Election Updates: Byron Donalds suggests Jim Crow had benefits for Black families.
Donald Trump, speaking to Sean Hannity, insisted that the state-by-state approach to abortion brought about by the end of Roe v. Wade, which he took credit for overturning, was “going to bring the country together.” He also attacked President Biden, comparing him unfavorably to Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping, who he said were, mentally, “at the top of their game.”
In an interview, Sean Hannity repeatedly offered former President Donald J. Trump an opportunity to refute the idea that he would conduct “retribution” against his political opponents. Referring to his claims that Democrats are unfairly wielding the justice system against him, he said several times, “It has to stop.” But, he added, “based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them.”
Donald Trump still hasn’t made an endorsement in the Nevada Republican primary for Senate, but Senator Steve Daines, the Montana Republican who leads Republicans’ effort to take back the Senate, told Politico on Wednesday that he’d spoken with Trump and believed the former president would endorse Sam Brown. Brown, the leading contender ahead of the primary next Tuesday, is the pick of the G.O.P. establishment.
Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican, told Spectrum News that he was holding off for now on endorsing Donald Trump, saying that the presumptive Republican nominee would need to be more vocally critical of pandemic lockdowns, the rising national debt and other “civil liberties abuses.” Even bitter primary rivals like Nikki Haley have fallen in line behind Trump, which makes Paul’s position stand out.
The Biden campaign is hitting Donald Trump on his most recent suggestion that his political opponents could be prosecuted. “Trump is pledging to rule as a dictator on ‘Day 1,’ punish his enemies, embrace violence done on his behalf, and warns of a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses,” James Singer, a Biden campaign spokesman, said in a statement, adding, “Trump is a danger to our Constitution.”
President Biden plans to confront former President Donald J. Trump over abortion and reproductive rights at their debate this month, his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a call today with reporters about Republican efforts to limit contraception. “This is another example of the extremism that Donald Trump is going to have to answer for on the debate stage in Atlanta in three weeks,” she said.
President Biden had a strong performance in Tuesday’s primaries — all of the “uncommitted” ballot options hit less than 10 percent of votes tallied. One exception is South Dakota, where Biden has about 74 percent of the vote while Marianne Williamson has over 10 percent. Donald Trump went uncontested in the Republican primary in that state, so direct comparisons are difficult.
The primaries on Tuesday were the first time Donald Trump was on the ballot as a convicted felon, but there was no sign that Republican primary voters have shifted against him. In New Mexico, a blue state, Trump had nearly 84 percent of the vote, and the protest vote against the former president in Montana, a red state, was hovering at about 10 percent.
Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican whom Donald J. Trump is said to be considering for his running mate, suggested on Tuesday that the Jim Crow era had some virtues for Black people while trying to persuade voters of color to back the former president.
Mr. Donalds, who has emerged as a key Black surrogate for Mr. Trump, made the comments on Tuesday evening at a “Congress, Cognac, & Cigars” event in Philadelphia. The gathering, hosted by Mr. Donalds and Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas, another Black Republican, was intended to promote Mr. Trump and the Republican brand.
At the event, Mr. Donalds said that the programs that followed the Jim Crow era of racial violence and segregation — the federal government’s welfare system during the 1950s and the civil rights agenda of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s — had a detrimental effect on Black families.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Mr. Donalds said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — because Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”
Mr. Donalds’s comments drew criticism from members of President Biden’s campaign, which has been trying to shore up his diminished support from voters of color, particularly among Black men.
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, assailed Mr. Donalds’s remarks.
“Donald Trump spent his adult life, and then his presidency, undermining the progress Black communities fought so hard for — so it actually tracks that his campaign’s ‘Black outreach’ is going to a white neighborhood and promising to take America back to Jim Crow,” Ms. Chitika said in a statement to The New York Times.
She said that Black voters would reject Mr. Trump’s “racist agenda” in November.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries,Democrat of New York and the House minority leader, also condemned Mr. Donalds on Wednesday, making a thinly veiled reference to the congressman during remarks on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“That’s an outlandish, outrageous and out-of-pocket observation,” Mr. Jeffries said of Mr. Donalds’s comments, pointing to the lynchings and inequities that defined the Jim Crow era. “How dare you make such an ignorant observation? You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.”
A spokesman for Mr. Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday.
