Trump signs proclamation to try to prevent changes to gold-covered Oval Office

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“The article describes President Trump's proclamation to protect the design of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. The proclamation aims to prevent future administrations from making changes to the rooms. The article also mentions Trump's previous renovation projects at the White House, including the demolition of the East Wing and the construction of a permanent granite helipad.

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President seeks to make Oval Office a national monument to ensure designs are not ‘ripped down by stupid people’

Maya Yang

Trump signs order to make gold-decorated Oval Office a national monument – video

Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Thursday that he says will prevent future administrations from changing his design of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, spaces which he declared as national monuments that should be preserved.

In the days since his party suffered historic defeats in the midterm elections, the president has seemingly turned his attention to the many renovation projects he has begun across the nation’s capital. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Trump declared the Oval Office a “national monument”.

“I’m going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages,” he told reporters in the gold-covered Oval Office.

According to the president, the proclamation would ensure the West Wing rooms would not be “touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape”.

“I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come and take it down and try and do something with it,” he said.

“Every once in a while they’ll look and they’ll say, oh, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll put some glass up that’s a little bit better or something, and I say no, you’re not going to do anything. We’re going to leave this as it is,” he continued.

“If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you’ll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here and I will make sure it never happens.”

Since returning to office, Trump has embarked on a series of White House “beautification” projects, most notably the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a $600m ballroom, as well the building of a permanent granite helipad on the South Lawn.

Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, the president defended his wider renovation work at the White House, saying the building’s exterior had suffered from years of deterioration. He pointed to cracked windows, damaged stonework and broken decorative features, saying he had paid for repairs and hired skilled workers to restore them.

“When you looked at that wall one year ago, it was badly damaged from years of service,” he said, adding that exterior columns had also been in “horrible shape”.

On the desk next to where he signed the proclamation was a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word “Veto” – an explicit reminder of his threat to block the legislative priorities and bills passed by the new Democratic-controlled Congress next year.

The baseball hat with ‘Veto’ written on the front. Photograph: Shawn Thew-Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

Democrats made significant gains in several traditionally Republican states where Trump had previously won, including Texas, Kansas, South Carolina and Iowa, by campaigning on issues including affordability and tackling corruption, while also securing control of Congress.

Trump’s opulent redesign of the Oval Office has drawn criticism, including from former president Barack Obama, who recently joked that “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”

Obama’s remark prompted a coordinated response from the White House, with treasury secretary Scott Bessent appearing to hit back by dining at a Cheesecake Factory.

In a final appeal ahead of the midterm elections, Trump held a press conference highlighting the delayed results of his $14m renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, while blaming Joe Biden for the algae that had accumulated in its waters.

“This was in the Biden era … Look, it’s not an easy thing. The algae is brutal. It forms easily. All you saw was dirt and filth and paper and everything else for years,” Trump said on Monday.

Two days later, as the scale of his party’s staggering losses came into focus, Trump led a media tour of the White House Ballroom construction site, where he marveled at the renovations to come.

“The whole thing is a miracle,” he said.“

 

JD Vance Is Probably Toast

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 Summary

“JD Vance faces a weakened path to the presidency after midterm losses tied to the Iran war and inflation. His alignment with Trump and Silicon Valley ties may hinder him, despite Trump’s favor and Vance’s resourcefulness.

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Nov. 6, 2026

Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

By Matthew Schmitz

Mr. Schmitz is the editor of the magazine Compact and a host of the politics and culture podcast “Counterculture.”

His name may not have been on the ballot, but the biggest loser of the midterms was Vice President JD Vance. President Trump will never face voters again. Mr. Vance, by contrast, doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring public opinion. If he hopes to win the presidency in 2028, he will need to sell voters on the tarnished Trump brand.

Republicans such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are already distancing themselves from the Trump presidency. On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis characterized the election results as “a rejection of Republicans in Washington.”

Mr. Vance will have a harder time putting daylight between himself and an unpopular president. Many Republicans have expressed fealty to Mr. Trump, but Mr. Vance has gone further. In both style and substance, he has presented himself as an avatar of the MAGA movement, more Trumpist than Mr. Trump. He has not only served as vice president but has also grown close with Mr. Trump’s family, particularly Donald Trump Jr. To a far greater extent than, say, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Mr. Vance is Mr. Trump’s man.

