<Former President Donald Trump’s constant legal troubles and court appearances are eating up a lot of his time lately. To make the most of his remaining time, he has to focus on high-impact campaigning and fundraising events. But amid his time-starved schedule, he’s carving out one night later this month to address an oddly niche crowd: the Libertarian Party’s national convention.

It’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Presidential candidates are typically focused on preparing for their own parties’ conventions; it is not the norm for nominees of the two major parties to attend, much less address, the convention for a third party, which typically consists of activist types who dislike the other parties and who in most states will rack up only tiny percentages of the vote. President Joe Biden was also invited by the Libertarian Party to speak at its convention, but he has not taken up the offer — and it’s pretty safe to assume he will not.

But Trump did accept, making him, according to the party, the first former president ever to attend the convention. “Libertarians are some of the most independent and thoughtful thinkers in our Country, and I am honored to join them in Washington, DC, later this month,” Trump said in a statement on Wednesday. “We must all work together to help advance freedom and liberty for every American, and a second Trump Administration will achieve that goal.” He added, “If Libertarians join me and the Republican Party, where we have many Libertarian views, the election won’t even be close.” (Notice how strange it sounds when Trump’s rhetoric turns collaborative and coolly strategic?)

The simplest explanation for Trump’s interest in addressing libertarians is his growing anxiety about competition from anti-establishment movements, particularly independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Trump might be calculating that he can use the Libertarian Party convention to win over libertarians and other two-party–skeptical voters ahead of what’s likely to be yet another election decided by small margins in battleground states where independent candidates are polling unusually well. He also needs to find ways to shore up his weakness among more traditionally conservative Republicans and independents — and Trump might see third parties as a supplement to compensate for that softening support....>

<....Libertarians would not seem a natural fit for today’s Republican Party. They are generally free market fundamentalists who want minimal government intervention in economic and social life, who favor non-interventionist foreign policy and tend to like highly permissive immigration policies. That’s starkly at odds with MAGA Republicanism in a number of ways. Trump is an economic protectionist who loves tariffs and who has expressed limited interest in cutting government programs like Medicare and Social Security. He wants to deport immigrants en masse, not let them into the country. He is fervently devoted to an authoritarian theory of governance, in which he plans to further centralize power in the hands of the president.

But there is an odd wrinkle here that might be influencing the Trump camp’s interest in showing up at the convention, where party members will be voting for their presidential nominee. In the past few years, the Libertarian Party has been overtaken by a faction called the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus (named after the famous libertarian economist), and under its leadership the party has become less traditionally libertarian and more MAGA-friendly — as well as more interested in engaging with the mainstream political scene. As Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy has noted, some of this caucus’ changes to the party have made it strange bedfellows with the modern GOP:

Assuming the Trump campaign is aware of this, it might see libertarians as a more receptive crowd than they have been in the past — whom he can possibly woo to his side. There is also the possibility that Trump just wants to cast as wide a net as possible among anti-establishment voters and sees the Libertarian Party convention as an efficient venue to begin honing and disseminating that message.

Trump’s camp and his allies are increasingly nervous about the threat posed by Kennedy, who takes a bigger chunk out of Trump’s vote share than Biden’s in some recent polls with hypothetical matchups. Given that much of Kennedy’s political platform has taken on a pronounced libertarian tone on issues like Covid policy and climate change, Kennedy and Trump are potentially vying for an overlapping pool of voters with anti-big-government sensibilities. And while the Libertarian Party is niche, it is still big enough to matter for Trump in a tight race. In 2020, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson’s vote share was larger than Biden’s margin of victory over Trump in a number of swing states. In 2016, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson took more than 3% of the popular vote — at that point both Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had levels of unpopularity that mirror the unpopularity of Biden and Trump today.

On a big-picture level, Trump’s appearance at the Libertarian Party convention is a pretty odd spectacle. But it's not odd that Trump is maneuvering to monopolize the anti-establishment vote as aggressively as possible.>

<This past month, a group of self-styled American Christian prophets released an urgent word from God on YouTube about an impending Islamic uprising in the U.S. Pointing to pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, they declared that an “insurrection is forming that is like unto the communist takeover in Russia. … This is not only about bringing a Palestinian state to the Middle East but an Islamic state to North America and other nations.”

