Elections

The voters of San Francisco recalled their district attorney over crime in June, and now the big question in next week’s election is whether the voters of New York will turn out their Democratic governor over the same issue. Several recent polls say that Gov. Kathy Hochul is holding on by just single digits in a state that Joe Biden won by 23 points in 2020.New York hasn’t had a hotly competitive governor’s race since 1994, a year like this one when many voters were frustrated with one-party Democratic rule in Washington, and crime and economic issues were top concerns for the electorate. Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress that year, and in New York, Republican George Pataki toppled Gov. Mario Cuomo. The headwinds now facing Ms. Hochul and Democratic incumbents nationwide are in some ways worse, with high inflation hurting voters and an overwhelmed immigration system that is now making life more chaotic in American cities.But crime is the issue particularly bedeviling Ms. Hochul and some other Democrats, and in the end could lead New York voters — including independents, Bloomberg Democrats and others — to elect Representative Lee Zeldin as the first Republican governor since Mr. Pataki. Mr. Zeldin faces a tough climb in a strongly Democratic state, but why a Zeldin victory is even conceivable is instructive about the mood of the electorate and the state of the Democratic Party in New York and nationally.Rather than change course over the last year in the face of troubling trends on crime, inflation and immigration, Democrats nationwide, including Ms. Hochul, have paid lip service to voter anxiety and offered a mix of empathy and multi-point plans instead of bold solutions. Virtually every New Yorker knows that Democrats run the show in Albany and New York City, with large majorities, and have the power to confront problems in the state and are accountable for failing to do so. Voters want fiscal responsibility, violent criminals taken off the streets, and a working immigration system. Ms. Hochul has given them a $220 billion budget, stalled on meaningful fixes to the bail system and sidestepped confronting the immigration system. Mr. Zeldin has had an open field on all of these issues.In New York, these national trends play out particularly with a focus on crime, which is up in New York City by 30 percent this year. That includes a 33 percent increase in robberies and an 11 percent increase in rapes (although homicides are down 14 percent). Subway ridership remains depressed, with regular stories of people being pushed onto the tracks, random muggings, and most horrifically, a mass shooting on a Brooklyn train earlier this year.The New York City mayor, Eric Adams, declared a state of emergency this month as the number of people in shelters approached an all-time high — exacerbated by the influx of migrants, including thousands bused in from Texas. The city shelter system is struggling to accommodate these men, women and children.More important than the actual statistics, at least when it comes to politics and elections, is that public concern about crime has increased. It is the most important issue in the governor’s race, dominating this election just as it did last year’s election for New York City mayor. When asked the most important issue in New York State, 28 percent of likely voters picked crime, while 20 percent said inflation and 14 percent chose protecting democracy, according to a Quinnipiac poll conducted in mid-October.In particular, New York City’s anxiety over crime could make the difference in this election. Thirty-six percent of New York City residents said crime was their greatest concern — three times as much as those that picked inflation, the second most popular choice. Mr. Zeldin most likely needs at least 30 percent of the New York City vote in order to win, and that doesn’t seem as unlikely as it did earlier this fall. The Quinnipiac poll has Mr. Zeldin getting 37 percent.Voters’ greatest concerns vary by party, but Mr. Zeldin could win because independents are siding with Republicans on crime and inflation rather than with Democrats, whose concerns over protecting democracy take precedence. The story of the 2022 election could be that Democrats overestimated how much voters cared about the events of Jan. 6 and the ties to Donald Trump of Republicans like Mr. Zeldin. In fact, by constructing a campaign around those concerns — and not the threats posed by crime, inflation and immigration — Ms. Hochul and other Democrats nationwide are at real risk of not facing up to the mood of the electorate at a time of pressure and fear. They are clearly counting on enough moderates and independents to conclude that supporting a Trump-loving Republican and abortion opponent on Nov. 8 is beyond the pale. Mr. Zeldin, in turn, says that abortion laws in New York State are safe and implies that the election-denying attacks on him are overblown.In the Quinnipiac poll of likely New York voters, independents said they care most about crime (31 percent) and inflation (21 percent), while protecting democracy was a distant third (11 percent). Protecting democracy was the most common choice for Democrats, but even 30 percent of Democratic voters chose crime and inflation in the number two and three spots, respectively.Mr. Zeldin was attacked while onstage at a campaign stop this summer by an assailant with a knifelike weapon; the attacker was released from custody soon after his arrest, only to be rearrested and held after intervention by a U.S. attorney. Mr. Zeldin’s daughters recently called 911 when a shooting erupted outside their suburban home. These incidents underscore the prevalence and salience of the crime issue this year. In the 1990s, when crime rates were high and the issue was of enormous concern to voters, President Clinton’s ads featured a major police union endorsement, and then-Senator Joe Biden spearheaded the crime bill; as a result, Democrats largely neutralized the issue.Voters across America may want to switch things up because they are fundamentally unhappy with the direction of the country and their states as we come out of the pandemic. In New York, 52 percent of likely voters think the state is on the wrong track, up eight points from 2018. Not only are crime and inflation voters’ top concerns, but Mr. Zeldin’s messaging on these issues is working: voters believe he will