Elections

With Election Day fast approaching, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Democrat, will face his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, as well as Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, in their first and (likely only) debate.Mr. Masters, a political newcomer who received the enthusiastic backing of the tech mogul Peter Thiel, has struggled to attract independent voters, who make up roughly a third of the state’s registered voters.Much of Mr. Masters’s campaign has focused on anti-immigration messaging. He has shifted his stance on abortion since the primary and has deleted his false claim that President Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election from his website. He is likely to face questions from the moderators and Mr. Kelly on his shifting positions.Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut and the husband of Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman who was shot in the head in 2011, has run a carefully choreographed campaign. He has relied on his reputation as a moderate incumbent, drawing consistent support from some Republicans. Mr. Kelly also has one of the most well-funded Senate campaigns, raising over $52 million.The debate, hosted by the Arizona Clean Elections Commission, is at 6 p.m. local time (and 9 p.m. Eastern time). It will be aired by C-SPAN and we will be covering it here with live updates and analysis from our reporters. More

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Before we get to the point, keep in mind that during Montana’s recent primary election, in the Second Congressional District race in Garfield County — a stretch of eastern badlands and prairie nearly the size of Connecticut — 14 Democrats voted. Then again, maybe that is the point.After the 2020 census, Montana regained the second House seat it lost 30 years ago. Here in the western mountains where I live, the First District could be competitive for Democrats if the college towns and Indian reservations can outflank clumps of Trumpists and armed Christian separatists. But when I asked Dorothy Bradley — a Democratic icon since she got elected to the state legislature as a 23-year-old in 1970 — about the Second District, she replied point blank, “A Democrat can’t win in eastern Montana.”She is, however, floating a Plan B. In April, Ms. Bradley invited to the Capitol in Helena her opponent in the 1992 gubernatorial race, Marc Racicot, the two-term governor and former chair of the Republican National Committee. In the contest for the House seat in the eastern district, they endorsed an independent, Gary Buchanan, who is running against Montana’s current at-large representative, Republican Matt Rosendale. The Bradley-Racicot endorsement was a singular milestone in Montana politics, as if the C.E.O.s of Pepsi and Coke called a truce to sell some Dr. Pepper.President Biden’s plea to rational Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats in the midterms, as a ploy to root out authoritarian Republican extremists, could persuade the already persuadable. But winning the popular and electoral votes in 2020 does not change the fact that he lost in about 2,500 of the nation’s 3,000 or so counties. While the Republican Party spurns observable reality, the Democratic Party has alienated most of the continent (which is also unrealistic in a republic if governing is the goal). In landscapes where, as former Senator Conrad Burns described eastern Montana, there is “a lot of dirt between light bulbs,” defending pluralist democracy might require a pluralist task force. Realistic Democrats allying with Republican defectors and the unaffiliated to elect civic-minded independents could look like the bipartisan coalition backing Mr. Buchanan and an experiment south of here in Utah.The Utah Democratic Party decided not to field a U.S. Senate candidate and instead endorsed the independent Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer who ran for president in 2016, to oppose Mike Lee, who initially supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election. That was a stirring, patriotic feat. Still, what did they have to lose? The last Democrat to win the Senate in Utah was born in 1911 and lost to Orrin Hatch in 1976.These independents overlap in ways that could be instructive in future races — levelheaded centrists with establishment support and a sense of place running against mortifying Republican oddballs in regions where Democrats are pariahs. And while Mr. Buchanan has raised about twice as much money as his Democratic opponent, the fact that Mr. McMullin doesn’t have a Democrat to contend with has helped propel him to a statistical tie with Senator Lee, according to a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.No responsible American can vote for congressional Republicans — with few exceptions, like Senator Lisa Murkowski — for the foreseeable future because of the threat that party poses to orderly elections. Montana’s Representative Rosendale, who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, personifies that threat.Mr. Buchanan, who owns an investment advisory firm in Billings, made a last-minute decision to run for the House after Mr. Rosendale voted against a bipartisan resolution titled “Supporting the People of Ukraine.”How do you know if your representative is not the least bit representative? When the House votes 426-3, and yours is among the three.Mr. Buchanan described that vote as the moment “when embarrassment became shame.” It’s worth noting that our right-wing governor, Greg Gianforte, was so offended by the invasion, he started immediately divesting the state’s Russian assets, proclaiming, “Montana stands with Ukraine.” It’s such a near-unanimous position that even I will stand with my journalist-clobbering governor, though I will be 10 yards away wearing my dad’s welding helmet.Pondering Representative Rosendale’s peculiar record (he was also in the minority when the House voted 394-18 to support Sweden and Finland joining NATO), Mr. Racicot summarized his disapproval: “These aren’t necessarily moral judgments. These are almost mathematical judgments.”Though I voted for Dorothy Bradley in 1992, I do find Mr. Racicot, as a former R.N.C. chair who publicly endorsed Joe Biden for president, to be a reliable sherpa in ascending to the ideal of country above party.