The good news, according to these prophets, is that God also says, “If the church repents, I will relent. I will protect your nations.”

If this God-speaking-through-prophets-and-warning-nation- s-about-other-religions business sounds fringy and oddball in modern Christianity, it once was. But such prophecies and these prophets are rapidly redefining mainstream American evangelical theology, practice and politics. They are affiliated with a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, a set of leadership networks whose leaders call themselves modern-day apostles and prophets and believe they are commissioned by God to take over the world.

This NAR movement runs like a golden thread through recent flashpoints of evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump, Christian nationalism and Christian extremism. NAR leaders were central to the mobilization of Christians for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and many apostles, prophets and NAR symbols were present around the U.S. Capitol that day. NAR ideas helped inspire the recent controversy surrounding the Alabama Supreme Court in vitro fertilization ruling. House Speaker Mike Johnson flies a flag outside his office that is closely associated with the NAR’s aggressive prophetic politics.

The reasonable objector may argue that all of those things might be true, and yet the NAR could still be a fringe movement. How much influence do NAR ideas have on broader American evangelicalism?

It’s true that the NAR networks come from the amorphous nondenominational, charismatic sector of American evangelicalism that seeks to restore the supernatural dimensions of early Christianity. Historically these groups have been outside the evangelical mainstream.

But we have collected data showing just how far these NAR-associated beliefs and practices have spread within American evangelical communities. The present-day reach and influence of these ideas may be shocking to those acquainted with conventional evangelicalism. Charismatic theologies, NAR prophecies and radical politics that once operated on the margins of evangelicalism have moved to the center of the action. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this transformation has a lot to do with Donald Trump.

The New Apostolic Reformation refers to a set of charismatic leadership networks established in the late 1990s and early 2000s by a renegade evangelical seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. Almost all of its leaders, including Wagner himself, believed themselves to be newly commissioned apostles and prophets, endowed with immense supernatural authority to revolutionize the church, to defeat Satan and his demons and build the kingdom of God on earth.

Wagner deemed the newly minted apostles and prophets “generals of spiritual warfare,” who were guided by the Holy Spirit to lead prayer and warfare campaigns to defeat the demonic principalities (or “territorial spirits”) who control actual physical territory and hold the United States under their sway. The recent prophecy about Islam taking over America is of a piece with other NAR prophecies that threaten gloom and doom or promise a Christian utopia in America if the church will just defeat America’s (literal) demons.

Wagner and his fellows deeply believed they would provide the spark for a global “Third Great Awakening,” where, as one cherished prophecy put it, a “billion-soul harvest” of conversions to charismatic Christianity would upend societies around the world.

In the intervening decades, NAR ideas and leaders have become extremely popular in charismatic media, functioning as some of the top-tier thought leaders in the burgeoning nondenominational charismatic world. NAR networks also became increasingly politicized in the late 2000s, especially by a prophecy called the Seven Mountain Mandate, first formulated by NAR apostle (and Wagner mentee) Lance Wallnau.

The Seven Mountains prophecy imagines every society as having seven major arenas of influence — religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and commerce — and the prophecy commands Christians to conquer the tops of each of these mountains so that Christian influence can flow down into broader society. Put simply, the Seven Mountain Mandate is a prophetically derived, systematic program for Christian supremacy.....>

<....Shortly after Trump declared his candidacy for president in summer of 2015, he enlisted his friend and spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, a charismatic apostle and televangelist, “to be the bridge between him and evangelicals.” White-Cain began by inviting many of her fellow charismatic evangelical leaders — Messianic rabbis, televangelists, prophets, NAR apostles and megachurch pastors — to meet with Trump early in the campaign.

These were the first evangelical leaders to begin endorsing Trump, signing on to his policy agenda and offering theological rationales for choosing Trump over other, more conventionally evangelical candidates. The popular idea that Trump was anointed by God (like the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus) to be president and play a special role in protecting Christians was originally championed early in the 2016 campaign by none other than Wallnau, who was involved in the 2015 meetings organized by White-Cain.

