Election Updates: A Biden campaign ad is calling attention to Trump’s felon status.
A Texas man who left threatening phone messages for Representative Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles-area Democrat, was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday. The man, Brian Michael Gaherty, pleaded guilty in connection with the calls, which included racist and misogynistic language. A hate-crime enhancement was added to his sentence.
The Biden campaign is reminding voters that four years ago today, Donald J. Trump as president downplayed the dangers of large gatherings for spreading the coronavirus, including his first pandemic campaign rally. Herman Cain, a former G.O.P. presidential candidate, attended that Oklahoma rally, one linked to a surge in infections, and later died from the virus. He was trending Monday on social media.
Donald J. Trump knocked Representative Bob Good, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, on social media ahead of a virtual town hall for his Republican primary opponent in Virginia, John J. McGuire, whom he has endorsed. “He turned his back on our incredible Movement, and was constantly attacking and fighting me until recently, when he gave a warm and ‘loving’ Endorsement,” he wrote.
Fighting for his political life, Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York is leaning on star power in the final week of his Democratic primary campaign. Bowman will appear Wednesday night on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” On Thursday, his campaign will host a concert featuring the rapper Cash Cobain.
“The Daily Show,” the flagship program of Comedy Central, will host a series of events combining voter registration drives with rescue dog adoptions during the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer in Milwaukee and Chicago. The initiative, The Daily Show Presents: InDogCision 2024: Rescuing Democracy, will open Friday with an event in New York City.
CNN is debunking right-wing media chatter that President Biden’s campaign was trying to renegotiate the rules for the network’s June 27 debate to allow him to be seated when he faces former President Donald J. Trump. A CNN spokeswoman said that both campaigns had agreed to the rules proposed by the network, including for the rivals to be standing.
Florida, no longer the swing state it was once, has drawn some recent attention as Democrats hope that abortion and marijuana ballot measures lift their turnout. But the reality is that the state still looks very favorable to Republicans, and some Democrats think party leaders should be more upfront about their expectations.
Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to visit Atlanta on Tuesday to attend the opening of a campaign office and a Juneteenth block party. The planned trip is Harris’s second to Atlanta in five days. Recent polls have shown President Biden trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Georgia, as some Black voters appear to turn away from the president.
Where is Donald J. Trump heading immediately after next Thursday’s debate? To meet with donors. He will drop by a watch party in Atlanta being thrown by Kelly Loeffler, the former senator, and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, according to a copy of the invitation. Special guests are being teased: Those who spend $50,000 get “preferred watch party dinner seating with V.I.P. surrogates" — but a regular seat can be had for $10,000.
Former President Donald J. Trump is set to host a fund-raiser this Saturday in Philadelphia, according to a copy of the invitation. Trump has invited couples who donate or raise a joint $35,000 to the event. He is also scheduled to host a rally at Temple University that evening — and donors are invited to a “Photo Opportunity and V.I.P. Rally Experience.”
Reporting from Washington
President Biden’s campaign on Monday began its most aggressive effort to brand former President Donald J. Trump a felon, with the introduction of a new television advertisement that focuses on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s criminal conviction.
The campaign said the ad would be part of a $50 million investment in battleground states in June. A growing number of Democrats have been urging the president to become more aggressive in branding Mr. Trump with his criminal conviction.
“We see Donald Trump for who he is,” the ad’s narrator states. “He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault and he committed financial fraud.”
The ad concludes by framing the election with the choice the Biden campaign aims to sear into the memory of voters who may be on the fence about casting a ballot for Mr. Biden, whose approval ratings last week reached the lowest point in his presidency.
“This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad’s narrator states.
Since Mr. Trump’s trial concluded last month, the president’s Democratic allies have been engaged in a broad discussion about how to use the New York jury’s decision in the campaign.
While Mr. Trump regularly bemoans his conviction in rally speeches and on his social media platform, Mr. Biden has for the most part avoided the subject, aside from an offhand remark at a Connecticut fund-raiser this month. He has not attacked Mr. Trump for his criminal conviction in front of television cameras, though surrogates such as Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois have shown themselves to be far less reluctant to do so.
In just 10 days, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump will meet for their first debate of the campaign, an event the president’s team hopes will help cement with voters the idea that the 2024 election is a choice between Mr. Biden and his predecessor.
“Trump approaches the first debate as a convicted felon who continues to prove that he will do anything and harm anyone if it means more power and vengeance for Donald Trump,” said Michael Tyler, a Biden campaign spokesman. “His entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution.”
