California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday became the second governor in U.S. history to defeat a recall aimed at kicking him out of office early, a contest the Democratic governor crafted as part of national battle for his party’s values in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and lingering threats from “Trumpism.” The victory cements Newsom as a prominent figure in national Democratic politics and preserves his prospects for a future U.S. run. It also ensures the nation’s most populous state will remain in Democratic control as a laboratory for progressive policies on immigration, climate change, representation and inequality. “‘No’ is not the only thing that was expressed tonight,” Newsom said at a news conference. “I want to focus on what we said ‘yes’ to as a state: We said yes to science, we said yes to vaccines, we said yes to ending this pandemic.” A Republican almost certainly would have replaced Newsom had the recall succeeded, bringing a polar opposite political worldview, though they would have had to contend with a state Capitol dominated by Democrats. The recall, which turned on Newsom’s approach to the pandemic, mirrored the nation’s heated political divide over business closures and mask and vaccine mandates, and both parties will dissect its outcome heading into the 2022 midterm elections. Read:Firefighters advance on blaze that shut California highway President Joe Biden sought validation of the Democratic Party’s approach of tighter restrictions and vaccine requirements, urging Californians to show the nation that “leadership matters, science matters.” The race also was a test of whether opposition to former President Donald Trump and his right-wing politics remains a motivating force for Democrats and independents. “We defeated Donald Trump, we didn’t defeat Trumpism. Trumpism is still alive, all across this country,” Newsom said as he campaigned in a state that the former president lost by 29 percentage points. Republicans had hoped for proof that frustrations over months of pandemic precautions would drive voters away from Democrats. They also searched for evidence that voters were tiring of liberal leadership. Democrats have controlled every level of government in California for more than a decade, a period marked by a housing crisis and the increasingly damaging effects of climate change. Republicans won back four U.S. House seats last year, success that leaders hoped had indicated revived signs of life. But a recall election is an imperfect barometer — particularly of national trends. Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1 in California, so the results may not translate to governors in toss-up states or reflect how voters will judge members of Congress next year. That the unusual contest was held at the tail end of summer meant some voters weren’t even tuned in. Voters were asked two questions: Should Newsom be recalled, and, if so, who should replace him? Only a handful of the 46 names on the replacement ballot had any level of public recognition, but most failed to gain traction with voters. Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder held a commanding lead on the second question and appeared all but certain to end the race with the votes needed to have replaced Newsom had the recall been a success. He had entered the race just three months before Election Day and quickly rose to the top of the pack. But that allowed Newsom to turn the campaign into a choice between the two men, rather than a referendum on his performance. Newsom seized on Elder’s opposition to the minimum wage and abortion rights as evidence he was outside the mainstream of California. The governor branded him as “more extreme than Trump,” while Biden called him “the closest thing to a Trump clone I’ve ever seen.” Though the contest didn’t quite bring the circus-like element of California’s 2003 recall — when voters replaced Democratic Gov. Gray Davis with Republican movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger — it featured quirky moments of its own. Reality TV star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner entered the race but gained little momentum and left the state for part of the campaign to film a reality show in Australia. Businessman John Cox, who lost badly to Newsom in 2018, tried to spice up his campaign by hiring a live bear to join him, branding himself as the “beast” to Newsom’s “beauty.” The best known Democrat on the replacement ballot was a 29-year-old YouTube star who dispenses financial advice to his followers. Though Newsom defeated the recall, he may soon be running against Elder again: The governor is up for reelection next year, and the primary, which puts candidates from all parties on one ballot, is just nine months away. Read: California governor seeks $16.7M in aid for Afghan refugees The recall, initiated by an amateur political organizer, wasn’t the first attempt to oust Newsom, and it began as an expression of frustration over Democrats’ grip on power. But when Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order, the pandemic became the race’s driving force. Recall organizers needed about 1.5 million signatures — California has 22 million registered voters — to make the ballot. They owe their success in part to a single day in November, when a judge gave them four extra months to gather signatures due to the pandemic. That same day, Newsom