“I don’t care about the things that are debatable, that thoughtful people can argue about and come to different conclusions,” he told me. “What I care about is betraying the country and betraying the democracy.” Because of fidelity to the Constitution, he argues that “a lot of people are to the point where they can finally say: ‘You know what, I’m not a Democrat first. I’m not a Republican first.’”A man in a bar recently asked Mr. Buchanan if he’s an F.B.I. agent or a Mormon. He looks like he served as Montana’s first Department of Commerce director in the early 1980s. Sounds dull, yet those were desperate years, when much of the old Montana up and died — the Butte copper mine, the Great Falls refinery and the Anaconda smelter shut down, and the farm crisis incited hundreds of farmers in Montana and the Midwest to take their own lives. Mr. Buchanan oversaw “Build Montana,” a program focused on beefing up what’s now the economic pillar of tourism. He created the still ubiquitous “Made in Montana” label to promote homegrown products, a marketing ploy I fall for every time I face life’s jelly and jam dilemmas. Endangered fossil fuel towns might appreciate his experience with tough transitions. And his fealty to the right to privacy in the Montana Constitution, which guarantees abortion rights (for now), provides an alternative to Representative Rosendale’s rigid opposition.Mr. Buchanan told me that when he’s out campaigning in the eastern district, he meets Montanans who have never heard of the category of independent, but they instantly see themselves in that word. More than 40 percent of Americans identify as independents, according to a Gallup poll — the biggest bloc in the country, outnumbering either party. That figure should shame both parties’ leaders into deep self-reflection.When I saw photos of Mr. Racicot and Ms. Bradley standing beside Mr. Buchanan for endorsement, my first reaction was relief that there might be a plausible home remedy to Representative Rosendale and his ilk. Last month, in Livingston, I noticed about a dozen Buchanan yard signs and zero for his major party opponents. I know hardcore liberals in Helena and the Shields Valley who plan to vote for him.While I wish I could reach a comforting conclusion about the improvised communities bucking up these western independents for the greater good, partisans putting aside heartfelt differences is not necessarily a sign of hope but a warning that the two-party system has failed them. Congress is supposed to compromise, not voters.Sarah Vowell is the author of, among other books, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States” and the producer of an oral history of the Montana Constitutional Convention of 1972.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

WASHINGTON — In Las Cruces, N.M., self-styled fraud investigators have deluged election officials with open-records demands for office email, images of all 130,000 ballots cast in 2020 and digital records that lay out what votes were cast at every polling place.In Tioga County, Pa., fliers hung on doorknobs urge voters to delay going to polling places until minutes before they close, potentially snarling election-night reporting of results.And in Nye County, Nev., where an election denier is overseeing the next election, officials are recruiting volunteers to hand-count thousands of ballots after the county commission did away with electronic voting machines.With just five weeks left until Election Day on Nov. 8, a drumbeat of lawsuits, harassment, calls to change balloting procedures and demands for reams of election records — driven by people who mistrust or outright reject the idea that elections are fair — are adding to pressures on election officials just as work in advance of the vote is peaking.The problems reflect fears for the November vote and concerns that the demands on voting oversight will further deplete an election infrastructure already pushed to the breaking point — with the 2024 presidential election looming beyond the midterms.“The exhaustion is real for election officials,” Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said in an interview. He added: “The partisanship and polarization around elections — and election officials themselves — is a strain and a threat to our elections.”Mr. Norden said the pressures on election offices are compounded by a falloff in the federal aid and cybersecurity assistance that poured into the 2020 election. “I’m not so worried for the near term,” he said, “but I am for the long term.”Election workers assisting voters at a polling site in Las Vegas in June.John Locher/Associated PressConsider Lycoming County, Pa., home to the city of Williamsport and some 71,000 predominantly Republican voters. Election critics are in court there, demanding a voluminous record of the county’s 2020 vote. Last month the county board of commissioners approved, then scrapped, a referendum on the November ballot over abolishing electronic voting systems in favor of hand-counting ballots. That referendum, too, had been pushed by election skeptics and deniers. Another records request asked for the names and jobs of the county’s 400 poll workers.“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. “It should be number one.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot envelopes and applications. The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said the barrage of records requests had hit red and blue counties alike. “Election officials don’t wake up on Election Day or the day before and decide to put on an election,” she said. “Running an election takes weeks of preparation.”The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. He added that local supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, commonly called cast vote records, from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.“That’s why we can’t have machines used in future elections,” he said. “Any election in the United States going forward, we need to get rid of them.”In Doña Ana County, N.M., which includes Las Cruces, the state’s second-largest city, the county elections staff member in charge of processing open records requests quit this year, in part because of the workload, said Amanda López Askin, the county clerk.Voters waiting in line to cast their ballots during the primary election in Las Cruces, N.M., in 2020.Paul Ratje/Reuters“They demand and accuse, and then they leave you with a year’s worth of work,” she said. “In some cases you have to redact information manually, and you have 80,000 pieces of paper” that must be edited to remove protected data.Some of the records requests seem to have been coordinated by nationwide groups of election deniers. In Pennsylvania, lawsuits in two counties seek to force election officials to turn over cast vote records that state officials say are exempt from disclosure. Both suits are being backed by the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative law firm that also filed suits seeking to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election victory. The demand for documents comes atop a host of other issues that were already plaguing preparations for November.In a reprise of 2020 pre-election tactics, activist groups promoting the baseless notion of widespread voter fraud are trying to invalidate tens of thousands of voter registrations, mostly in Democratic areas. Most of the challenges have failed.Election administrators in a number of states are rushing to adapt to new rules laid down in recent court cases and laws, some of which would impose harsh penalties for making administrative