might well earn yourself a real significant backlash,” Levitt said.

But even talking about election suppression has a risk of discouraging voters, convincing them there is risk involved or that the elections might be rigged anyway. Conversely, talk of vote-rigging can do the same thing.

“Our fight right now is both to protect the security of our elections and people’s faith in them, because they’re deeply intertwined and they’re both under attack,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

​Politics

Gov. Janet Mills’ first ad buy as she seeks to unseat Sen. Susan Collins features a repudiation of ICE as Democrats nationwide seize on backlash over the agency’s aggressive tactics.

The new TV spot, shared first with POLITICO, pairs news clippings and videos of ICE agents aggressively detaining people with footage of Mills criticizing the deportation campaign during her State of the State address on Tuesday.

“Our federal government has deployed masked law enforcement onto the streets, including here in Maine, stoking fear in our communities and killing American citizens in Minnesota,” Mills says in the ad. “It’s ridiculous, outrageous and unconstitutional.”

The six-figure buy goes up statewide on Friday and is running across broadcast and digital for the next two weeks.

It comes as immigration enforcement has become a national political issue, with voter backlash against ICE raids leading Democrats to talk more about an issue that had once been favorable for Republicans.

An ICE surge in Maine, dubbed Operation Catch of the Day by Homeland Security officials, received widespread backlash from Democrats and local leaders, who highlighted cases of Maine residents being detained by the agency despite having legal work permits and no criminal histories. The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend further inflamed anger in Maine, too.

Collins announced Thursday that ICE would be halting its surge in the Pine Tree State, but the fallout of the heightened enforcement continues to roil the state. Mills’ decision to seize on ICE for her first ad is a sign she believes the issue will have staying power.

Mills’ main primary opponent, oysterman and political newcomer Graham Platner, has also gone after Collins on ICE this week, holding protests outside her offices in Portland and Bangor on Thursday.

Platner ran TV ads skeptical of Mills when the governor first jumped into the Senate race last fall. His campaign recently went up with more biographical spots and has pledged to stay on air through the June primary.

​Politics

Minnesota Democrats are figuring out the delicate art of Trump diplomacy this week.

First, President Donald Trump had a “very good call” with Gov. Tim Walz, an inflection point after days of heated GOP attacks on the former vice presidential candidate. Then, Trump declared he’d had another “very good” conversation, this time with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Both sides had been looking to deescalate, and Trump seemed to be turning a corner on the two Democratic “sanctimonious political fools” he had initially blamed after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Then the mayor accidentally broke the detente.

After meeting with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, Frey reiterated on social media that “Minneapolis does not and will not enforce federal immigration laws,” which a person close to Frey said was simply intended as “clarifying what our stance was.” But Trump quickly shot back, declaring Frey’s “statement is a very serious violation of the Law” and warning the mayor that “he is PLAYING WITH FIRE.”

Trump’s response “surprised” the mayor, according to the person close to him, who was granted anonymity to speak about a sensitive issue. This person said city officials saw Trump’s response “as a threat.” Nonetheless, Frey, in recent appearances on CNN and at the National Mayor’s Conference in Washington on Thursday said “the Operation Metro Surge needs to end” while eschewing the kind of combative rhetoric that he had used over the weekend. Homan told reporters on Thursday morning that he’d asked for immigration agencies to work on a “drawdown plan.” After a tense day or two, the fragile peace appeared to be holding.

The episode illustrates just how delicate the ongoing talks to deescalate the crisis in Minnesota are with a president known for his capricious and erratic negotiating style. As Democrats across the country see a rare political opening on immigration, Minnesota Democrats are first and foremost trying to end the immigration crackdown in their own state. Despite their public confidence, they’re privately on tenterhooks over whether Trump will take the exit ramp.

“This back and forth [between Trump and Frey] is unhelpful,” said one Minnesota Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. “Strategically, I wouldn’t have phrased it that way. It’s not a huge mistake, but it’s not helpful.”

It’s a lesson foreign leaders are deeply familiar with already: Diplomatic breakthroughs with Trump can come fast, and fall apart just as quickly. European officials have regularly had to scramble to respond to the president’s controversial statements on the war in Ukraine or the ownership of Greenland with highly deferential overtures in both public and private. They’ve had mixed success.

