Politics

PHOENIX (AP) — Brett Foto and his fiancee were vacationing in Phoenix last fall when they heard about a rally nearby for Kari Lake, then running for governor of Arizona.

No matter that they don’t live or vote in Arizona. Lake was going places, an emerging star on the populist right, and they had to see her.

“We’re seeing something very interesting tonight,” said Foto, a 52-year-old sales representative who lives outside Denver. “We’re going to look back and say, ‘We saw her when we went to this little hangar in Phoenix.’”

Lake went on to lose that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, a setback that would typically thwart political ambitions. But among conservatives, defeat has done little to erode Lake’s standing. If anything, her refusal to acknowledge her loss only enhances her stature well beyond Arizona.

In the months since the election, Lake has popped up at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate and a palatial California hotel, where she unsuccessfully lobbied members of the Republican National Committee to defeat Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. A more recent swing through Iowa sparked speculation about whether she may run for president or angle for a role as Trump’s running mate if he clinches the GOP nomination again.

Wherever she is, she’s doubling down on the formula that enthralled the Republican base but was rejected by a broader electorate: unflinching fealty to Trump, a relentless focus on unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and tough talk about securing the U.S.-Mexico border with force.

Lake will have another chance to showcase her bond with the GOP base next month with a prominent speaking role at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Washington.

“She speaks MAGA,” Chuck Coughlin, a longtime political consultant in Arizona who was one of former Gov. Jan Brewer’s top advisers, said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “She’s better than Trump in many respects. She’s a cultural warrior. She expresses their angst and anxiety over the way the country’s going.”

Meanwhile, Lake is continuing to fight her loss in the Arizona appellate courts, which rejected her election challenge Thursday. She vowed to take her lawsuit to the state Supreme Court. She held a campaign-style rally this month to draw attention to her case.

“Kari Lake is the total package. She’s articulate. She’s confident. She’s beautiful, but not in a threatening way,” said Linda Greulich, a 70-year-old retiree in Phoenix. “And I think if she wants to stay in politics, I see her going all the way to the top.”

The flurry of activity comes as Lake considers running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema, an independent and former Democrat. She met recently with National Republican Senatorial Committee officials in Washington.

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Arizona, yet they’ve struggled to win during the Trump era. The GOP lost three straight Senate races in Arizona as ticket-splitting voters who mostly support Republicans refused to vote for candidates closely aligned with Trump.

Eleven percent of voters identifying as Republicans voted for Hobbs last year, compared with just 4% of Democrats who voted for Lake, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 3,200 voters in Arizona.

Sinema has not said whether she’ll run for a second term, a decision that could have a monumental impact on the battle for control of the Senate. Democrats worry a three-way race between Sinema, a Democrat and a Republican will scramble the formula that’s worked so well for them, creating an opening for a candidate like Lake.

Other Republicans looking at running include Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb. Also considering a bid are Jim Lamon, Blake Masters and Karrin Taylor Robson, candidates in 2022 for either the Senate or governor.

Lake is pushing back against those in the GOP trying to move past claims of election fraud that have proved toxic in swing states, including Arizona, where Lake and three other Trump-backed Republicans lost their races. She told Iowans, who are proud of their role in vetting presidential hopefuls, to press candidates about “where they stand on stolen elections.”

“We need to make sure all of these candidates think that election integrity is a No. 1 issue,” she said.

Lake was a news anchor for nearly 30 years in the Phoenix market. She left the Fox affiliate in 2021, saying journalism had strayed into advocacy. She began her campaign for governor a short time later, channeling Trump with frequent attacks on the news media she left behind.

She records every interaction with reporters, often posting contentious exchanges on social media and earning plaudits from her fans, and she still attracted unprecedented attention from global media.

Money has continued to pour in for Lake since her loss. Her campaign raised $2.6 million from Election Day through the end of the year, with the biggest haul coming on the day the race was called for Hobbs.

She’s raised more money through a nonprofit group her advisers created in December, which doesn’t have to disclose details about its donations and has become her main fundraising vehicle.

Foto, who saw Lake on his Arizona vacation, was not deterred by her loss to Hobbs and hopes she’ll take another stab at running for office.

“I pray for that to happen and I pray for that for this country,” Foto said by phone. “I think we need people like her to make sure of a strong future for all of us.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The security at the U.S. border with Mexico. The origins of COVID-19. The treatment of parents who protest “woke” school board policies.

These are among the far-reaching and politically charged investigations House Republicans are launching, along with probes of President Joe Biden and his family, an ambitious oversight agenda that taps into the concerns of hard-right conservatives but risks alienating other Americans focused on different priorities.

Republicans have tasked every House committee with developing an oversight budget, and GOP leaders are educating rank-and-file lawmakers — many have never had subpoena powers — with how-to courses including “Investigations 101.” They are planning to take their investigations on the road to stir public interest, including a border hearing this week in Yuma, Arizona.

“We have a constitutional duty to do oversight,” Rep. Jim Jordan told The Associated Press in an interview. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and its powerful new select subcommittee on what Republicans call the “weaponization” of the federal government.

Jordan, R-Ohio, said his goal is “to figure out what legislative changes need to be made to help stop the egregious behavior that we discovered.”

The approach is all part of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s effort to steer his new majority to one of the core roles of the legislative branch, oversight of the executive, as he promised voters ahead of the fall election. But powered by some of the more firebrand figures in the GOP, the investigations pose a high-risk, high-reward proposition that is quickly drowning out much of the other House business.

The first hearing of the “weaponization” of the federal government, perhaps the signature panel of the new House majority ostensibly modeled after the post-Watergate Church Commission, devolved into a litany of allegations and theories about the Bidens, the FBI and the coronavirus, among others. The far-flung ideas are familiar to consumers of conservative media, and often linked, but may not necessarily be top of mind for the wider public.