A few months later Wagner himself endorsed Trump in early 2016, and Wallnau and the other NAR leaders became the chief Christian propagandists surrounding Trump with theology and prophecy. They have written books, created memes, prophetically appropriated symbolic pieces of Americana and launched massive prayer and spiritual warfare campaigns, all to see Trump victorious.

Charismatics, including a number of NAR apostles and prophets, have made up more than half of all of Trump’s evangelical advisory boards, including the new one for his 2024 campaign. In fact, these networks of NAR leaders were the central nervous system of Christian organizing and mobilization for Jan. 6, and many core NAR leaders, including Wallnau, were present at the Capitol that day.

Jan. 6 religiosity may strike many readers as the definition of fringe. How many Christians today actually believe these NAR ideas or support NAR politicized prophecies and spiritual-warfare practices?

To find out, we surveyed 1,500 self-identified Christians in early January 2024, weighting the sample so that it reflected the demographic profile of American adult Christians. Like other surveys, this one was split 50% self-identified evangelical and 50% nonevangelical. The figure below shows agreement with seven statements of charismatic theology which principally originated among the NAR networks. The bars represent the percentage who agree or strongly agree with the statement; the orange bars show that percentage among evangelicals, while the blue bars are the nonevangelical Christian responses.

Strikingly, strong majorities of evangelicals indicate agreement with six of the seven statements, with up to 69% agreeing with the idea that demonic principalities and powers control physical territory. Lagging not far behind is the 66% who agree that the church needs to engage in spiritual warfare to displace high-level demons. Somewhat fewer evangelicals (55%) agree with Wallnau’s prophecy that God wants Christians to stand atop the Seven Mountains of society....>

<....Almost 40% of our Christian sample identifies as either charismatic (or “Pentecostal” or “spirit-filled,” both rough synonyms for charismatic). A narrow majority (51%) of self-identified evangelicals claim a charismatic identity, but so do 24% of nonevangelicals.

It is also important to note that while charismatic Christians are more likely to ascribe to an NAR worldview, agreement with the survey statements does not line up exclusively with an affirmative charismatic identity. The figure below shows that 78% of charismatic evangelicals agree that there are demonic principalities and powers who control physical territory, but so do 59% of evangelicals who do not claim a charismatic identity.

Charismatics who don’t identify as evangelicals also show majority support for the territorial spirits notion (59%), which only drops below a majority (to 34%) for nonevangelical, noncharismatics. In short, these NAR ideas and theologies have spread far beyond the explicitly charismatic circles in which they originated.

In other words, what not long ago seemed to be a marginal set of beliefs has become a dominant religious framework among American Christians. We’ve known for quite some time that charismatics and Pentecostals were the fastest-growing Christian group in the country, but no one has shown yet just how widespread NAR-linked beliefs are, or how far they extend beyond a charismatic/Pentecostal identification. From our evidence, it is no surprise that we are hearing much more talk from religious leaders about demons and spiritual warfare.

The fact that these NAR-affiliated Christians make up the core of Christian Trump support and the new base of the Republican Party also helps explain why many elected officials have taken a decidedly charismatic turn. It explains why a Southern Baptist in good standing like Mike Johnson would be linking arms with NAR apostles, why provocateur Roger Stone has claimed he too is the subject of prophecies and announced in 2022 that he had a vision of a demonic portal above Joe Biden’s White House. It explains why former Texas Gov. Rick Perry would propagate the notion of Trump being anointed by God.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Andy Card, one of George W. Bush’s former chiefs of staff, commented, “The rug of American politics used to have more rug than fringe. Today, the rug seems to have little rug and a lot of fringe.”

Card was describing a tectonic shift in the tone and tenor of Republican politics in the age of Trump, but the same can be said of American evangelicalism. The combined force of Trump’s insurgent politics and the popularity of the Christian leaders surrounding him have together transfigured American evangelicalism. The fringe has become the carpet, and ideas that emerged decades ago on the evangelical margins are today drawing more and more Christians into zealous Trump support.>

Note to the twin pillars of evil: the only force compelling you to come round is a desire to harass me. Make your snide comments of how I have too many posts, there isn't enough content, they're off topic, et cetera. You are two thoroughly detestable human beings deserving of naught but obloquy.