On Wednesday, Mr. Vance issued a carefully argued statement on X in response to the midterm losses, which he attributed to frustration over the Iran war and inflation, combined with a desire to put America first and change the country’s relationship with Israel. He was at pains not to appear at odds with the president. When he wrote that “the reason we lost is the war,” he was quick to add that “the president himself said so last night.” And Donald Trump Jr. reposted the statement approvingly (“Every word of this is 100, 100, 100”).

Notably, Mr. Vance’s statement made no mention of tariffs, which increased costs even before the price of gas was driven up by the war. His silence is not surprising. Mr. Vance’s political story centers on his connection to a working class left behind by globalization. He cannot change his tune on trade without betraying his political identity.

On Iran, Mr. Vance has no good options. He argued against the venture in internal deliberations but, having lost the argument, backed the war in public. Now he has to convince voters to give him credit for privately opposing the same war he was publicly defending. That dog won’t hunt, unless he breaks with Mr. Trump in a more forceful and dramatic way.

Publicly crossing the president would be risky, though, given that Mr. Vance has already changed his tune on Mr. Trump once, going from staunch critic in 2016 to vocal supporter in 2021. Another reversal would seem all too politically expedient. A hard break with Mr. Trump would also be risky given the president’s support among Republicans. Though his backing has declined among independents, 82 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing.

As for changing America’s relationship with Israel, that is a pseudo-populist nothingburger. It won’t improve the life of a single Trump voter (most of the money “sent” to the country is spent in the United States) or eliminate the reasons the United States projects power globally. But cutting Israel loose is a lot easier to do than imposing tariffs and closing the border while keeping prices low.

Mr. Vance’s postmortem on Wednesday said nothing about corruption. No wonder. Mr. Trump promised to drain the swamp but instead permitted an algae bloom. Rank money-grubbing has surrounded the administration, making Hunter Biden’s attempts at self-enrichment look amateur. Democrats will do everything they can to expose these tawdry dealings through congressional investigations and hearings. Many of Mr. Vance’s closest allies, including Donald Trump Jr., will be subject to scrutiny. However spotless Mr. Vance’s own conduct has been, the dirt will rub off on him.

Mr. Vance retains important advantages. He has Mr. Trump’s favor, has raised money for countless Republican candidates and has successfully courted important parts of the right. But Mr. Vance’s wealthy connections may prove a liability. Populists on the left like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will eagerly tie Mr. Vance to Silicon Valley’s abysmally unpopular artificial-intelligence-fueled visions of a post-human society. Mr. DeSantis, who has gone after A.I. companies, may be prepared to do the same. And across the country this year, voters rejected candidates with close ties to the tech titans of Silicon Valley; even accepting a donation from someone like Elon Musk, for some politicians, seems to have backfired.

Likewise, the sectors of the right courted by Mr. Vance seem increasingly unhinged. Tucker Carlson, a longtime Vance ally and once a unifying MAGA voice, now devotes much of his time to promoting bizarre theories about Jews and Israel. Ten years ago, it seemed that populism might mean reshoring American manufacturing, securing the border, advancing a more modest foreign policy and resisting elite cultural priorities. But for many, it now means nothing more than denouncing a far-off country.

Mr. Vance is resourceful and shrewd. He made his way from the Rust Belt to Yale Law, and from saying Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to serving as his vice president. Perhaps he can complete another unlikely journey, to the presidency. But he now seems farther from that office than he did just one week ago.“

 

Hungry for Change, L.A. Voters Choose Nithya Raman as the Next Mayor

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 Summary

“Nithya Raman defeated Karen Bass to become Los Angeles mayor, winning 52 percent of the vote. The democratic socialist prioritized homelessness, housing, and public safety, promising to replace the police chief. Bass conceded, pledging a smooth transition.

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The 45-year-old City Council member defeated the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, 73, a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders.

Published Nov. 5, 2026Updated Nov. 6, 2026, 3:30 a.m. ET

Nithya Raman Elected Mayor of Los Angeles

Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist, defeated the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, to become the next leader of Los Angeles.Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Nithya Raman, a 45-year-old democratic socialist who tapped into a widespread frustration with the quality of life in the nation’s second-largest city, will become the new mayor of Los Angeles, The Associated Pressreported Thursday. 

Her victory over Karen Bass, the 73-year-old incumbent, is a sweeping success for a new generation of progressive leaders and the arrival of younger Angelenos as a political force in the sprawling metropolis. 