A Trump campaign spokesman said the Biden campaign’s new ads demonstrated that Mr. Biden had led a coordinated attack against Mr. Trump — a theory for which there is no evidence. In addition to the New York case, Mr. Trump has been indicted in two separate federal cases and one case in Georgia.
“Joe Biden and his campaign are stupid enough to highlight how they have weaponized the justice system to attack the leading presidential candidate and their opponent in order to interfere in the election,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman. “The Biden campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising, yet their numbers have not changed.”
Mr. Trump has held narrow leads over Mr. Biden in most public polling for months, though interviews with nearly 2,000 voters who took polls in recent months from The New York Times and Siena College found a slight shift to Mr. Biden from Mr. Trump after the former president’s conviction.
As the arm of the Democratic Party that works on state legislative races, it is the job of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee to care about the bottom of the ballot. With a $10 million campaign announced on Monday, it is trying to get more voters to care, too.
The $10 million investment, part of a $60 million total that the group previously announced as its target for the 2024 cycle, will fund an unusually early and expansive public push — one intended not only to support candidates, but also to convince voters of the importance of controlling state legislatures.
The money will go to party caucuses in Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most of these are swing states, but red Kansas is included because Democrats hope to break Republicans’ supermajorities there — which would let the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, veto legislation with less chance of being overridden.
A broader public-facing campaign is centered on a website that will spotlight and raise money for a cycling lineup of candidates, including in solidly Republican states like Idaho and Oklahoma where the party is trying to make long-term inroads.
The message: Much of the policy that directly affects Americans’ lives is enacted at the state level. That is perhaps most prominently true on abortion, one of the most salient issues for the Democratic base, but it is also true of voting access, gun laws, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and economic programs like paid leave. Republican-led states could supercharge, and Democratic states could constrain, a second Trump administration, and vice versa if President Biden wins.
“It is so crystal clear that regardless of who wins the White House, this Republican agenda — this dangerous MAGA Republican agenda — is going to move through our statehouses,” said Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “We can’t just continue to pay attention to what is happening in Washington, D.C., and our federal races.”
Also true, if less commonly spoken, is that fielding candidates in state legislative races can increase turnout for the presidential and congressional races regardless of the outcome of the state races: the converse of the typical coattails effect in which candidates lower on the ballot benefit from turnout driven by the top.
Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young progressives to run for office, said her group’s candidates often encountered voters who seemed enthusiastic about them even if they were unimpressed by Mr. Biden and other national Democratic leaders — a potentially significant dynamic in a presidential race in which many Americans are dissatisfied with their options.
“Most of them presumably are going to show up and also vote the rest of the ballot,” Ms. Litman said, “but they’re doing so at the invitation of the state legislative candidate.”
The first candidates to get a boost from the Democratic committee in its public messaging are from North Carolina — where Republicans secured supermajorities in both chambers after a Democrat switched parties last year, and Democrats hope to break at least one — and Pennsylvania, where Democrats are trying to protect a narrow House majority. More candidates will be highlighted over the course of the summer as states hold their primaries.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee investment — and investments of outside groups like the States Project, which has announced $70 million in spending — follows many years in which Republicans dominated state races even when Democrats did well nationally. That disparity was attributable in part to gerrymandering, but also in part to Democrats’ being outspent and out-organized in state legislative races.
This year, for the first time in three decades, a Democrat is running in every legislative district in Florida. The party is also fielding candidates for every Senate seat in Wisconsin and every House seat in Michigan, as well as unusually high numbers of candidates in red states such as Arkansas and Idaho.
The committee’s Republican counterpart, the Republican State Leadership Committee, has not announced a spending target but has said it expects to have less money than the Democrats, a fact it has tried to spin as a positive.
“It should come as no surprise that state Democrats are running their traditional playbook this cycle — banking on massive investments from the national liberal money machine to try to bail them out for their failed policies that are out of step with voters,” the group’s president, Dee Duncan, said in a statement, adding that he was “confident that Republicans are in a strong position to stave off the massive onslaught of money pouring in from the Democrats.”
In addition to defending majorities in states like Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin — where that job became harder after a court-ordered redrawing of gerrymandered maps — Republicans are trying to regain majorities in Michigan and Pennsylvania and to chip away at Democratic dominance in states like California and New York.
The first presidential debate is 10 days away, the first convention four weeks away, and the unprecedented first criminal conviction of a former president less than three weeks in the past. In between, the never-normal 2024 campaign is grinding on.