<Columbia offers a case-study in how right-wing politicians are using exaggerated claims of anti-semitism to advance a conservative agenda.

In late April, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the chutzpah to post a video warning that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in the United States. It was a crudely inaccurate characterization—and from a man whose military campaign in Gaza has destroyed all the enclave’s universities. Nevertheless, as protests against the war spread on campuses across the country, news coverage presented the demonstrators as “pro-Hamas” hooligans—a line trumpeted by grandstanding politicians who have paraded through Columbia University, the epicenter of the student organizing, purporting to defend Jews.

It is precisely this false framing, pushed by bad-faith political actors, that has propelled university administrations to crack down mercilessly against students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. At Columbia, the crackdown began as far back as November, with the suspension of campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine—and it culminated last Tuesday night with a violent police raid on the campus, during which cops cleared Hamilton Hall of students who had occupied it and arrested more than 100. Each escalating step the university has taken to repress pro-Palestine speech has been based on mendacious portrayals of student activists, and each has predictably provoked the intensification of their tactics.

I am a professor at Columbia, a Jewish one at that, and I have watched with alarm as politicians have ginned up exaggerated charges of antisemitism to advance an ultraconservative agenda. The reality is that, while there have been some isolated cases of heinous and unacceptable antisemitism on campus (as well as more coming from non-community members outside the gates), these politicians are not helping to make the campus safe for Jews or anyone else; they are seeking to undermine faculty governance, academic freedom, and intellectually honest research and teaching. If anyone is trying to take over the university, it is these rightwing opponents of the critical thinking and learning that universities foster.

A list of some of the most vocal politicians is revealing. House Speaker Mike Johnson made a demagogic whistle-stop to Columbia on April 24 to denounce “lawless agitators and radicals” who had been allowed to spread “the virus of antisemitism.” (He was joined by Republican representatives Virginia Foxx, Nicole Malliotakis, Anthony D’Esposito, and Mike Lawler.) Around the same time, Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton demanded that the National Guard be sent in to quell what Cotton hysterically called “nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Meanwhile, Representative Elise Stefanik—the star browbeater of the hearings on campus antisemitism called by the House Education and Workforce Committee—has been gunning forthe resignation of Columbia President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik (a matter that is not the purview of politicians, but of faculty, administrators, and trustees).

These politicians are the same ones who have spent much of the last few years trying to quash critical academic engagement with topics like the history of slavery or the variable nature of gender. Now, they have declared criticism of Israeli behavior and of the ideology of Zionism off-limits. They have done so with increasing support from their Democratic colleagues, and with the aid of pro-Israel advocates, who have worked long and hard to silence Palestinian expression. Never mind that some of these same politicians have trafficked in white supremacist rhetoric and are hardly reliable friends of the Jews. (Ditto the headliners of a prayer rally near Columbia on April 25, led by Christian nationalist Sean Feucht, meant to protect Jews by bringing the love of Jesus.) They are exploiting exaggerated charges of antisemitism. And they are doing this with the full, if perhaps unwitting, complicity of university leadership itself.

When President Shafik testified before Congress about campus antisemitism on April 17, she took a highly conciliatory tack. (Apparently, she was angling to avoid the same gotcha traps that felled the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in similar hearings last December.) She acceded to the committee’s false premise that students were spewing anti-Jewish hatred—not demonstrating out of concern for Palestinian lives and liberation—and she effectively handed over to these meddling government officials the powers of faculty governance without uttering so much as a peep about principles of academic freedom.....>

<....Yet Committee Republicans were not impressed. As the session came to a close, the committee’s chair Virginia Foxx warned Shafik that they would “bring [her] back” if they didn’t see “more tangible progress.” The message was clear: If Shafik didn’t crack down on student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and change faculty and university curricula in the ways they demanded, Columbia would face fearsome consequences.

A day later, Shafik cracked down: She called in the police to break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that students had set up on a campus lawn—a collection of tents, protest signs (“Disclose, Divest”; “Dykes 4 the Death of Empire”), a posted set of “community guidelines,” Palestinian flags, and a vibe that mixed political commitment with the simple joy of kids hanging out on the grass in springtime. Though Shafik claimed in her request to the police that the protesters represented a “clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,” police chief, John Chell disputed that characterization. He told the Columbia Spectator, that the students “were peaceful” and “were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.” Nonetheless, his police, in riot gear, arrested at least 108 students and swept the camp. (Students soon rebuilt it.)