Throughout Trump’s second term, Democrats have struggled to find their footing in negotiations with the president. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer drew fury from his own party for voting for a GOP-drafted continuing resolution in March. In October, Democrats forced what would become the longest government shutdown in US history over health care funding, but they emerged from it without any tangible deliverables. But in Minnesota, Democrats appear to hold the political upper hand, as Trump’s polling numbers, particularly his handling of immigration, plummeted in recent weeks — and he signals eagerness to cut a face-saving deal.

“Everyone needs to give something here to move on from this,” one Minnesota union chief said — adding that it can be difficult to do. A Democratic operative in the state expressed hope that Frey’s post was merely “a bump on the exit ramp.”

But not all Minnesota Democrats agree that playing ball is the way forward. “Being nice isn’t somehow going to stop Donald Trump when anything can set him off,” said Ron Harris, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota. Frey’s post, he said, simply “emphasized what the law is.”

A spokesperson for Frey said in a statement that “the mayor has been communicating both publicly and privately, including to the president and Tom Homan, that Minneapolis would be happy to partner on criminal investigations, and that’s what we’re focusing our limited law enforcement resources on.”

It’s unclear when the Trump administration will end its operation in Minnesota, though the president appears motivated to do so. The Trump administration has already pulled back in other states. Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins said that ICE has “ended its enhanced activities” in Maine after politicians on both sides of the aisle urged the agency to stop.

For Democrats studying Trump diplomacy, Walz and Frey may offer a template in some of their tonal differences. Interviews with nearly a dozen Minnesota Democrats said the pair were largely aligned in substance, and the rhetorical daylight, highlighted by the social media scuffle with Trump, reflects their differing constituencies and styles — and political realities.

Last November, Frey held off a stiff challenge from the left from state Sen. Omar Fateh, a Democratic Socialist, to win reelection. But the progressive wing of the party retook the majority on city council, too. “He’s facing a lot of internal pressure” from the city council to “continue calling out the craziness,” said a Democratic strategist who, like others, was granted anonymity to candidly discuss a sensitive issue.

“Frey’s constituency is different” than Walz, the strategist said, “and in general, I think he’s been more combative … They’re also just different people with different negotiating styles.”

The 44-year-old mayor is also seen as a potential statewide candidate, layering in its own political calculations. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s gubernatorial run — and departure from the Senate — could likely open up another statewide office after 2026.

Walz, for his part, is unshackled from an immediate political future. The two-term governor dropped his reelection bid earlier this month, after a welfare fraud scandal in the state threatened to engulf his campaign. Walz acknowledged the scandal affected his decision and Republicans were eager to tie him to it, but he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Abou Amara, a Minneapolis civil rights attorney, said Frey’s aggressive rhetoric toward the beginning of the federal government’s intervention was “necessary,” but now “everyone understands there has to be a ratcheting down.”

“The mayor is obviously closer to the people, he understands the visceral pain and the trauma that the people are experiencing,” Amara said. “The governor is operating on a level of having a bit more authority here on how the state interacts with the federal government. … Governor Walz is in a position to deliver on things with the federal government in a way that the mayor is not.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report. 

​Politics

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.​Politics

Sen. Tillis: ‘Get the amateurs out of the Oval Office’ | The Conversation

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​Politics

Democrats, election experts and even some members of the Trump administration expressed alarm and bewilderment about why Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene as the FBI raided a Georgia election office that has been at the center of Donald Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was photographed late Wednesday outside the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta, Georgia, as the FBI executed a search warrant to seize ballots and other records related to the 2020 election.

As DNI, Gabbard has no domestic law enforcement authority and is not typically involved in criminal investigations, a reality that alarmed many Democrats on Capitol Hill — and even puzzled some Trump officials.

“My constituents in Georgia and I think much of the American public are quite reasonably alarmed in asking questions after the director of national intelligence was spotted bizarrely and personally lurking in an FBI evidence truck in Fulton County, Georgia, yesterday,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said during an unrelated Senate hearing Thursday morning.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Gabbard was investigating the 2020 election, and has regularly briefed Trump and other administration officials about her search. “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told The Journal.

Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for Gabbard, confirmed the DNI was on the scene in Atlanta. She did not immediately respond to follow-up inquiries about her reported probe of the 2020 vote.