Former President Donald J. Trump has two rallies scheduled this week: one on Tuesday in Racine, Wis., and one on Saturday in Philadelphia. And some of his allies will gather in Washington in the second half of the week for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference, an assembly of conservative evangelical activists.
At the moment, President Biden doesn’t have any major campaign events scheduled for himself. But Vice President Kamala Harris will appear with the rapper Quavo on Tuesday at an event in Atlanta focused on combating gun violence, a few days after the Supreme Court overturned a ban on bump stocks — a policy that Mr. Trump enacted after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas but has since backed away from, and that Mr. Biden supports.
Ms. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, will be in North Carolina the same day, to talk about Biden administration policies on clean drinking water and to speak at a campaign event.
The most consequential political events of the week may be outside of the presidential race, with congressional primaries or runoffs happening on Tuesday in Georgia, Oklahoma and Virginia.
Of particular note are the races for two competitive House seats in Virginia that are being vacated by Democratic incumbents: Representatives Abigail Spanberger (who is running for governor) and Jennifer Wexton (who is retiring because of a rare neurological disorder). There is also a bitter Republican primary between Representative Bob Good — the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus — and John McGuire, a challenger endorsed by Mr. Trump, who is still angry that Mr. Good supported Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary.
And in Oklahoma, Representative Tom Cole, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and one of a dwindling number of Republicans who actively works across the aisle, is facing a primary challenge from his right.
On the campaign-finance front, Thursday is the monthly deadline for candidates to file reports on their fund-raising and spending, which will provide an updated picture of their financial strength.
Annie Karni, who covers Congress, traveled through the Fifth Congressional District in Virginia for this article, reporting from Goochland and Powhatan.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia stepped off a tour bus wrapped in “Trump 2024” decals one afternoon this month in south-central Virginia with a simple message: Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was a traitor to former President Donald J. Trump.
“We need loyalists,” Ms. Greene barked at about a dozen voters gathered on a baking parking lot in Goochland. Mr. Good, she said, had “kicked Trump when he was down, and went and endorsed another candidate.”
John J. McGuire, a state senator, former Navy SEAL and election denier, is challenging Mr. Good for the Republican nomination on Tuesday. Mr. McGuire, who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, “is the true MAGA, the true Trumper loyalist!” Ms. Greene said.
Not too far down the road the following evening, Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, was on hand to rally with Mr. Good, an important injection of MAGA bona fides for a congressman dealing with the potentially crippling fact that Mr. Trump has endorsed his opponent.
“They think you’re a bunch of morons who don’t count,” Mr. Bannon told a large crowd gathered on a pleasant summer evening in front of the Powhatan Court House, surrounded by rolling farmland. He reminded the audience that Mr. Good was one of eight rebel Republicans who voted last year to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his post, and he cast the fight for re-election as a battle against the traditional G.O.P.
“Why are we here today?” Mr. Bannon asked. “Because of Kevin McCarthy. We’re here because we were sold out by the Republican establishment. They hate anybody that will stand up to them. This is not about President Trump.”
But this wild Republican primary in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains has become all about Mr. Trump. It has splintered the MAGA movement and the G.O.P. itself and highlighted the shifting alliances, personal feuds and chaotic maneuvering that have come to define the party as much as any ideological or policy position.
Both candidates have plastered Mr. Trump’s name in letters as big as their own on their campaign lawn signs. (The Trump campaign sent Mr. Good a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he stop, but it does not appear to have had any effect.) Mr. Trump is scheduled to participate in a tele-town hall meeting for Mr. McGuire on Monday night, on the eve of the primary, which his supporters think will put him over the edge for victory.
The back-to-back events early this month pitting some of the most famous MAGA figures against each other have highlighted how strange this civil war of a primary has become. It is indicative of a larger split on the right that has been brewing for years. Each candidate is pitching himself as the lawmaker in lock step with Mr. Trump, dividing the far right in this bright red district and leaving many voters confused.
“It shows the weakness of MAGA and the Trump coalition,” said David Richards, a professor of political science at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia. “There are a lot of egos trying to leverage Trump to their advantage. If that’s all you have going and you don’t have a big policy difference, that’s going to lead to some really weird splits.”
The establishment Republican Main Street Partnership is backing Mr. McGuire, who bears little resemblance to the kind of center-leaning Republican the group typically aligns with. While most Freedom Caucus members are supporting their chairman, at least one member of the group, Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, is backing Mr. McGuire.
