What does it mean to be the nation’s second Catholic president?

Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza talks with senior staff writer Ruby Cramer about how Joe Biden balances a very public role with the “private matter” of his faith at a time of deep division over abortion, and among the bishops in his own church.

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DES MOINES, Iowa — The nation’s secretaries of state used to be little-known, wonky bureaucrats who operated in near-anonymity. But after the 2020 election, they are now on the frontlines of the battle over trust in American democracy.

Since the last time they gathered in person more than a year-and-a-half ago, the secretaries of state have seen their jobs — and U.S. elections — change completely. And they are still grappling with how to respond.

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A new, highly anticipated report from the leading association of pollsters confirms just how wrong the 2020 election polls were. But nine months after that closer-than-expected contest, the people asking why are still looking for answers.

National surveys of the 2020 presidential contest were the least accurate in 40 years, while the state polls were the worst in at least two decades, according to the new, comprehensive report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

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Former Attorney General William Barr pushed back Tuesday against suggestions from former President Donald Trump and a former federal prosecutor in Pennsylvania that federal authorities were ordered not to aggressively investigate claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

Trump declared in a statement sent to reporters Monday evening that the former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, William McSwain, was blocked from pursuing assertions of election tampering.

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The legal reckoning for attorneys who pushed former President Donald Trump’s spurious claims of election fraud advanced on Monday, with a federal court in Detroit holding a hearing on whether to impose sanctions over a suit filed last year seeking to decertify Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan and declare Trump the winner.

Two of the most prominent attorneys in the pro-Trump camp — Dallas-based Sidney Powell and Atlanta-based L. Lin Wood — are among the lawyers who brought the unsuccessful suit and whose conduct is under scrutiny by U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker.

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A Pennsylvania ally of former President Donald Trump announced that he would try to initiate a review of the 2020 election in the key battleground state, mirroring a controversial effort in Arizona to examine the results months after President Joe Biden was sworn in.

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who has repeatedly echoed Trump’s false claims about widespread fraud and is now considering a run for governor next year, announced on Wednesday that he would investigate the 2020 general election and the 2021 election in “several counties” in the state.

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When Arizona Republicans first pushed for a partisan audit of the 2020 presidential ballots cast in the Phoenix metropolitan area, they argued that they needed to know if any irregularities or fraud caused President Trump to lose this rapidly evolving swing state.

But the audit itself could be damaging Republican prospects, according to a new Bendixen & Amandi International poll, which shows roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort. In addition, a narrow majority favors President Biden in a 2024 rematch against Trump.

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Donald Trump just can't seem to quit 2020. That means Republicans can't either.

The former president is returning to the national spotlight with plans to play a central role in the GOP's push to reclaim power, huddling with members of the conservative Republican Study Committee at his New Jersey resort last week. Trump told the crew there he is “more motivated than ever” to be engaged in House and Senate races, according to RSC Chair Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.).

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Cindy McCain on Sunday called Arizona Republicans' audit of the 2020 election results in the Phoenix area “ludicrous.”

Arizona Senate Republicans hired a Florida firm, Cyber Ninjas, to audit the election results in Maricopa County, though only the two races — president and U.S. Senate — which were won by Democrats. Cyber Ninja founder Doug Logan has offered pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the election.

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President Joe Biden’s path to reelection just got a little harder.

As a result of Census Bureau population figures released Monday, if every state voted the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020, Biden would win three fewer Electoral College votes than he did in November, while the Republican nominee would win three more.

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A group of top Democratic Party pollsters are set to release a public statement Tuesday acknowledging “major errors” in their 2020 polling — errors that left party officials stunned by election results that failed to come close to expectations in November.

In an unusual move, five of the party’s biggest polling firms have spent the past few months working together to explore what went wrong last year and how it can be fixed. It’s part of an effort to understand why — despite data showing Joe Biden well ahead of former President Donald Trump, and Democrats poised to increase their House majority — the party won the presidency, the Senate and House by extremely narrow margins.

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Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, arguing the cable news giant falsely claimed in an effort to boost faltering ratings that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election.

It’s the first defamation suit filed against a media outlet by the voting company, which was a target of misleading, false and bizarre claims spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden. Those claims helped spur on rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a violent siege that left five people dead, including a police officer. The siege led to Trump’s historic second impeachment.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has passed up yet another opportunity to wade into disputes over last year’s presidential election.

The justices on Monday declined to take up cases challenging a Pennsylvania state court decision that extended the ballot-receipt deadline in last November’s election by three days due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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House Minority Whip Steve Scalise on Sunday continued to spread the blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, while stating both that former President Donald Trump condemned the violence and that Democrats did not adequately denounce unrelated violence during last summer’s racial justice protests.

"Surely, there's a lot of blame to go around," Scalise (R-La.) said on ABC’s “This Week.”

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A federal judge in Washington on Friday formally referred a Minnesota lawyer for potential discipline over a lawsuit filed in December seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s wins in at least five battleground states.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg said the suit was so flimsy and legally flawed that it could merit the attorney who filed it, Erick Kaardal of Minneapolis, facing some sort of punishment from the court.

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Hawkfish, the Democratic data firm backed by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is shutting down, according to people familiar with the plans.

The news was announced at a staff meeting Friday afternoon.

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Former President Donald Trump has blamed the election results on unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance. But at the top levels of his campaign, a detailed autopsy report that circulated among his political aides paints a far different — and more critical — portrait of what led to his defeat.

The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.

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A majority of Americans support the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump and want to see him convicted in the Senate and barred from holding future federal office, according to a new poll released Monday by Monmouth University.

The poll found 56 percent of Americans approve of the the House of Representatives impeaching Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, a slight uptick compared with his first impeachment — 53 percent of those surveyed by Monmouth University in January 2020 approved.

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Senate Republicans talk as a party as many as three times a week during normal times. But these times are anything but normal.

The Senate GOP has not spoken as a conference for more than two weeks now, since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asked Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who wasn't present, to explain his plans to challenge the election in a party conference call. Since that Dec. 31 conversation, eight senators challenged the election results, the Capitol was overrun by pro-Donald Trump rioters and the president was impeached.

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Vice President Mike Pence called his successor, Kamala Harris, on Thursday to congratulate her ticket's win and to assist the transition, people familiar with the situation confirmed to POLITICO.

The phone call came only six days before Inauguration Day, following a fraught post-election season in which President Donald Trump and his supporters vehemently denied his loss in the 2020 election. Though Trump acknowledged his time in the White House was coming to a close following a violent insurrection by his supporters at the Capitol, the president has yet to fully admit defeat to Biden.

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