Despite concerns raised by Democrats, Gabbard appears to be taking on a more expansive public role in American elections. On Thursday, White House aide Jared Borg told a group of election officials that Gabbard — alongside Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi — is set to address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday.

Trump has long fixated on unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden. He has continued to falsely suggest that the election was stolen since returning to the White House, including in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Gabbard in an emailed statement. “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases and election infrastructure,” he wrote. “She has and will continue to take action on President Trump’s directive to secure our elections and work with our interagency partners to do so.”

Trump spent much of the morning amplifying claims that the Georgia vote was rigged on Truth Social, and even called attention to Gabbard’s role in Wednesday’s raid.

Gabbard’s role remains confusing to some in the administration. Two current Justice Department officials and one Trump administration official said they were also puzzled by Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County. “It remains a mystery to me why she would need to be there,” said the administration official, who, like others interviewed, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued on X Wednesday that there “are only two explanations” for Gabbard’s presence in the raid.

“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus — in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns — or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy,” he wrote.

Warner and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) wrote to Gabbard Thursday to request briefings for both panels about the legal basis, scope, and justification of her participation in the raid.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who before entering Congress was California’s chief election official, told a panel at NASS on Thursday that Gabbard’s presence at the raid should be a reminder about “the urgency of the situation.”

“I guess they’re still searching for 11,000 more votes,” he quipped, referencing a call Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after losing the 2020 election. “But it should be a reminder — or a wake up — that this can happen at any point once again between now and this coming November.”

Gabbard’s appearance at the raid led some Democrats to believe she wanted to be there to claim credit for it publicly.

“When the head of a department participates in something, it’s about PR, not about process and the law,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told POLITICO. “If they have evidence, they want evidence and they have a valid warrant, and you let the professionals go in and do that.”

While Gabbard has veered in and out of the good graces of Trump during her tenure as DNI, she appeared to hit a high point last summer when she alleged that senior U.S. intelligence officials under then-President Barack Obama were guilty of treason because they had fabricated intelligence about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Trump said last week that individuals who played a role in that year’s vote will soon be prosecuted.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told reporters on Thursday that Gabbard’s Georgia appearance only sparks more concerns that the raid “is an attempt to fuel false claims and disinformation.”

“There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site,” he said. “She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site. And so it’s incredibly troubling to see something like that.”

Mo Ivory, a Fulton County commissioner, said Thursday that federal officials took 700 boxes of ballots and “ancillary” materials from the 2020 election. The county’s attorney, she said, is “working with a group of local and national lawyers” to formulate a legal response.

The first DOJ official said the ballots are now being stored at an FBI facility in Winchester, Virginia.

Spokespeople for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did not respond to requests for comment. In 2020, Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s pressure campaign to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election for him.

The two DOJ officials said the FBI received a heads up that Gabbard would be on site for the raid. They said her participation did not bother FBI Director Kash Patel or other bureau officials.

Democrats, however, worry more broadly that the raid could have a chilling effect on future elections.

“The facts are clear, Trump lost, and he has to accept that and move on with his life,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in an interview. “And everyone in his administration should do the same, instead of terrorizing election officials and interfering with our work to simply just prepare for the midterm elections.”

Erin Doherty and Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

​Politics

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Thursday declined to say whether he would support Sen. John Fetterman if he runs for reelection in 2028, the latest twist in a fraught relationship between Pennnsylvania’s two most prominent Democrats.

“John will decide if he’s going to run for reelection. I appreciate his service,” Shapiro said before quickly pivoting, when asked whether Fetterman is “someone that you admire and would support for reelection” at a Christian Science Monitor press event in Washington.

Asked point-blank whether he liked Fetterman, Shapiro replied: “Of course. And we all work together to do good things for the people of Pennsylvania.”

Fetterman has not yet said whether he will seek reelection in 2028. But progressives are already plotting a primary challenge to him over his centrist congressional voting record that’s seen him cross party lines to support some of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, give full-throated support for Israel and repeatedly buck Democrats during shutdown fights.

The relationship between the top Pennsylvania Democrats and stylistic opposites has long been strained, though Fetterman has been much more public about his disdain for Shapiro than the other direction.