Mr. Donalds responded to Mr. Jeffries in a video posted on X, calling Mr. Biden’s and Democrats’ criticisms of his comments “lies.”
“What I said was is that you had more Black families under Jim Crow and it was the Democrat policies under H.E.W., under the welfare state, that then helped to destroy the Black family,” he said, referring to the U.S. government entity that would ultimately become the Department of Health and Human Services. “And I also said, You’re seeing a reinvigoration of Black families today in America. And that is a good thing.”
During the Jim Crow era, which lasted from the end of the Civil War until the 1950s, Black people in the United States were subjected to legal and social segregation and were brutalized by racist authorities. They were denied voting rights and could not check into white-only hotels or buy homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. The discrimination of the era severely disadvantaged Black families from an economic standpoint, often creating the need for larger families — and contributing to the widely-held belief among Black conservatives that they were more unified.
The term “Jim Crow” came from minstrel shows during the 1830s, when performers appeared in blackface, and it became a racist epithet.
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s campaign opened its first field office in Philadelphia, the deep-blue bastion that helped flip the battleground state of Pennsylvania to Mr. Biden during the 2020 election.
Mr. Donalds was making a broader point about the shift he felt that Black voters, particularly Black men, had made toward the Republican Party. He said that more than 20 percent of Black voters would support the G.O.P. in November because its message aligned with their culturally conservative values.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, expecting a closely contested rematch, have devoted significant attention and resources toward Black voters.
A set of polls conducted from the end of April to early May by The Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer showed that Mr. Trump had made inroads with nonwhite voters. More than 20 percent of Black voters said that they would support him, which would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Mr. Trump has said that he is likely to make his vice-presidential pick closer to the Republican National Convention in mid-July.
An earlier version of this article misstated when the minstrel shows took place from which the term “Jim Crow” is derived. It is the 1830s, not the 1930s.
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On the 56th anniversary of his father’s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, again pleaded on Wednesday to be granted Secret Service protection, arguing in an interview on Fox News that he was at an elevated risk of being targeted because of his family history.
“I was with my dad when he died in Los Angeles in 1968,” said Mr. Kennedy, who was 14 at the time of the shooting. He then asserted that the White House “is involved in this decision” to deny his requests for Secret Service protection and argued that his campaign was significant enough to deserve that protection.
A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.
Mr. Kennedy has made requests for Secret Service protection for more than a year, predating his independent candidacy. Last July, when he was still running against President Biden in the Democratic primaries, he said a request for a Secret Service detail had been denied by Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, who has the authority to approve those requests.
Mr. Kennedy has since repeatedly made the request, circulating an online petition in support of it, and has been denied each time. In his interview on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy pointed to several incidents that demonstrated his need for additional security, including break-ins at his home in California and an episode in September in which an armed man was arrested at a campaign event and charged with gun crimes after he tried to meet Mr. Kennedy.
Mr. Mayorkas has previously said that he has declined Mr. Kennedy’s requests at the recommendation of a panel of top congressional leaders.
“It is ultimately my decision, but I have followed their recommendation each time,” he said in May.
Mr. Mayorkas can consider several factors in determining who should receive protection, and those criteria give preferential treatment to major-party candidates. Before Nikki Haley ended her Republican presidential campaign, the congressional panel recommended that she receive Secret Service protection, in part for her strength in national polling. The Secret Service also notes that “some candidates have received protection earlier in the campaign pursuant to presidential memoranda.”
For a candidate in the Democratic or Republican primaries, the polling threshold is 15 percent or more for 30 consecutive days. For an independent or third-party candidate, the threshold is 20 percent. According to Real Clear Politics, which the guidelines list as one of the polling benchmarks, Mr. Kennedy is polling at an average of 10 percent nationally.
That threshold has prevented most third-party or independent candidates from receiving Secret Service protection, with a few exceptions. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968 and was granted a Secret Service detail by President Lyndon B. Johnson after Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy’s father, was killed during the Democratic primaries that year.
The rules have changed significantly over time. Secret Service protection was significantly expanded for presidential candidates after Senator Kennedy’s death, but the rules have historically been restrictive for third-party candidates. Ross Perot, the most prominent third-party candidate since Wallace, did not ask for Secret Service protection during his presidential campaigns, so it is unclear if he would have been eligible.