A Harvard-educated policy expert who served six years on the City Council, Ms. Raman turned the page on a liberal bastion whose leaders had been consumed with big-picture battles with the Trump administration. Instead, she zoomed in on the nuts-and-bolts distress of young voters who increasingly found themselves priced out of the famously expensive city. Polls consistently showed her ahead by a wide margin with voters under 35. 

The vote also revealed a broad appetite for change among the four million residents of the city — an echo of calls for a fresh perspective that on Tuesday night propelled a Democratic wave from Maine to California. In Los Angeles, which is already deep blue, it also suggested a widespread openness to the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftist movement that helped elect New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

By Thursday, Ms. Raman was leading with 52 percent of the vote and D.S.A.-backed candidates had won races for city attorney and Congress. Members of the movement already hold three seats on the 15-member City Council. Ms. Bass called Ms. Raman, her one-time ally, to concede on Thursday morning as the ongoing vote count showed a widening lead for Ms. Raman. 

“I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” the mayor said in a statement. “Moving this city forward is what Los Angeles needs from all of us.” 

Ms. Raman at her election party on Tuesday.Philip Cheung for The New York Times

On Thursday evening, Ms. Raman, who until recently was little known outside of progressive political circles, spoke to reporters at a farmers market in the Fairfax District, surrounded by throngs of news cameras, supporters and onlooking shoppers. She wore a blood-orange leather jacket and seemed to pause in front of the microphones, as if taking in her first moments before the public as mayor-elect.

“The key priorities that we’ve heard across this entire city are homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” Ms. Raman said, adding, “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.” 

She sought to reassure those who voted for her opponent or opted to not participate in the election. “I think that’s a sign of the deep distrust and cynicism that has taken hold here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said. “My goal is to earn your trust.” 

Ms. Raman, an immigrant from India with a screenwriter husband and two children, said her story of becoming mayor was emblematic of the opportunity the city represented to the rest of the world. “This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here,” she said. “And the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor, at this moment in American history, is so deeply moving to me.” 

Preliminary election results showed that Ms. Raman had amassed support on the city’s gentrifying Eastside and in neighborhoods dense with young people, newcomers and renters. Ms. Bass drew from homeowners on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley and historically Black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles.

In one largely Latino neighborhood — Boyle Heights — where a cold storage warehouse fire burned for days in June, filling the air with the stench of rotten meat and seafood, voters who had backed Ms. Bass during the primary election flipped and supported Ms. Raman by large margins in the general election vote.

In interviews this week, voters said they welcomed Ms. Raman’s return to basics. Anthony Nabea, 36, said that he liked her focus on city services and potholes. Marisol Medina, 52, disapproved of the money Ms. Bass had spent on the police, whose union was among her primary supporters.

Zanisha Butler, 33, said she was simply ready for a new face in the mayor’s office. “I feel like Karen Bass has run her course to be honest,” Ms. Butler said.

Others expressed concern over the loss by Ms. Bass, whom they viewed as a steady hand compared to the relatively untested Ms. Raman. Daquan Houston, 42, a truck driver in the South Los Angeles of Vermont Square, said the mayor deserved a chance to finish the work she had started. 

“If you get someone new,” he said, “then they’re going to be starting from scratch.”

Overall, however, Zev Yaroslavsky, the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime civic leader, said Ms. Raman’s victory was “a reflection of an electorate that feels the city is on the wrong track.” 

An annual survey conducted early this year by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., found that residents across the county were less satisfied with their quality of life than at any point in more than a decade. 

Few members of the civic establishment publicly backed Ms. Raman. But those who did cited pragmatic motives. 

George Kieffer, a former chair of the University of California board of regents and a principal coauthor of the Los Angeles City Charter, said that at 78, he had decided that only a major political shake-up would wake the city bureaucracy out of its lethargy.

“My party’s establishment is caught in its own bubble,” he said. “Nithya sees it. When she jumped, I did.”

Karen Bass represented Los Angeles for more than two decades in the State Legislature and Congress before her 2022 election as mayor.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

A physician assistant and native Angeleno who organized in South Los Angeles against the crack epidemic in the 1980s, Ms. Bass rose politically as a progressive outside the city’s establishment circles. When she was elected mayor in 2022 , as the city strained to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, she defeated Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and civic leader who spent $100 million of his own money on the campaign.

But her fortunes turned in January 2025. Traveling to Africa at the behest of the Biden administration, she was out of the country when devastating wildfires erupted.