If Shafik had thought that she would appease her Congressional critics by throwing students and faculty under the bus, she failed—and for reasons that any six-year-old with stolen lunch money could have explained: If you don’t stand up to bullies, they will demand even more. And the Republican bullies are doing just that.

As Rep. Foxx put it in a letter to Shafik and the two Columbia trustees who flanked her at the hearing, the “ongoing chaos” on campus “constitutes a major breach of the University’s Title VI obligations, upon which federal financial assistance is contingent, and which must immediately be rectified.” Not long after, Stefanik doubled down on the same grounds, calling on Biden to pull federal funding from Columbia. Last year, the university received upwards of $1 billion in federal money....>

<....Not satisfied with usurping the university’s self-governance, these politicians were also claiming the powers of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. The OCR is responsible for investigating and judging Title VI complaints of “discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” in programs that receive federal funds. In recent years, the government has adjusted the policy to include discrimination against those with “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics”—which includes Jews, among others. While this is a valuable intervention, those who speciously equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism have been abusing this important law to try to repress free speech about Israel.

So far the OCR has not found that anti-Israel expression in itself has violated Title VI, but last week, the House pressed to require them to do so when they adjudicate the flood of complaints related to campus protests of the last six months. By a bipartisan vote of 320 to 91, the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify into federal civil rights law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which encompasses criticism of Israel. (It’s not yet clear what chance the bill has of passing in the Senate. Kansas Senator Roger Marshall has already declared he will oppose it—following House colleagues like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz—because the IHRA definition lists the claim that Jews killed Jesus as an example of classic antisemitism. Apparently, this is a central tenet for these Gospel-believing Christians.)

Shockingly, before the OCR has even examined complaints against Columbia, Shafik publicly agreed with these Congressmembers that the university has been the site of violations of Title VI. In a message she sent to the Columbia community on April 29, a day before she called in the cops to sweep Hamilton Hall, she claimed that “The encampment has created an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty. External actors have contributed to creating a hostile environment in violation of Title VI, especially around our gates, that is unsafe for everyone—including our neighbors.” By acquiescing to the inaccurate accusation that the university has become a hotbed of discrimination and by inviting riot cops to Morningside Heights to repress political speech, Shafik has not only made our campus unsafe for everyone, she has also imperiled us academically and materially. She has handed over Columbia’s function and future to enemies of our mission.

This reactionary conquest should put universities all across the country on alert. Congressional Republicans are pushing to sabotage higher education.

And Jews—some willingly—are, dangerously, the excuse.>

<When it came time to cast his ceremonial Electoral College vote for Joe Biden in 2020, Democrat Khary Penebaker had to keep things hush-hush.

He wanted to bring his girlfriend at the time, but wasn't allowed a guest. He couldn't even walk through the front door of Wisconsin's statehouse.

Instead, Penebaker and other Badger State electors met at an undisclosed location. Law enforcement escorted the group through tunnels to arrive at a room in the statehouse, which had been closed off to the public.

The 46-year-old Democrat, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2016, called the experience "terrifying." He was scared after seeing stories of election workers being harassed in other swing states.

Penebaker, who is Black, said he thought back to how civil rights activists more than half a century ago had crossed Alabama's Edmund Pettus Bridge knowing they would be beaten by police officers on the other side. He said if they could survive that, he could muster the courage to cast an electoral vote.

Democrats, scholars and election watchdogs are keenly vigilant about the safety of people like Penebaker, who sign up to cast votes for their political parties on behalf of the Electoral College a month after Election Day, and who typically assemble at statehouses as a key part of the Constitutionally-mandated ceremonial process of choosing the next president.

Political violence can slow down the process of electing the president because officials end up needing to evacuate buildings and halt proceedings to shore up security, such as what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. The additional time can give bad actors time to sow doubt in the democratic process.