Mr. Kennedy said on Wednesday that Secret Service protection had been given to candidates “with much less poll numbers, much less high-risk profiles than I have.” In other interviews, Mr. Kennedy has pointed to Jesse Jackson as one example of someone with “a tiny fraction of my polling” who received a Secret Service detail. But Mr. Jackson ran as a Democrat, not an independent, and at one point in his 1984 campaign polled at 20 percent.
Former President Donald J. Trump again suggested his political opponents could face prosecution on Tuesday, saying in an interview with Newsmax that it might “have to happen to them” following his conviction by a jury in New York.
“You know, it’s a very terrible thing. It’s a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Mr. Trump said in response to a question from the host, Greg Kelly, about whether the conviction could help him politically.
He then repeated a false suggestion from last weekend that he had opposed his supporters’ calls during the 2016 campaign to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. (He repeated the calls himself.) He praised himself for not directing the Justice Department to prosecute Mrs. Clinton once he was elected, and said he might act differently if elected again.
“Wouldn’t it be terrible to throw the president’s wife and the former secretary of state — think of it, the former secretary of state, but the president’s wife, into jail. Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing? But they want to do it,” he said. “So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
He added: “Would have been very easy to do it, but I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country. And now, whoever it may be, you’re going to have to view it very much differently.”
The New York case — in which Mr. Trump was convicted on Thursday of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn star in an effort to influence the 2016 election — was brought by the Manhattan district attorney, and neither President Biden nor the Justice Department was involved.
Mr. Trump has a long history of calling for weaponizing the justice system against his political opponents, dating back to the “lock her up” chants. But he has escalated those calls during the current campaign, including by vowing last year to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Mr. Biden.
He has said repeatedly that Mr. Biden and Democrats have weaponized the justice system against him, but has provided no evidence for his claims that Mr. Biden was involved in his indictments: the one in New York, one in Georgia and two federal cases from the Justice Department, which has long made prosecution decisions independently from the White House. The Justice Department also investigated Mr. Biden’s own handling of classified information and is currently prosecuting his son.
Mr. Trump has indicated that, if elected to a second term, he would jettison the department’s independence and intervene directly in its prosecution decisions — something he also tried to do during his first term.
With former President Donald J. Trump’s organization in full attack mode, former Gov. Larry Hogan’s path to the Senate in Maryland is getting considerably narrower.
Mr. Hogan, a popular Republican in a strongly Democratic state and prized Senate recruit, has never tried to hide his disdain for Mr. Trump, the former president and presumptive nominee. But when he urged “all Americans to respect the verdict” just before guilt was rendered against Mr. Trump last week in Manhattan, the Trump team decided the former president’s interests outweighed the Republican Party’s push to regain control of the Senate.
“You just ended your campaign,” announced Chis LaCivita, a veteran Republican operative who serves as a senior campaign adviser to Mr. Trump and as an official at the Republican National Committee.
It got personal quickly. Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair and Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, strongly denounced him on CNN.
“He doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and quite frankly, anybody in America,” she said, adding, “I think he should never have said something like that. I think that’s ridiculous.”
She did not directly answer follow up questions on whether the Republican Party would use its resources to support Mr. Hogan’s campaign going to forward.
But Michael Whatley, the chairman of the R.N.C., seemed to on Tuesday when he told an anchor on Newsmax, the right-wing cable news channel, that “right now Larry Hogan has to run his own race.”
For an anti-Trump Republican, all of that might be a badge of honor. Mr. Hogan has also said he would not be going to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next month, where Mr. Trump will officially receive the nomination. But in a state where President Biden beat Mr. Trump 65 percent to 32 percent in the 2020 election, the further fracturing of the Republican vote may not be helpful.
Mr. Hogan remains personally popular in Maryland, something Mr. Trump is not. But mathematically, in a state that is particularly attuned to federal elections given its proximity to Washington, D.C., he would need almost all Republicans — and a lot of Democrats — to rally around him in November to win the seat of Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, who is retiring.
“We don’t want to alienate Trump voters,” Mr. Hogan told The Associated Press in April. “We need Trump voters. And we need a lot of Biden voters. Maryland is tough.”
Mr. Whatley didn’t close off the possibility that the R.N.C. could lend financial support in the future. A Hogan campaign adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal campaign issues, said no one at the committee had reached out to the campaign, formally or informally, to cut off aid — or to assure Hogan aides the money will still flow.