decisions on balloting matters that long had been seen as matters of discretion. Wisconsin officials, for example, have been barred by a court ruling from contacting would-be voters to correct minor mistakes or omissions in absentee ballots; instead, the ballots must be returned.Election offices in many jurisdictions are being threatened with lawsuits by election-denial groups, or simply being threatened by angry constituents. Meetings of election boards and county commissions have become forums for campaigns to abandon electronic voting machines or rehash fraud claims from 2020.In a handful of places, campaigns have succeeded. In sprawling Nye County, Nev., where some 33,000 voters are sprinkled over an area nearly as big as two Vermonts, County Clerk Mark F. Kampf — who has said he believes Donald J. Trump won in 2020 — is soliciting volunteers to hand-count ballots in November. County commissioners voted in March to stop using voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems, apparently responding to the debunked conspiracy theory that the machines were rigged to favor Mr. Biden in 2020.Mr. Kampf did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.In Tioga County, Pa., the only snag in election plans is the door-to-door campaign by an election-denial group and watchdog, Audit the Vote PA, to persuade voters to line up at polling stations as they are about to close.Voting during the primary election in Lower Gwynedd, Pa., in May.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesToni Schuppe, identified as the group’s founder, turned down an interview request, and the county elections director, Penny Whipple, declined to speak on the record. Others said the campaign appears to stem from a conspiracy theory that voting machines are rigged to add bogus Democratic votes throughout the day, and that a last-minute fusillade of votes would thwart that scheme.The only real effect, however, would be to delay the reporting of election results, said Mr. Lehman of Lycoming County, which abuts Tioga. “To get a lot of people showing up at 7:45 p.m. in the dark, in the cold of November, and then have delays at all your precincts — that would be a recipe for chaos,” he said.The stress, and the added workload posed by the growing nationwide trend toward voting by mail, are taking a toll. In Kentucky, more than one in five of the state’s 120 county clerks are not seeking re-election in November, and six have quit outright this year, the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Michael Adams, said.Ms. Ertmer, the Winnebago County clerk, said turnover also has been unusually high in Wisconsin, both among county clerks and municipal clerks who perform most election duties. “I’m going to retire next year,” she said. “I would have continued if the atmosphere was different. I love my job, and the people I work with. But enough is enough.”And in Washoe County, Nev., home to Reno, county officials made it official policy to give legal and public relations help to government officials who are harassed or smeared after the registrar of voters, Deanna Spikula, announced her resignation in June.All that said, Mr. Adams, Ms. Ertmer and other officials said they planned to be ready when voting begins. Mr. Adams even expressed guarded optimism that the wave of activity by election deniers had crested: “The My Pillow guy did his thing on me a week ago, and I thought I’d get thousands of records requests,” he said, referring to Mr. Lindell. “But I got very little.”Some officials, like Anthony W. Perlatti, the director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Ohio, said they had learned lessons in 2020 that will help in 2022.And Nichole Baldwin, the clerk and registrar of voters in tiny White Pine County, Nev., said she was unfazed by the records requests. “They’re all asking for the same thing: cast vote records,” she said. “I have them on a flash drive, and I’m sending them out as they come in. No big deal.”Indeed, the greatest worry for many was the prospect of the unexpected.Kaitlyn Bernarde, the city clerk in Wausau, Wis., said she was reviewing her emergency management plan, with guidelines for handling aggressive voters and rules governing the conduct of observers inside polling places.In April, she said, primary elections in Wausau went swimmingly. She added: “I anticipate it won’t be as easy in November.” More

MADISON, Wis. — Politicians who visit diners know the deal: In exchange for photos establishing their working-class bona fides, they must cheerfully accept heaping portions of unsolicited advice.But on Tuesday at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner here in Madison, one of the first people to approach Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, took the tradition to a new level, presenting him with a typed-up list of concerns about his campaign.The supporter, Jane Kashnig, a retired businesswoman who has spent recent weeks going door to door to speak with voters, told Mr. Barnes his backers were jittery about his inability to repel an unending volley of attack ads from Senator Ron Johnson and his Republican allies.Show more fire, Ms. Kashnig urged the Democrat and his campaign. “The people on the doors want him to fight,” she said.Democrats in Wisconsin are wringing their hands about how Mr. Barnes’s political fortunes have sagged under the weight of the Republican advertising blitz. Grumbling about his campaign tactics and the help he is receiving from national Democrats, they worry that he could be one of several of the party’s Senate candidates whose struggles to parry a withering G.O.P. onslaught could sink their candidacies and cost Democrats control of the chamber.At Monty’s Blue Plate Diner in Madison, Wis., one voter presented Mr. Barnes with a list of concerns about his campaign.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes held a “Ron Against Roe” event at the diner, referring to Senator Ron Johnson’s opposition to abortion rights.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBeyond Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidates and their allies in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia have alarmed Democrats with their gains in the polls after an enormous investment in television advertising. In those three states, Republicans and their allies outspent Democrats in September, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.The Republican wave of ads has helped counteract the Democratic momentum that followed the Supreme Court’s decision in June to end the constitutional right to an abortion. Republicans have shifted the debate to more friendly terrain, focusing in Wisconsin and other places on crime.“There were weeks where we would get outspent two-to-one on TV,” Mr. Barnes said in an interview. “There has been an unprecedented amount of negative spin against me.