Timothy Naftali, a professor at New York University and a scholar of the Nixon era, said congressional oversight is one of the functions of good governance, but he warned that “one of the possible downsides is you end up with paralysis.”

“Oversight is healthy,” Naftali said. “Then it’s a question of what the goal of oversight is.”

Naftali said that while Americans may share many of the same questions and concerns Republicans are raising on topics like the origins of COVID-19 or the ability of the FBI to investigate Americans, he warned against a rising ”performative nature” of Congress that results in political grandstanding without concrete legislative or policy solutions.

“It’s potentially very healthy if these investigations are animated by an empiricism — an ability to get to the facts,” he said. “But I’m not convinced of that.”

Rather than focus on a singular mission — as happened with the impeachment probes of President Donald Trump by Democrats or the Republican investigations of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya — Republicans have cast a net both deep and wide.

McCarthy, of California, laid out a road map last year and gathered key congressional staff for training sessions even before Republicans won the House majority in the fall election, according to a senior GOP leadership aide who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private machinations.

Some of the investigations underway into the U.S. border with Mexico are focused on potentially building an impeachment case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

A coronavirus committee will dig into the work of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former National Institutes of Health official who served both Republican and Democratic presidents but came under scrutiny during the Trump era for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The workings of the Justice Department and particularly the FBI are under deep scrutiny, particularly as federal law enforcement works to stamp out the alarming rise of domestic extremism in the U.S., which Republicans argue is a heavy-handed and overblown infringement of Americans’ First Amendment rights.

The Justice Department’s prosecutions of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, trying to overturn Biden’s election victory and its investigations of parents making menacing and even threatening protests at school boards over the teaching of Black history or other “woke” policies are part of the GOP’s probe of the FBI’s handling of extremists.

Subpoenas have already been issued by Jordan’s committee to the five largest technology companies — Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon — to appear for questioning about what Republicans assert is widespread corporate censorship of conservative voices.

There will be national security investigations by two committees surrounding Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which ending the 20-year war, as well as the U.S. approach to China.

Since last summer, the White House has ramped up its ability to respond in real time to the House investigations, positioning personnel in various executive branch agencies to handle the onslaught of letters — and potential subpoenas — demanding information.

Inside the West Wing is a small team of lawyers and communications experts, some hand-picked and appointed by Biden, positioned to defend the Democratic president in what could shape up to be the biggest political battles in his career.

The Biden war room streams news outlets including Newsmax and Fox News Channel as aides prepare for attacks by House Republicans targeting the president’s family, his administration and, ultimately, his legacy.

Outside the White House, various groups of Biden allies known for crisis management and battles with Congress have formed to churn out opposition research on the Republican lawmakers leading these investigations and provide real-time fact-checks of the GOP lawmakers’ claims.

The White House sees the far-reaching Republican investigations as potentially overlapping and even interfering with one another and argues that the GOP priorities are not in line with those of the American people.

“Peddling debunked conspiracy theories through stunt investigations may make good fodder for Fox News primetime, but it won’t help make a dozen of eggs or a gallon of milk cheaper for American families,” Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said in a statement to the AP.

In many ways, the oversight agenda stands in for legislative action as McCarthy is forced to steer a slim House majority whose ranks are often divided, which makes it difficult to pass his party’s bills.

Already the panels run by Jordan, a pugilistic politician and a former wrestling coach, have issued hundreds of letters and begun taking private transcribed interviews from people with information about the FBI that may or may not be made public.

Jordan said he hopes to eventually offer legislation that would change some ways the federal government operates.

“You know, my attitude is you just dig in there and talk to as many folks as you can, get as many documents as you can, and you get the facts to the American people,” he said.

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ATLANTA (AP) — They were led down a staircase into a garage beneath a downtown Atlanta courthouse, where officers with big guns were waiting. From there, they were ushered into vans with heavily tinted windows and driven to their cars under police escort.

For Emily Kohrs, these were the moments last May when she realized she wasn’t participating in just any grand jury.

“That was the first indication that this was a big freaking deal,” Kohrs told The Associated Press.

The 30-year-old Fulton County resident who was between jobs suddenly found herself at the center of one of the nation’s most significant legal proceedings. She would become foreperson of the special grand jury selected to investigate whether then-President Donald Trump and his Republican associates illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. The case has emerged as one of Trump’s most glaring legal vulnerabilities as he mounts a third presidential campaign, in part because he was recorded asking state election officials to “find 11,780 votes” for him.

For the next eight months, Kohrs and her fellow jurors would hear testimony from 75 witnesses, ranging from some of Trump’s most prominent allies to local election workers. Portions of the panel’s final report released last Thursday said jurors believed that “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges. The report’s recommendations for charges on other issues, including potential attempts to influence the election, remain secret for now.

The AP identified Kohrs after her name was included on subpoenas obtained through open records requests. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney advised Kohrs and other jurors on what they could and could not share publicly, including in interviews with the news media.

During a lengthy recent interview, Kohrs complied with the judge’s instructions not to discuss details related to the jury’s deliberations. She also declined to talk about unpublished portions of the panel’s final report.

But her general characterizations provided unusual insight into a process that is typically cloaked in secrecy.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the receiving end of Trump’s pressure campaign, was “a really geeky kind of funny,” she said. State House Speaker David Ralston, who died in November, was hilarious and had the room in stitches. And Gov. Brian Kemp, who succeeded in delaying his appearance until after his reelection in November, seemed unhappy to be there.

Kohrs was fascinated by an explainer on Georgia’s voting machines offered by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive. She also enjoyed learning about the inner workings of the White House from Cassidy Hutchinson, who Kohrs said was much more forthcoming than her old boss, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Kohrs sketched witnesses in her notebook as they spoke and was tickled when Bobby Christine, the former U.S. attorney for Georgia’s Southern District, complimented her “remarkable talent.” When the jurors’ notes were taken for shredding after their work was done, she managed to salvage two sketches — U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence — because there were no notes on those pages.