perform better than Ms. Hochul on reining in crime, taxes, and spending, according to a New York Post report on a recent Schoen Cooperman Research poll. Mr. Zeldin also wants to bring energy costs down with renewed fracking, while Ms. Hochul called it “dead on arrival.”In last week’s New York governor’s debate, Ms. Hochul hit abortion and Mr. Zeldin’s ties to Mr. Trump while Mr. Zeldin tried repeatedly to focus on crime, vowing to declare a “crime emergency.” Ms. Hochul, who was endorsed by the N.R.A. when she ran for Congress, focused on new gun control measures. They each got their messages out, offering clear contrasts of their campaigns. Mr. Zeldin put fighting crime first. The question is whether New Yorkers will do the same in high enough numbers to elect (or even nearly elect) the first Republican governor in decades and send a bracing message to the Democratic Party about what matters most urgently to them.Mark Penn was a pollster and adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton from 1995 to 2008. He is chairman of the Harris Poll and chief executive of Stagwell Inc.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The liberal state, where Democrats often run against fellow Democrats in November thanks to an unconventional election system, is the unlikely backdrop of some of this year’s most bitter political campaigns.LOS ANGELES — The mailers and online ads vividly paint David Kim as a right-wing extremist, accusing him of running for a House seat in California “with QAnon-MAGA support” from “QAnon Republicans.”But Mr. Kim is not a Republican. He’s a progressive Democrat who supports “Medicare for all” and a Green New Deal. And the attacks come from a fellow progressive Democrat, Representative Jimmy Gomez, who is fighting to keep his seat in Congress.The vitriol in what is normally a quiet race for a decidedly safe Democratic seat illustrates how liberal California, of all places, has become home to some of this year’s most vicious political mudslinging — and not across party lines.Unlike a vast majority of the country, where voters are mulling the yawning ideological gaps between Republicans and Democrats on their midterm ballots, California has a top-two open primary system, which means two Democrats can — and often do — square off against each other in general elections. And in many cases, those candidates prove strikingly similar on policy, forcing them to dig deep to distinguish themselves.Lately, it’s grown pretty nasty.Democrats are running against Democrats in six House races, 18 state races, and dozens of municipal and local elections around California in November. In many contests, the candidates have resorted to extreme and divisive language, in a reflection of the growing polarization of American politics.An array of mailers and ads have targeted Mr. Kim.Illustration by The New York TimesThat’s particularly the case in azure-blue Los Angeles, where nearly every elected office is held by a Democrat, only a single Republican has served as mayor in the past half-century, and an explosive racism scandal involving three members of the City Council plunged the city’s political world into chaos just weeks before the election.Take the race to be the city’s next controller, typically a dull contest with few, if any, pyrotechnics. But this year, Paul Koretz, a progressive city councilman with more than three decades in public office, has taken to calling his opponent, Kenneth Mejia, “dangerous,” saying he is an antisemite and an “anarchist” who is little different from the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“He’s the phoniest Democrat you can find,” Mr. Koretz said in an interview of Mr. Mejia, a relative political newcomer and former Green Party member who has supported a reduction in police funding and backs a national tenants’ bill of rights.Mr. Mejia’s campaign manager, Jane Nguyen, called Mr. Koretz’s accusations “ridiculous smears” and said he was “out of touch.” Since the leak this month of a recording of City Council members in a discussion that involved offensive comments, she and other allies of Mr. Mejia have sought to portray Mr. Koretz as a racist, accusations he denies.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.Some Democrats worry that the poisonous environment is bad for party unity.“There are wild charges going back and forth about whether one candidate is a closet conservative and one is a closet Marxist,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist. “I just don’t think these runoffs between Democrats should turn into a derby about who can accuse the other of being the most extreme. That’s not a healthy debate to have.”Mr. South and other consultants pointed out several other races where the animosity was at full pitch, including a contest for a City Council seat on the wealthy Westside of Los Angeles. One candidate, a centrist Democrat with a background in employment law, has tried to link her progressive opponent, a criminal defense lawyer, to pedophiles and rapists. That lawyer, in turn, has called her a racist.Mr. Kim checking in with his campaign team and volunteers after canvassing in Los Angeles on Saturday.Alisha Jucevic for The New York TimesIn a race for a State Senate district encompassing parts of Downtown and South Los Angeles, two Democrats with nearly identical policy positions have accused each other of being pro-business and anti-tenant..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It’s a race to the bottom,” Mr. South said.For more established candidates, the negative messaging may come from a place of desperation: Even before the controversy consumed City Hall early in October, an anti-incumbent mood seemed to have settled over Los Angeles.In the June 7 primary, two sitting City Council members lost decisively to inexperienced challengers, one by a wide enough margin to preclude a runoff.In their primary, Mr. Mejia walloped Mr. Koretz by nearly 20 percentage points, though he fell short of the 50 percent threshold that would preclude a runoff. Afterward, Mr. Mejia gained several key endorsements, including from The Los Angeles Times and Councilman Mike Bonin, whose son was the subject of some of the racist comments at the heart of the unwinding scandal.Mr. Koretz, by contrast, had been endorsed by all three City Council members caught on the now-infamous recording. After the scandal broke, his campaign website was scrubbed of mentions of their support, cached versions of the site show.In their race for Congress, Mr. Gomez and Mr. Kim have a history.In 2020, Mr. Gomez, who has served in the House since 2017, also faced Mr. Kim, an immigration lawyer. That time, Mr. Gomez won the primary by almost 30 points and went on to the general election without paying much, if any, attention to his rival. “He never even mentioned my name,” Mr. Kim said over a breakfast burrito at a restaurant this month.Representative Jimmy Gomez with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Washington in 2020.