Elections

The choices made by Latino voters on Nov. 8 will be crucial to the outcome in a disproportionate share of Senate battleground states, like Arizona (31.5 percent of the population), Nevada (28.9), Florida (25.8), Colorado (21.7), Georgia (9.6) and North Carolina (9.5).According to most analysts, there is no question that a majority of Hispanic voters will continue to support Democratic candidates. The question going into the coming election is how large that margin will be.In terms of the battle for control of the House, three Hispanic-majority congressional districts in South Texas — the 15th, 28th and 34th — have become proving grounds for Republican candidates challenging decades of Democratic dominance. In a special election in the 34th district in June, the Republican candidate, Mayra Flores, prevailed.Two weeks ago, The Texas Tribune reported that:Since Labor Day, outside G.O.P. groups have blasted the Democratic nominees on multiple fronts, criticizing them all as weak on border issues and then zeroing in on candidate-specific vulnerabilities. Democratic groups are countering in two of the races, though for now, it is Republicans who appear to be in a more offensive posture.Last week, Axios reported that in the 15th Congressional district, which is 81.9 percent Hispanic, national Democratic groups had begun to abandon its nominee as a lost cause:Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, a progressive running in a majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley district against Republican Monica de la Cruz, isn’t getting any Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee support in her Trump +3 district. House Majority PAC is planning to cancel the scheduled ad reservations for her at the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the group’s plans.Across a wide range of studies and exit poll data analyses, there is general agreement that President Donald Trump significantly improved his 2016 margin among Hispanic voters in 2020, although there is less agreement on how large his gain was, on the demographics of his new supporters, or on whether the movement was related to Trump himself, Trump-era Covid payments or to a secular trend.In their July 2022 paper “Reversion to the Mean, or their Version of the Dream? An Analysis of Latino Voting in 2020,” Bernard L. Fraga, Yamil R. Velez and Emily A. West, political scientists at Emory, Columbia and the University of Pittsburgh, write that there isan increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos. Moreover, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among newly-engaged U.S.-born Latino children of immigrants and Catholic Latinos. The results point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.That is, the more Hispanic voters subordinate traditional party and ethnic solidarity in favor of voting based on conservative or moderate policy preferences, the more likely that are to defect to the Republican Party.The authors caution, however, that nothing is fixed in stone:On the one hand, there is evidence that working-class Latino voters became more supportive of Trump in 2020, mirroring increases in educational polarization among the mass public. If similar processes are at play for Latinos — and if such polarization is not Trump-specific — then this could mean a durable change in partisan loyalties.On the other hand, they continue,Historical voting patterns among Latinos reveal natural ebbs and flows. Using exit poll data from 1984-2020, political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that the pro-Democratic margin among Latinos ranges from +9 in 2004 to +51 in 1996, with an average margin of +35 points. Instead of reflecting a durable shift, 2020 could be a “reversion to the mean,” with 2016 serving as a recent high-water mark for the Democrats.In an email responding to my inquiry about future trends, Fraga wrote:My sense is that most of the Latinos who shifted to the Republican Party in 2020 have not returned to the Democratic Party. Many of these new Republican converts were ideologically conservative pre-2020, so Republicans didn’t have to shift their policy message very much to win them over.“Portrait of a Persuadable Latino” — an April 2021 study by the nonprofit Equis Research of Hispanic defections from the Democratic Party — found similar overall trends to those reported in the Fraga-Velez-West paper, but revealed slightly different demographic patterns.The Equis survey found that the largest percentage tilt toward Trump was among women, at plus 8 percent, compared with men, at 3 percent; among non-college Latinos, plus 6, compared with just 1 percent among the college educated; among Protestants, plus seven compared with plus 5 among Catholics and plus 15 percent among conservative Hispanics — compared with no tilt among liberals and a plus 4 percent tilt among moderates.Carlos Odio, co-founder and senior vice president at Equis Labs, a nonprofit committed “to massively increase civic participation among Latinos in this country,” emailed a response to my query about Hispanic voter trends:While Latinos shifted toward Republicans between 2016 and 2020, an 8-point swing toward Trump, we do not see evidence of a further decrease in Democratic support since Biden’s win. In most states, things do not look worse for Dems with Latinos than they did in the last election, nor do they look better.But, Odio pointedly cautioned,The political environment has the potential to lead to further erosion of Democratic support among Latinos. A meaningful share of Latino voters remain on the fence, having not firmly chosen a side in the election. These late breakers could move toward either party, or toward the couch, before the midterms are over.Odio sent me a September 2022 Equis report, “Latino Voters in Limbo — A Midterm Update,” which found thatYoung Latinos (18-34), Latino men, and self-identified conservatives are overrepresented among the 2020 Biden voters who today disapprove of the president’s job performance. Among the most likely to be undecided today are ideological holdouts: conservative and moderate Latinos who have held back from Republicans, despite seeming to share some characteristics with their G.O.P.-supporting white counterparts. Notably Republicans have not increased support among these Latinos in the last year in almost any state — likely because a large majority of conservative or moderate Latinos who don’t yet vote Republican believe Democrats “care more about people like them.”Today, the report continues, “what keeps many Latinos on the fence is again concerns about the economy and fears that Democrats don’t consistently prioritize the economy, handle it as decisively as business-obsessed Republicans, or value hard work.”A separate Equis study, “2020 Post-Mortem: The American Dream Voter,” found that a negative attitude toward socialism was a factor among Hispanics nationwide, especially among those who stress the importance of working hard to get ahead:There isn’t one overriding concern about “socialism”— but a package of complaints usually rises to the top around government control over people’s lives, raising taxes, and money going to ‘undeserving’ recipients. If a through line exists, it is a worry over people becoming “lazy and dependent on government’ by those who highly value hard work.”The American Dream Voter study found that the declining salience of immigration in 2020 compared with either 2016 or 2018, combined with the debate in 2020 over Covid lockdowns versus reopening the economy, diminished ethnic solidarity in 2020, allowing conservative Hispanics to shift their allegiance to the Republican Party:The economy unlocked a door: the issue landscape shifted to more favorable ground for Trump, opening a way for some Latinos who found it unacceptable to vote for him in 2016. The socialism attack broke through: it created a space for defection,” according to the report’s authors. “Democrats retain some natural credibility with Latino voters but have lost ground on workers, work and the American Dream; they’re also open to attack for taking Hispanics for granted; Republicans have some openings but are still held back by their image as the uncaring party of big corporations.In 2016, the study continued,some Latinos who we might predict would vote Republican — based