After Graham tried so hard to avoid testifying — taking his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — Kohrs was surprised when he politely answered questions and even joked with jurors.

Former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was funny and invoked privilege to avoid answering many questions but “genuinely seemed to consider” whether it was merited before declining to answer, she said.

When witnesses refused to answer almost every question, the lawyers would engage in what Kohrs came to think of as “show and tell.” The lawyers would show video of the person appearing on television or testifying before the U.S. House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, periodically asking the witness to confirm certain things. Then the scratching of pens on paper could be heard as jurors tallied how many times the person invoked the Fifth Amendment.

At least one person who resisted answering questions became much more cooperative when prosecutors offered him immunity in front of the jurors, Kohrs said. Other witnesses came in with immunity deals already in place.

Trump’s attorneys have said he was never asked to testify. Kohrs said the grand jury wanted to hear from the former president but didn’t have any real expectation that he would offer meaningful testimony.

“Trump was not a battle we picked to fight,” she said.

Kohrs didn’t vote in 2020 and was only vaguely aware of controversy swirling in the wake of the election. She didn’t know the specifics of Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud or his efforts to reverse his loss. When prosecutors played the then-president’s phone call with Raffensperger on the first day the jurors met to consider evidence, it was the first time Kohrs had heard it.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said on the call.

Though Kohrs said she tends to agree more with Democrats, Kohrs said she doesn’t identify with any political party and prefers to listen to all opinions.

“If I chose a political party, it would be the not-crazy party,” she said.

Kohrs called herself a “geek about the justice system” and noted the challenges some jurors faced balancing their responsibilities on the panel with outside duties. When she eagerly volunteered to be foreperson, she met no resistance from her fellow jurors, who were less enthusiastic about the time-consuming obligation stretching before them, she said.

One of her first duties as foreperson was to sign a big stack of subpoenas.

As the proceedings played out, one of her fellow jurors brought the newspaper every day and pointed out stories about the investigation. Prosecutors, Kohrs said, told jurors they could consume news coverage related to the case but urged them to keep an open mind.

Kohrs said she mostly avoided stories related to the proceedings to avoid forming an opinion.

“I didn’t want to characterize anyone before they walked in the room,” she said. “I felt they all deserved an impartial listener.”

Of the 26 people on the panel — 23 jurors and three alternates — 16 had to be present for a quorum. There was a core group of between 12 and 16 who showed up almost every day they were in session, Kohrs said, and she could recall only one day when they couldn’t proceed because not enough seats were filled. The most they ever had in the room was 22 — on the day Giuliani testified.

As the months passed, the grand jurors grew more comfortable with each other and with the four lawyers on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ team who led the proceedings. But they’re not all best friends now that it’s over.

“We are not meeting up now. We don’t have a group chat,” Kohrs said.

While the jurors asked to hear from certain witnesses, most witnesses were decided upon by the district attorney’s office. But Kohrs said she didn’t feel as though prosecutors were trying to influence the jurors’ final report.

“I fully stand by our report as our decision and our conclusion,” she said.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of investigations related to former President Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/trump-investigations.

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Rhode Island congressman David Cicilline said Tuesday he will step down this summer to lead his home state’s largest funder of nonprofits.

The Democrat, who is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Committee on the Judiciary, was named president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, effective June. 1.

“Serving the people of Rhode Island’s First Congressional District has been the honor of my lifetime,” said Cicilline, who is serving his seventh term. “As President and CEO of one of the largest and oldest community foundations in the nation, I look forward to expanding on the work I have led for nearly thirty years in helping to improve the lives of all Rhode Islanders.”

Cicilline, 61, said the opportunity to lead the foundation was unexpected, but gives him the opportunity to “have an even more direct and meaningful impact on the lives of residents of our state.”

The Rhode Island Foundation, founded in 1916, focuses on supporting economic security, affordable health care, as well as education and job training. It raised $98 million in 2021 and awarded $76 million in grants, according to its website.

Cicilline takes over for Neil Steinberg, who will continue as president and CEO until Cicilline starts. The congressman has “the experience, the skills, the passion, and the network to ably lead the Foundation,” Steinberg said.

Cicilline was selected after a national search.

“Congressman Cicilline’s career-long fight for equity and equality at the local, national and international level, and his deep relationships within Rhode Island’s communities of color are two of the many factors that led us to this decision,” said Dr. G. Alan Kurose, chair of the foundation’s board of directors, said in a statement.

Cicilline has represented Rhode Island in the U.S. House since 2011.

The news of his retirement comes months after he withdrew his bid for a leadership post in the House this Congress. Cicilline, who is openly gay, had challenged Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina for the Democrat’s assistant role, arguing that it was time the party’s leadership table included LGBTQ voices.

But Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black American in Congress, received unanimous support from the caucus in closed-door elections in December to stay in leadership.

The challenge to Clyburn was a surprise, but Cicilline said at the time that he felt the need to act to ensure the Democratic leadership “fully reflect the diversity” of the caucus and of the country.

During his tenure he was a frequent critic of big tech and the amount of power the nation’s tech companies held. He was a House impeachment manager during former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, and a lead sponsor of the legislation that gave federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

Cicilline previously served as mayor of Providence from 2003 to 2011, and in the state legislature from 1995 until 2003. He has degrees from Brown University and Georgetown University Law Center.

Rhode Island’s other longtime Democratic representative, Jim Langevin, served his last day in office earlier this year after announcing in January 2022 that he would not seek reelection to the seat he has held since 2001. He was replaced by another Democrat, Seth Magaziner.

Under state law, Rhode Island’s governor can set a date for a special election to find Cicilline’s successor.

___

Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri in Washington, D.C. contributed to this story.