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut Mr. Gomez ended up winning the 2020 general election by a surprisingly slim margin of six points. In April 2021, he asked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to inject money into the contest for what has traditionally been a safe seat for the party, telling donors he was “in a very tough race,” HuffPost reported.This past August, Mr. Gomez’s campaign unveiled a website titled “Who Is the Real David Kim?” that accuses him of failing to support democracy and of hiding a “QAnon MAGA endorsement”; a core falsehood of QAnon is that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is trying to control politics and the news media. In October, Mr. Gomez has sent out three mailers juxtaposing photos of Mr. Kim with an image of Jan. 6 rioters climbing up the walls of the Capitol, and has paid for internet ads with side-by-side pictures of his rival and former President Donald J. Trump.The QAnon reference, explained Steven Barkan, a consultant for Mr. Gomez’s campaign, stems from the fact that, in 2020, Mr. Kim asked for and received endorsements from the losing candidates in the primary. One of them, Joanne Wright, a Republican, turned out to have embraced conspiracy theories, and had a “Q” image on her Twitter page before being kicked off the platform. Mr. Barkan said that Ms. Wright’s views were exposed before the primary, and he argued that Mr. Kim either knew or should have known whom he was dealing with. (Ms. Wright did not respond to requests for comment.)“It is correct to say we don’t think he’s QAnon,” Mr. Barkan conceded. “But he ran with QAnon support. It is serious when people like Kim give credibility to QAnon.”Some of the Gomez campaign’s attacks have also centered on the fact that Mr. Kim was once a registered Republican; Mr. Kim says he was raised in a Republican family but long ago changed his registration.Mr. Kim called the advertising campaign a dirty tactic and said the endorsements, which included one from a Democrat he defeated, showed that he was “a unifying candidate and leader” willing to work with people who hold different viewpoints. He also pointed out that the endorsement occurred in the 2020 race, yet was being misleadingly presented as if it happened in the current campaign.Mona Perez, left, talking with Mr. Kim about student loan debt.Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times“People like Jimmy continue to add to the extreme polarization of our country and government,” Mr. Kim said.Bill Przylucki, the executive director of Ground Game LA, a nonprofit group that promotes progressive politics and candidates, frowns on messaging that associates left-wing candidates with extremists at a time when more than 370 Republican candidates for influential offices nationwide have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.“Given the national picture, I think that’s a bad strategy overall for the Democrats,” Mr. Przylucki said, comparing the approach to “red-baiting.”Some political observers note that it has scarcely been a decade since California moved to an open primary system, and say that some adjustment is necessary. But Mr. Przylucki argued that the hostilities emerging in the current system called for a complete rethinking of traditional Democrat-versus-Republican politics.“Democrats are trying to figure out what it means to be a party in a place like Los Angeles,” he said. “Or whether it even makes sense.” More

On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.He told Ms. Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about Covid-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees‌. “The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust” of the public, he said.Ms. Ingraham’s guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen back on to her show. Dr. Jensen was, in Ms. Ingraham’s telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who’d had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. “You were vilified,” Ms. Ingraham said. “I was vilified for featuring you.”By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the State Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, at the party’s endorsement convention. Dr. Jensen’s Covid theories proved central to his message. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t popular,” he said at the G.O.P. convention. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t politically safe.”At the heart of Scott Jensen’s candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor who downplays, if not outright denies, the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Dr. Jensen’s self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today’s Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the “corrupt, rotten media” that wants to “brainwash” Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.It is possible to see Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that’s almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.Watching Dr. Jensen’s swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They’ve experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” from memory. He embraced F.D.R.’s New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say, “the Democratic Party left me.”This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.Reagan’s ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous “read my lips” quip — and the voters cast you out.After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Mr. Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.Instead, Mr. Trump’s sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America’s greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about “American exceptionalism” and the “city upon a hill,” the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the “finest fighting force” the world had ever seen, and so on.Mr. Trump’s trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. “We don’t win anymore, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s China with our trade agreements,” he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. “No matter what it is, we don’t seem to have it.”No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Mr. Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like “strangers in their own land.” Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Mr. Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he’d tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were “un-American” and “evil.” Court decisions he opposed were a “disgrace” and judges who ruled against him were “putting our country in great danger.”By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Mr. Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who’d renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn’t deliver what Mr. Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan’s Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Mr. Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but Mr. DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.A judge had dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, Mr. DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general’s office replied that such a theory could mean as many as eight million audits every election. It would “mean that no election results would ever be final.” (The court dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit, saying he had “merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”)Mr. DePerno’s argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that Mr. DePerno is the state Republican Party’s nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state’s election laws.A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, Mr. DePerno’s legal background only enhances his credibility. “He is a killer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DePerno, whom he has endorsed. “We need a killer. And he’s a killer in honesty. He’s an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here.”Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Mr. Trump’s praise with her insistence that Mr. Biden is not the lawful president. Ms. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media’s credibility. “I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she told The Times in an interview. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.” In one campaign ad, Ms. Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. “The media isn’t just corrupt,” she says in another spot. “They are anti-American.”As for Dr. Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his Covid theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor’s public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Dr. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of Covid-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Mr. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6 percent of Covid-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Mr. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?”Dr. Jensen’s popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn’t want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno, Dr. Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate’s path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Dr. Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Ms. Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and Mr. DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by today’s apostate candidates — Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and others — is that they don’t want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Mr. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president’s legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.It’s why Ivy League graduates like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Mr. Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors’ mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Governor Jensen could, for example, pack his state’s medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak. A Governor Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party’s most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern G.O.P. has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It’s “a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change,” says Mr. Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake and Mr. DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The contests are close in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Many voters want Republicans to flip the Senate, but prefer the Democrat in their state.Control of the Senate rests on a knife’s edge, according to new polls by The New York Times and Siena College, with Republican challengers in Nevada and Georgia neck-and-neck with Democratic incumbents, and the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania clinging to what appears to be a tenuous advantage.The bright spot for Democrats in the four key states polled was in Arizona, where Senator Mark Kelly is holding a small but steady lead over his Republican challenger, Blake Masters.The results indicate a deeply volatile and unpredictable Senate contest: More people across three of the states surveyed said they wanted Republicans to gain control of the Senate, but they preferred the individual Democratic candidates in their states — a sign that Republicans may be hampered by the shortcomings of their nominees.Midterm elections are typically referendums on the party in power, and Democrats must defy decades of that political history to win control of the Senate, an outcome that has not completely slipped out of the party’s grasp according to the findings of the Times/Siena surveys. Democrats control the 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. To gain the majority, Republicans need to gain just one seat.Senate Races in Four StatesIf this November’s election for U.S. Senate were held today, which candidate would you be more likely to vote for? More