The disaster all but leveled the star-studded Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades, and many survivors never forgave her for being absent during a time of crisis. Her campaign for re-election was an uphill battle from then on.

Six months after the fire, a violent crackdown on immigrants in Los Angeles by the Trump administration set off protests that the White House then seized upon to deploy some 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines into Southern California. Throughout the occupation, which lasted until the end of the year, the Republican president and his allies clashed withMs. Bass. 

The partisan tension shored up her support, but not enough to fend off a serious challenge. After Austin Beutner, a civic leader from Pacific Palisades, entered the race and then withdrew in the wake of a family tragedy, Ms. Raman jumped in.

Ms. Raman, a specialist in urban planning who had been elected to the City Council in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, channeled both Mr. Mamdani and San Francisco’s more centrist mayor, Daniel Lurie. Los Angeles was “broken,” she charged, and Mayor Bass had fallen short on ensuring a basic quality of life.

Although Ms. Raman at times stumbled on camera, and had to scramble to clarify her missteps, her campaign also shrewdly deployed social media videos designed to reach younger voters.Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

Although Ms. Raman at times stumbled on camera, and had to scramble to clarify her missteps, her campaign also shrewdly deployed social media videos designed to reach younger voters. Following in the footsteps of Mr. Mamdani, she gamely appeared in spoofs of microdramas made by real Hollywood production crews and election-themed skits with D.S.A.-aligned actors and influencers. In one video, she talked about creating more shade in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, while pretending to be burned by hot surfaces — a car door, a picnic bench. 

She also distanced herself in some ways from the D.S.A., supporting changes to a local “mansion tax,” for instance, that would have benefited one of the D.S.A.’s usual targets: apartment owners. But she pledged to replace the police chief, whose aggressive crowd-control tactics during immigration protests were denounced by the D.S.A. The group also accused the Police Department of protecting federal agents. 

Ms. Bass seized on Ms. Raman’s promise, calling it reckless with the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028, and charged that her challenger was “untested” and “not ready for prime time.” Ms. Bass’s 2022 opponent, Mr. Caruso, came to her aid, urging voters to reject Ms. Raman and the D.S.A. Every member of the City Council expressed support of Ms. Bass, except for Ms. Raman. 

None of it was enough. After a hedge fund manager and advocate for increased bicycle use in the car-crazy city, backed Ms. Raman, becoming the race’s largest donor, Ms. Raman began airing ads on Dodger games and national news shows. 

As her victory became clear, lobbyists, unions, downtown businesses, nonprofits and other entrenched civic interests were already preparing for a realignment. The pressure will be on the mayor-elect, according to Mr. Yaroslavsky at U.C.L.A. 

Ms. Raman, he said, “now must face the challenge of erecting a new administration and beginning to fulfill her promise to fix the city she will lead in six short weeks.”

Vik Jolly contributed reporting.

Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.

Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.

Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.“

 

Trump Tried to Undermine the Nation’s Elections. It Didn’t Work.

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 Summary

“Trump’s efforts to undermine elections failed as Democratic victories on Tuesday reinforced democratic resilience. Courts blocked interventions, and Trump accepted results. Democrats gained control in battleground states, potentially reducing election denialism, though investigations and Alaska litigation continue.

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Millions of Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday in an election that showed the resiliency of democracy. The president said he would accept the results.

Nov. 5, 2026

A person wears a ‘Stop the Steal’ hat at a rally to support Ken Paxton, the defeated Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, at a rally in Lubbock last month.Kaylee Greenlee/Reuters

President Trump started his second term intent on harnessing the power of the federal government to resurface false claims that widespread fraud had tainted his earlier defeat — and to use those claims to assert unprecedented control over the midterms this year.

He failed.

Voters so thoroughly rejected Republicans on Tuesday, ushering in one of the largest Democratic House majorities in generations and flipping seats that had been red for decades, that it became impossible to blame the outcome on fraud.

Since returning to the White House in 2025, the president has resurrected outlandish and disproven theories of machines tainted by Democrats to steal votes and rampant voting by noncitizens. He tried to redirect the Postal Service to restrict mail voting. He seized ballots from 2020 in Georgia. And his administration launched a massive investigation of state voter rolls, suing states to remove suspected noncitizens.

But the courts reined in many of his most brazen attempts, including on the eve of the election, when the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s effort to require that California set aside 20,000 mail-in ballots that the administration claimed had been provided to noncitizens.