attended a birthday party with friends and lobbyists at the lavish French Laundry restaurant, a gathering that violated his pandemic rules. The episode spiraled into a public relations disaster. Supporters of the recall expressed frustration over months-long business closures, restrictions that kept most children in distance learning for a full academic year, and the confusing patchwork of rules that governed how people could gather with friends and family. Rising homicides, an unabated homelessness crisis and an unemployment fraud scandal further angered Newsom’s critics. But the broader public stayed on Newsom’s side. Polling from the Public Policy Institute of California showed his approval rating remaining above 50% throughout the pandemic. With weeks to go, the institute’s poll showed 60% of Californians approved of Newsom’s handling of the pandemic. In the early months of his campaign, Newsom declared California was “roaring back” from the virus, and he used a windfall of tax dollars to dole out billions for programs from child education to homelessness. Middle- and low-income Californians got checks of up to $1,100 each. The rise of the highly contagious delta variant over the summer dampened Newsom’s positive messaging, as he began to frame the race as one of “life or death” consequences. He pointed to Texas and Florida, which were seeing worsening surges as their Republican governors rejected mask and vaccine mandates, as cautionary tales for what California could become. When Texas’ new law banning most abortions took effect Sept. 1, Newsom’s comparison with the GOP state only became more stark. Newsom’s administration has mandated children wear masks in schools and is requiring all health care workers to get vaccinated. Teachers and government employees must be vaccinated or tested regularly. Ace Smith, one of Newsom’s political consultants, said before the race concluded that he believed it would provide Newsom — and the Democratic Party — a “clear mandate” for “sanity” on public health. The party’s biggest luminaries stepped out for Newsom, highlighting the national stakes. Beyond Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama appeared in state or in campaign ads to help Newsom drive up turnout. National Republican leaders largely kept the contest at arm’s length. Trump barely commented on the race until the final days, when he suggested with no evidence that the results would be rigged because of mail-in balloting. One of the recall’s original organizers said his comments would do more harm than good. Read: Fires harming California’s efforts to curb climate change In the closing days, Elder’s campaign echoed Trump’s messaging, saying he expects “shenanigans” and linking to a website insinuating Newsom had already won the election due to fraud. The site included language from a petition circulated to help Trump’s effort to overturn last year’s presidential election, but that wording was removed by Tuesday afternoon. Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, once considered the party’s best hope to win back statewide office given his record in a Democratic city, failed to find his niche with voters, struggling to appeal to both the party’s base and the broader electorate. Elder immediately captured attention from the party’s conservative grassroots, but he also alienated independents and Democrats who may have considered a vote against Newsom. Newsom has been viewed as a potential White House contender since at least 2004, when he defied federal law to issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples as mayor of San Francisco. His victory maintained those prospects, though he will still have to navigate around the ambitions of Harris, who came up through San Francisco politics alongside Newsom. Newsom came to the contest with advantages — it was his to win or lose. California’s electorate is less Republican, less white and younger than it was in 2003, when voters booted the Democratic Davis. Newsom was allowed to raise unlimited funds, dwarfing his competitors while flooding TV screens with advertising. Public worker unions and business and tech executives poured millions into his campaign. The GOP had looked to build on its four congressional wins in 2020 and recruited tens of thousands more volunteers to campaign for the recall. Voter turnout and the recall results in the four Southern California districts, in Orange County and the Los Angeles suburbs, will offer an early indication of the party’s ability to hold the seats next year.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City after appealing to the political center and promising to strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing. A former police captain, Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor if elected. He triumphed over a large Democratic field in New York’s first major race to use ranked choice voting. Results from the latest tabulations released Tuesday showed him leading former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 8,426 votes, or a little more than 1 percentage point. “While there are still some very small amounts of votes to be counted, the results are clear: an historic, diverse, five-borough coalition led by working-class New Yorkers has led us to victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York,” Adams said in a statement. Read:Biden: Infrastructure vow was not intended to be veto threat He said he was running to “deliver on the promise of this great city for those who are struggling, who are underserved, and who are committed to a safe, fair, affordable future for all New Yorkers.” Adams will be the prohibitive favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels. Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-to-1 in New York City. Adams’ closest vanquished Democratic rivals included Garcia, who campaigned as a technocrat and proven problem-solver, and former City Hall legal advisor Maya Wiley, who had progressive support including an endorsement from U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Andrew Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate known for his proposed universal basic income, was an early favorite but faded in the race. Voting in the primary ended June 22. Early returns showed Adams in the lead, but New Yorkers had to wait for tens of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted and for rounds of tabulations done under the new ranked choice system. Under the system, voters ranked up to five candidates for mayor in order of preference. Candidates with too few votes to win were eliminated and ballots cast for them redistributed to the surviving contenders, based on the voter preference, until only two were left. The city’s first experience with the system in a major election was bumpy. As votes were being tallied on June 29, elections officials bungled the count by inadvertently including 135,000 old test ballots. Erroneous vote tallies were posted for several hours before officials acknowledged the error and took them down. The mistake had no impact on the final outcome of the race. Adams, Garcia and Wiley all filed lawsuits last week seeking the right to review the ranked choice tally. Wiley said in a statement Tuesday that the board “must be completely remade following what can only be described as a debacle.” As for herself, she said her campaign would have more to say soon about “next steps.” Garcia’s campaign issued no immediate response to Tuesday’s vote tally, but said she would be making a statement Wednesday morning. Adams, 60, is a moderate Democrat who opposed the “defund the police” movement. Read: Black Americans laud Juneteenth holiday, say more work ahead “We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” Adams said after three people including a 4-year-old girl were shot and wounded in Times Square in May. “If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse. It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities,” he told supporters the night of the primary. But Adams is a study in contradictions who at different times has been a defender of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a registered Republican and a Democratic state senator thriving in a world of backroom deals. Adams speaks frequently of his dual identity as a 22-year police veteran and a Black man who endured police brutality himself as a teenager. He said he was beaten by officers at age 15. Adams became a police officer in 1984 and rose to the rank of captain before leaving to run for the state Senate in 2006. While in the police department, he co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that campaigned for criminal justice reform and against racial profiling. After winning a state Senate seat from Brooklyn in 2006, Adams made an impression with an impassioned speech favoring same-sex marriage rights in 2009, two years before New York’s state legislators passed a marriage equality bill. Adams also weathered a few controversies, including a 2010 report from the state inspector general that faulted his oversight of the bidding process to bring casino gambling to the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. Adams had accepted campaign contributions from a politically connected group bidding for the gambling franchise. Adams was elected in 2013 as Brooklyn borough president, his current job. Adams is a vegan who credits a plant-based diet with reversing his diabetes. He has a 25-year-old son, Jordan Coleman, with a former girlfriend. His current partner is Tracey Collins, an educator who holds an administrative job in the city’s public school system. Journalists raised questions during the race about where Adams lived. He was born in Brooklyn, walked the beat there as a cop, owns real estate there and represented it in the state Senate. But he slept in his office in Brooklyn Borough Hall for months during the pandemic and opponents noted that he shares a place with his partner in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Adams gave reporters a tour of a basement apartment in Brooklyn that he said was his primary residence. Read:Adams takes fragile lead in NYC Democratic mayoral primary Adams can be a charismatic speaker but has also made cringe-worthy utterances, such as his 1993 suggestion that Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican-born politician, should have married a Latina instead of a white, Jewish woman. Speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event last year, Adams complained about gentrifiers moving to the city from elsewhere. “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio,” Adams said. “New York City belongs to the people that were here and made New York City what it is.” Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, was barred by the city charter from seeking a third term.