There is scant difference between the two hard-right candidates on the issues. They are both America First isolationists who want to crack down at the southern border, block aid to Ukraine and shrink government spending. Center-leaning Republicans have aligned with Mr. McGuire because of Mr. Good’s vote to oust Mr. McCarthy, who has been on a revenge tour against the eight Republicans who voted him out. And Mr. Trump turned against Mr. Good after he backed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over him in the Republican presidential primary.
It has all left Republican voters in the district frustrated and at odds with people they usually agree with. About a third of voters in the district said they were still undecided, according to a recent survey by the Virginia Faith and Freedom Coalition. That poll found Mr. McGuire with a 10-point lead over Mr. Good. But another poll commissioned by the Champions of Freedom PAC showed Mr. Good leading by nine points.
Mr. Good, who calls himself a “biblical conservative,” first won his seat in 2020 by stoking a right-wing revolt against a Republican incumbent, Representative Denver Riggleman, for officiating at the same-sex wedding of one of his congressional aides.
But he made a powerful enemy of Mr. Trump last year when he backed Mr. DeSantis, claiming that he wanted to help elect a Republican who could serve two terms in the White House. Then, after Mr. DeSantis dropped out of the race, Mr. Good may have set a world record for the speed at which he blasted out a statement in support of Mr. Trump.
But it was too late. In a recent video for Mr. McGuire’s campaign, Mr. Trump told Virginia voters that Mr. Good “will stab you in the back like he did me.”
In an interview last week, Mr. McGuire said he was still getting used to the fact that Mr. Trump now calls him out of the blue to chat.
“I’ve got his cellphone number!” he said with glee.
He recounted his phone conversation with Mr. Trump before the official endorsement went out on social media. “He said, ‘It’s going to be great; it’s going to be huge,’” Mr. McGuire recalled. “Then he starts counting down. ‘Five, four, three, two — you ready for this? It’s going to be great.’ And he hit the button.”
Mr. McGuire, who in 2006 broke his neck in a freak accident on a trampoline and was told he would never walk again, was just elected to the State Senate last year.
“I took it really hard when he decided he was going to run against Bob Good,” said Karen Wirsing, who voted for Mr. McGuire last year for the local seat. “He was very opportunistic.”
Ms. Wirsing, who serves on the Goochland County School Board, said she was a die-hard Trump supporter but would not follow his lead in backing Mr. McGuire.
“Whatever Trump’s reasons are for doing that, we have to vote on the issues that matter to us in our area,” she said.
Jeanette Makowskyj, who is retired, said she used to be a supporter of Mr. Good but is now for Mr. McGuire.
“He is just standoffish,” she said of her congressman. “I worked the polls a couple of years ago. John McGuire shook my hand, thanked me for volunteering. He’s more personable.”
But, she added: “It’s sad. We should be one united party.”
With little in the way of policy differences dividing the two candidates, most of the campaign has been spent on personal attacks.
“The whole campaign is based on lies; the whole campaign is based on deceit,” Mr. Good said of his opponent last week, without providing any examples. He said the people of his district would not let the seat be “bought by the D.C. special interests.”
Mr. McGuire, the day before, said that “Bob Good is on the Bob Good team.” And he criticized him for his vote to oust Mr. McCarthy, calling him a “Republican in name only.” “If you’re on the Republican team and you partner with the Democrat team to take out the Republican leader, who’s the RINO?”
Mr. Good’s vote to oust Mr. McCarthy got mixed reviews in the district.
“That wasn’t right,” said Phil Griffin, a Vietnam veteran who previously supported Mr. Good and is now backing Mr. McGuire. “I didn’t like McCarthy, but that wasn’t right. We’re still in no better shape. It didn’t do a thing. He’s a traitor; it’s not right.”
Jim Agnew, a retired sheriff, said it made him like Mr. Good more.
“He’s shown a real backbone in standing up for what he believes,” he said.
But many voters were simply left confused by the entire thing.
On Thursday morning, LaGina Facinoli, a recent transplant to the district, witnessed supporters of Mr. Good holding up signs near an event for Mr. McGuire as a peaceful counterprotest. Both sets of signs displayed Mr. Trump’s name.
“What happened between Bob Good and John McGuire?” she asked a volunteer for the McGuire campaign. “What is the problem?”
The volunteer said her candidate was a former Navy SEAL backed by Mr. Trump.
“That’s all I needed to know,” Ms. Facinoli said.
By the time Mr. McGuire stepped off his tour bus, Ms. Facinoli was waving a campaign sign and waiting to shake his hand.