Although the district in central New York leans Democratic, it has been safely held by a moderate Republican, Representative John Katko, who is retiring.SYRACUSE, N.Y. — For years, Democrats have avidly eyed a congressional district in central New York as ripe for the flipping.The numbers were in their favor: The party enjoyed a voter registration edge over Republicans; in 2016, district voters favored Hillary Clinton by about four percentage points over Donald J. Trump; four years later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the district by nine points.Yet every two years, Representative John Katko, a local Republican with moderate views, outperformed his party to defend his seat. This year, Mr. Katko is no longer a factor: He has chosen not to seek re-election.Mr. Katko’s open seat in the 22nd District represents a rare chance for Democrats — who are all-in on trying to protect their majority in Congress — to win a Republican-held seat.It is not expected to be easy: With Republicans riding a national wave of anger over inflation and fear of crime, recent polls show a tight race between the Republican candidate, Brandon Williams, and his Democratic opponent, Francis Conole, a Naval intelligence officer with deep ties to the district.“This is a very volatile year,” said Stephanie Miner, the former Democratic mayor of Syracuse. “And that’s going to be reflected in what happens in this race.”Voters will have a clear contrast in choosing between the candidates; Mr. Williams seems most unlikely to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Katko, who was recently listed as the third most bipartisan member of Congress.A conservative businessman who lives outside the district, Mr. Williams embraces Donald Trump and ran without his party’s backing in the primary.He has characterized Mr. Katko as a RINO, or Republican in name only, and criticized his lack of loyalty to Mr. Trump. And in a recent debate against Mr. Conole, Mr. Williams made clear that, if elected, he had little intention of working with Democrats.“I want to translate bipartisan, which really means politics as usual,” Mr. Williams said in Wednesday’s debate. “We can’t afford politics as usual. We really need a fresh perspective.”Representative John Katko, who is retiring, has not endorsed Mr. Williams, his party’s candidate.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Conole has attacked his opponent’s hard right stances on issues including his support for tax and spending cuts and his opposition to abortion rights. He has also raised $2.6 million for his campaign, ending the last filing period with more than half a million cash on hand, to his opponent’s $236,000.But Mr. Williams has the support of a vast Republican campaign apparatus. Last week, he was joined on the campaign trail by a handful of House Republicans, including the House minority whip, Steve Scalise, and Representative Lee Zeldin, the party’s candidate for governor of New York.Republican interests have also spent nearly $6.5 million on television and radio ads to bolster Mr. Williams in the last six weeks, according to the advertising firm AdImpact — the vast majority from the Republican Congressional Leadership Fund.In a media call on Thursday, the state Republican chairman, Nick Langworthy, expressed confidence about Mr. Williams’s chances, predicting inflation would be a driving factor for voters.“Voters cannot and will not trust the people who made this economic mess to fix it. And that’s why we have the momentum in this race with 12 days to go,” he said.The momentum is also being seen elsewhere. Gov. Kathy Hochul is leading the Republican nominee, Mr. Zeldin, in some polls by single digits — an unusually tight race for left-leaning New York. Nationally, pundits ask not whether Republicans will retake the House of Representatives, but by how much..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The sea change in New York, of all places, is the latest sign that Democrats are struggling to assure voters they have a plan to tackle rising inflation and other economic woes. Their ability to do so could hold the key to determining swing districts across the nation, analysts say.“I see this race as a talisman race for the House, not just here in New York State, but throughout the Northeast and Midwest,” veteran Democratic political strategist Bruce Gyory said. “I would not bet on the outcome.”This Syracuse-area district was Democrat-leaning even before the current redistricting cycle. Spanning Oneida, Onondaga and Madison Counties, it is one of state’s rare purple districts, a place that repeatedly sent Mr. Katko to Washington at the same time as it chose Ms. Clinton and President Biden over Mr. Trump.Mr. Conole, who was born and raised in the 22nd District, was recognized recently by one of his schoolteachers, who greeted him from her car.Benjamin Cleeton for The New York TimesMr. Katko has stayed pointedly neutral during this campaign, refusing to endorse Mr. Williams, though he has been supported by the rest of the Republican establishment.This silence has allowed the Democratic candidate, Mr. Conole, to claim his legacy as a bipartisan deal maker.“Central New Yorkers and Americans are exhausted with the extremes. They’re not going to move this country forward,” Mr. Conole said in a recent debate hosted by Syracuse.com.Mr. Conole was born and raised in the district, the grandson of the former Onondaga County sheriff, Patrick Corbett, the first Democrat elected to the post. He served in Iraq before joining the Pentagon, staying through both the Obama and Trump administrations. He ran for Congress in 2020, losing in the Democratic primary to Dana Balter.“I made the decision to run because of the multitude of crises we face,” Mr. Conole explained in an interview, listing gun violence, the climate, economic distress and abortion rights. “We now have fundamental freedoms at risk. Before that we had elections denied, Jan. 6 — the very guardrails of our democracy on the line.”Mr. Williams came to the area over a decade ago, when he and his wife purchased a homestead outside Skaneateles, N.Y., where they farm hazelnut trees and truffles. The son of a wealthy Dallas Democrat, Mr. Williams has attended top schools, served on a nuclear submarine, worked on Wall Street and founded a venture capital firm and software company. This is his first time running for office.In an interview, Mr. Williams described what drew him to postindustrial central New York, which has seen a sharp economic decline with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.