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The field of four candidates running for a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court seat will be cut in half after Tuesday’s primary, with the top two vote-getters advancing to an April 4 general election in the presidential battleground state.

Conservatives have controlled the court since 2008 and issued rulings handing Republicans victories on voting restrictions, gerrymandered legislative districts and other high-stakes cases.

But with a conservative justice retiring, voters now have a chance to tip that balance toward the left, with implications for abortion rights and perhaps the outcome of the next presidential election. The court came within one vote of overturning President Joe Biden’s win in the state in 2020.

Both sides are preparing for another close presidential race in 2024, with four of the past six contests in Wisconsin decided by less than a percentage point.

Tuesday’s officially nonpartisan primary features two conservatives and two liberals. The conservatives are former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly and Waukesha County Circuit Judge Jennifer Dorow, and the liberals are Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell.

The next court is likely to issue key rulings on Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban law, legislative maps, union rights and challenges to election results.

Republicans also fear that laws they enacted over the past decade could be in jeopardy under a liberal court, such as a 2011 law signed that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public employees, a voter ID law, a ban on absentee ballot drop boxes, and a host of others.

Protasiewicz has called the GOP-drawn legislative maps rigged and has made her support for abortion rights a focus of her campaign. Mitchell, who would be the first Black justice elected to the court, also has said the maps are unfair and expressed support for abortion rights.

Both conservative candidates are supported by anti-abortion groups in the state.

Dorow has been active in local Republican Party politics. Kelly was endorsed by Trump during his unsuccessful run two years ago and did work for both the state and national Republican parties the past two years, including advising on the scheme in Wisconsin to have fake electors cast ballots for Trump. Both candidates have been speaking to GOP groups across the state during the primary campaign.

Dorow became nationally known after presiding over the trial of Darrell Brooks Jr., who was convicted of killing six people when he drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in 2021.

The campaign is expected to shatter national spending records. Outside groups had already spent some $7 million as of a week before the primary, about evenly split between the two sides, according to AdImpact Politics, which tracks advertising.

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URBANDALE, Iowa (AP) — Nikki Haley is swinging through Iowa this week fresh off announcing her presidential campaign. Her fellow South Carolinian Republican, Sen. Tim Scott, will also be here as he decides his political future. And former Vice President Mike Pence was just in the state courting influential evangelical Christian activists.

After a slow start, Republican presidential prospects are streaming into the leadoff presidential caucus state. Notably absent from the lineup, at least for now, is former President Donald Trump.

Few of the White House hopefuls face the lofty expectations in Iowa that Trump does. He finished a competitive second to devout social conservative Ted Cruz in 2016, and went on to carry the state twice, by healthy margins, as the Republican presidential nominee in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“It is genuinely impossible for this guy to try to manage these expectations,” said Luke Martz, a veteran Iowa Republican strategist who helped lead Mitt Romney’s 2012 Iowa caucus campaign. “They are enormous. They are self-made. I don’t see how anyone who is saying ‘I’m the guy’ can come in and even get even a second-place finish.”

Yet, in the three months since he announced his bid for a comeback, Trump has not set foot in Iowa, the first place his claim of party dominance will be tested early next year.

To be sure, Trump is making moves in Iowa. On Monday, his team announced it had named a state campaign director, Marshall Moreau, who managed the 2022 campaign of Republican attorney general candidate Brenna Bird. Bird defeated Democrat Tom Miller, who had been the longest-serving attorney general in the country, first elected in 1978.

Trump has maintained an Iowa political presence, with a national campaign team member, Alex Latcham, based in the state. But Trump held a kickoff rally on Jan. 28 in South Carolina, where his 2016 primary victory sealed his status as GOP frontrunner. And he squeezed in a speaking spot earlier that day at the annual state GOP meeting in New Hampshire, where he also won the first-in-the-nation primary seven years ago.

Though the caucuses remain nearly a year off, they remain the first event on the calendar, and some Iowa GOP activists have taken notice of Trump’s absence.

“I found that quite interesting,” Gloria Mazza, chairwoman of the Polk County GOP, said of Trump’s New Hampshire and South Carolina stops. “Because Iowa is first in the nation, doesn’t everybody come here first?”

Meanwhile, others are making impressions.

Haley’s sharpest applause during her first stop as a candidate in Iowa — and the first campaign event by any GOP prospect in Iowa — came Monday night at a flooring company warehouse in Urbandale, a Des Moines suburb, as she addressed gender education in schools, a flashpoint among conservatives.

She suggested to an audience of about 200 that gender education need not begin in schools before middle school, marking a contrast with prospective candidate Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor last year signed legislation forbidding instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity before fourth grade.

“Well, I don’t even think that goes far enough,” she said. “We don’t need to be telling our children about gender. That’s for the parents to do. That has nothing to do with schools.”

Though Pence is not yet a candidate, his advocacy group Advancing American Values last week launched a campaign to organize opposition to school policies like one in an eastern Iowa district.

Pence was in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday rallying opponents of a policy by the nearby Linn-Mar Community School District that’s at issue in a federal lawsuit. The school board last year enacted a measure allowing transgender students to request a gender support plan to begin socially transitioning at school without the permission of their parents.

The issue, an early focus of 2024 Republican presidential prospects, is particularly contentious among Christian conservatives, with whom Pence routinely says he identifies. And at Wednesday’s event at a pizza restaurant — it had the feel of an early caucus campaign stop — Pence illustrated its traction.

“We don’t co-parent with government,” Pence told a cheering audience of more than 100. “We trust parents to protect their children and no one will ever protect America’s children better than their moms and dads.”

Haley plans a rally Tuesday in the Cedar Rapids area. Meanwhile, Scott is speaking an event at Drake University on Wednesday, part of what aides call a national listening tour aimed at informing his plans, before addressing the annual Polk County Republican fundraiser in suburban Des Moines that evening.