on their demographics, partisanship and ideology — were held back from supporting Trump by (a) opposition to his hard-line immigration positions and (b) the importance of their Hispanic identity. By the middle of 2020, neither views on immigration nor the role of Hispanic identity were showing a major effect on vote choice — they were no longer cleanly differentiating Trump voters from Democratic voters.In 2018, according to the study, “Trump lost even the conservatives on family separation. But family separation was not front-and-center by the end of the (2020) election. Reopening the economy — one of Trump’s most popular planks with Latino voters — was.”A 2021 Pew Research report found that Latinos view anti-Hispanic discrimination differently from anti-Black discrimination. Hispanic voters were asked whether “there was ‘too much,’ ‘about the right amount’ or ‘too little’ attention paid to race and racial issues” when it comes to Hispanics and then asked the same question about Black Americans.Just over half, 51 percent, of Latino respondents said, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination against Hispanics, 28 percent said, “about the right amount” and 19 percent said, “too much.” Conversely, 30 percent of Latino respondents said that in the case of Black Americans, “too little” attention is paid to discrimination, 23 percent said, “about the right amount” and 45 percent said, “too much.”The American Dream Voter survey Equis performed found that when Hispanics were asked “which concerns you more, Democrats embracing socialism/leftist policies or Republicans embracing fascist/anti-democratic policies,” 42 percent of Latinos said socialism/leftist policies and 38 percent said fascist/anti-democratic politics.Equis did find substantial Democratic advantages when Hispanics were asked which party is “better for Hispanics” (53-31), which “is the party of fairness and equality” (51-31) and which party “cares about people like you” (49-32). But the Democratic advantage shrank to statistical insignificance on key bread-and- butter issues: which party “values hard work” 42-40 and “which is the party of the American dream” 41-39, and a dead 42-42 heat on “which party is better for the American worker?”Last month, Pew Research released a survey that showed continuing Democratic strength among Hispanics, “Most Latinos Say Democrats Care About Them and Work Hard for Their Vote, Far Fewer Say So of G.O.P.”Pew found that over the past four years, Democrats experienced a modest gain in partisan identification among Hispanics over Republicans, going from 62-34 (+28) in 2018 to 63-32 (+31) in 2022.From March 2022 to August 2022, the share of Latinos identifying abortion as a “very important issue” shot up from 42 to 57 percent in response to the Supreme Court’s decision’s decision in Dobbs in June. Hispanics favor abortion rights by a 57-40 margin, slightly smaller than the split among all voters, 62-36, according to Pew.At the same time, the percentage of Latino respondents listing violent crime among the most important issues rose from 61 to 70 percent; support for gun control rose from 59 to 66 percent; and concern over voter suppression rose from 51 to 59 percent.Registered Latino voters split 53-26 in favor of voting for a generic Democratic congressional candidate over a generic Republican, according to Pew, but there were striking religious differences: Catholics, who make up 47 percent of the Hispanic electorate, favored a generic Democratic House candidate 59-26; evangelical Protestants, 24 percent of Hispanics, backed Republicans 50-32; Latinos with little or no religious affiliation, 23 percent, backed Democrats 60-17.Matt A. Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at U.C.L.A, pointed to data in the Oct. 2 National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials weekly Latino voter poll:Indeed if you look at issues like access to abortion, student debt, immigrant rights and gun violence, there are no signs at all that Latinos are becoming more conservative. When asked about government policy, 70 to 80 percent of Latino voters give support to the Democratic Party policy agenda. Indeed for the fourth week in a row, the NALEO tracking poll shows that abortion rights are the number two most important issue to Latino voters in 2022 and issues such as mass shootings and lowering the costs of health care are top 5 issues as well.Trump’s 2020 gains reflected “a clear pattern that concern over the Covid economic slowdown helped Trump make temporary gains with Latino voters,” Barreto argued. “Because so many were negatively impacted by the slumping economy in 2020, Trump was able to convince at least some Latinos that he would reopen the economy faster.”Despite those improvements, Barreto contended, “the reality is that Trump’s gains in 2020 were not part of any pattern of realignment or ideological shift among Latinos. As the national economy continues to recover and improve, Biden favorability continues to recover among Latinos.”In September 2020. Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at the University of California- Berkeley, wrote an essay for The Times with Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a liberal advocacy group. They wrote that when they asked white, Black and Hispanic votershow “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. The message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs “and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.In other words, Haney López and Gavito wrote, “Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.” Progressives, they continued,commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color. In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.I asked Haney López about the current political and partisan state of play among Hispanic voters going into the 2022 election. He emailed me his reply:As with white voters, the most important predictors of support for Republicans track racial resentment as well as anxiety over racial status. Rather than an ideological sorting, we are witnessing a racial sorting among Latinos — not in terms of anything so simple as skin color, but rather, in terms of those who seek a higher status for themselves by more closely identifying on racial grounds with the white mainstream, versus those who give less priority to race, or even see Latinos as a nonwhite racial group.Some Latinos, Haney López continued,are susceptible to Republican propaganda promoting social conflict and distrust. The greatest failure of the Democratic Party with respect to Latinos, and indeed the polity generally, is its failure to pursue policies and to stress stories that build social solidarity, especially across lines of race, class, and other wedge identities, including gender and sexual identity.Asked the same set of questions, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston and a former dean of the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, had a somewhat different take.By email, Suárez-Orozco wrote:I am unpersuaded by the claim that Hispanics are becoming more conservative. To be more precise, over time, they are becoming more American. The holy trinity of integration: language, marriage patterns, and connectivity to the labor market tell a powerful story. Over time, Hispanics mimic mainstream norms. They are learning English much faster than Italians did a century and a half ago, they are marrying outside their ethnicity at very significant rates, and their connectivity to the labor market is very muscular.To Suárez-Orozco, Latinos in the United States are primed to play an ever more significant role — in politics and everywhere else: “The dominant metaphor on Hispanics qua elections over the last half-century has been ‘the sleeping giant.’ When the sleeping giants wakes up: Alas, s/he is us.”The question is whether this sleeping giant will move to the right or to the left. The evidence points both ways — but this is not a contest the Democrats can afford lose.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