“The more prosperous a community has been, you know, a lot of times it’s becomes transactional and transitional,” he said. “You just have this fabric of families here that you don’t find really in a lot of other communities.”Democrats, including President Biden, have sought credit for the legislative package of incentives that helped lure Micron to build a semiconductor factory near Syracuse.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesReviving the area’s economy has been a focus of local leaders, especially Democrats who hope the announcement of a new Micron semiconductor factory, which is projected to create 50,000 jobs in the region, will help to temper some of those concerns.On Thursday, President Biden, whose low approval ratings have made him a rare sight on the campaign trail, appeared in Syracuse to deliver a message of economic hope, referring to the Micron factory — billed as the largest private investment in the country’s history — as one of the “bright spots where America is reasserting itself.”He specifically cheered Representative Katko for supporting the CHIPS and Science Act that provided the subsidies credited for sealing the deal, saying, “John is Republican. I like him a lot.”Mr. Williams has criticized the CHIPS Act, but he has also said that he would have voted for the semiconductor subsidy.Republicans have strongly supported Mr. Williams, with a handful of House Republicans, including Lee Zeldin, the state G.O.P. candidate for governor, appearing with him on the campaign trail.Benjamin Cleeton for The New York TimesVoters like Randy Watson are hopeful that Mr. Williams will bring them some relief. A town supervisor in Vernon, about an hour east of Syracuse, he showed up for a breakfast town hall hoping to hear from Mr. Williams and introduce himself.His biggest concern, he said, was inflation, which was “just killing everyone.” Mr. Watson, a Republican, said he blames Democrats in Washington for financial policies that have overstimulated the economy.“I really hope they stop giving away our tax money,” Mr. Watson said. “Everyone had so much because of Covid, and they just spent and spent and spent.”Others see more complex causes of economic distress, including global pressures.“If you think the Democratic Party is responsible for inflation, you aren’t paying attention,” said Kathy Kelly, of Syracuse. Ms. Kelly believes that Democratic policies have set the country on the right direction, but that there is still much work to do. She worried that voters concerned with their own immediate economic situation could miss the bigger picture.“We want our elderly to be taken care of, and we want job security,” she said, adding: “The bottom line is, people want the same thing.” More

Gov. Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, who would like to replace him, met Sunday night for one of the last major televised debates of the 2022 midterm election cycle, and the Georgia showdown delivered an hour heavy on substance and light on political fireworks and viral moments.Mr. Kemp, a Republican who narrowly defeated Ms. Abrams, a Democrat, in 2018, holds a durable lead of 5 to 10 percentage points in public and private polling, a status that was evident throughout their discussion.Mr. Kemp took few chances, stuck to his talking points about how Ms. Abrams has spent the years since their last contest and tried to sell Georgia voters on how good they have things now.Ms. Abrams, as she has done throughout her campaign, pressed a message that prosperity in Mr. Kemp’s Georgia has not been shared equally. Under an Abrams administration, she said, Black people and women would have more input into their relationship with the government — or in the case of abortion rights, pushing the government away from any relationship at all.Here are four takeaways from Sunday’s debate:Abrams tried to catch up.With just about all of Ms. Abrams’s arguments against Mr. Kemp well worn by now — she has been making parts of them fairly consistently since their 2018 race — she sought a new approach to chip away at Mr. Kemp’s advantage in the race and remind her supporters that the election isn’t over.So she turned to Herschel Walker, seeking to tie Mr. Kemp to Georgia’s Republican Senate nominee. Mr. Walker’s campaign has been plagued by a host of revelations about his past: that despite opposing abortion rights, he pushed women with whom he’d had relationships to undergo abortions and that he had physically attacked women and family members — accusations Georgians are seeing nonstop in television advertising.A watch event in Atlanta for the governor’s debate on Sunday evening.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesDuring a segment discussing new restrictions on abortion that Mr. Kemp signed into law, Ms. Abrams accused him of refusing to defend women.“And yet he defended Herschel Walker, saying that he didn’t want to be involved” in Mr. Walker’s personal life, she said. She added, “But he doesn’t mind being involved in the personal lives and the personal medical choices of the women in Georgia. What’s the difference? Well, I would say the equipment.”Kemp: Check my record.Ms. Abrams criticized Mr. Kemp for a majority of the policy decisions during his term as governor, like ignoring public health guidance to keep businesses open at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting a law that allows the purchase of firearms without a permit. But Mr. Kemp dismissed her arguments with an I’m-rubber-and-you’re-glue argument.“This debate’s going to be a lot like the last one,” he said early on, before delivering a line he’d repeat throughout the hour. “Ms. Abrams is going to attack my record because she doesn’t want to talk about her own record.”The refrain is a common one from Mr. Kemp and one he used against his Republican primary opponent, David Perdue. It also underlines a key feature of Mr. Kemp’s re-election campaign, which has focused largely on his first term. And while Ms. Abrams has a policy record dating back to her years as State House minority leader, hers did not include policymaking from the governor’s mansion.She recognized that fact in her rebuttal before reading off a laundry list of his policies she disagreed with: “I have not been in office for the last four years.”Mr. Kemp stuck to his talking points on Sunday in the debate in Atlanta.Ben Gray/Associated PressLong answers led to fewer fireworks.Hosted by the Atlanta TV station WSB, the debate was meant to be heavy on policy and