Quietly making inroads is former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who visited Iowa in January, and met last week with legislative Republicans in the Capitol in Des Moines and Republican activists in western Iowa.

Though several would-be candidates including Trump were in Iowa last year campaigning for midterm candidates, these first impressions at the outset of the GOP presidential primary are important. That’s especially true as many in the GOP wait to see whether DeSantis proceeds with a White House bid.

But as the field of candidates grows in the coming months, Trump still retains a core of Republican support that could be hard to overcome.

In October, 57% of Iowa Republicans said they hoped Trump decided to run in 2024, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, while 33% said they hoped he would not and 10% said they were not sure.

“Of course, there’s a contingent that will support him regardless,” Iowa Republican national committeeman Steve Scheffler said. “But there’s an increasing number of people who want to kick the tires before making a decision. That’s what gives others an open door.”

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ATLANTA (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter, who at 98 years old is the longest-lived American president, has entered home hospice care in Plains, Georgia, a statement from The Carter Center confirmed Saturday.

After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

The statement said the 39th president has the full support of his medical team and family, which “asks for privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”

Carter was a little-known Georgia governor when he began his bid for the presidency ahead of the 1976 election. He went on to defeat then-President Gerald R. Ford, capitalizing as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office in 1974.

Carter served a single, tumultuous term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, a landslide loss that ultimately paved the way for his decades of global advocacy for democracy, public health and human rights via The Carter Center.

The former president and his wife, Rosalynn, 95, opened the center in 1982. His work there garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Jason Carter, the couple’s grandson who now chairs The Carter Center governing board, said Saturday in a tweet that he “saw both of my grandparents yesterday. They are at peace and—as always—their home is full of love.”

Carter, who has lived most of his life in Plains, traveled extensively into his 80s and early 90s, including annual trips to build homes with Habitat for Humanity and frequent trips abroad as part of the Carter Center’s election monitoring and its effort to eradicate the Guinea worm parasite in developing countries. But the former president’s health has declined over his 10th decade of life, especially as the coronavirus pandemic limited his public appearances, including at his beloved Maranatha Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School lessons for decades before standing-room-only crowds of visitors.

In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment, as an experimental drug had eliminated any sign of cancer.

Carter celebrated his most recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the tiny town where he and Rosalynn were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.

The Carter Center last year marked 40 years of promoting its human rights agenda.

The Center has been a pioneer of election observation, monitoring at least 113 elections in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 1989. In perhaps its most widely hailed public health effort, the organization recently announced that only 14 human cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in all of 2021, the result of years of public health campaigns to improve access to safe drinking water in Africa.

That’s a staggering drop from when The Carter Center began leading the global eradication effort in 1986, when the parasitic disease infected 3.5 million people. Carter once said he hoped to live longer than the last Guinea worm parasite.

Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, to a prominent family in rural south Georgia. He went on to the U.S. Naval Academy during World War II and pursued a career as a Cold War Naval officer before returning to Plains, Georgia, with Rosalynn and their young family to take over the family peanut business after Earl Carter’s death in the 1950s.

A moderate Democrat, the younger Carter rapidly climbed from the local school board to the state Senate and then the Georgia governor’s office. He began his White House bid as an underdog with a broad smile, outspoken Baptist mores and policy plans reflecting his education as an engineer. He connected with many Americans because of his promise not to deceive the American people after Nixon’s disgrace and U.S. defeat in southeast Asia.

“If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president,” Carter said often as he campaigned.

Carter, who came of age politically during the civil rights movement, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to sweep the Deep South, before the region shifted quickly to Reagan and the Republicans in subsequent elections.

He governed amid Cold War pressures, turbulent oil markets and social upheaval over racism, women’s rights and America’s global role.

Carter’s foreign policy wins included brokering Mideast peace by keeping Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the bargaining table for 13 days in 1978. That Camp David experience inspired the post-presidential center where Carter would establish so much of his legacy. At home, Carter partially deregulated the airline, railroad and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He designated millions of acres in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges. He appointed a then-record number of women and non-whites to federal posts. He never had a Supreme Court nomination, but he elevated civil rights attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, positioning her for a promotion in 1993.

Carter also built on Nixon’s opening with China, and though he tolerated autocrats in Asia, pushed Latin America from dictatorships to democracy.

Yet Carter’s electoral coalition splintered under double-digit inflation, gasoline lines and the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran. His bleakest hour came when eight Americans died in a failed hostage rescue in April 1980, helping to ensure his landslide defeat.

For years after his loss, Carter largely receded from electoral politics. Democrats were hesitant to embrace him. Republicans made him a punchline, caricaturing him as a hapless liberal. In reality, Carter governed more as a technocrat, more progressive on race and gender equality than he had campaigned but a budget hawk who often angered more liberal Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who waged a damaging primary battle against the sitting president in 1980.

Carter said after leaving office that he had underestimated the importance of dealing with Washington power brokers, including the media and lobbying forces anchored in the nation’s capital. But he insisted his overall approach was sound and that he achieved his primary objectives — to “protect our nation’s security and interests peacefully” and “enhance human rights here and abroad” — even if he fell spectacularly short of a second term.

And years later, upon his cancer diagnosis as a nonagenarian, he expressed satisfaction with his long life.

“I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said in 2015. “I’ve had an exciting, adventurous and gratifying existence.”

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A conservative tilt on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has given Republicans victories on voting restrictions, gerrymandered legislative districts and other high-stakes cases in recent years.

Voters now have a chance to tip that balance toward the left, with implications for abortion rights and perhaps the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in one of the nation’s most closely divided political battlegrounds.

Tuesday’s primary will feature two conservatives and two liberals running for the seat of a retiring conservative justice. The top two finishers advancing to the April 4 general election.