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.It has been an abrupt turnaround for Mr. Barnes since late summer, when he won the Democratic primary by acclimation and opened up a lead in polls over Mr. Johnson, who has long had the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent senator on the ballot this year. But the hail of attack ads from Mr. Johnson and allied super PACs has tanked Mr. Barnes’s standing, particularly among the state’s finicky independent voters.Republicans have seized in particular on Mr. Barnes’s past progressive stances, including his suggestion in a 2020 television interview that funding be diverted from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services — a key element of the movement to defund the police. Since then, Mr. Barnes has disavowed defunding the police and has called for an increase in funding.Mr. Barnes entered the Democratic primary race as a favorite of the party’s progressive wing.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesRace has also been at the center of the televised assault on Mr. Barnes, who is Black. Mail advertising from Republicans has darkened Mr. Barnes’s skin, while some TV ads from a Republican super PAC have superimposed his name next to images of crime scenes.Those overtones come as no surprise to Wisconsin Democrats. He is only the third Black statewide official in Wisconsin’s history; the first two both lost re-election in campaigns widely regarded as racist. And Democratic strategists and voters are well aware that fighting back aggressively has its dangers.“It’s real easy to go from ‘fired up for change’ to ‘the angry Black guy from Milwaukee’ in the public perception,” said Alexia Sabor, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Dane County, which includes Madison.For all of the Republican optimism, Mr. Barnes still has a path to victory. Wisconsin elections over the last two decades have been very close, with Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. each winning the deeply polarized state by fewer than 25,000 votes in their successful presidential campaigns. And Wisconsin Democrats have a record of winning tight races: Including nonpartisan State Supreme Court elections, the party has won nine of the 10 statewide elections since 2018. Mr. Johnson is also less popular in the state now than he was when he won narrow victories in 2010 and 2016.“I have not met somebody who’s like, ‘Oh, gee, how should I vote in the Senate race?’” said Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, a longtime friend and political supporter of Mr. Barnes. “I mean, mostly people know.”Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin and other prominent Democrats in the state held a rally for abortion rights at the State Capitol on Tuesday. Mr. Barnes was not present.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes entered the primary as a favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. When he first ran for office, in 2012, he wrote on Twitter that progressive candidates who moved to the political center were “compromising all integrity.” In 2019, he delivered the Working Families Party’s response to Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address.Mr. Barnes, 35, a former state legislator who was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, consistently led in the primary polls. Two weeks before the primary, his leading rivals dropped out and endorsed him one by one, saying they hoped to give him a runway to raise money and begin attacking Mr. Johnson..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.“I gave him a two-week head start,” said Tom Nelson, the Outagamie County executive, who was the first Democratic Senate candidate to end his campaign and back Mr. Barnes.But now, Mr. Nelson said, “The campaign needs to fire its media consultant.” He added, “They’re losing.”The Republican ads have been remarkably effective. Shortly after the Aug. 9 primary, Mr. Barnes led Mr. Johnson by seven percentage points overall and by 15 points among independent voters, according to a poll conducted by Marquette University Law School. But 41 percent of voters still didn’t have an opinion about Mr. Barnes. A month later, Mr. Johnson led by a point overall and by two points among Wisconsin’s independents.Mr. Johnson declined an interview request. In an interview with a conservative talk radio host in Milwaukee last month, Mr. Johnson accused Democrats of “playing the race card,” adding, “That’s what leftists do.”Mr. Johnson has the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent senator on the ballot this year. But he has pulled out narrow victories twice before, in 2010 and 2016.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesA Barnes event in Racine, Wis. On Monday, his campaign begin airing an ad criticizing Mr. Johnson’s anti-abortion stance.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Barnes, who announced on Wednesday that he had raised $20 million during the three-month fund-raising period that ended Sept. 30, has responded to Mr. Johnson with gentle advertisements in which he speaks to the camera and calmly asserts that the senator is lying about his record. In one, he is at a kitchen table making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Only on Monday did the Barnes campaign begin airing an ad criticizing Mr. Johnson’s opposition to abortion rights.Some Democrats also worry that Mr. Barnes is not sufficiently motivating Black voters, a key constituency largely concentrated in Milwaukee. Most of the city’s leading Black elected officials endorsed other candidates during the Senate primary.“The progressives have been Mandela’s base from the day that he was elected — it really has never been the Black community,” said Lena Taylor, a Black Democratic state senator from Milwaukee whom Mr. Barnes unsuccessfully challenged in a 2016 primary for her seat. “Because of that, he does have to do a little bit more with what other people would have seen as his natural base.”Even Mr. Barnes’s longtime supporters are frustrated that his campaign has allowed Republicans to frame the contest as being about crime rather than Mr. Johnson’s past support for overturning the 2020 election and the misinformation he continues to spread about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Barnes once spoke of diverting money from “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to social services, but now emphasizes his support for giving more money to law enforcement.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“To call what happened on Jan. 6 an armed insurrection, I just think is not accurate,” Mr. Johnson said on Tuesday during remarks to the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.Senior Democrats in Wisconsin and Washington concluded long ago that condemning Mr. Johnson over Jan. 6 in television ads is not a winning argument with swing voters.