light on drama — and policy heavy it was. The format gave each candidate 90 seconds — as opposed to 60 or even 45 in some other debates — to answer each question, with rebuttals that often lasted just as long.It was also a performance in which both candidates kept within the rules. There were no interruptions or interjections and at no point in the hourlong debate did the moderators have to remind either candidate of the agreed-upon time limits.That gave the candidates ample time to articulate their views and gave Georgia’s voters one of the clearest opportunities to judge for themselves the candidates’ policy and stylistic differences.The moderators also left the job of policing fact from fiction to the candidates themselves — a responsibility both Mr. Kemp and Ms. Abrams did not hesitate to accept. The questions posed were open-ended, allowing a robust discussion but not one in which the moderators challenged the candidates on their own past positions and statements.Two candidates who disagree on everything.There is virtually no overlap in Ms. Abrams’s and Mr. Kemp’s views on the issues most animating the race. Those stark differences came into full view during their back-and-forth on firearms, abortion, the state’s election laws and use of the state’s budget.Mr. Kemp argued that universal access to guns would allow more people in Georgia to protect themselves. Ms. Abrams said that logic would put more people in danger and increase the likelihood of mass shootings.Ms. Abrams has loudly criticized the state’s newly instituted law outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — Mr. Kemp signed and defended the law. And on the state’s more than $6 billion state budget surplus, Mr. Kemp said he supported allocating the funds for tax relief while Ms. Abrams has proposed using it to fund an array of state programs.The differences highlighted the candidates’ contrasting partisan instincts and put a clear choice between the two on display for an electorate that is very closely divided. More

The attack on the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which appeared to target her, came after more than a decade of Republican efforts to demonize and dehumanize the most powerful woman in Washington.WASHINGTON — In 2006, as Nancy Pelosi was poised to become the first female speaker of the House, Republicans made a film spoof that portrayed an evil Democratic empire led by “Darth Nancy.”In 2009, the Republican National Committee ran an advertisement featuring Ms. Pelosi’s face framed by the barrel of a gun — complete with the sound of a bullet firing as red bled down the screen — a takeoff on the James Bond film “Goldfinger” in which the woman second in line to the presidency was cast as Pussy Galore.This year, a Republican running in the primary for Senate in Arizona aired an ad showing him in a spaghetti western-style duel with Democrats, in which he shoots at a knife-wielding, mask-wearing, bug-eyed woman labeled “Crazyface Pelosi.”The name echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s many derisive monikers for Ms. Pelosi, including “Crazy Nancy.”The attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, on Friday, which left him with a fractured skull and appeared to be part of a planned attack on the speaker herself, came after a yearslong campaign by Republicans to demonize and dehumanize Ms. Pelosi in increasingly ugly ways.For the better part of two decades, Republicans have targeted Ms. Pelosi, the most powerful woman in American politics, as the most sinister Democratic villain of all, making her the evil star of their advertisements and fund-raising appeals in hopes of animating their core supporters. The language and images have helped to fuel the flames of anger at Ms. Pelosi on the right, fanned increasingly in recent years by a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and misinformation that has thrived on the internet and social media, with little pushback from elected Republicans.Ms. Pelosi is now one of the most threatened members of Congress in the country.After the grisly assault on Mr. Pelosi, 82, many Republican lawmakers and leaders denounced the violence, but hardly any spoke out against the brutal political discourse that has given rise to an unprecedented wave of threats against elected officials. Most instead tried to link the incident to rising crime rates across the country that the party has made a centerpiece of its campaign message ahead of the midterm elections that are just days away.“You can’t say people saying, ‘Let’s fire Pelosi’ or ‘Let’s take back the House’ is saying, ‘Go do violence.’ It’s just unfair,” Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And I think we all need to recognize violence is up across the board.”Yet it is clear that the targeting of Ms. Pelosi, who was not at home during the attack, was not random violence. The suspect, David DePape, 42, who is accused of yelling “Where is Nancy?” after entering the couple’s home, had zip ties with him when he entered the home, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. He appears to have been obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories, including false claims about the 2020 election being stolen and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet. Ms. Pelosi in recent years has been a leading character in such viral falsehoods about Democratic misdeeds, including QAnon, and Republican leaders have blamed her groundlessly for the Jan. 6 attack.“How did he get to that point?” said Mona Lena Krook, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who began studying violence against women in politics in 2014, referring to the suspect. “This has to do with things that he sees in the media, things he sees on social media, the people he socializes with that he felt like it was necessary and justified to attack her.”As a wealthy woman from the progressive bastion of San Francisco, and her party’s leader in the House for 20 years, Ms. Pelosi has long represented a singular target for her political opponents.