Response rates suggest the “death of telephone polling” is getting closer.Ryan CarlWe’re already in the field with our next New York Times/Siena College national survey, so it’s a good time to go through some of the poll-related reader mail we’ve received recently.Here’s a version of a question we get a lot:Given that pollsters are relying on calling people on the phone (per your methodology description at the bottom of the poll), how do you know where they are, and how do you account for the fact that so few people answer their phones at all anymore? I for one have moved twice since I got my current phone number, most recently to a different state, so my phone number has nothing to do with my actual location. Meanwhile, most of my calls are spam, so I almost never answer my phone unless I recognize the phone number — and I am someone who is old enough to have grown up with what is now called a landline. My teenage kids almost never answer their phones at all. The only people I know who still ever use a landline at all are my parents. — Doug Berman, West Jordan, UtahThere are a lot of good points here, so let’s take it bit by bit.How do we know where they are? Some pollsters (like us) call voters from a list of telephone numbers on a voter registration file, a big data set containing the names and addresses of every registered voter in most states. The addresses tell us “where they are” with a great deal of precision.How do we deal with people who have moved? The voter file offers a solution to this problem as well. Once you’ve registered to vote in your new state, pollsters can call your phone number if it’s on the voter file — and call it regardless of whether it’s an in-state or out-of-state area code.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.How do you account for the fact that few people answer? Before I respond, I want to dwell on just how few people are answering. In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.No, it wasn’t nearly this bad six, four or even two years ago. You can see for yourself that around 1.6 percent of dials yielded a completed interview in our 2018 polling.The Times has more resources than most organizations, but this is getting pretty close to “death of telephone polling” numbers. You start wondering how much more expensive it would be to try even ridiculous options like old-fashioned door-to-door, face-to-face, in-person interviews.Call screening is definitely part of the problem, but if you screen your calls almost 100 percent of the time, it might be a little less of one than you might think. About one-fifth of our dials still contact a human. But once we do reach a person, we’ve got a number of challenges. Is this the right human? (We talk only to people named on the file, so that we can use their information.) If it is the right person, will he or she participate? Probably not, unfortunately.OK, back to the question: What do we do to account for this? The main thing is we make sure that the sample of people we do reach is demographically and politically representative, and if not, we adjust it to match the known characteristics of the population. If we poll a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points, and our respondents wind up being registered Democrats by a four-point margin, we give a little less weight to the Democratic respondents.We make similar adjustments for race; age; education; how often people have voted; where they live; marital status; homeownership; and more. As I explained last month, we believe our polls provide valuable election information. Is all of this enough? After 2020, it’s hard not to wonder whether the people who answer the phone might be more likely to back Democrats than those who don’t answer the phone. We’re conducting some expensive multi-method research this fall to help answer this question, to the extent we can. We’ll tell you more at a later time.What about cellphones? Finally, an easy one: We call cellphones and landlines! About three-quarters of our calls go to cellphones nowadays — including nearly every call to young people. More

The Florida governor looks to be well positioned to head into a hypothetical presidential primary in 2024. But past Republican darlings rose just as fast — only to fall quickly.In March 2015, the Republican National Committee held a donor retreat in Boca Raton, Fla. The belle of the ball was a Republican governor with a penchant for owning the libs, delighting Fox News and playing bare-knuckle politics.One speaker, a New York real estate mogul widely seen as an unserious blowhard, drew eye rolls among those present as he groused about how the R.N.C. should have held the event at Mar-a-Lago, his private club just down the road.The governor, who was polling well in Iowa, was running for president on a simple platform: Your enemies are my enemies, too. Almost universally, pundits speculated that he would be the one to beat in a G.O.P. primary that would be dominated by cultural resentment and anger over the current president’s policies.Well, that governor, short on cash and charisma, flamed out months before any 2016 primaries were even held. His name was Scott Walker. And the real estate mogul who bored the crowd was, of course, Donald Trump.American politics is no longer as predictable as it once was. Each day seems to violate one bit of received wisdom or another. But Walker’s rise and fall nevertheless offers a cautionary tale for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the current favorite to be the G.O.P. nominee in 2024.*“There are a lot of folks who have buzz right now,” said Bob Vander Plaats, president of The Family Leader, a social conservative organization in Iowa. “Will they have buzz a year from now?”Vander Plaats, who has met DeSantis and said he was well regarded within Iowa Republican political circles, added, “I would rather be peaking at this stage versus not peaking at all.”Charlie Sykes, a conservative former radio host in Wisconsin who now works at The Bulwark, a website that has become a refuge for anti-Trump Republicans, said that despite his image as a fighter, Walker in person was “quite genial.” In his memoirs, Walker said he rejected Sykes’s advice to be more of a political pugilist because it just wasn’t his style.The fundamental question for DeSantis — a more combative person in private as well as in public — Sykes said, was, “How does that personality scale up? How will that wear?”*Key caveat: in a hypothetical world where Trump doesn’t run.The DeSantis buzzOn paper, DeSantis has a lot going for him.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.He has amassed a campaign hoard worthy of Smaug, the dragon in “The Hobbit.” A stocky former college baseball player and officer with the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he projects the sort of strength that plays well in Republican politics. And he emerged from the pandemic bolstered, on the right at least, by the perception that he navigated the coronavirus relatively successfully in defiance of experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci.In polls, DeSantis consistently rates as the second choice of Republican voters, behind Trump but well ahead of any putative rivals. And in focus groups, voters often describe him as “Trump without the baggage,” according to Sarah Longwell, a G.O.P. strategist who opposes Trump.Like Walker, though, DeSantis risks peaking too early. Walker’s operation made a strategic error early on by parking much of its cash in a 527 committee, a tax-exempt organization that was barred from certain campaign activities. When the money dried up in the summer of 2015, his official campaign had trouble paying for the extensive apparatus it had built in anticipation of better fund-raising success.The early infatuation of Republican voters (and pundits!) with shiny objects is a timeworn tradition, too. Remember Marco Rubio, the “Republican savior”? Rand Paul, “the most interesting man in politics”? Rick Perry, the hot stuff of the early 2012 hustings? And it remains to be seen whether DeSantis, a wooden speaker with a reputation for burning through his staff, has the personal skills to go the distance.In interviews, Republican strategists and donors said that DeSantis looked to be in a strong position for 2024. His home in Florida gives him access to a deep-pocketed donor community that Walker lacked, several noted. He’s won allies in the political influencer community on the right. And his ability to appeal to both the Trump and Mitch McConnell wings of the party affords him room for maneuver in a Republican Party divided between two mutually hostile camps.But everyone I interviewed emphasized that anything could happen. Several mentioned that they expected Trump to avoid announcing a re-election run as long as possible — freezing the potential G.O.P. field in place and, possibly, crippling any nascent campaign organizations they hope to build.That could spell trouble for DeSantis, despite his fund-raising prowess, since he currently lacks the sort of national political operation necessary to win a presidential nomination. Under campaign finance rules, DeSantis won’t be able to reallocate much of his 2022 hoard to any presidential campaign, either.