The eventual winner will determine whether conservatives maintain the majority on the officially nonpartisan court or it flips to 4-3 liberal control for at least the next two years. The court came within one vote of overturning President Joe Biden’s win in the state in 2020, and both major parties are preparing for another close margin in the 2024 contest.

“For a lot of Americans, this is the moment that they can catch their breath after all the intensity of 2022,” said Ben Wikler, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “But in Wisconsin, this race is at least as important as all the battles of the last two years.”

The Supreme Court election campaign could break national spending records if a conservative and a liberal make it through the primary, with issues such as abortion, the fate of legislative maps, union rights and challenges to election results at stake.

Four of the past six presidential races in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a percentage point, including Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and Biden’s win in 2020. In 2024, Democrats will try to reelect Sen. Tammy Baldwin and chip into Republican’s hold on six of the state’s eight congressional seats.

“The alarm has been sounded,” Wikler said. “National Democrats, elected officials and civic engagement groups can all see plainly that this race is the key to the future of not just democracy in Wisconsin, but American democracy writ large.”

In addition to the court ruling on any challenges to the 2024 election results, Republicans said laws they enacted when they had full control of state government are in jeopardy. That includes a 2011 law signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public employees, as well as GOP-drawn legislative districts, a voter ID law, a ban on absentee ballot drop boxes and a host of other measures.

“Rarely is there a race like this that has so much potential to overturn so many key issues and decisions in the past,” said Brandon Scholz, who ran two campaigns for the conservative justice whose retirement set up the race and is a former Wisconsin Republican Party executive director.

The court is likely to determine whether the state’s law that bans nearly all abortions — enacted in 1849, a year after statehood — remains in effect and whether Democrats get a chance to undo political maps drawn by Republicans, who have increased the number of state legislative seats they hold to a near supermajority. A voting rights attorney already has pledged to file a lawsuit the day after the new justice takes office if a liberal wins.

The contest is the latest example of how officially nonpartisan court races have grown into political battles as major legal fights play out at the state level.

Unlike in many other states, including neighboring Michigan, voters in Wisconsin don’t have the ability to place initiatives on the ballot to overturn laws or make their own. Their only options are making changes through the Legislature, which has been under Republican control since 2011, or the courts.

Recent state Supreme Court elections in other states show the impact that a flip in majority control can have.

In North Carolina, the new Republican majority earlier this month agreed to rehear redistricting and voter identification cases less than two months after the court’s previous edition, led by Democrats, issued major opinions against the GOP-controlled Legislature.

The conservatives running in Wisconsin for the seat of retiring Justice Patience Roggensack are former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly and Waukesha County Circuit Judge Jennifer Dorow. The liberals are Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell.

While the race is nonpartisan and Wisconsin voters don’t register by party, each of the candidates has staked out clear conservative or liberal-leaning positions on some of the top issues.

Protasiewicz has called the GOP-drawn legislative maps “rigged” and has made her support for abortion rights the focus of her television ads, the first to air in the race. The Wisconsin Republican Party has filed an ethics complaint against her, arguing that Protasiewicz has prejudged cases that could come before her. Her backers dismiss the action as a campaign stunt.

Mitchell, who would be the first Black justice elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, also has said the current legislative maps are not fair and expressed his belief that women have the right to an abortion.

Both conservative candidates are supported by anti-abortion groups in the state.

Wisconsin’s 19th century law banning abortion went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. The state’s Democratic attorney general, with support from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, is suing to overturn it. The case is expected to reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Dorow became nationally known after presiding over the trial of Darrell Brooks Jr., who was convicted by a jury of killing six people when he drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in 2021.

Her first TV ad showed footage from the Waukesha parade killings as she made her case as a tough-on-crime candidate. Kelly was appointed to the court in 2016 but lost in 2020 when Democratic turnout was high for the presidential primary.

Dorow has been active in local Republican Party politics. Kelly was endorsed by Trump during his unsuccessful run two years ago and did work for both the state and national Republican parties the past two years, including advising on the scheme in Wisconsin to have fake electors cast ballots for Trump. Both Dorow and Kelly have been speaking to GOP groups across the state during the primary campaign.

Spending on the race is expected to soar after Tuesday’s primary and eventually could exceed the most ever spent on a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin — $10 million in 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice The most ever spent on a state Supreme Court election is $15.2 million in Illinois in 2004, according to the center.

A week before Tuesday’s primary, about $3.5 million had been spent on ads supporting the left-leaning candidates while $3.4 million had been spent backing the conservatives, according to AdImpact Politics, which tracks advertising. Protasiewicz has raised nearly $1.9 million since she got into the race last year, which is about $500,000 more than the campaigns of the other three candidates combined.

That level of spending creates “all sorts of problems” for the perception of the court, said Matt Rothschild, director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks spending in state elections.

“It totally defies our ideal of having independent, nonbiased judiciary,” he said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been called the worst job in Washington. The gatekeeper to the most powerful leader on earth. The president’s alter ego or the chief javelin catcher.

The job of White House chief of staff is at the fulcrum of the federal government, yet it’s a role that remains largely opaque outside of Washington circles. The newest person to assume the title is Jeff Zients, a longtime Washington hand with a reputation as a managerial whiz who became President Joe Biden’s second chief of staff last week.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said the White House chief of staff is a kind of a “chief operating officer of the country.”

“He’s not the biggest problem solver. He shouldn’t have to do the analysis and he’s got all sorts of other people that will do that,” said Romney, who pondered his own chief of staff picks when he was the GOP presidential nominee in 2012. “But he’s got to run the government, and that’s a task which very few chiefs of staff have had real experience in doing.”

So what does a White House chief of staff actually do?

Zients is literally the chief of the West Wing staff, ensuring that trains run on time and that the president is well served by aides. Zients is the one who presents options to the president on any number of executive decisions.