Democrats did not disclose the specifics of their security plans, but a top official with the Democratic National Committee said they had one in 2020 and have one for 2024. When electors are placed, which is happening all over the country, the party will hold a security briefing for them.

The concerns about electors' safety are similar to the ones about election workers, which a new survey released this month by the Brennan Center for Justice shows 38% of whom have experienced threats, harassment or abuse for doing their jobs, forcing many to quit.

Secretaries of state have said it’s getting harder to recruit and retain poll workers, and Democrats say people are less willing to sign their names to be electors. Even when they do, they experience anxiety.

USA TODAY spoke with five Democratic Party officials in four swing states — Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada — who all said electors are feeling apprehensive. The Republican National Committee and presumptive 2024 GOP nominee Donald Trump's campaign did not respond to requests for comment about security concerns. Efforts to reach Republican officials in Pennsylvania were unsuccessful.

This chorus is likely to intensify in the coming months, especially given Trump's refusals to explicitly rule out political violence in multiple interviews should the former president lose this fall and his previous attempt to fraudulently replace those slates in 2020 to overturn his election loss.

Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Georgia Democratic Party, pointed to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — which pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the legitimate electoral votes from people like Penebaker so that Trump could win the election — as an example of what could happen.

"We’d be foolish not to take the security of electors and everyone involved in our presidential electoral process very seriously — for good reason," he said.

Penebaker said he received hundreds of emails threatening him with lynching if he didn’t change his 2020 electoral vote from Biden to Trump.

He had panic attacks, fearing something could happen at any minute. He said he'll never sign up to be an elector again.

"They took what should be the pageantry, the majestic feel of being an elector," Penebaker said. "You’re one of (538) people in the country who get to do this, and that’s a huge honor, and to have it robbed of you … it’s unfair."

Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who authored a book about the 2020 election, said the fears are legitimate.

He pointed to actual violence that occurred on Dec. 14, 2020, the day electors across the country assembled in their respective states and that served as a preview of the attack on the U.S. Capitol a few weeks later.....>

<...."There were examples of actually people being physically hurt," he said. "There was a person shot in Washington State and there were people stabbed in Washington DC. So there was violence on the day that the electors met."

On that day Delaware relocated its electors ceremony to a gymnasium so they could provide better security at that location when they cast their votes for Biden, for example.

Similarly, Michigan Republicans, who at the time still controlled the state legislature, closed the capitol on Dec. 14, 2020. They had urged legislative staff to work remotely, "based on credible threats of violence."

Similar prudent steps were taken in the Biden-won states of Wisconsin and Arizona amid protests happening across the country fueled by Trump's rhetoric.

Ken Martin, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, said this has made it harder to recruit people to do the job in 2024.

"It’s had a little bit of a suppressive effect, because now people who went through that four years ago, of course, aren’t willing to do it again, and the new people coming in have expressed some concern about their own physical safety,” Martin said.

Ahead of the 2024 election, state Democrats have established security plans for their electors, according to multiple officials.

It was at the forefront of a discussion with state-level leaders who gathered in Chicago in April for a pre-DNC convention huddle, USA TODAY has learned.

"We have talked about security plans for electors, and we did have a whole plan in 2020 after the threat level increased on our electors to keep them safe," Martin said.

"There are conversations that have happened, that continue to happen, to help protect the safety of people who administer elections."

Georgia leaders in particular expressed apprehension given how Peach State poll workers were targeted by Trump and his allies in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Capitol attack. State Democratic officials told USA Today they have specific worries about electors facing doxing, online harassment and physical harm.

The Georgia party officials declined to provide details about their security plans, but emphasized there are real world fears about ensuring their 16 electors—who were selected by the party chair earlier this year—are protected.

"I remain hopeful that that is not going to be the place that we find ourselves in after Nov. 5, but we'll have to wait and see how people behave and what happens," said Olasanoye, the Georgia Democratic executive director.

"But I think I would be lying if I did not say that we are certainly on high alert, and figuring out and thinking through how would we respond," he added.

As part of the Electoral College, each state gets two electors per senator, plus the number of congressional districts. That means California, the most populous state, has 54 electors. Wyoming, the least populous, has 3 electors. It takes at least the votes of 270 electors to win the White House.