Fetterman, in his 2025 memoir, criticized Shapiro for acting out of “political ambition” and wrote that he was caught on a hot mic calling Shapiro a “fucking asshole” during a Zoom meeting while serving together on the state’s pardon board. Fetterman wrote he wished Shapiro the best — but claimed the two “no longer speak.”

Shapiro refuted that Thursday, saying “yes” the two are on speaking terms, adding that they were in a meeting together with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “a few weeks ago … working on an important issue in Pennsylvania.”

Shapiro makes just two mentions of Fetterman in his own memoir, “Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service,” which was released this week — both just passing mentions of the two being at the same political events. He notes the two spoke backstage at an Erie Democratic dinner days before Fetterman’s stroke.

A representative for Fetterman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

​Politics

State election officials were among the most visible defenders of American democracy after the 2020 election — standing up to President Donald Trump, rejecting false claims and, whether they wanted to or not, becoming national symbols of institutional resistance to his attempts to overturn his election loss.

But as some run for governor in 2026, they are eager to talk about anything but 2020.

More than five years after Trump’s attempt to cling to power ignited a political rallying cry on the left and a loyalty test on the right, these Republican and Democratic candidates are betting — and, in some cases, hoping — that voters have moved on.

A pair of Republican secretaries of state who rejected Trump’s false 2020 election claims and then survived MAGA-fueled 2022 primaries are running for governor. Unsurprisingly, neither is keen to relitigate the issue that linger over their hopes this year.

“2020 is very far behind us as secretaries of state,” Kansas Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab said. “We remember it, but we’re moving on, and I think the American public is too.”

But Trump isn’t ready to move on, complicating these candidates’ hopes of putting 2020 in the rearview mirror. Speaking before an audience of global leaders and business officials in Davos last week, Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” and promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Two Democratic secretaries of state are also running for the governor’s mansion. And while defending democracy and their defiance to Trump on election issues forms a defining part of their political biographies, both candidates lead with pocketbook issues rather than making protecting the vote the centerpiece.

“This election is about Michigan, and this election is about who is best positioned to lower costs for the people in our state,” Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told POLITICO.

In many ways, the shift reflects the reality of running for the governor’s mansion. The job description is much broader from the office of the secretary of state — and voters want to hear about what politicians will do for them now.

But it also underscores the political evolution of one of the most animating aspects of Trump’s first term.

For Democrats, democracy was a potent force in 2022, when candidates leaned heavily into running against election deniers. And many Democrats say it’s still effective.

“They use the issue as an illustration of character,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “It really communicates integrity, nonpartisanship, commitment to democracy and freedom, standing up for people, and courage.”

As Democratic candidates’ use of democracy messaging has evolved, strategists say the meaning of “democracy” itself has also shifted since 2020. Then, it was largely about election integrity and the transfer of power. Now, it’s increasingly tied to broader concerns about executive authority, with Democrats arguing they’ll be the ones who can stand up to a president they see as authoritarian.

“This is the moment where you need a governor who won’t bend the knee,” said Benson, who has been outspoken against the Trump administration following back-to-back killings of protestors in Minnesota by federal agents.

Jocelyn Benson

Benson was on the front lines of defending her state’s election results after 2020, facing threats and swatting attacks. That period is a part of her messaging: Her campaign launch video showed news footage of her home being surrounded by protesters, and she remains outspoken against false claims related to the 2020 election.

She has also cast that moment as proof of leadership — and a willingness to stand up to Trump. “We fought back to protect democracy itself and we showed that as state officials, that’s how we have to respond to bullies who try to rip away our rights no matter how powerful they may be,” she said.

But on the campaign trail, Benson has often focused more on bread-and-butter economic issues. Affordability, housing, health care, childcare and energy costs are listed as her top issues on her campaign website.

“What every resident, every citizen, every voter in this election knows is how important it is to have a governor who will fight for them and who will fight for them in a way that that effectively lowers their cost of living while also protecting the safety of themselves, their families and their communities,” Benson told POLITICO.

Brad Raffensperger

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was one of the most prominent Republicans to reject Trump after the president urged him to “find” more votes in his state. The incident propelled him into the national spotlight — and drew fury from the president and his MAGA base, leading to death threats. He warded off a Trump-endorsed primary challenge in 2022, in part by taking his case to conservative media. Now, he’s seeking the governor’s mansion in the state that is in many ways the epicenter of Trump’s bid to hold on to power in 2020.