“One big difference is Trump,” said Mike DuHaime, a former political adviser to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who noted that the large G.O.P. field in 2016 was an important factor in that primary.But if Trump doesn’t run, he said, “I think a question for DeSantis is whether there will be other people in the same governors’ lane or ideological lane,” which could split the vote among similar candidates.DeSantis might also find, as Walker did before him, that being a governor has advantages and disadvantages. Just because donors gave to his re-election campaign does not mean they would necessarily finance a presidential run, for instance. And his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian will be scrutinized carefully for any signs of mismanagement or callousness.But on the positive side of the ledger, “being governor allowed him to strike a different path,” DuHaime said. “It gets you out of being a knee-jerk parrot for Trump, like many senators had to do.”Gov. Chris Christie with President Barack Obama in New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Christie precedentFor DeSantis’s confidants — and, by most accounts, his wife, Casey, is his closest political adviser — the more salient cautionary tale is that of Christie.The former New Jersey governor decided not to run in 2012, when he was at the peak of his popularity. He waited instead until 2016, when he ran into a buzz saw named Trump, and has long regretted it.“You have a moment,” Casey DeSantis has told associates, according to my colleague Matt Flegenheimer. And the DeSantises apparently believe that moment is now.Christie is making noises about running again in 2024. He told a reporter this weekend, “I don’t care who else runs. If I decide I want to run, I’m running.”But his criticism of Trump could be fatal. Trump remains popular among Republican base voters: In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, 53 percent of those who voted for him in 2020 said they had a “very favorable” opinion of him, and 36 percent said their opinion of him was “somewhat favorable.”When Christie recently defended the Justice Department’s search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump fired back by posting a mocking photo.One key lesson DeSantis seems to have learned from Christie’s defenestration: Don’t embrace a Democratic president, metaphorically or otherwise.Photos of Christie warmly welcoming President Barack Obama when the two met after Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey coastline in 2012 were weaponized against him four years later — with a handshake morphing into a “hug” that helped doom him in the 2016 G.O.P. primary.When DeSantis met President Biden last week after Hurricane Ian wrecked much of the west coast of Florida, their body language was rather different — professional, but hardly warm.“Mr. President, welcome to Florida,” DeSantis said as he handed over the lectern at their joint news conference. “We appreciate working together across various levels of government, and the floor is yours.”If Biden had any inclination to embrace his potential rival, he betrayed none of that in his remarks.“We have very different political philosophies, but we’ve worked hand in glove,” Biden said. And when the president praised the governor’s recovery efforts as “pretty remarkable so far,” DeSantis offered only a polite smile.What to readHouse Republicans have only a dozen members of color, but they are fielding a slate of 67 Black, Latino, Asian or Native American candidates in November, by the party’s count. Jonathan Weisman spoke to many of them.In the two parties’ efforts to control Congress, New York has become surprisingly competitive. Nicholas Fandos writes about the districts that are in play.Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, has drawn attention to the Jewish religion of his opponent, Josh Shapiro. Katie Glueck examines the alarm among Jewish voters.The idea of sending migrants to left-leaning areas of the U.S. circulated in conservative circles for years. Maggie Haberman and Michael C. Bender look back at the traction it gained under Donald Trump and the path to Republican governors’ putting it into practice.With less than a month until Election Day, candidates are meeting for debates. Alyce McFadden breaks down what has taken place so far and how to watch the debates to come.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

The shooting of two teenagers directly outside his Long Island home has given Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to push his tough-on-crime message within a personal frame.After two teenage boys were shot outside his home on Long Island last weekend, Representative Lee Zeldin wasted little time to amplify the tough-on-crime message he has relentlessly pressed in his bid for governor of New York.He quickly assembled a news conference in front of his moonlit house on Sunday night, followed up the next day with a Fox News interview, and used an appearance at the Columbus Day Parade to imbue his political messaging with a new personal, if frightening, outlook.“It doesn’t hit any closer to home than this,” Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, said while marching at the parade in Manhattan on Monday, describing the incident as “traumatic” for his twin 16-year-old daughters, who were doing their homework in the kitchen when the shooting happened. “This could be anyone across this entire state.”“Last night the girls wanted to sleep with us,” Mr. Zeldin also said during the parade. “I didn’t think that the next time I’d be standing in front of a crime scene, it would be crime scene tape in front of my own house.”The shooting unfolded on Sunday afternoon when the police said multiple gunshots were fired from a dark-colored vehicle at three teenage boys walking near Mr. Zeldin’s home in Suffolk County on Long Island. Two 17-year-old boys were forced to take cover by Mr. Zeldin’s porch, suffering injuries that were not life threatening, while a 15-year-old boy fled the shots unharmed.That the shooting unfolded near the home of a conservative congressman who has anchored his campaign for governor on the state of crime in New York, attracting outsize media attention, appears to have been pure happenstance.The police had not made any arrests as of Tuesday, but they were investigating whether the incident was connected to gang violence, according to a law enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss an ongoing investigation.But with less than four weeks until Election Day, the shooting offered Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to elevate the issue of public safety in the governor’s race, as the congressman seeks a breakout in his efforts to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who has so far enjoyed a comfortable lead in most public polls.Mr. Zeldin faces a steep climb to overcome Ms. Hochul’s significant fund-raising edge in a state where Democrats overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans. He has been quick to talk about the impact of the shooting in starkly personal terms, appealing to New Yorkers who have also been affected by gun violence. Mr. Zeldin was at a campaign event in the Bronx with his wife during the shooting.Mr. Zeldin, a staunch Trump supporter who has represented Suffolk County in Congress since 2015, has said he would make law and order his top priority if elected. He has consistently sought to blame the rise in violence on criminal justice policies enacted by progressive lawmakers as well as on left-leaning prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan. He has promised to fire Mr. Bragg “on Day 1.”At the same time, he has opposed Democratic-led efforts to tighten gun control measures, cheering the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down New York’s concealed carry law as “a historic, proper, and necessary victory.”Ms. Hochul, who is seeking her first full term, has trumpeted her efforts to tighten the state’s bail laws and has emphasized initiatives to crack down on illegal gun trafficking, as well as a law she signed raising the age for the purchase of semiautomatic rifles, after a massacre at a Buffalo supermarket earlier this year.