“To make Mandela and Black folks endure the relentless racist attacks, then not hit back on treason, corruption and lies, is unfortunate,” said Francesca Hong, a state representative from Madison who was an early supporter of Mr. Barnes.In the interview with Mr. Barnes, held after a campaign stop at a brewery in Racine, he both reiterated his support for increasing funding for law enforcement and said he had not changed any progressive positions he took earlier in his political career.“Things haven’t changed, right? But it’s what we talk about,” he said. “My positions are the same and where I stand on those issues is the exact same.”He also said he did not believe he faced extra hurdles running to represent Wisconsin as a Black Democrat from Milwaukee — the state’s largest city but one that has long punched below its weight in statewide elections. Since 1913, when the ratification of the 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of senators, Wisconsin has elected only one from Milwaukee, Herb Kohl, who served four terms.“There’s a Black dude from Chicago whose middle name was Hussein,” Mr. Barnes said, referring to former President Barack Obama. “He won Wisconsin twice.”Mr. Barnes joined United Auto Workers members on a picket line on Monday in Mount Pleasant, Wis.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPerhaps the clearest sign of Mr. Barnes’s political challenges is the lack of eagerness by some of his fellow Democrats to campaign with him.Three hours before Mr. Barnes’s stop at the Madison diner, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat locked in a tight re-election race of his own, held a rally on the steps of the State Capitol calling on voters to punish Republicans for refusing to consider changes to the state’s 1849 law banning abortion. Those present included the state’s attorney general, treasurer, Democratic state legislators and the state Democratic Party’s chairman.Mr. Barnes wasn’t there, and the parade of speakers barely mentioned him.“It wasn’t that he wasn’t invited or was invited,” Mr. Evers said afterward. “He just scheduled something different at the same time to talk about the same thing.”Mr. Johnson, for his part, appears to be in a jubilant mood. On Wednesday, he thanked the Tavern League of Wisconsin, the state’s trade association for bars, for endorsing him by posting a video in which the 67-year-old senator chugs a Miller Lite in four seconds. More

Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOn today’s episode: How the Republican grass roots got years ahead of a changing country, and whether the Democrats can catch up.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesGuestsJ. David Goodman, The Times’s Houston bureau chief, covering Texas.Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.Background ReadingPatriot Mobile, a Christian cellphone company, is spending money to promote conservative views on race and gender in schools. Read J. David Goodman’s reporting on how the company has become a rising force in Texas politics.Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, Democrats in difficult re-election races are reorienting their campaigns around abortion rights.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

SCOTCH PLAINS, N.J. — When New Jersey’s congressional map was redrawn last year, Representative Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat, was widely considered a political goner.President Biden’s popularity had plummeted, gas prices were soaring and Mr. Malinowski’s Seventh Congressional District — in which he barely eked out a re-election victory in 2020 — had been redrawn to include nearly 27,000 more registered Republicans. When Mr. Malinowski announced he would run for a third term, he did so in a terse statement, quoting an ominous Shakespearean battle cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”But 10 months later, as voters have absorbed the impact of the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that Democrats believe the national political momentum has shifted to a degree that even this race, written off by some as a strategic sacrifice, is narrowing.Any path by which Democrats are able to stave off a midterm rout or retain a slim House majority cuts straight through districts like Mr. Malinowski’s, where moderate, well-educated voters helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018 and are seen as crucial to holding it.“I do see it as a bit of a bellwether — an indicator of how things are going to go nationally,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who was a key architect of former Gov. Chris Christie’s victories in 2009 and 2013.Mr. Malinowski is running for a second time against Tom Kean Jr., the namesake of a beloved former New Jersey governor making his fourth run for Congress. Mr. Kean came within about 5,000 votes of winning in 2020 and remains a formidable opponent this year.Still, a national political action committee dedicated to preserving the Democratic majority in the House has suddenly begun buying up its first television time for Malinowski ads. And Democratic loyalists who have been knocking on doors for Mr. Malinowski say concern over abortion rights has grown palpable within the suburban swing district, which stretches from one side of northern New Jersey to the other.“I don’t know a woman who isn’t really angry and really scared,” Jennifer Robinson of Tewksbury, N.J., who supports Mr. Malinowski, said on Sunday night after a forum with both candidates sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey.“Republicans targeted this race thinking Tom Kean Jr. was going to ride a red wave,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Instead, with five weeks to go, this race remains neck and neck.”None of the major independent polling operations in New Jersey have released surveys about the race. A poll conducted in late July, paid for by a group that supports term limits, showed Mr. Kean leading by eight percentage points; 11 percent of the 400 people surveyed said they were undecided.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.On Sunday, an internal poll memo released by Mr. Malinowski’s campaign suggested that the race had narrowed, and that he and Mr. Kean were statistically tied, 48 percent to 48 percent.Mr. Kean’s campaign spokesman dismissed the poll and called its release a “desperate cry for help.”Mr. Malinowski and three other New Jersey Democrats rode a wave of anti-Trump fervor to Congress during the 2018 midterm cycle, temporarily leaving the state with just one Republican in its 12-person congressional delegation. But many of these newly blue swing districts remained highly competitive.Last year, the new congressional map, redrawn to reflect the 2020 census, eased some of the pressure on Democrats. As it added Republican-leaning towns to Mr. Malinowski’s district, it shored up the districts of several other vulnerable incumbents at a time when Democrats were bracing for a midterm shellacking.The districts of Democratic Representatives Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim and Mikie Sherrill all shed Republican-leaning towns — territory that in southern and central New Jersey the state’s two Republican congressmen, Christopher Smith and Jeff Van Drew, mainly absorbed, making their seats safer, too. Only Mr. Malinowski’s race, on paper, got harder.Yet until last month, the Democrats’ House Majority PAC had not made ad buys for Mr. Malinowski’s race, even as Republican special interest groups prepared to pump millions of dollars into Mr. Kean’s.But in late September the political action committee began booking television airtime, and it has now reserved between $100,000 and $185,000 in ads each week until Election Day, according to data maintained by Ad Impact, a company that tracks political advertising.Tom Kean Jr. speaking to voters in Scotch Plains, N.J., on Sunday. He came close to winning in 2020.