The adviser added that the new party leadership installed by Mr. Trump was never going to spend much in support of down-ballot Republicans, estimating that around $600,000 in campaign assistance could be lost.
Other parts of the Republican campaign structure have rallied around Mr. Hogan, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official Senate Republican political arm, and the Republican leadership’s super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund.
“I thought the trial was a sham,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana and chairman of the senatorial committee. “But Larry Hogan is running for Senate in Maryland, not Mississippi,” a nod to the needle Mr. Hogan must thread.
The eye of that needle is exceptionally small, which is why political handicappers still favor Mr. Hogan’s Democratic opponent, who is not as well known: Angela Alsobrooks, the executive of Prince George’s County, a diverse Washington suburb.
In a less inflamed political moment, Mr. Hogan’s statement just before the verdict was rendered might well have been greeted as statesmanlike: “Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process,” he wrote on social media. “At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
Instead, he was greeted with a stream of invective from Trump supporters, including the disgraced former Representative George Santos, the veteran television personality Lou Dobbs, and Chaya Raichik, who runs the right-wing social media account Libs of TikTok, which regularly posts anti-gay and anti-transgender content.
But Mr. Hogan finds himself in a bind. Democrats aren’t likely to sacrifice a seat in the Senate to the former governor, no matter how moderate his politics, or how much distance he creates for himself from Mr. Trump.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, came to Mr. Hogan’s defense on Monday, and Maryland Democrats on Tuesday used that testimonial to say that Mr. Hogan is a Republican like any other Republican, not the bipartisan moderate he portrays himself as.
“They need him in the Senate to win the majority and pass their extreme agenda, including a national abortion ban,” said Lindsay Reilly, a Maryland Democratic Party spokeswoman. “That’s disqualifying for Maryland voters.”
Tim Sheehy, a businessman and former Navy SEAL, won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Montana on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting him up for a November showdown against Senator Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent.
With roughly half of the vote counted, Mr. Sheehy had 73 percent, well ahead of his lesser-known opponents. Brad Johnson, Montana’s former secretary of state, had 19 percent of the vote, and Charles Walkingchild had 7.5 percent.
“As a Navy SEAL, I’ve always put country before self and I’m running for the U.S. Senate to end Joe Biden and Jon Tester’s inflation, seal our border, secure our children’s future, and put America First,” Mr. Sheehy said in a statement, adding that he was “humbled and honored by all the support.”
The Republican primary was essentially a foregone conclusion since February, when Representative Matt Rosendale abruptly exited the race — less than a week after he entered it — citing former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Sheehy. Mr. Rosendale, a right-wing hard-liner, had been viewed as the only serious challenger to Mr. Sheehy, for whom the Republican establishment had worked to clear the field. His victory is a boon for Republicans as they work to recapture control of the Senate, competing on a favorable map in which a number of vulnerable Democrats face tough re-election battles.
“Tim Sheehy is a strong conservative, an American hero and a successful businessman who will bring an outsider’s perspective to a broken Washington,” said Senator Steve Daines, the Montana Republican who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate. “The clearest path to a Republican Senate majority runs through Montana.”
Mr. Sheehy will face a formidable opponent in Mr. Tester, a popular incumbent who has survived past challenges in his ruby-red state by leaning on his background as a third-generation Montana farmer and his reputation of bipartisanship. Recent polls have suggested a tight race, and the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates Montana a “tossup.” Mr. Tester officially captured the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.
In a post on X on Tuesday night, Mr. Tester acknowledged his November opponent: “It’s official. I’m facing off against Mitch McConnell’s handpicked candidate Tim Sheehy for Montana’s U.S. Senate seat. And I’m going to win.”
Mr. Tester has a cash advantage; he raised $4.1 million between April 1 and May 15, according to recent financial filings, and his campaign has $11.7 million cash on hand. Mr. Sheehy’s campaign raised $2.1 million in the same period — including $600,000 the candidate lent himself — and had $2.2 million cash on hand.
But Republicans believe Mr. Tester, first elected in 2006, is especially vulnerable this election. After more than 17 years in Washington, they think his rural, working-class narrative has worn thin with Montanan voters, and argue he has been a reliable vote for laws signed by President Biden, who is unpopular with the state’s voters. They plan to pin the border crisis and the rising costs of living in Montana on Mr. Biden and, by extension, Mr. Tester.