The chief of staff controls access to the president and is charged with turning the administration’s ambitions into reality. The president’s top aide is part of the Cabinet and must maintain good relationships with the heads of other agencies to ensure they are all on the same page. The job means juggling countless competing constituencies and often being the person who has to say “no” to them.

In a 2005 Washington Post article, Andy Card, who served President George W. Bush for nearly six years, likened his approach to managing a kitchen. Top priority items were on the front and back burners of the stove and longer-term tasks got stashed into the freezer.

“I’ve described it as a wind tunnel,” said Mack McLarty, who was President Bill Clinton’s first chief of staff. McLarty recalled that as he was preparing to assume the role, he was told by Howard Baker, chief of staff in President Ronald Reagan’s second term, that there was no worse job in the nation’s capital.

During his first 10 days on the job, Zients has had to handle long-planned White House priorities ( a planned trip to Poland to mark one year since Russia invaded Ukraine) and unexpected challenges ( multiple unidentified objects shot down from the sky). All throughout, Zients’ chief objective as the president prepares for a likely reelection campaign is to seamlessly implement several landmark bills that Biden signed into law in his first two years.

“As a team, our approach to delivering results for the American people will be straightforward,” Zients wrote in a note to White House aides on his first day as chief of staff. “We must aggressively and equitably implement the President’s policies, ensure that Americans know how to access these benefits and clearly communicate what we have accomplished on behalf of ALL Americans.”

The new chief of staff, who was an initial investor in a Washington bagel shop, immediately resurrected an old tradition from his previous stint in the White House: Bagel Wednesdays.

Those who have been a White House chief of staff, as well as those who have studied them, can point to several traits that are key to success: experience serving in previous administrations, an intimate familiarity with Capitol Hill, managerial acumen and political shrewdness. Also: a temperament that doesn’t gyrate with the whims of a news cycle — not to mention a close, personal relationship with the president.

Past chiefs of staff with that precise collection of characteristics, according to Chris Whipple, who wrote extensively on the role for “The Gatekeepers,” include James Baker, Reagan’s first chief of staff; Leon Panetta, Clinton’s second chief of staff; and Ron Klain, who recently exited the White House after serving as Biden’s chief of staff his first two years.

“Every president learns — sometimes the hard way — that he cannot govern effectively without empowering a White House chief of staff as first among equals in the West Wing to execute his agenda and to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear,” said Whipple, who spent extensive time with Klain for his latest book, “The Fight of His Life.”

Panetta, who would go on to serve as CIA director and defense secretary under President Barack Obama, agreed.

“I think the success or failure of any chief of staff is going to be very dependent on the relationship that that individual has with the president,” Panetta said in an interview. “In order for any chief of staff to do his job, he absolutely has to have the trust of the president of the United States, and the two of them have to be able to trust one another.”

Romney said he would have picked either Mike Leavitt, a former Utah governor and Bush’s health secretary who led Romney’s would-be transition team, or just-retired Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, as chief of staff had Romney won the presidency. He said both possessed “extraordinary management capacity.”

Panetta also underscored the importance of the White House chief of staff maintaining close ties on Capitol Hill, which steers so much of the administration’s objectives or impede them. Zients has never worked in Congress, although he has won praise from Republican lawmakers from his time leading the Biden White House’s COVID-19 response team.

Lawmakers “can set the tone for what’s before the White House for that particular day, as to whether they’re having a good day or a bad day,” Panetta said.

As for those who weren’t quite as successful in the role, Whipple pointed to Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s final chief of staff — noting that Meadows declined to keep tight controls on who had access to Trump and did not push back on the president’s most outlandish demands.

“He swung the gate wide open for this Star Wars bar cast of characters parading into the Oval from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell to the pillow guy,” said Whipple, referring to MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a high-profile Trump ally. Giuliani was Trump’s personal lawyer and Powell was a lawyer for Trump’s campaign’s legal team who was booted from that role after pushing unfounded conspiracy theories after the 2020 election.

Whipple also said Donald Regan, Baker’s successor under Reagan, did not serve the president well as the Iran-contra affair engulfed the Reagan administration, and saw himself akin to a prime minister with little interest in the “staff” part of his title. Regan, who died in 2003, famously feuded with first lady Nancy Reagan, who helped force him out in 1987.

In picking a chief of staff, presidents sometimes gravitate toward someone with whom they’ve had long-held ties. McLarty was a kindergarten classmate of Clinton in Hope, Arkansas. Klain spent decades alongside Biden on Capitol Hill and was a campaign adviser on Biden’s previous presidential bids and chief of staff when Biden was vice president.

Trump went the opposite direction with his first chief of staff, picking Reince Priebus, who led the Republican National Committee in 2016. Priebus struggled to unite the warring factions within the White House. He never overcame deep suspicion from Trump loyalists who viewed him as a stalwart of the party establishment they reviled. Priebus was unceremoniously fired via tweet just six months into Trump’s term.

Biden signaled the importance he places on his chief of staff during an event honoring Klain, saying a president is “only as good as the team you put around you.”

The White House chief of staff is one of just a handful of the most powerful jobs in government that have been occupied only by white men. Asked last month whether Biden would select someone who is not white or male if he has the chance to choose another chief of staff after Zients, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say.

But she said the current administration is “the most diverse in history” and “we expect this trend to continue.”

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BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) — James Knox was glad to get out of the big city.

Part of a network of activists who believe U.S. elections are unreliable, Knox has unsuccessfully tried to convince supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county and home to Phoenix, that they should throw out elections that Republicans lost and get rid of voting machines.

So earlier this past week, Knox went somewhere more hospitable to his project — nearly 200 miles south of his home in the Phoenix exurb of Queen Creek to Cochise County. During last year’s elections, the county’s conservative-majority Board of Supervisors tried to count all ballots by hand — until a judge blocked that — and then refused to certify the results until a judge ordered them to do so.