The nation’s decentralized elections system worked reasonably smoothly on Tuesday. Millions of Americans cast their ballots in an election that showed the resiliency of democracy.

The U.S. Constitution states explicitly that the states hold the power to administer elections. Congress may pass laws. The executive branch is given no role.

The victories on Tuesday appear poised only to strengthen the independence of the nation’s election administrators. Democrats who opposed Trump’s federal intervention will soon control the top election office in nearly every significant battleground state for 2028, including newly competitive Texas and Ohio.

Democrats also swept into power in statehouses where Republican lawmakers had played a key role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.

That means fewer election deniers will hold office at the state and local levels as the nation heads into the 2028 presidential election. Fewer state legislatures are likely to adopt voting restrictions, such as limiting access to vote by mail or prohibiting nursing home aides from helping older voters cast ballots. There will also likely be fewer attempts to upend the electoral process through cumbersome hand counts or changes to the certification process.

Election administrators and voting-rights advocates who have spent the last six years fighting election deniers and their unfounded allegations of fraud are now hoping that the midterms have broken the movement.

“I think American voters are tired of this,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works to support election officials in both parties. “It’s not based on fact. They’ve been making claims for well over six years. They’ve been raising money off of these claims, taking money off of sincerely disappointed supporters of losing candidates. And after six years, they produced zero evidence.”

Even Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had fallen short. “I am absolutely willing to accept those results, yeah,” the president told The Times in a telephone interview late Tuesday. Tuesday’s sweeping Democratic victory, it seemed, was too big to deny.

It was not for lack of trying.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump, the nation’s most influential election denier, is entirely done pushing the idea that this week’s election was rigged.

His administration has appeared eager to continue to investigate and intrude on the electoral process. On Tuesday, before polls closed, both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullinpledged in television interviews to investigate the election.

“After this election, we’ll be gathering all the data, we’ll be gathering the voting logs and we’ll be going through those and making sure that no illegals voted,” Mr. Mullin said during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday afternoon.

On Thursday, however, the Department of Justice lost one of its leaders in the crusade to find voter fraud. Harmeet Dhillon, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, resigned after conflicts with other department leaders, including disagreements over legal strategy in the midterm elections.

The president also continued to fixate on the Senate race in Alaska, where a spoiler candidate recruited by Democrats shares a name with the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan. His administration sued to throw out the results if Senator Dan S. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, loses by a margin that can be blamed on the spoiler. The case was dismissed on Nov. 1, but the Justice Department has appealed.

It’s the one frontier the president has not abandoned since Tuesday’s resounding results. On Thursday, he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that any votes for the spoiler, Dan J. Sullivan, should be awarded to the incumbent senator.

The core of the election denial movement is that the electoral system itself has been corrupted. Advocates over the years have alleged, among many theories for which they have no evidence, that large numbers of noncitizens vote illegally, that voting machines are compromised, that fake ballots made of bamboo were shipped to the U.S. from Southeast Asia, and that Italian satellites hacked voting systems to deny Mr. Trump victory.

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The denialist movement has become central to Mr. Trump’s brand, and is deeply embedded in the culture of Republican politics. A Reuters/Ipsos pollthis year found that 63 percent of Republicans believe the president’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

It’s not yet known if the size of the Democratic victories this week, which were fueled at least in part by Republicans voting for Democrats, has changed such views.

Some of the most fervent voices have been richly rewarded by Mr. Trump in his second administration. They have become his close allies, earned audiences with him, helped guide his agenda, and inspired a wave of voting legislation across the country aimed at making voting harder, often to the benefit of Republicans.

In April, ProPublica reported that at least 11 administration appointees had ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative group that has spread misleading claims about the American election system.

The group was founded by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and close ally of the president’s who was on the infamous 2021 phone call between Mr. Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump made false claims of fraud and pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in Georgia.

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Ms. Mitchell took umbrage when asked whether, like Mr. Trump, she had accepted the results of the election.

”I am not going to answer that question because that is a stupid question,” Ms. Mitchell said.

When asked if her movement would remain an influential force in American politics, Ms. Mitchell said, “We’ll see.”

“We’re going to be continuing to be very active,” she said. “We’re adding state coalitions as we speak.”

Looking ahead to 2028 was critical for Democratic candidates for secretary of state, said Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada.

“Everybody was thinking short-term of House and Senate, and we had to get donors and voters focused on the long-term goal of 2028,” Mr. Aguilar said. “And sometimes that didn’t register through the panic, through the chaos of what was happening. So it took us a while to get our message to resonate. But once it resonated, it hit. Really well.”