Democrats have countered with attacks on Mr. Sheehy’s biography. As a wealthy businessman who grew up in Minnesota and moved to Montana a decade ago, they say he epitomizes a trend of rich transplants moving to the state and driving up housing prices, which has infuriated longtime residents. (Mr. Sheehy, who runs an aerial firefighting company and owns a stake in a cattle ranch, made his wealth after moving to the state.)
They have also poked holes in his back story, pointing especially to lingering questions over how he sustained a gunshot wound that he has said came from his time in Afghanistan.
The original super PAC supporting Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign plans to report that it raised nearly $70 million in May, and that it will spend a further $100 million through Labor Day, according to a memo written for the group’s donors.
The super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., is preparing an advertising blitz focused on a handful of key states in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, where several polls show Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, leading President Biden.
The memo, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by someone who received it, was written by the group’s chief executive, Taylor Budowich. The burst of fund-raising it describes is on track with the surge that the Trump campaign has said it experienced after Mr. Trump was convicted last week in a Manhattan courtroom on 34 counts of falsifying business records intended to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016.
The Trump campaign has said that it raised $141 million in the days after the verdict on May 30. That, along with the MAGA Inc. figure, cannot be independently verified until campaign finance reports are made public. But by all accounts, Mr. Trump and his allied groups are moving to chip away at what has been an enormous cash advantage held by Democrats.
Mr. Budowich argued that the conviction in the Manhattan case had not changed the fundamentals of a race in which Mr. Biden is running as an incumbent with dangerously low approval ratings.
In the memo, Mr. Budowich said the money would be used to continue to try to peel off Black and Latino voters, from whom Mr. Trump is currently attracting more support than he has in the past. The money will also be spent in the Rust Belt, where Mr. Trump’s longtime base of white working-class voters dominates.
The memo provides insight into how Mr. Trump’s extended orbit views his paths to the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency, and how pivotal one state in particular — Pennsylvania — is to their plans.
Democrats “need to both solidify the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, while keeping President Trump defensive in the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada,” Mr. Budowich wrote.
He noted that Mr. Trump had been faring better in the Sun Belt states, adding: “That doesn’t mean it’s a certainty — but we are well positioned. That’s why MAGA Inc.’s summer investments will prioritize providing Team Trump with the most electoral paths to victory, while narrowing the battlefield geographically come fall.”
He wrote that Pennsylvania is “the ballgame,” but also said Georgia’s 16 electoral votes presented, through the south, “the best gateway to the White House for President Trump — delivering the targeted 270 electoral votes.”
The super PAC has focused heavily on Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden’s support is stronger than in other Rust Belt states.
Mr. Budowich noted that Mr. Biden’s campaign had spent aggressively on advertising, but that the outlays had not yet materialized into a more expansive block of support for the president. Repeatedly, he pointed out that Mr. Trump was being outspent even as he maintained a solid position in polls.
And he said that MAGA Inc. would work off a targeted voter model with its spending in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
“We may not be able to outspend Democrats, but we can ensure the messages that are being distributed are done so using the targeting that each individual voter requires,” he wrote.
While MAGA Inc. was the first blessed super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, another group, Right for America, is being led by a Trump ally, Sergio Gor. In addition, Miriam Adelson, the megadonor and widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, plans to fund a separate entity supporting Mr. Trump, called Preserve America. That group was initially formed in 2020, when Mr. Trump was running for re-election.
Representative Andy Kim won a decisive victory in the Democratic Senate primary in New Jersey on Tuesday, beating two other candidates and setting up what could be a lively general election campaign in the fall.
The incumbent senator, Robert Menendez, did not appear on the Democratic ballot. He is standing trial in Manhattan on federal bribery, corruption and obstruction charges. But on Monday, he filed paperwork that will allow him to appear on the November ballot as an independent candidate.
Mr. Kim, 41, beat Lawrence Hamm, who headed Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign in New Jersey, and Patricia Campos-Medina, a workers-rights scholar and organizer.
Even before Tuesday, Mr. Kim had vanquished a third potential Democratic rival. Tammy Murphy, the first lady of New Jersey, entered the primary but ultimately bowed out.