American authorities seized a range of Iran’s state-linked news website domains they accused of spreading disinformation, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday, a move that appeared to be a far-reaching crackdown on Iranian media amid heightened tensions between the two countries. The Justice Department said 33 of the seized websites were used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union, which was singled out by the U.S. government last October for what officials described as efforts to spread disinformation and sow discord among American voters ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The U.S. says three other seized websites were operated by Kata’ib Hizballah, which more than a decade ago was designated a foreign terrorist organization. The website domains are owned by U.S. companies, but despite the sanctions, neither the IRTVU nor KH obtained the required licenses from the U.S. government before using the domain names, according to the Justice Department. Read: Hard-line judiciary head wins Iran presidency in low turnout The Justice Department announcement came hours after the Iranian state-run news agency IRNA revealed the U.S. government seizures without providing further information. The takedowns come as world powers scramble to resurrect Tehran’s tattered 2015 nuclear deal and just days after the election victory of Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi. On Monday, Raisi, known for his hostility to the West, staked out a hard-line position in his first news conference. He ruled out the possibilities of meeting with President Joe Biden or negotiating over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and support for regional militias — concerns the Biden administration wants addressed in future talks. Relations between Iran and the U.S. have deteriorated for years following President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal and the return of devastating sanctions on the country. That decision has seen Iran, over time, gradually abandon every limit on uranium enrichment. The country is now enriching uranium to 60%, its highest level ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels. Iran provides support to militant groups in the region, such as Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, as it seeks to wield its influence far afield and counter its foes. On Tuesday, visiting the addresses of a handful of sites, including Iran state television’s English-language arm Press TV, Yemeni Houthi-run Al-Masirah satellite news channel and Iranian state TV’s Arabic-language channel, Al-Alam, produced a federal takedown notice. It said the websites were seized “as part of law enforcement action” by the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Read: Iran elects hard-liner Raisi as new president The U.S. government also took over the domain name of the news website Palestine Today, which reflects the viewpoints of Gaza-based Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, redirecting the site to the same takedown notice. Press TV, launched in June 2007, is the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s English-language service. Its Iran-based website, PressTV.ir, was not affected. Most of the domains seized appeared to be “.net,” “.com” and “.tv” domains. The first two are generic top-level domains as opposed to country-specific domains, while “.tv” is owned by the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu but administered by the U.S. company Verisign. Seizing a domain on a major country-specific top-level domain such as Iran’s “.ir” would be apt to produce widespread international condemnation as a violation of sovereignty. It’s not the first time that the U.S. has seized domain names of sites it accuses of spreading disinformation. Last October, the Department of Justice announced the takedown of nearly 100 websites linked to Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard. The U.S. said the sites, operating under the guise of genuine news outlets, were waging a “global disinformation campaign” to influence U.S. policy and push Iranian propaganda around the world. Yemen’s Houthi rebel group announced that its Al-Masirah satellite news channel went offline Tuesday without prior notice. It said the channel would continue in its mission of “confronting the American and Israeli acts of piracy against our nation, by any means.” Responsibility for providing name service for the domain name presstv.com was apparently switched to an Amazon name server on Tuesday at mid-afternoon European time, said internet infrastructure expert Ron Guilmette. Cybersecurity researchers at RiskIQ found a total of 24 seized sites sharing the same Amazon name server. Read: Moderate Iran candidate concedes win by judiciary chief There are no private television or radio stations in Iran. Satellite dishes, while widespread, also are illegal. That leaves IRIB with a monopoly on domestic airwaves. Marzieh Hashemi, a prominent Press TV anchor who, in 2019, was arrested as a material witness in an unspecified criminal case and has appeared before a grand jury in Washington, told The Associated Press that the channel was struggling to “figure out the reasons” for the seizure. While airing in Iran, Press TV focuses predominantly on international affairs through the lens of how leaders in the Islamic Republic see the world. Fierce criticism of British and American foreign policy is common. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, IRIB has been in the hands of hard-liners who back Iran’s government. Press TV has previously run into trouble with Western authorities over its reporting. The Anti-Defamation League has criticized the channel as “one of the world’s leading dispensers of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in English.”