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Malinowski’s district includes affluent commuter towns close to New York City, communities filled with horse-country estates (and a former president’s golf course) and rural, Republican bastions. Voters in the district backed Mr. Biden by less than four percentage points, even though he beat former President Donald J. Trump by nearly 16 percentage points in New Jersey, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by just over one million voters.Even if it has narrowed, the race remains a decidedly uphill battle for Mr. Malinowski.Inflation has been stubborn, and consumers are still feeling an economic pinch — an issue that a Monmouth University poll released on Monday found is likely to overshadow abortion access as a motivator heading into the midterms. Only 42 percent of voters across the country support Mr. Biden, according to last month’s New York Times/Siena College poll, a threshold that is just as bad or worse than any president whose party went on to lose control of Congress in midterm elections, going back to 1978.And Mr. Malinowski remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations he failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock trades, an error he has taken responsibility for and said resulted from carelessness.“It’s better for Democrats than six months ago,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But it’s still a better political environment for Republicans than it was two years ago — and certainly four years ago.”At the forum on Sunday, questions from an audience filled almost entirely with Malinowski supporters centered largely on Mr. Kean’s position on abortion.Mr. Malinowski supports access to abortion at any point in a pregnancy, and he said on Sunday that he would vote to enshrine a right to abortion into federal law.Mr. Kean, a former state senator and assemblyman, has said he supported a “woman’s right to choose.” But he opposes abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent extenuating circumstances, according to his campaign.“I think there are meaningful exceptions that should be rape, incest, life and the health of the mother,” he said Sunday. “Those are exceptions for a reasonable amount of time.”In the Senate, he voted against a bill affirming abortion as a right in New Jersey. He said he opposed the legislation, which was later signed into law, because it permitted abortion at any point in a pregnancy, including what he called late-term abortion. Abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy are rare, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.A Kean campaign website is less nuanced.“Tom is a fierce defender of the sanctity of life, fighting every step of the way to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws proposed in New Jersey, and will continue to do so in Congress,” it reads.“When I’m talking about the egregious piece of legislation, the ability to choose to terminate, for not valid reasons, when a baby can stay alive, be alive, outside of the womb, is wrong,” he said at the forum.Of the 616,000 registered voters in the district, about a third are not enrolled in either major party. It is these moderate voters who tend to sway elections in New Jersey.Motivating supporters to turn in mail ballots or to show up at polling places during an election year with no statewide races is crucial for any candidate, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.“Elections are about turnout,” Ms. Walsh said. “The people who turn out are the people who feel they have the most at stake.”Ms. Walsh, whose organization studies voting trends among women, said she believed the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly 50 years of abortion rights in the United States would be an “energizer.”“I think it all feels very real to people,” she said.Tracy Keegan, a founder of Summit Marches On, a left-leaning group in Mr. Malinowski’s district that formed after the 2017 Women’s March and includes mainly women with children, said she believed the growing energy among voters extended beyond concern over reproductive rights.“It’s not just about abortion,” she said. “It’s about a government’s willingness to remove freedoms.”A gun control rally in Summit, N.J., after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, drew hundreds of people, said Ms. Keegan. a 51-year-old mother of three.“It wasn’t just Democrats,” she said. More

In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our Yahoo browsers. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Amid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter.Mr. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. “McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days.Mr. McCain and Mr. Dean both lost — but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time.The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “the victory lab.”The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.A warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. Obama for the outburst.But after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign.This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer.The story was similar for Amy McGrath, who ran against Senator Mitch McConnell, and Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who got shaved clean by Bryan Steil. The lesson remains unlearned: This year Marcus Flowers has raised $10 million in his assuredly hopeless race against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — double the receipts of more competitive races. Added together, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates. At a minimum, that money could be used more efficiently by the Democratic Party. But that entire way of thinking might be a reflection of broken politics brain. Aren’t there myriad better uses for all that altruism than pumping out hokey attack ads?As the social media outrage fund-raising model began to come into form, the political parties began to professionalize their grass-roots outreach using email and then text messages. Gone was the decentralized model Mr. Dean had road-tested, whereby supporters organized among themselves, recruiting neighbors and message board friends toward a common cause. By the 2010s, that was displaced by centralized, beta-tested boiler rooms that used powerful digital tools to prey on people’s emotions. The result is very little message variation within the party coalitions. We’ve seen a few exceptions, most notably Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. But overall, it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.To get a sense of just how noxious and stupid the material is that reaches America’s inboxes, I like to peruse The Archive of Political Emails’ The Firehose from time to time. A colleague of mine engineered the site for archival purposes, signing up for various lists and funneling them to the same place. You won’t be surprised to find out that The Firehose is largely devoid of that community-minded hopey-changey stuff that we were promised in the aughts. Instead it’s peppered with conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time. (We all have our weaknesses.)Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?This part is a deep, bipartisan problem. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee might be the longest-running offender when it comes to sending apocalyptic, wheels-off messages demanding voters’ money. It has even been chastised from within its own ranks — to little effect.There is also the more direct grift. Last year I wrote about how the National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation form used a prechecked box scheme, which automatically doubled the dollar amount and made it recurring. A warning aggressively threatened donors if they unchecked the box. Similar tactics resulted in the Trump campaign’s having to return $122 million to supporters who had been duped and, in some cases, financially devastated. If the old fund-raising system was transactional, this new one is dominated by the eternal and emotionally toxic hunt for the small donor.As gross and unethical as those tactics are, the greatest threat resulting from all of this is how the very politicians who are refusing to abide by the results of democratic elections are often being funded: by the once vaunted online donor, even if this one just wants to watch the whole system burn.Senator Josh Hawley raised around $3 million in the first quarter of 2021, mostly after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol. He’s even merchandising this asininity. Most of the Republican leadership has fund-raised on Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-addled social media site. Rank-and-file voters who preferred candidates who promised to decertify the last election or who might certify the next one only if they get their preferred winner (or both) helped fund those candidates in Republican primaries this year.Many of these candidates have struggled to raise what is required for the general elections, in part because Mr. Trump is sucking up nine figures for his PACs, at least one of which spent copiously on legal fees this summer while spending little on supporting Republican candidates. But some wild-eyed insurrectionists might get swept into office during an election cycle in which Republicans perform well, and that is dangerous enough.Maybe, then, given the results of our two-decade experiment in people-powered politics, we might temper rhetoric that glorifies the mighty grass-roots dollar. And reflect on how we might reform our financing system to disincentivize the crazy-making. Empowering the little guy and draining the swamp sounds nice and all, but as it turns out, there is something to be said for a little gatekeeping.And if you don’t believe me, the O.G. disrupter basically admitted as much.Last week I called Mr. Dean to ask him to reflect on the devolution of the netroots model that seemed to offer so much hope for doe-eyed reformers two decades ago.“At the time, it was a way that a young generation could start pushing their way up by using technology,” he said, “and it was incredible.”“But now that technology has been abused,” he continued. “The right-wingers are using it in service of fascism.” He added, “And I just send all my fund-raising emails to junk.”Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”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

Soon after Herschel Walker, the former football star, announced he would run for U.S. Senate in Georgia as a Republican, his son Christian appeared with him at an event at Mar-a-Lago, and grinned when his father greeted him with a kiss on the head. “Had the honor of introducing my dad,” he tweeted, “then got to hug a future senator. Perfect night.”The moment seemed a logical convergence of Christian Walker’s personal and public lives: the young man was already emerging as a conservative social media star who took delight in provoking the left, and defending Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.Yet, after that night, he fell largely silent about his father’s campaign. That changed in spectacular fashion Monday night after news broke that in 2009, Herschel Walker, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, paid for his then-girlfriend to have an abortion, according to a report from the Daily Beast.“You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” Christian Walker wrote of his father on Twitter.Feuding among family can be a source of embarrassment for any political campaign. But what unfolded in Georgia this week was extraordinary for the level of indignation so forcefully and publicly aimed at a candidate by his child at such a crucial campaign moment.Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, one of the most competitive races in the country,Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNow, Christian Walker, 23, is at the center of a drama that could upend one of the most competitive races in the country.The elder Mr. Walker called the abortion report a “flat-out lie,” while conservative news media and Republicans, eager to regain control of the narrowly split Senate, rallied to his side. The Walker campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.The spectacle has also put a fresh spotlight on how Christian Walker arrived at his political views, some, he now says, directly connected to his father and his own tumultuous family life.Christian Walker, though, has been his own right-wing warrior for several years. He built a large social media presence, and revels in his seeming contradictions. He is a young Black man who called the George Floyd protests “terrorist attacks.” He is attracted to men but does not identify as “gay,” while calling L.G.B.T.Q. activists a “rainbow cult” and mocking Pride Month. He delights in antagonizing the left through short video rants on social media, often while holding an iced coffee and wearing an impish grin.