“What I hope people see in me is someone who wants to do the work,” Mr. Kim said in an interview.
He campaigned on ending New Jersey’s political cronyism, and took a large step in that direction during the primary campaign. He was a plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced officials to redesign Democratic ballots across the state, ending a longstanding practice of giving preferential positions to candidates endorsed by local party leaders.
New Jersey voters have not sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate in more than half a century. But several candidates saw a glimmer of opportunity in the chaos created by Mr. Menendez’s legal woes.
The winner of the Republican primary was Curtis Bashaw, a 64-year-old Cape May developer, who beat three other candidates: Christine Serrano Glassner, 60, the Mendham Borough mayor; Albert Harshaw of Jackson, a Navy veteran; and Justin Murphy of Tabernacle, a former deputy mayor.
Republican votes may become more meaningful in November if Mr. Mendendez, who would be a high-profile independent, actually appears on the ballot, potentially splintering the vote.
Representative Rob Menendez of New Jersey on Tuesday staved off a tough Democratic primary challenge from Ravi Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken, N.J.
The race in House District 8, which includes parts of Newark and Jersey City, was more competitive than expected because of the legal troubles facing Mr. Menendez’s father, the state’s senior U.S. senator, who is on trial in Manhattan on federal bribery, corruption and obstruction charges.
Representative Menendez, a first-term congressman, has not been accused of wrongdoing and has not been implicated in the legal case against his father. He characterized those seeking to oust him as opportunists who regard him as vulnerable because of his father’s legal trouble.
Though most of the state’s Democratic leaders have abandoned his father, Mr. Menendez collected endorsements from political leaders, organized labor and civic groups and had considerably more campaign cash than his opponents.
Still, even some of the congressman’s allies said in interviews in recent days that they were worried. A former private equity lawyer, Mr. Menendez had only a slim record to fall back on. He had never held elected office before his father helped clear the field for him two years ago. And he has remained loyal, saying last fall that he has “unwavering confidence” in his father’s “integrity and his values.”
Senator Robert Menendez did not compete in the Democratic primary for his own seat. But on Monday, he filed paperwork allowing him to appear on the general election ballot as an independent. If he does run, it will place his son in the potentially awkward position of appearing on the same ballot as his father.
In addition to Mr. Bhalla, Mr. Menendez was running against Kyle Jasey, 41, of Jersey City, who runs a real-estate finance company, in the Democratic primary.
He will face Republican Anthony Valdes, 43, of West New York, a building inspector, in the general election in November.
Reporting from the Capitol
House Republicans have spent the past 18 months vowing to use their majority to attack what they claimed was a “weaponization” of government against conservatives, including the prosecutions of former President Donald J. Trump, but have made little headway in doing so.
But following Mr. Trump’s felony conviction last week, they are promising again to use every congressional tool at their disposal to avenge their party’s leader, seeking to show their fealty and fire up the G.O.P. base.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday announced a “three-pronged approach” for how Republicans on Capitol Hill would push back against the prosecutions of the former president.
Mr. Trump was convicted last week of 34 counts of falsifying business records, prompting widespread outrage in the G.O.P. and a rush by Republicans to capitalize politically on it. Mr. Trump faces three other criminal cases, including two brought by the Justice Department over his handling of classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“We’re looking at various approaches to what can be done here,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference, “through the appropriations process, through the legislative process, through bills that will be advancing through our committees and put it on the floor for passage, and also through oversight. All those things will be happening vigorously, because we have to do that because the stakes are too high.”
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, laid out some of the proposed cuts in a letter to the Appropriations Committee, which determines spending levels.
Mr. Jordan recommended prohibiting taxpayer funding for any new F.B.I. headquarters facility; eliminating any federal grants for those prosecuting Mr. Trump, including Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, Fani Willis in Atlanta and Attorney General Letitia James of New York; and cutting all funding for the special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
“We have rogue prosecutors around the country that have drug President Trump through this process because of who he is,” Mr. Johnson said. “Everybody knows if it wasn’t him, the charges in Manhattan would never have been brought.”
Mr. Jordan also pushed for cuts to federal law enforcement last year, including some of the same ones he is proposing now, and other Republicans introduced bills to defund Mr. Smith’s office, but the G.O.P. did not have the support in its own ranks to win passage of any of those measures, and they were never enacted.