Some Republicans welcome the possibility that the election denier movement might be dimming. Gabriel Sterling, the former chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, said the dominance of false claims about election fraud made it harder for conservatives like him to focus on actually preventing fraud by keeping voter rolls clean. Although deniers talk regularly about the need to remove noncitizens from the rolls, they led the movement to dismantle the multistate system that helped states prevent double votes and duplicate registrations, which are far more common types of fraud.

Mr. Sterling, who serves as senior fellow at the Secure Democracy Foundation, was forced into the national spotlight just after the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump continued to spread falsehoods about that year’s election in Georgia, Mr. Sterling criticized the president for failing to condemn threats of violence against people overseeing Georgia’s voting system.

In an interview this week, Mr. Sterling said he was not sure whether the movement was on the way out.

“One election cycle does not an election denialism kill,” he said. “You know, it depends on the closeness of elections, and it depends on the efficacy of the election administrators.”

He said elections officials around the country likely helped beat back conspiratorial thinking by carrying off an Election Day marked by only a few glitches.

“We were all terrified to jinx it, because it was all going so smoothly,” he said.

Richard Fausset is a national correspondent for The Times who writes about the way Americans live in a polarized country.

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.“

Midterm Recap Part II: The South Has Got Something to Say

 

 

‘Never stay down’: The powerful lesson behind Keisha Lance Bottoms’ win

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 Summary

“Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia’s governorship through Black women’s resilience, including Stacey Abrams’ infrastructure and LaTosha Brown’s organizing. Defying a billionaire opponent, her victory reflects refusal to stay down.

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Tuesday’s win was the product of Black women refusing to give up.

Keisha Lance Bottoms speaks at an election night event in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2026. Brynn Anderson / AP Photo

Donald Trump ran in 2024 with lies that Black immigrants were eating petsand horrific characterizations of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. After he took office, he began purging people of color from federal jobs. 

Against that backdrop, then-candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms entered the Georgia gubernatorial race with a message: “No matter how hard they swing, you never stay down.”

It was a message that many of us needed to hear at that moment.

It wasn’t just that America had accepted Trump, but that it also rejected Black women. In states like North Carolina, Democrats won the races for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, yet voters couldn’t also tick the box for the supremely qualified state attorney general turned senator turned vice president at the top of the ticket. When I asked myself why, the answer was almost too much to face.

It felt like America didn’t want us, no matter how often we proved ourselves or how qualified we were. It felt like a direct rebuke of our very personhood, from our fellow countrymen.

Black women have a participation rate of more than 60% in America’s labor force — the highest among women. We’ve seized opportunities and dramatically increased our educational attainment. Many of us are the breadwinner of our family despite earning lower wages. We help send men to the moon, we broker diplomatic deals, we craft the soundtrack of the nation— and still our neighbors reject the idea that we could ever be leaders.

In being elected the first Black woman governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms defied that devastating narrative. But make no mistake, this wasn’t because of the sudden altruism of voters; it was because of work put in by Black women who refused to stay down after suffering defeat.

Former state Rep. Stacey Abrams twice had to concede the governor’s mansion in Georgia, but the voting infrastructure she developed with her New Georgia Project laid the groundwork for reshaping not just the politics of the Peach State, but the politics of the nation. LaTosha Brown and Black Voters Matter have pumped millions of dollars into grassroots organizing in Southern states that set the stage for massive Democratic victories in the South last night.

And Keisha Lance Bottoms was key to her own success as well.

Throughout this campaign, people spoke as though her victory could only happen by clinging to Sen. Jon Ossoff’s coattails. They dismissed her extensive rural outreach, her laser focus on affordability and healthcare expansion, and her strategic use of campaign funds to ultimately clobber a billionaire opponent who was readily outspending her using his personal wealth.

Last night’s victory was not American voters giving Black women permission to lead. The governorship wasn’t a position they finally decided to give to us. It was the product of Black women not staying down, no matter how hard they swung. It was decades of subtle moves and superhuman patience. It was the indefatigable resilience that has defined our place in the American story and repeatedly held this country to its promise.

Come January, Georgia’s governor will be named Keisha, and she’s going to write a new chapter of that story and remind America what we can do.

Evan Brechtel contributed to this report.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW, and check out Symone’s podcast with Eugene Daniels, “Clock It.” Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.“