THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Not so long ago, the Republicans who ran elections in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds—Maricopa County, Arizona—largely got along. There were egos and quibbles, sure. But in the face of unyielding attacks on elections led by President Trump, the recorder and board of supervisors—which together split election duties—resolved conflicts without blowing up a delicate system built on trust and cooperation.Today’s recorder and board, a mostly new cast chosen by voters in 2024, are different. They’re locked in an all-out war over the machinery, money, and operations that make the democratic process possible. Both sides agree that the standoff threatens their ability to carry out November’s midterm elections free of complications for the county’s 2.6 million voters, more than half the state’s total. The recorder’s side describes the situation in dire terms, writing to a judge that “the legal validity of the election results themselves” is at risk. The recorder’s critics fear that the fight could be used as pretext to cancel results MAGA doesn’t like in elections that could tip the balance in Congress.Before this battle for control fully exploded in recent weeks—with the recorder insisting the Republican-dominated board pay six-figure contempt-of-court fines and election staff facing possible prosecution for setting up ballot drop boxes—he floated an idea through his attorney. Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally who was elected two years ago on a pledge to “end the laughingstock elections,” suggested that the two sides mediate their dispute using Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer and election activist who worked closely with Trump to try to reverse his 2020 defeat. “Ms. Mitchell would be ideal,” the attorney wrote, according to records I obtained, which cited “her expertise.”The suggestion that Mitchell be brought in to broker the conflict astonished county staff still haunted by a 2020 cycle that drew protests at the tabulation center, pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, years of death threats, and ceaseless trolling from critics. In February, Mitchell told me that “Maricopa County is a complete disaster” and that federal investigators should turn their attention to the desert swing county. The recorder’s proposal to bring her in as a mediator of the dispute went nowhere. But the very idea that a lawyer who plotted to overturn the 2020 election could be a neutral arbiter signaled how differently Heap and the Board of Supervisors see the situation, people involved in the private deliberations… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after the company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”[Elaine Godfrey: The Democratic base is ready to go]In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump has a new nemesis, with a name worthy of a supervillain: Scenedesmus.The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.The pool, at the moment, looks like a strange bit of modern art. As workers treat different sections, the areas where they succeed in reducing the algae turn lighter shades of green. In some places, the water is relatively clear. In others, it’s an oily sludge. A quick glance, though, is enough to confirm that this is not the American-flag blue it was supposed to be.Over the past few days, I’ve seen baby ducks swim through the pool; National Park Service workers wading around as they try to clean it; small children bending over to touch it. But none of the NPS workers at the site have been able to definitively tell me whether despite all of the algae—some species of which can be toxic—the water remains safe.A spokesperson at the Department of Interior told me “there is ongoing water testing happening,” but would not disclose the results of those tests. Requests to spokespeople at the NPS have gone unanswered. I have been in touch with scientists who have applied for permits to get into the pool and conduct their own tests, but those permits have yet to be granted.With the lack of transparency from the federal government and no clarity on what’s inside that murky water, I decided to dig—or dip—a little deeper myself. So late on Thursday morning, I filled several water bottles from different areas of the pool. Some were fairly clear, while other samples were dark green. My samples were delivered to two different scientists by that evening. Algae from the Reflecting Pool seen under a microscope (Courtesy of Grey Boyer) When algae first began to flourish in the Reflecting Pool, it appeared to be a blue-green cyanobacterial bloom that had taken over. Photos showed the kind of greenish surface film that can be indicative of that algae, which in some instances may produce neurotoxins harmful to… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Perhaps I should’ve expected the meeting to devolve into chaos. It was predictable, especially if you subscribe to the essential maxim that any room containing several dozen women of a certain age and Summer Shandy on tap is bound to get a little rowdy. Unfortunately, the chair of the Ohio Democrats did not see it coming.Kathleen Clyde, the state party leader, was standing on a small stage at a bar in the Cleveland suburbs, having just finished delivering what was supposed to be a stirring call to action to a group of local Democratic activists. Her tone, however, had not conveyed any particular sense of passion about the upcoming midterms. The ladies in the audience did not seem impressed. And now—oh, no—it was time for questions.“What are we going to do differently?” one woman asked, pointing out that the Democrats’ brand is terrible. Eventually, the microphone was abandoned, and another woman asked: “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?” A third woman chimed in, a little frantically: “What can we do?!”Clyde’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t expected friendly fire. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!” But the women smelled weakness, and now, several of them were shouting at once. “How are you going to do that?” one demanded. “It has to be more specific!” From the back, an older woman offered: “We need smart!” Clyde assured the group that the party’s message was smart, and it was going to resonate in November. But moments later, she was off the stage and hightailing it back to Columbus.Afterward, one of the attendees joked in a group chat that she had witnessed a murder. Actually, what she’d witnessed was a tidy encapsulation of the broader tension at play in her party: Ahead of the midterms, the base is raring to go. But it’s also demanding a reckoning from its highest ranks that hasn’t come. “The party needs to be able to answer tough questions,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of the group at the bar, told me. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump.”It’s a dynamic that has some Democrats chewing their cuticles, despite a fairly promising political landscape for their party. These Democrats expect, of course, that many of their candidates will perform well in November.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.“Quite green,” remarked another.A woman visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, told me she just hopes it’s fixed in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4: “We came and expected it to be blue, and we’re like, What is all this green junk in there?”It’s a question that has ignited internet memes and conspiracy theories, posing the latest political Rorschach test to a divided nation. A not insignificant number of federal workers have now been mobilized to fight the green junk and answer questions about whether the green junk is under control. After the morning doses of hydrogen peroxide came the midday deployment of half a dozen National Park Service workers in bright-yellow vests, many with long-poled contraptions that they swept through the water. “Is that … a vacuum?” a passing man wondered aloud. Yes, he was told. It is a vacuum.By evening, the situation had escalated: Workers strapped on waders, grabbed handfuls of tubing, and got in the pool. Generators hummed; water pumped; workers scraped. By dusk, some areas—though by no means all—had transformed to a hopeful shade of teal. Aerial views, as some noted, made it look like a painting by the abstract artist Mark Rothko.So it’s come to this: A nation launched on the Founding Fathers’ grand dreams about democracy—one that survived a civil war and foreign attacks, that endured depressions and recessions and assassinations—is celebrating its semiquincentennial by watching to see whether we can clean the water in a century-old concrete pool. Even a stone-faced Abraham Lincoln is looking on.Trump’s second term has been all about… [TheTopNews] Read More.