There are general requirements under the U.S. Constitution for the electors. They cannot be members of Congress, hold high-level federal positions or have engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. They must convene a month after the November election to select the presidential and vice presidential candidates who won their respective states. Each state can also have additional procedures.

For decades, electors largely had a bit-part in a presidential race, playing a role that flew under the political radar until Dec. 14, 2020. That's when the ceremonial assemblies were met with varying degrees of altercations and the shuttering to the public of state legislative buildings in a few key battleground states.

What happened in 2020 has changed how the job was once viewed by both parties, and it also explains the Democrats' apprehension going into 2024, McDonald said.

Unlike poll workers and other election officials, he said, electors tend to be more partisan and experienced players, whose selection often reflects longstanding civic service or political stature....>

<...."So, at the outset, I think people who were going to be electors have their eyes wide open and understand that they're going to be involved in a very political process," McDonald said.

"Given our heightened polarization and rhetoric that we have around elections now I would reasonably assume that if you were an elector you could imagine that you could have your life threatened in some way," he added.

In terms of protecting electors, very little has been accomplished in terms of codifying their safety.

Democratic officials underscore how even attempts to create guardrails against fake elector schemes have also been thwarted by GOP opponents.

Nevada Democrats, who control both chambers of the state legislature, for instance, tried that last year when they proposed a bill that would have carried a penalty of up to a decade in prison for those found guilty of signing elector certificates falsely claiming a losing candidate had won.

Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo said he agreed there "should be strict punishments" for those who "engaged in schemes to present slates of false electors." But he still blocked the measure, saying the punishments were too severe.

Congress did address some legal holes by enacting the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, which was a bipartisan idea requiring states to follow rules in place before the election, such as electors respecting a state's popular vote.

Anyone who decides to be an elector should follow the safety guidelines from the party and make sure to keep them quiet because “you don’t know who’s going to turn on you," Penebaker said. He also advised that electors come up with individual safety plans for themselves.

Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, said electors tend to be obscure players.

"It used to be the case that most people wouldn’t even know who the electors were," he said.

Roosevelt, a great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, said that safeguarding against threats to the country's democratic process, including security for the 2024 electors, stands out among the unresolved issue from the last presidential race.

"I would be worried that the people who tried to subvert the election in 2020 have more experience and understand the weak points in the system better, so that they’re going to be more sophisticated and more effective," he said, adding: "I am not sure our attempts to protect the system have kept up.">

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 Nf6 4.Nc3 cxd4 5.Qxd4 Bd7 6.Bg5 Nc6 7.Qd2 a6 8.O-O-O b5 9.Bxf6 gxf6 10.Kb1 e6 11.Nd4 Qb6 12.Nxc6 Bxc6 13.Qf4 Be7 14.Re1 Qd4 15.Bd3 O-O-O 16.Qd2 Rd7 17.f4 Kb8 18.Re3 Bd8 19.Ne2 Qc5 20.Nc1 d5 21.Nb3 Qb6 22.exd5 Bxd5 23.Rg3 f5 24.Qc3 f6 25.a4 b4 26.Qe1 a5 27.Bb5 Rc7 28.c3 bxc3 29.Rxc3 Rg8 30.Rxc7 Bxc7 31.Qc3 Bxf4 32.Nc5 Ka7 33.Nd7 Qc7 34.Qd4+ Kb7 35.Nc5+ Ka8 36.Na6 Qd6 37.Qc3 Qb6 38.Qxf6 Bxg2 39.Qxe6 Qxe6 0-1>

<The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case has reversed her own decision and elected to postpone the deadline for a crucial court filing in the criminal proceeding. This decision, revealed Monday, increases the risk that the trial will be pushed back past the November election.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s postponement of the filing deadline — a list of the classified documents that the defense team would like to present at trial — is another feather in Trump’s cap, marking his latest successful attempt at delaying the classified documents trial. If he wins, Trump can then order his Justice department to drop the matter entirely, The New York Times reported.

Trump's lawyers were supposed to file their list by this Thursday, a deadline Cannon had set last month. The judge did not announce a new deadline, nor has she announced a trial start date. The trial had been slated to start May 20, but that date was scrapped at a March 1 hearing.