“Here, it’s a little bit easier to be heard by the board,” Knox said before the latest supervisors’ meeting, where members discussed replacing the respected elections director, who resigned after objecting to the board’s decisions.

Last year was a tough one for the election denial movement in Arizona. Its candidates for U.S. Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general all lost. But it’s still thriving in rural Cochise County, a vivid example of how paranoia about elections fanned by former President Donald Trump maintains a stubborn grip in rural parts of the country.

Trump last year backed a slate of candidates for top state election positions in Arizona and elsewhere who parroted his lie about losing the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud. Every one of those candidates lost in the battleground states that typically decide the presidency. But the election conspiracy movement maintains a firm hold in beet-red rural spots such as Cochise County, a swath of the Sonoran Desert dotted with ranches, small towns and U.S.-Mexico border communities that encompasses an area larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.

The county’s respected elections director, Lisa Marra, who had opposed the board’s voting moves, recently resigned from the nonpartisan position after five years in the job. The two Republicans on the three-member board are seeking to replace her with the elected county recorder, David Stevens, another Republican.

Stevens is a friend of former GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, who attended Trump’s rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol riot and who ran unsuccessfully last year for secretary of state, Arizona’s top election post. Finchem had said he would not have certified President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona.

Stevens was prepared to oversee Cochise County’s hand count when Marra objected last year, and only stopped once a judge ruled that it violated state law. Stevens and the two Republican board members have appealed that ruling. The recorder recently joined a nonprofit founded by Finchem to focus on election “integrity.”

In Arizona, elected recorders such as Stevens already play a part in elections. They register voters, distribute mail ballots and verify signatures on the ones sent back, while the nonpartisan election director handles the counting. Stevens said he has always been a fair broker in elections and that in 2020, he spoke more to Democratic groups about voting than Republican ones.

Still, many residents are furious at Stevens’ new role.

“Recorder Stevens has proven he’s part of the crazy conspiracy crowd,” said Jennifer Druckman, a retiree who was one of dozens who spoke out against Stevens getting expanded responsibilities to oversee elections in the county.

Cochise is staunchly conservative — Trump won the county by 20 percentage points in 2020 even as Biden took the state. But the backlash to the election chaos has been palpable.

Activists are circulating petitions to recall Supervisor Tom Crosby, one of the two Republicans who voted for the hand count in October. Crosby also refused to certify the county’s vote tallies as a way to stop the state from finalizing election results in December after Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake for governor.

After a judge ordered the Cochise County board to certify the election, Crosby skipped the next meeting, leaving fellow Republican Peggy Judd and Democrat Ann English to take the vote. It was a dramatic example of how the once-routine task of formalizing election results became charged with politics as Trump allies in scattered rural counties in the West targeted certification as a way to disrupt elections.

In an interview after this past week’s meeting, Crosby scoffed at speakers’ claims that he represents a threat to democracy.

“The ‘Big Lie’ is that checking voting machines is subverting democracy,” Crosby said. “My constituents feel like, if we can’t check ‘em, we don’t want ’em.”

Election officials, including in Cochise County, check the accuracy of their machines by comparing their tabulations with paper ballot receipts, but Crosby said he still had broader suspicions. Crosby also dismissed the recall effort.

“If it’s leftists bashing me or patriots saying I’m wonderful, the message is the same,” he said.

But not everyone upset at Crosby is a leftist. Greg Lamberth, a retired engineer and lifelong Republican, is one of the people circulating petitions to recall the supervisor.

“I don’t see Mr. Crosby as acting in a way that gives us a functional government in Cochise County,” Lamberth said in an interview, noting the county has already spent more than $100,000 in legal fees related to its election adventures.

A former Marine, Lamberth is also disappointed in Stevens, a onetime military information technology specialist.

“He knows damn well that a hand count is less accurate than a machine count,” Lamberth said.

That’s why election officials decades ago largely turned away from hand counts and used tabulators to tally up ballots. Trump and his allies have attacked those devices, making unsupported allegations they were rigged against him in 2020, sometimes insinuating that foreign powers such as Venezuela were behind it. Those allegations triggered pushes for hand counts in a few rural counties in Nevada and New Mexico.

Stevens said in an interview that last October, a small group of conservative citizens approached him and asked whether the county could tally all ballots by hand rather than rely on machines. Stevens said he told them no — it was too close to the election to change procedure.

But Stevens suggested the county conduct a parallel hand count to check the machines’ accuracy. Other election officials were alarmed, warning it could fan misinformation about the true tally in statewide races. A judge ruled the county didn’t have discretion to pursue a full hand count; the county is appealing.

Stevens stressed that none of this was his idea or that of the supervisors.

“All this comes from the grassroots,” he said in an interview in his office in the county building, where a pockmarked target from a shooting range hung from the wall and assembled Lego Star Wars sets sat on his coffee table.

While Stevens knocked down some prominent Arizona election conspiracy theories, saying most were a product of people not understanding the complexity of the elections process, he said he didn’t want to dismiss the value of a hand count.

“I try not to have preconceived notions — let’s find out,” Stevens said.

Elisabeth Tyndall, the chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party, said the problem is that Cochise’s Republican power structure simply cannot say “no” to its base.

“We have had Republican leadership pretty much forever,” Tyndall said. “They haven’t held their fellow Republicans accountable for nonsense.”

Despite their overwhelming numerical advantages at the ballot box, many Cochise Republicans still see themselves as an aggrieved minority that needs to get more aggressive.

Bob McCormick, 82, a retired real estate agent, was a member of the small group that initially met with Stevens. He said their numbers are now more than 100.

Still, McCormick knew as he waited to enter the supervisors meeting that he was outnumbered by angry Democrats wanting to vent at the Republican supervisors and Stevens.

“For every 10 of them, one of us shows up,” McCormick said of Democrats. “We really don’t fight. Until we change the whole system, we’re going to be in trouble.”

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Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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