Raffensperger does not directly talk about the 2020 incident in his launch video or on his campaign website. Instead, he frames his record as evidence that he is willing to make the “tough decisions.” His launch video focuses on creating jobs in Georgia, lowering property taxes and banning transgender women from women sports, among other issues — issues that are key to voters but not central to his current day job.

But Georgia’s 2020 election keeps getting pushed back into the spotlight.

On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta, seizing all ballots from the 2020 election there.

“He’s trying to talk about other issues, [but] 2020 keeps coming up,” said Buzz Brockway, a former Republican state legislator who lost to Raffensperger in a 2018 primary.

Brockway said many Republicans have moved on from 2020 — but that there remains a “loud, noisy contingent who are continuing that battle” that Raffensperger will have to contend with, even if most voters’ main focus lies elsewhere.

Raffensperger has largely sidestepped questions about the 2020 election — in a November interview with the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, he said that it showed that he does the “right thing, no matter what.”

“Other people haven’t been put to that test, but we were at the end of the day,” he said.

Raffensperger’s campaign declined to comment for this story.

Still, Raffensperger’ opponents in the GOP primary, particularly Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, are eager to keep 2020 alive in the race. Jones, who was a fake elector in the state, has tried to cast his actions during that period as unflinching loyalty to the president.

“I don’t know that it brings Jones any new voters,” Brockway said, but it may be an effort to “energize his base.”

Scott Schwab

In ruby-red Kansas, Schwab defied some of the loudest voices in his party when he repeatedly rejected false claims about the 2020 election in his role as secretary of state. He has been clear that he does not see that chapter as central to his gubernatorial bid as he runs in a crowded GOP primary.

“Everybody’s concerned about taxes, especially with cost of living,” Schwab, a past chair of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said in an interview. “Property taxes are a real red-hot button in Kansas.”

His campaign launch video only briefly mentions election issues, and almost as an afterthought. “As secretary of state, I streamlined business services and cut bureaucratic red tape,” he said. “I secured our elections, too.”

There remains a segment of the GOP for whom election issues remain salient, said Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University in Kansas. But for the broader electorate — those most likely to turn out in midterm elections — these issues are still “pretty low down the list.”

In 2022, Schwab, Raffensperger and Benson all prevailed in their reelections, despite facing Trump-backed challengers or outright election deniers.

“I would say that most people really believe that we’ve moved on,” Schwab said.

Shenna Bellows

Democrat Secretary of State Shenna Bellows became Maine secretary of state in January 2021 after being chosen by the state legislature, just as Trump was in the middle of his push to overturn his election loss. In 2023, she ruled that Trump should be barred from the ballot for his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court.

In the blue-leaning state, and facing a crowded primary, Bellows has been more eager to talk about the issue than some of her fellow chief election officials.

“Leadership is about doing what is right, even when it is hard,” she said in her launch video, which highlighted the threats and harassment she faced as a result of her decision.

In her bid for governor, she has emphasized that anger over Trump’s actions exists in tandem with persistent anxiety about the economy. Like Benson, she has been vocal in criticizing the killings in Minnesota.

“The economy is the number one issue for most Mainers, there’s a lot of economic concern right now, especially in the wake of the tariffs and increasing job losses that we’re about to see,” she told POLITICO.

“That being said, I also think it’s really important to tell the truth,” she said. “What the Trump decision and my work as secretary and defending democracy tells people about me is that I will do the right thing even when it’s hard.”

​Politics

For years, Republicans have had some reliable terra firma: If they were talking about immigration and border security, they were winning.

Even amid the backlash from Donald Trump’s 2016 pledge to ban all Muslim immigrants to his 2024 amplification of baseless claims that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—immigration remained a durable, winning issue for the GOP.

Now the ground is shifting under them.

A torrent of viral images from Minnesota and beyond as Trump’s immigration agents stepped up their shambolic interior campaign of enforcement in recent months — and the killing of two people in Minneapolis in two separate incidents this past month — have led to a loud public backlash, soured voters on the GOP’s approach and eroded President Donald Trump’s standing on the issue ahead of the looming midterms.

