News — Politics

Even as the House of Representatives laid the groundwork Monday for a second impeachment of President Donald Trump, one of his supporters, Jessica Martinez, took heavy political fire 3,000 miles away in her role as a member the Whittier City Council. Martinez was in Washington D.C. last week when Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol in the hope of upending the recent presidential election. Now, many in the city of 86,000 want her to step down from the council. She’s hardly alone. From local teachers to attorneys to students to business owners, people from all parts of Southern California...

What Now? On June 23, 2017, Sarah Verardo, now the CEO of a veterans’ charity called the Independence Fund, and her husband, Mike, a two-time Purple Heart recipient and double amputee, attended a White House bill-signing as Donald Trump’s guests of honor. Mike, a former infantryman in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, told the crowd that a “new day” had dawned under the president. Minutes later, Trump cited the Verardos’ experience while he promised sweeping changes to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Then he signed the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act into law and gave his pen to Mike,...

I. This is an election like no other. The most important election of our time. The election that opens the future or slams it shut. That rewrites the past. The most important election of your life. Anyone’s life. The most important election since the last election that was called the most important election of your life. You know, it was almost always true. Boy cries wolf. No wolf. Boy cries wolf again. No wolf. Boy cries. Wolf shows. Then a pack. This time, a pack as big as a forest in flames. Glaciers melt. Farms parch. Seas boil. Species collapse....

The Pandemic Has Changed Their Plans. In 2020, Democrats were going to knock on a lot of doors. There won’t be any doors knocked—not now, not soon, and perhaps not until sometime after November’s ballots have been cast. Since the summer of 2019, the Democratic National Committee has trained more than 600 college students on the best methods for door-knocking, phone-banking, and party recruitment. In particular, the party focused on “relational organizing”—face-to-face conversations that typically leverage one’s own social network to develop long-term, community-building relationships. The initiative, called Organizing Corps, aimed to put 1,200 students—primarily from communities of color—on the...

In the fall of 1920, Warren G. Harding won the biggest popular-vote landslide in history without ever holding a rally. Instead of hitting the trail, the Republican nominee let the campaign come to him. About once a day, Harding emerged from his home in Marion, Ohio, to address a small crowd of voters and reporters, who wrote up his remarks for their readers across the country. A multimillion-dollar advertising budget took care of the rest. Harding’s “front-porch campaign” was a product of its time—a more dignified manner of politicking in an age when traditional campaigning was sometimes seen as gauche....