“It is gender. It is class. The whole idea of a wealthy San Francisco liberal woman. The whole package is there,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “The difference is what began as a way to raise money and gin up turnout has now become a much more deadly game.”Even in 2012, when Ms. Pelosi served as minority leader, wielding less power than Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader at the time, Republican television ads were six times more likely to mention Ms. Pelosi than to mention Mr. Reid, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.As she has risen in prominence, Ms. Pelosi has become a more frequent target. Since 2018, Republicans have spent more than $227 million on advertisements featuring her, according to data provided by AdImpact, an organization that tracks political advertisements. They aired nearly 530,000 times. This year alone, Republicans poured more than $61 million into advertisements featuring Ms. Pelosi that aired about 143,000 times.The efforts to vilify Ms. Pelosi have yielded mixed political results; Democrats managed to win the House majority twice as attacks against her surged over the past 16 years.But they have persisted, even as Ms. Pelosi has become a reviled figure in the far-right reaches of the internet and social media platforms. Before taking office, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who at the time openly embraced QAnon, claimed that Ms. Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” adding, “it’s a crime punishable by death, is what treason is.” She liked a Facebook post that advocated “a bullet to the head” for Ms. Pelosi, according to posts unearthed by CNN.(When it surfaced, Ms. Greene claimed that not all of her Facebook likes had been by her or reflected her views.).css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Such statements have brought no consequences from Republican leaders. Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, rebuked Ms. Greene for the comments but declined to punish her, instead elevating her within his conference.When asked to address it in an interview on Breitbart radio on Friday, Mr. McCarthy called it “wrong” and condemned political violence, noting that he had reached out to Ms. Pelosi with a text message.The two have a toxic relationship, and Mr. McCarthy once mused publicly about wanting to hit Ms. Pelosi with the oversized wooden speaker’s gavel, a remark his aides said was a joke.A spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Mr. McCarthy, said it would not be pulling its attack ads against Ms. Pelosi in light of the assault.For those close to Ms. Pelosi, the attack at her home was something they have long dreaded. Few lawmakers have been targeted and threatened as routinely as Ms. Pelosi, according to a review by The New York Times of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016, which found the speaker was the target of more than one in 10. Threats that were serious enough to result in criminal charges appeared to spike after the 2020 presidential election and through January 2021, around the time of the attack on the Capitol and President Biden’s inauguration.But Republicans have been taking aim at Ms. Pelosi for far longer. In 2010, John Dennis, who challenged Ms. Pelosi in her re-election race, circulated a campaign advertisement in which an actor playing Ms. Pelosi was presiding over an animal sacrifice, and another that depicted her as a wicked witch from “The Wizard of Oz.” In the ad, Mr. Dennis threw a bucket of water labeled “freedom” to melt her away.“It has grown ever more virulent,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a Pelosi ally who served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in both the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. He said the Republican efforts to demonize Ms. Pelosi intensified after passage of the Affordable Care Act, which she helped push through Congress.“The attacks on her have been especially personal — not only attacking her politically, but also personally,” Mr. Van Hollen added. “It has been unrelenting.”The vilification of Ms. Pelosi increased in recent years, when she emerged as the Democrats’ most potent foil to Mr. Trump. Where the left turned her into a sunglasses-wearing icon, Mr. Trump branded her “crazy as a bedbug,” and circulated a photograph of her telling him off at the White House, branding her “Nervous Nancy” and accusing her of having an “unhinged meltdown.”Ms. Pelosi for years has shrugged off the attacks, characterizing them as a badge of honor.“If I weren’t effective, I wouldn’t be a target,” Ms. Pelosi told Time magazine in 2018.“She would flick at her shoulder and say, ‘It is just dust on my jacket,’” said Brendan Daly, a former spokesman. “I think she would always take it as a point of pride.”But in a letter to her colleagues on Saturday, the speaker said she and her family were “heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack” on her husband.The assault has underscored the dangers all members of Congress have faced, but none more than Ms. Pelosi. She was a particular fixation of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, who hunted for her and menacingly called her name. “Bring her out here,” one woman yelled at the Capitol Police. “We’re coming in if you don’t bring her out.”And she has been the object of many other threats that garnered far less attention. In Ohio, a 53-year-old man called police departments across the country a week after the 2020 presidential election and described online his plans to kill Ms. Pelosi “because she is committing treason against the United States of America.”A heavily armed Georgia man who traveled from Colorado to Washington on Jan. 6 but arrived too late to participate in the rally sent a text message saying he would put “a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”And a 27-year-old Maryland man who was charged with threatening to blow up the I.R.S. building made additional threats on Twitter against the speaker, federal prosecutors said, writing that he was “laser focused on thinking about ways to kill Nancy Pelosi.”Ms. Pelosi has usually taken the vitriol aimed at her in stride. She understood when Democratic candidates had to distance themselves from her to win elections and has internalized the attacks as part of her political identity, people close to her said.When Mr. Biden addressed House Democrats in March at their retreat in Philadelphia, he lamented the abuse he receives across the country, including signs that address him with an expletive. “Little kids giving me the finger,” Mr. Biden said. “You guys probably don’t get that kind of response when you go out some places.”Ms. Pelosi interjected, “I do.”The crowd chuckled.Stephanie Lai More