“We’re not running away from those issues,” Ms. Hochul said on Monday. “We’re leaning hard into them because we have a real record of accomplishment.”The shooting outside Mr. Zeldin’s home is the second time his safety has been threatened this election cycle.Three months ago, a man tried to physically attack Mr. Zeldin with a sharp key chain during a campaign event near Rochester. The attacker, a veteran of the Iraq War who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, was quickly subdued and initially released without bail before being arrested on federal assault charges.Mr. Zeldin, who was not injured, used the confrontation to attack Democrats for the reforms they enacted to the state’s bail laws two years ago, even if the episode did little to shake up the state of the race.“It’s an extraordinary coincidence of events that gives Zeldin’s crime message added credibility, urgency, and national attention,” said William F. B. O’Reilly, a Republican political consultant who is not working on the Zeldin campaign. “This will almost certainly help him in the final weeks of the campaign.”Mr. Zeldin could certainly use a boost, having lagged behind Ms. Hochul in nearly every public poll commissioned this cycle. He has also found himself chasing her haul of campaign contributions — a tribute to a voracious fund-raising apparatus that raised $11.1 million from July to October of this year. The cash has allowed her to blanket airwaves and smartphones with campaign ads attacking Mr. Zeldin’s support of Mr. Trump and his opposition to abortion rights.Mr. Zeldins financial outlook is not exactly bleak, however. He brought in $6.4 million during the same period, thanks in part to fund-raisers with former president Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. He has also seen support from conservative super PACs which have spent nearly $4 million in the past weeks on ads calling Ms. Hochul soft on crime and criticizing her handling of the economy.On Tuesday, a police car was still stationed outside Mr. Zeldin’s home in Shirley, a working-class hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island, where residents on the typically sleepy street were still rattled by the burst of violence.Dan Haug was in his home when he heard the shots and ran to the window, spotting one of the boys lying in Mr. Zeldin’s bushes, screaming and bleeding from the gunshot wounds.“You know, there’s little isolated incidents in this neighborhood with like, fireworks and like dogs getting loose,” said Mr. Haug, who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years. “But nothing like that.”Mary Smith, the mother of the teenager who escaped unharmed, blamed the shooting on the proliferation of guns among young people, while stressing that she did not believe her son was in a gang, saying: “He’s just a normal kid.”While expressing sympathy for the Zeldin family ordeal, Ms. Smith lamented that she had heard nothing from the congressman himself, despite his many public comments.“I’m around the corner from you,” Ms. Smith said in an interview. “They took the story away from the victims and made it about running for government.”Chelsia Rose Marcius More

A noted political scientist, he saw parties periodically realigning themselves in stark fashion, presaging the rise of Donald Trump.Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist who theorized that political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts that he called “America’s surrogate for revolution,” died on Oct. 4 in San Antonio. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Burnham.Professor Burnham, who taught most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, Austin, suggested that realignments of political parties had occurred roughly every three to four decades since 1896.With this in mind, he said, Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, while “shockingly unexpected” by the news media and professional pollsters, should not have been so surprising, coming as it did 36 years after the sharp turn to the right known as the Reagan revolution.“This was a ‘change’ election,” Professor Burnham wrote in the wake of it on the London School of Economics website. “Say what one wishes about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency which he has now won, he was obviously the ‘change candidate,’ promising reactionary revitalization in response to a present deemed by himself to be intolerable.”Enough voters agreed with Mr. Trump to give him a majority in the Electoral College, though not in the popular vote. But turnout still sagged below 60 percent of voting age Americans, a benchmark that it last topped in 1968 after falling from highs of 80 percent in the 19th century.Professor Burnham long lamented declining turnout rates, acknowledging that while some people were undoubtedly discouraged by legal and bureaucratic hurdles to registration and voting, removing those hurdles did not necessarily improve turnout dramatically.Instead, he attributed the historic decline in participation rates to an expanding gulf between Americans and their government, to the withering of party loyalty, and to the absence of a European-type social democratic party representing the poor and blue-collar workers.“The growing political problem is found where the degeneration of political parties intersects with the rise of television advertising, continuous polling, media consultants and consent-massaging election operatives,” he wrote in 1988 in a letter to The New York Times.In the presidential race that year, he added, “non-Southern turnout levels fell to their lowest point in 164 years — since before the democratization of the presidency in the Andrew Jackson era. This, I think, is the fruit of the corruption, pollution and trivialization of the electoral process in our time.”He later found that by 2014, regional differences in turnout between the South and the rest of country had virtually vanished, for the first time since 1872.Professor Burnham explored his ideas on political realignment and declining voter turnout in his influential article “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” published in 1965 in The American Political Science Review.He expanded those themes into a book, “Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics” (1970), which held that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.In this 1970 book, Professor Burnham argued that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.After the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans won their largest majority in nearly a century, Professor Burnham forecast the dynamics of the presidential campaign two years later.“Many are convinced that a few big interests control policy,” he and Thomas Ferguson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote of voters on AlterNet, a progressive website, weeks after the 2014 elections. “They crave effective action to reverse long term economic decline and runaway economic inequality, but nothing on the scale required will be offered to them by either of America’s money-driven major parties.”Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University School of Law, called Professor Burnham “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation on the role and nature of political parties in American democracy.”“Americans,” he added, “have gone through frequent eras of disdain for parties, including now, yet Burnham’s work still provides some of the most compelling rejoinders to that disdain and a powerful argument that insists on the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democratic politics. In particular, he asserted that weak parties creates weak, vulnerable legislators, which enables even greater domination of government by private interests.”Walter Dean Burnham was born on June 15, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio, to Alfred H. Burnham Jr., an engineer for General Electric, and Gertrude (Hamburger) Burnham, a homemaker.He received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and then served in the Army as a translator of intercepted communications in Russian. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard, where his mentor was the historian V.O. Key Jr.He taught at Boston, Kenyon and Haverford Colleges and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the M.I.T. faculty in 1971 and the government department of the University of Texas in 1988. He became professor emeritus in 2004.In addition to his daughter Anne, he is also survived by a son, John, and four grandchildren. His wife, Patricia (Mullan) Burnham, died in 2018.Professor Burnham noted that political parties, for all their shortcomings, “are the only devices thus far invented which generate power on behalf of the many.”“I guess I would like to go back not to the smoke-filled room, but to the smoke-free room,” Professor Burnham told The Times in 1988. “After all, the first president of the United States was chosen by a search process. I don’t believe the open primary system is a democratic process. A few thousand activists push the Republican Party to the right and the Democratic Party to the left.”Alex Traub More

The lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, has been charged with working with the far-right militia to disrupt the 2020 election. Now, her text messages — and testimony — could emerge as evidence at their trial.In the normal course of business, lawyers like Kellye SoRelle wear a variety of hats for their clients: They might keep secrets for them, offer them advice or defend them against charges.But Ms. SoRelle has a far more fraught relationship with one of her biggest former clients: the Oath Keepers militia.Last month, Ms. SoRelle was indicted on conspiracy charges, accused of working with the far-right group in its monthslong plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.Now, she has found herself at the center of a battle over whether her text messages — and testimony — can be used as evidence at the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, and four of his subordinates.The struggle between the defense and prosecution over how to define Ms. SoRelle’s role at the trial revolves around the issue of attorney-client privilege, which generally bars lawyers from disclosing private information about their clients.The dispute has become more complicated because the Oath Keepers may seek to call Ms. SoRelle as a witness in the case and defend themselves against some of the charges they are facing by claiming they were merely following her instructions in what is known as an advice-of-counsel defense.The boundaries of attorney-client privilege often become a matter of legal dispute. Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are fighting to use the protections of attorney-client privilege — and executive privilege — to limit the scope of a grand jury investigation into the role that Mr. Trump played in seeking to overturn his defeat in the election. Other lawyers for Mr. Trump are facing the prospect of becoming witnesses against him in a separate Justice Department inquiry into his handling of classified documents.On Monday night, before the Oath Keepers trial resumed in Federal District Court in Washington on Tuesday, prosecutors filed court papers asking a judge to set aside attorney-client privilege and admit text messages that Ms. SoRelle had swapped with Mr. Rhodes in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In one of the messages, from Dec. 29, 2020, Mr. Rhodes complained that he was getting tired of showing up at pro-Trump rallies in Washington where members of his group and other Trump supporters would simply “wave a sign, pray or yell.”“They won’t fear us,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Ms. SoRelle, “till we come with rifles in hand.”Prosecutors argued that the incendiary message should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because Ms. SoRelle, despite having described herself as the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, did not perform any legal work for the group until after the Capitol was attacked.Ms. SoRelle also played “an active role in the conspiracy” to disrupt the certification of the election, prosecutors wrote, so any communications between her and the Oath Keepers should be exempt from privilege under what is known as the “crime-fraud exception.”Based in Texas, Ms. SoRelle first emerged into the public eye one day after Election Day when, as a member of a group called Lawyers for Trump, she raised claims in a widely seen video that election workers in Detroit had committed voter fraud. Around the same time, prosecutors say, the Oath Keepers began to work for her as bodyguards.By the following month, she had signed her name to two open letters to Mr. Trump that Mr. Rhodes had posted on the Oath Keepers website. The letters, introduced as evidence at the trial last week, called on Mr. Trump to take a series of aggressive steps to remain in power, including invoking the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given Mr. Trump the authority to mobilize militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.While Mr. Rhodes has so far been the focus of the trial, testimony turned on Tuesday to one of his co-defendants, Jessica Watkins, an Ohio bar owner who ran her own militia in the state.Prosecutors introduced that evidence that Ms. Watkins had discussed cutting off pool cues to serve as “antifa smashers” at pro-Trump rallies in Washington and sought to recruit and train people to join the Oath Keepers at the events.One of the recruits sent a message to Ms. Watkins in mid-November of 2020 asking, “So should I get comfortable with the idea of death?”“That’s why I do what I do,” Ms. Watkins responded.Both defense lawyers and the government have claimed that Ms. SoRelle was, for a time, romantically involved with Mr. Rhodes, though she has said that is not true. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.Regardless of how she felt about Mr. Rhodes, there is no doubt that she did things for — and with — him that went beyond the typical services rendered to a legal client.The day before the Capitol attack, Ms. SoRelle accompanied Mr. Rhodes to a meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol where the two encountered Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, and Mr. Tarrio’s longtime associate, Bianca Gracia, the leader of a group called Latinos for Trump. Mr. Tarrio is facing seditious conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol attack.On Jan. 6, Ms. SoRelle followed Mr. Rhodes into a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, giving a celebratory play-by-play of the mob breaching barriers at the building on a Facebook livestream.“That’s how you take your government back,” she said. “You literally take it back.”After Mr. Rhodes fled Washington that day, fearing the authorities were after him, Ms. SoRelle took possession of his cellphone, the government said in the papers filed on Monday. Prosecutors claim that within two days, she had started sending orders in Mr. Rhodes’s name to other Oath Keepers, telling them to delete any incriminating messages and to stop discussing their roles in the Capitol attack.“CLAM UP,” she wrote at one point. “DO NOT SAY A DAMN THING.”For more than a year after Jan. 6, it remained unclear whether Ms. SoRelle would be charged. Even though the F.B.I. seized her phone and eventually arrested more than 20 members of the Oath Keepers — including Mr. Rhodes — she remained at large.During that time, she often told reporters she was cooperating with the government’s inquiry into the group and also claimed to have spoken repeatedly to staff investigators working with the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have said that it was only after Ms. SoRelle agreed this summer to testify at the trial on his behalf that the F.B.I. arrested her.The lawyers have further said they may call Ms. SoRelle as a witness, hoping that she bolsters one of Mr. Rhodes’s chief defenses in the case.The government has accused Mr. Rhodes of staging a heavily armed “quick reaction force” in hotel rooms in Virginia that was poised to rush to the aid of their compatriots at the Capitol if things got out of hand.While Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have not disputed that there was a quick reaction force, they have argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, as Mr. Rhodes recommended, it would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to use force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Ms. SoRelle gave this legal strategy her professional stamp of approval, telling the Oath Keepers they could “lawfully assist” Mr. Trump in putting down an insurrection, Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers said in court papers last month.The lawyers have argued that if Mr. Rhodes was simply following legal advice, he could not be held accountable for showing “any unlawful intent.”The gambit, however, is far from certain to work. While no one knows what Ms. SoRelle will do if called to the witness stand, she has repeatedly told reporters that she will exercise her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. More