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.His following on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram has made him well-known among members of Gen Z — many of whom are now just hearing about his father’s heyday as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star at the University of Georgia.In several statements (some deleted) and videos posted on Twitter on Monday and Tuesday, the younger Mr. Walker tore into his father, displaying an angry, wounded vulnerability that points to a complicated relationship with his celebrity father.“My favorite issue to talk about is father absence. Surprise! Because it affected me,” he said in a video posted to Twitter this week.“He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them,” he said of his father in one of two videos he posted to Twitter. “He was out having sex with other women. Do you care about family values?”Christian Walker has leveled some of his criticism at conservative activists and pundits who he said are “questioning my authenticity” while trying to pressure him into publicly supporting his father’s candidacy.He said he decided to speak out after his father denied the abortion story.“I haven’t told one story about what I experienced with him,” he said in one video. “I’m just simply saying don’t lie.”Christian Walker in 2020. He has leveled some of his criticism at conservative activists and pundits who he said are “questioning my authenticity” while trying to pressure him into publicly supporting his father’s candidacy.RHTY/starmaxinc.com/ShutterstockDespite the personal nature of his latest posts about his father, they echoed similar themes from many of his political diatribes, videos that often include tirades against men, like Herschel Walker, who have fathered children out of wedlock, or men and women who have affairs.“You’re not a victim when you sleep with a married man,” Christian Walker titled a recent episode of his podcast, “Uncancellable.” He has criticized an Instagram model for her alleged affair with the singer Adam Levine, who he noted “had a pregnant wife with children at home.”At times, he has publicly embraced his father’s legacy, initially promoting his candidacy. At other times he’s asserted his independence, writing in 2015, when he was a teenager, “um people need to understand that I’m CHRISTIAN WALKER not Herschel walkers son.”Christian Walker did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Walker, who grew up in Dallas, is the only child of Herschel Walker and his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman. Ms. Grossman filed for divorce in 2001, two years after their son was born.Herschel Walker dedicated his 2008 memoir to his son, writing: “To my son, Christian Walker, I love you. Thank you for helping me to mature as a man and a father.”After his son’s Twitter posts this week, Herschel Walker tweeted, “I LOVE my son no matter what.”Heath Garrett, a strategist whose firm does work with a Herschel Walker-aligned PAC, said Wednesday that he thinks “it is possible that Georgia voters are capable of having sympathy for both Herschel and Christian in this saga.”Christian Walker’s comments this week prompted a backlash from some conservatives, but also an outpouring of support on social media. Many, including some self-described liberals, said they disagreed with his politics but were moved by his family struggle. Others shared stories of their own absentee parents or childhood trauma.In Dallas, Christian Walker became a star athlete making waves in the competitive cheer scene in Texas. He won a world championship as a member of Spirit of Texas, a premier cheer team, according to social media reports and press interviews.In past interviews, Herschel Walker has said that after getting over the surprise about his son’s sport of choice, he was supportive. “I was proud that he was doing it,” he told C.B.S. News in 2015.Christian Walker continued his cheer career when he enrolled at Southern Methodist University in 2017. But in 2020, when he moved to the West Coast and transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, his priorities seemed to change.Posts on Christian’s Instagram account dated before June 2020 mostly consist of cheerleading photos, scenic Los Angeles, and typical influencer shots of him posing in designer clothing brands such as Gucci and Givenchy.But his posts made after the murder of George Floyd have an explicitly political slant. He called the Black Lives Matter protest movement the “KKK in blackface.” Along the way he amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across social media platforms.In online classes at U.C.L.A., however, Mr. Walker did not display the same level of combativeness, fellow classmates said.Jessica Epps, who took several classes with him during her time at U.C.L.A., remembered being surprised about how understated he was. During one class that took place amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the professor asked students to discuss the movement, and Ms. Epps remembered Mr. Walker speaking up and being somewhat critical. Still, he was measured in his response, she said.“His demeanor definitely seemed a lot more calm and reserved in the classroom setting,” she said. He seldom spoke during lectures, and mostly “kept to himself,” she said.He was also shaped by the uniqueness of being a conservative on a liberal college campus, he told The Conservateur, a conservative site.“Public schools and colleges have turned into Leftists’ indoctrination centers,” he told the publication. “There’s no ‘tolerance’ for any perspective other than the one that the professor is pumping into you.”At U.C.L.A., Christian Walker became known for tirades filmed in his car at a Starbucks drive-through, and conflicts with students and administrators.In livestreams and direct messages on social media, he feuded with fellow students and other people who assailed his political beliefs and, specifically, his use of an offensive term for mentally disabled people.The incident that seemed to spark the most acrimony occurred earlier this year, when he tweeted screenshots of comments made by students in a Chinese language class he had taken the year before, which showed them expressing their anger at his being in the class with them.“How dare you @ucla. I’ve paid 100s of thousands for this degree. I show up to class to study like everyone else. And you allow your students to treat me like crap because of my political beliefs? Wow. Disgusting,” Christian tweeted.Some U.C.L.A. students were fascinated by his persona.“He’s very loud, very flamboyant, he’s very attention-grabbing if you’re scrolling and find one of his videos — he’s immediately yelling,” said Joseph Keane, a recent U.C.L.A. graduate who said he and his roommate would watch Christian Walker’s videos to amuse themselves. “We would laugh — it’s intentionally over the top.”Mr. Keane said Christian Walker was well-known on campus as a conservative firebrand, though he and his friends did not take him seriously.In June, Christian Walker graduated from U.C.L.A. with a bachelor’s degree, according to the school. Shortly after, he announced he was moving to a place where more people shared his political beliefs: Florida. More