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams appeared to take a fragile lead Tuesday in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, but it could be weeks before it becomes clear who is actually on top in the first citywide election to use ranked choice voting. As ballot counting began Tuesday, a plurality of Democrats ranked Adams as their first choice in the race. It was tough to tell, though, whether that lead would hold. As many as 207,500 absentee ballots remained to be counted. Voters’ full rankings of the candidates have yet to be taken into account. It could be July before a winner emerges in the Democratic contest. Adams, a former police captain who co-founded a leadership group for Black officers, was leading former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and former de Blasio administration lawyer Maya Wiley. Read:Voting ends, wait for results begins in NYC mayoral primary Speaking to jubilant supporters, Adams acknowledged that he hadn’t won yet, and that under the ranked choice system there were multiple rounds of ballot counting still to go. “We know that there’s going to be twos and threes and fours,” he said. “But there’s something else we know. We know that New York City said, ‘Our first choice is Eric Adams.’” Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who was far behind in early returns, conceded about two hours after polls closed and vowed to work with the next mayor. In the Republican primary, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa defeated businessman Fernando Mateo. Ranked choice voting wasn’t a factor because there were only two candidates in the race. Several candidates in the race to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio have the potential to make history if elected. The city could get its first female mayor, or its second Black mayor, depending on who comes out on top. But in the Democratic contest, the initial picture could be misleading. After polls closed at 9 p.m., New York City’s Board of Elections began releasing results of votes cast in person, but the returns focused on who candidates ranked as their first choice. The ranked choice system, approved for use in New York City primaries and special elections by referendum in 2019, allowed voters to rank up to five candidates on their ballot. Vote tabulation is then done in computerized rounds, with the person in last place getting eliminated each round, and ballots cast for that person getting redistributed to the surviving candidates based on voter rankings. That process continues until only two candidates are left. The one with the most votes wins. It won’t be until June 29 that the Board of Elections performs a tally of those votes using the new system. It won’t include any absentee ballots in its analysis until July 6, making any count before then potentially unreliable. Among the votes counted on election night, Adams trailed both Garcia and Wiley when voters listed their second, third and fourth choices in the ranked choice voting system. Besides Adams, Garcia, Wiley and Yang, other contenders in the Democratic contest included City Comptroller Scott Stringer, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, former Citigroup executive Ray McGuire and nonprofit executive Dianne Morales. Read:US hits encouraging milestones on virus deaths and shots Stringer, McGuire and Morales addressed supporters after polls closed as early returns showed them trailing the front-runners but did not immediately concede. De Blasio, a Democrat, leaves office at the end of the year due to term limits. The candidates traveled around the city Tuesday doing a last round of campaigning. Wiley was losing her voice greeting voters near her polling place in Brooklyn. Garcia campaigned up in the Bronx, while Sliwa and Stringer bumped into each other campaigning in Manhattan. A still hoarse Wiley acknowledged the uncertainty of the race in a speech later. “What we celebrate today is that we have a path,” she said. Garcia told her supporters, “I know that we’re not going to know a lot more tonight, so I want to thank everyone who is here, and everyone who has been a part of this journey.” Concern over a rise in shootings during the pandemic has dominated the mayoral campaign in recent months, even as the candidates have wrestled with demands from the left for more police reform. As a former officer, but one who spent his career fighting racism within the department, Adams may have benefited most from the policing debate. He denounced the “defund the police” slogan and proposed reinstating a disbanded plainclothes unit to focus on getting illegal guns off the streets. Wiley and Stringer, battling for progressive votes, both said they would reallocate a portion of the police department’s budget to other city programs. Of the top contenders, either Garcia or Wiley would be city’s first female mayor if elected. Adams or Wiley would be the second Black mayor. Yang and Garcia formed an alliance in the campaign’s last days in an apparent effort to use the ranked voting system to block Adams. The two held several joint campaign events, with Yang asking his supporters to rank Garcia as their No. 2 — though Garcia did not quite return the favor, not telling her voters where to rank Yang. Adams accused his two rivals of purposely trying to block a Black candidate. Read:Biden and Congress face a summer grind to create legislation Sliwa does not have much of a chance to win the November general election in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 7 to 1. Former allies, the two Republicans Sliwa and Mateo traded personal insults and tried to shout over each other during one debate on Zoom. Sliwa, a radio host who still wears his red Guardian Angels beret when he appears in public, got an endorsement from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who called him “my great friend” in a robocall to Republican voters. Flanked by Giuliani at his victory party, Sliwa promised a general election campaign focused on crime. “This is going to be a campaign clearly in which I talk about cracking down on crime, supporting the police, refunding our heroes the police, hiring more police, taking the handcuffs off the police and putting it on the criminals, and restoring qualified immunity to the police so that they can’t be personally sued,” he said.

Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief won a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election, a vote that both propelled the supreme leader’s protege into Tehran’s highest civilian position and saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. The election of Ebrahim Raisi, already sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, became more of a coronation after his strongest competition found themselves disqualified from running in Saturday’s vote. That sparked calls for a boycott and many apparently did stay home — out of over 59 million eligible voters, only 28.9 million voted. Of those voting, some 3.7 million people either accidentally or intentionally voided their ballots, far beyond the amount seen in previous elections and suggesting some wanted none of the four candidates. Read: Iraq Interior Ministry: 82 killed in Baghdad hospital fire Iranian state television immediately blamed challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and U.S. sanctions for the low participation. But the low turnout and voided ballots suggested a wider unhappiness with the tightly controlled election, as activists criticized Raisi’s ascension. “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran,” Amnesty International’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said. In official results, Raisi won 17.9 million votes overall, nearly 62% of the total 28.9 million cast. Had the voided ballots gone to a candidate, that person would have come in second. Following Raisi was former hard-line Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei with 3.4 million votes. Former Central Bank chief Abdolnasser Hemmati, a moderate viewed as a stand-in for outgoing President Hassan Rouhani in the election, came in third with 2.4 million votes. Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi was last with just under 1 million. Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, who gave the results, did not explain the high number of voided ballots. Elections in 2017 and 2012 saw some 1.2 million voided ballots apiece. Iran does not allow international election observers. While Iran does not have mandatory voting, those casting ballots do receive stamps showing they voted on their birth certificates. Some worry that could affect their ability to apply for jobs and scholarships, or to hold onto their positions in the government or security forces. Read:A growing challenge for Iraq: Iran-aligned Shiite militias Abroad, Syrian President Bashar Assad immediately congratulated Raisi’s win. Iran has been instrumental in seeing Assad hold onto the presidency amid his country’s decade-long grinding war. Separate congratulations came from Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who also serves as the vice president and prime minister of the hereditarily ruled United Arab Emirates. The UAE has been trying to de-escalate tensions with Iran since a series of attacks on shipping off its coast in 2019 that the U.S. Navy blamed on Iran. Also congratulating Raisi was Oman, which has served as an interlocutor between Tehran and the West. Iran’s archrival Israel, however, slammed the new leader. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Raisi “the butcher of Tehran” and described him as responsible for the deaths of “thousands of Iranians.” Rouhani, who in 2017 dismissed Raisi as an opponent in his reelection as someone only knowing about “executions and imprisoning” people, met the cleric Saturday and congratulated him. “I hope I can respond well to the people’s confidence, vote and kindness during my term,” Raisi said. Read: Pope visits Iraq's war-ravaged north on last day of tour Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah, Iran’s theocracy has cited voter turnout as a sign of its legitimacy, beginning with its first referendum that won 98.2% support that simply asked whether or not people wanted an Islamic Republic. Some, including former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called for a boycott of Saturday’s election. A constitutional panel under Khamenei disqualified reformists and those backing Rouhani, whose administration reached the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The accord disintegrated three years later with then-President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of America from the agreement. Raisi’s election puts hard-liners firmly in control across the government as negotiations in Vienna continue to try to save a tattered deal meant to limit Iran’s nuclear program, at a time when Tehran is enriching uranium at its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels. Tensions remain high with both the U.S. and Israel, which is believed to have carried out a series of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear sites as well as assassinating the scientist who created its military atomic program decades earlier. Raisi also has become the first serving Iranian president sanctioned by the U.S. government even before entering office over his involvement in the 1988 mass executions, as well as his time as the head of Iran’s internationally criticized judiciary — one of the world’s top executioners. The State Department said it hoped to build on the Vienna talks “regardless of who is in power.” However, it noted the election’s lowest-ever turnout and described Iranians as being “denied their right to choose their own leaders in a free and fair electoral process.” “Iran’s restrictions on free expression and association fundamentally compromise the electoral environment,” the State Department said. “Hundreds of political prisoners remain jailed, and we join the international community in calling for their release.” Read:A timeline of disaster and displacement for Iraqi Christians But U.S. hopes for a longer and stronger nuclear deal from the Vienna talks may be in question. “Raisi’s ambivalence about foreign interaction will only worsen the chances that Washington could persuade Tehran to accept further limits on its nuclear program, regional influence, or missile program, at least in Joe Biden’s first term in office,” wrote Henry Rome, an analyst at the Eurasia Group who studies Iran. Iranian presidents have almost all served two four-year terms. That means Raisi could be at the helm what could be one of the most crucial moments for the country in decades — the death of the 82-year-old Khamenei. Speculation already has begun that Raisi might be a contender for the position, along with Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba.

A presidential campaign that was already tugging at the nation’s most searing divides has been jolted by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, potentially reshaping the election at a moment when some Americans were beginning to cast ballots. For months, the contest has largely centered on President Donald Trump’s handlin

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