ATLANTA — Democratic and Republican groups in Georgia are spending millions of dollars on highly personal negative advertising in the final weeks of the race between Senator Raphael Warnock and his challenger, Herschel Walker, disparaging the candidates by drawing more attention to their pasts.Days before the candidates are set to meet on a debate stage, groups aligned with each party are flooding the airwaves with a pair of ads that underline accusations of domestic violence against Mr. Walker, a Republican, and marital disputes involving Mr. Warnock, a Democrat. Their messages are shaping the final few weeks of campaigning in one of the country’s most closely watched races that could determine control of the Senate, and at times one of the most hostile.The advertising back-and-forth follows more than a week of negative headlines focused largely on Mr. Walker. After The Daily Beast first reported that Mr. Walker paid for a woman’s abortion, The New York Times confirmed the report and learned that the woman had ended their relationship after she refused to have a second abortion despite Mr. Walker’s urging.Now, as Democrats spend big to elevate those claims, Republicans are hitting back to paint Mr. Warnock as a candidate also plagued by scandal.A PAC supporting Mr. Walker, 34N22, is spending $1.5 million on an advertisement that shows footage from a police body camera after a 2020 incident between Mr. Warnock and his ex-wife, Ouleye Ndoye, who claims in the video and ensuing police report that he ran over her foot. Paramedics on the scene were unable to locate evidence of physical injury to Ms. Ndoye’s foot. Mr. Warnock was not charged with a crime.“I just can’t believe he would run me over,” she says through tears. “I’ve tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps for a long time, and today he crossed the line. So that is what is going on here, and he is a great actor. He is phenomenal at putting on a really good show.”The Democratic-aligned groups Georgia Honor and Senate Majority PAC are spending a combined $36 million to dominate the airwaves with anti-Walker advertising, including an advertisement that takes lines from a tweet that Mr. Walker’s son Christian Walker posted after the initial reports about his father’s paying for the abortion. In it, he accused Mr. Walker of domestic abuse against him and his mother, Cindy Grossman.A voice-over on the ad repeats the accusation as similar text flashes on the screen: “He threatened to kill us and had us move six times in six months running from his violence.” The ad also shows pictures of a police report that outlines an episode in which Mr. Walker arrived at Ms. Grossman’s home with a gun.“Six moves in six months running from Herschel Walker’s violence,” the voice-over says again against footage of an empty apartment and moving boxes.Mr. Walker and Mr. Warnock will debate in Savannah, Ga., on Friday. Early voting in Georgia begins on Monday. More

Christina Bobb is a former Marine and a fervent believer that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. She went to work for him and quickly found herself enmeshed in an obstruction investigation.WASHINGTON — This spring, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization.The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met Ms. Bobb at the president’s residence and private club in Florida and asked her to sign a statement for the department that the Trump legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government.Ms. Bobb, a 39-year-old lawyer juggling amorphous roles in her new job, was being asked to take a step that neither Mr. Trump nor other members of the legal team were willing to take — so she looked before leaping.“Wait a minute — I don’t know you,” Ms. Bobb replied to Mr. Corcoran’s request, according to a person to whom she later recounted the episode. She later complained that she did not have a full grasp of what was going on around her when she signed the document, according to two people who have heard her account.Ms. Bobb, who relentlessly promoted falsehoods about the 2020 election as an on-air host for the far-right One America News Network, eventually signed her name. But she insisted on adding a written caveat before giving it to a senior Justice Department official on June 3: “The above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”Her sworn statement, hedged or not, was shown to be flatly false after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, which recovered about 100 additional highly sensitive government documents, including some marked with the highest levels of classification. And prosecutors are now investigating whether her actions constitute obstruction of justice or if she committed other crimes.On Friday, Ms. Bobb sat for a voluntary interview with Justice Department lawyers in Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation. She told them that another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, contacted her the night before she signed the attestation and connected her with Mr. Corcoran. Ms. Bobb, who was living in Florida, was told that she needed to go to Mar-a-Lago the next day to deal with an unspecified legal matter for Mr. Trump.In her meeting with the department — a development reported by NBC News on Monday — Ms. Bobb, who was accompanied by her criminal defense lawyer, John Lauro, emphasized that she was working as part of a team rather than as a solo actor when she signed the statement attesting to the return of all the documents, the people said.Mr. Corcoran, she told the Justice Department, had walked her through how he had conducted a search of a storage facility at Mar-a-Lago for the documents. She said she had believed at the time she signed the attestation in June that it was accurate, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.Ms. Bobb has made clear that she is not taking an adversarial position toward Mr. Trump in answering the Justice Department’s questions. She told investigators that before she signed the attestation, she heard Mr. Trump tell Mr. Corcoran that they should cooperate with the Justice Department and give prosecutors what they wanted — an assurance that would come to ring hollow as the investigation proceeded and became a bitter court fight.The Justice Department declined to comment. Ms. Bobb, Mr. Corcoran and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Epshteyn did not respond to an email seeking comment.Ms. Bobb has been a fervent promoter of baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.Josh Ritchie for The New York TimesMs. Bobb’s trajectory is a familiar one in Mr. Trump’s orbit: a marginal player thrust by ambition and happenstance into a position where her profile and prospects are elevated, but at the cost of serious legal and reputational risk.But she stands out for a varied background — she is a former Marine who served in Afghanistan and a failed political candidate who jettisoned a conventional career to become a far-right cable news host — and for the tensile strength of her baseless conviction that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.More on the Trump Documents InquirySupreme Court Request: The Justice Department urged the justices to reject a request from former President Donald J. Trump asking the court to intervene in the litigation over documents seized from his Florida estate.Documents Still Missing?: A top Justice Department official told Mr. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the agency believed he had not returned all the records he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.Deflecting Demands: Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.Dueling Judges: The moves and countermoves by a federal judge and the special master she appointed reflect a larger struggle over who should control the rules of the review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.In the past two years, Ms. Bobb has emerged as one of his truest of true believers, embracing conspiracy theories with a fervor that has at times seemed over the top even to her colleagues, according to interviews with a dozen people who have worked with her over the past several years.Ms. Bobb has not been shy about expressing her opinions on conservative news outlets, speaking expansively about the court-authorized F.B.I. search and her low opinion of those who executed it.“I don’t believe that there was any classified material in there, though I’m sure the F.B.I. will say that there is,” she said in an interview with the conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza two days after the warrant was executed.Another conservative activist, Mike Farris, asked if she was concerned by the Justice Department’s aggressive approach.“I’m not too worried about it,” she replied. “They are all a bunch of cowards; they don’t have anything.”Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts.She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.Dominion Voting Systems is suing Ms. Bobb and OAN for promoting unsubstantiated claims that the company was part of a vote-switching scheme to favor Joseph R. Biden Jr. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot subpoenaed Ms. Bobb in March to testify about her “attempts to disrupt or delay” certification of the election and her reported involvement in drafting the executive order.She complied, but provided no proof when pressed on her claims about the election, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of her testimony.Ms. Bobb blurred the lines between covering Mr. Trump and working for him:She offered a dour after-action report of the failed attempt to appoint alternate electors to overturn the election in a previously undisclosed memo she sent to Mr. Trump on March 29, 2021, while working for OAN. The memo, obtained from a person to whom it was later forwarded, was marked “ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE” even though she was not on Mr. Trump’s legal team at the time.“If three states changed their electors, the result of the election would have flipped,” Ms. Bobb wrote, adding a caveat at the end: It was “unclear” whether the Supreme Court would have supported the elector scheme.It is not known if Mr. Trump read it. He seems to have a mixed opinion of Ms. Bobb’s on-air work, however, grousing that she was too flattering to him in several OAN interviews, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.After leaving the Department of Homeland Security, Ms. Bobb became a host on the far-right One America News Network.Gabby Jones/BloombergMs. Bobb, a standout soccer and volleyball player during her high school years in the Phoenix area, graduated with a joint business and law degree from San Diego State University and California Western School of Law in 2008.She joined the Marine Corps, going through officer candidate school and completing a grueling basic training course in May 2010 as one of 16 women in a class of 280. She served in the Judge Advocate General’s office, representing Marines in disciplinary hearings, and was assigned for a time in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as an operational law attorney consulting combat commanders on the legality of military operations.Those experiences, Ms. Bobb has suggested, were front of mind as she stood in the sweltering Mar-a-Lago parking lot angrily observing F.B.I. agents carrying out the search warrant. “Every service member can tell you that you have an affirmative obligation to disregard an unlawful order,” she told Mr. Farris in August.Ms. Bobb left the Marines after two years to work for a law firm in San Diego, where she served as a junior lawyer in three trademark infringement cases brought by CrossFit against local gym operators, according to court records.Ms. Bobb, second from right, during a meeting about a ballot review at the Arizona Senate in Phoenix in July 2021. In the postelection period, she blurred the lines between her work for One America News and her advocacy of Mr. Trump.Joseph Cooke/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORKAround that time, she made her first foray into politics, running as an independent for a House seat in a predominantly Democratic district in San Diego. She kept a defiantly low profile, criticizing politicians who craved the “limelight,” maintaining a bare-bones website and raising no money.“I understand that it might not work, but it might,” she told a reporter covering the race in 2014.It did not. Ms. Bobb finished last in a field of eight, with 929 votes. She did not challenge the result.A few years later, she moved to Washington; in mid-2019, she was selected for an administrative job at the Department of Homeland Security — executive secretary. She served as a conduit for external correspondence, and her name was often attached to important memos, largely drafted by others, such as a list of locations where Mr. Trump’s border wall was to be built.The job also entailed another responsibility: ensuring compliance with federal records laws.Colleagues remember Ms. Bobb as hardworking and professional, with a bearing more military than political (she retained the habit of referring to superiors as “sir” and “ma’am”). But it soon became clear that the department’s leadership, while satisfied with her work, was not wowed with it and had no intention of promoting her, two former co-workers said.In late 2019, she requested a position in the policy unit of Customs and Border Protection but left after only a few months, they said.At that point, Ms. Bobb made an abrupt career shift, applying for a job with the San Diego-based OAN, where her connection to homeland security seemed to have been a selling point.The network’s conservative owners viewed immigration as their top priority and wanted to bolster their coverage. Ms. Bobb’s first on-air interview was with her former boss Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary.It was after Election Day 2020 that she seemed to find her calling, airing multiple reports of unproven electoral fraud, culminating in a lengthy February 2021 segment, “Arizona Election Heist,” which promoted debunked and dubious claims about her home state.After the election, Ms. Bobb was also a fixture at meetings where Trump hard-liners like John Eastman and Sidney Powell discussed plans to reverse the results — which initially raised questions about whether she was embedded for reporting purposes or committed to the cause. Participants quickly concluded it was the latter, according to one of them.By December, she was back-channeling requests from Mr. Giuliani to Republican state officials in Arizona, pressuring them to authorize a recount of the Maricopa voting, despite a statewide canvass that confirmed Mr. Biden’s 10,000-vote margin of victory.“Mayor Giuliani asked me to send you these declarations,” Ms. Bobb wrote to one leader, accompanied by affidavits, according to an email obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.By March 2022, Ms. Bobb decided to leave OAN and relocated to Florida to be closer to Mr. Trump and some of the senior leadership of the Trump-affiliated Save America PAC, taking a staff job that paid $144,600 a year, according to federal campaign finance records.While she has been a fixture on the airwaves and social media, Ms. Bobb requested that her name be redacted from the signed attestation about the documents when it was unsealed in late August, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.It leaked anyway.Susan C. Beachy More