The broad sweep of public polling shows Trump fumbling what has historically been his party’s strongest issue, which even Democrats concede paved his path back to the White House. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found this week Trump hit a second-term trough on the issue, with a majority of Americans — 58 percent — saying his crackdown has gone too far. Only 39 percent approve of his handling of immigration, down two points from earlier this month, and an 11-point erosion from last February. What’s more, a poll from the Democratic-aligned Searchlight Institute this week found that 58 percent of likely midterm voters want ICE to be reined in.

“The image that has been created is not a good thing,” said Jose Arango, the Republican chair of Hudson County, New Jersey, a heavily Democratic area with a large Hispanic population that shifted rightward in 2024. “We’re losing in the public relations campaign.”

Even before Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis, Trump’s own voters were fretting over his agenda. A plurality of Americans said the president’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive — including 1 in 5 voters who backed Trump in 2024, according to the latest POLITICO Poll. More than 1 in 3 Trump voters said that while they support his immigration agenda, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.

And another new round of polling on Thursday could give Democrats more ammo as voters move away from Trump’s immigration agenda. The Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC’s latest polling, shared exclusively with POLITICO and being sent to lawmakers, donors and campaigns Thursday, shows not only a growing number of likely voters who disapprove of ICE, but also a majority in favor of Democrats’ strategy of demands for reform even if it means a partial government shutdown, with 54 percent also saying they would blame the GOP and Trump for the shutdown and not accepting ICE reforms. These numbers are especially telling as the biggest shifts occur “among moderates, non-MAGA Republicans, and key swing voters,” the polling memo said.

As former President Joe Biden and his administration officials left themselves electorally exposed on the issue, then-candidate Donald Trump exploited those vulnerabilities with vows to seal the southern border and enact the largest deportation campaign in American history. But his enforcement actions have focused less on the border, which polls show most voters approve of, and more on the nation’s interior, drawing the ire of Trump-curious commentators like the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and raising alarm among Republicans.

“The president can feel, generally, that his policies at the border have been largely supported by a majority of Americans. But what he’s doing inside the border seems to be not working,” said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican who runs one of the most conservative large cities in the nation but backed Kamala Harris in 2024.

One longtime Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024, granted anonymity to candidly assess Republicans’ standing, expressed consternation over ICE’s deployment to a place like Minnesota, far from the southern border.

“When I think of immigrants broadly, I don’t think of Minnesota,” the strategist said. “People want to see, like, okay, ‘I voted for taking criminal illegal immigrants and getting them out of the country. I want to see criminal illegal immigrants taken out of the country. I want to see more miles of wall being built.’ I feel like we talked about the wall weekly in Trump 1. I don’t remember the last time we talked about the wall in Trump 2.”

All of which raises an uncomfortable question for Republicans: Is the party in danger of ceding one of its best issues back to Democrats?

“Immigration used to be a winning issue for Democrats back when we made clear we took enforcement seriously,” said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) and top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who commissioned the Searchlight polling shared with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as he shuttled toward another potential shutdown over the issue. “It can be a winning issue for us again if we are smart about how we handle this.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a rising Democratic star who won his seat in 2024 at the same time Trump carried his state, campaigned in key Latino areas for his party in New Jersey, Virginia and Miami’s mayoral elections last year, and who has launched his own border security and immigration platform, told POLITICO his party has to build trust with swing voters.

“We have to be the party that talks about professional, legal enforcement of our immigration laws with an understanding that criminals need to be deported and the border needs to be secure, and that we have to move to a sane compromise when it comes to immigration reform,” Gallego said.

It wasn’t so long ago that was the reality: As recently as 2013, under then-President Barack Obama, the majority of Americans said the Democratic Party better represents their feelings on immigration than Republicans did.

What does the GOP risk ahead of the midterms if it doesn’t find a better message?

“I think you’ll see the numbers continue to suffer,” the longtime GOP strategist said.

Gallego, who has called for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to be fired, said that gives Democrats an opportunity.

“If I was the Republicans right now, I would be very worried about what the future looks like in terms of elections, and Stephen Miller may have basically created a political tsunami among voters, both Latino voters as well as just kind of moderate voters,” Gallego said. “That’s going to come back and haunt them, going into the 2026 election.”

Alec Hernández, Lisa Kashinsky and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.

​Politics