When the list of defense documents is filed, it will be an integral part of the criminal trial, with lawyers for both sides arguing over what jurors would be allowed to hear at trial. This is “a contested process, balancing issues of public access and national security, that could take months to complete,” according to the Times.

The first time Trump’s team asked for a delay of the Thursday deadline was about a month ago, when they sought to have it pushed to June. At the time, they argued that they were too busy defending the former president in one of the other four criminal cases against him: the Manhattan hush money trial.

But on Monday the defense pointed to a different reason, arguing that special counsel Jack Smith’s office hadn’t properly secured the classified files that they seized them [sic] from Trump’s private club and residence in Mar-a-Lago and that they needed more time to assess that revelation. Smith in a filing last week had noted that some of the files were not in their original order, possibly due to an earlier review by a so-called special master that had been sought by the defense.>

<For the 2022 midterm elections, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use congressional districts that violated the law and diluted the voting power of Black citizens.

A 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court in February 2022 let Alabama use these illegal districts during the election while the court heard the state’s appeal on the case known as Allen v. Milligan. In that case, voters had sued Alabama, arguing that its new congressional district map violated the Voting Rights Act by unfairly reducing Black voting power. Only one of seven congressional districts on Alabama’s new map had a majority Black population, despite Black residents making up a quarter of the state’s population.

The lower federal courts had agreed with the voters who sued and declared Alabama’s map illegal, ordering the state to draw a new one.

Then the Supreme Court intervened.

By June 2023, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Alabama. It upheld the requirements of the Voting Rights Act under these circumstances and allowed the lower court case to move forward.

But by then the votes had been cast in the 2022 elections, and the winners were seated in the U.S. House of Representatives. In November 2022, more than 1 million Americans in Alabama – as well as Louisiana and Georgia – voted in congressional districts that violated the law. Those congressional districts were used to choose political representation for Alabama citizens for the next two years.

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow presumptively illegal redistricting maps during the election not only had major effects for representation, but it also ran counter to six decades of federal court precedent.

Historically, the federal courts prioritized voting rights and legal congressional districts for upcoming elections above all other concerns, allowing lower federal courts to order or – in extreme circumstances – to draw new districts that complied with the law.

In this case, the Supreme Court instead prioritized deference to state election powers and judicial restraint over the rights and representation of voters in Alabama and the federal judiciary’s role in guaranteeing them.

Congressional redistricting and reapportionment typically takes place once a decade. Following the U.S. census, each state is required to redraw its congressional districts to account for changes in population. This is usually completed by state legislatures or redistricting commissions. After the 2020 census, Alabama’s state legislature drew its districts.

By late 2023, Alabama finally got brand-new congressional districts for the upcoming 2024 election. These new borders were imposed by the federal district court and feature a new Second District where Black voting-age residents represent a near majority. Now, Black residents in Alabama, who compose 25.4% of the state population, make up a substantial part of the electorate in two of the state’s seven congressional districts.

The 2024 primary elections have already shown the effect of this court-made map.

In 2022, the Republican candidate for the old version of the Second District ran unopposed in the primary and won the seat by 40 points in the general election. Based on newly drawn district lines, the 2024 primaries have had 17 candidates run in Democratic and Republican primaries to represent this new Second District. Both party primaries went to runoff elections in April.

This newly competitive district in Alabama not only could influence partisan control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025, but it also highlights the direct effect that the federal courts can have on American democracy and representation.

Just as the Supreme Court decision in 2022 limited Black voting power in the state, and thus representation in Congress, the lower court plan increased Black representation in Congress.

The federal judiciary has played a critical role in drawing congressional maps since 1962. That’s the year of the landmark decision in Baker v. Carr, which established that the federal courts could hear cases about whether redistricting and reapportionment plans violated voting rights. Previously, these cases were seen as what were called “political questions” beyond the scope of judicial authority.

The federal courts thus became a consistent, if reluctant, part of the redistricting process each decade since then. Federal courts have imposed some congressional districts used in every redistricting cycle since the Baker decision, in 1972, 1982, 1992, 2002 and 2012. Most plans have been imposed as a result of state legislative failure to propose new districts, unequal district populations or violations of the Voting Rights Act....>