Elections

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A brutal plot to abduct the governor. An armed protest in the galleries of the State Capitol. A candidate for governor who stormed the halls of Congress — only to see his popularity rise.In Michigan, you can feel extremism creeping into civic life.Michigan is far from the only state in the grip of politicians who peddle disinformation and demonize their opponents. But it may also be the one best positioned to beat back the threat of political violence.Unlike, say, Arizona and Pennsylvania, two purple states where Republicans have also embraced a toxic brew of political violence and denialism, Michigan is home to voters who, to date, have avoided succumbing to the new conservative dogma, thanks in large part to its Democratic politicians, who have remained relentlessly focused on kitchen table issues. In that sense, Michigan may hold lessons for residents of other states looking to withstand the tide of authoritarianism and violence, restoring faith in the American institutions under siege from the right.Certainly, recent history is concerning. Although a jury last month convicted two men who plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over her Covid shutdown orders, that verdict came only after a jury in an earlier trial could not reach a unanimous verdict on the charges against them and acquitted two other co-defendants, despite chilling evidence that members of a militia group known as the Wolverine Watchmen had been building homemade bombs, photographing the underside of a bridge to determine how best to destroy it to slow a police pursuit and using night-vision goggles to surveil Ms. Whitmer’s vacation home.In that first trial, the defense argued that the F.B.I.’s informants had egged on the men, and it was persuasive enough to deadlock the jury. But I doubt the jurors would have been so receptive to that line of argument without Donald Trump persistently blasting government employees as “the deep state” and calling the conduct of the F.B.I. “a disgrace.”For the upcoming November elections, the G.O.P. nominees for attorney general and secretary of state are election deniers, and the candidate for governor has also cast doubt on the results of the 2020 vote for president. And not only are Republican candidates consumed with signaling an allegiance to Mr. Trump, but we are also seeing an alarming rise in political extremism in Michigan.In spring 2020, armed protesters demonstrated against Covid shutdown orders by occupying the galleries over the Senate chamber in the State Capitol while brandishing assault rifles. After the 2020 election, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson faced a deluge of threats and harassment from election deniers, including an armed protest at her home, where a mob chanted “stop the steal” while she was inside with her 4-year-old son. Ryan Kelley, who sought the Republican nomination for governor, was charged with four misdemeanor offenses for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. After his involvement in the attack became well known, his polling numbers actually went up.Still, there is reason for some cautious optimism. In the Republican primary, voters rejected Mr. Kelley. An independent citizens redistricting commission has been created by a voter initiative to end the gerrymandering that has led to a Republican-controlled State Legislature. Recent polling shows Ms. Whitmer, Ms. Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel, who are all Democrats, with comfortable leads as the general election approaches, and their resilience in the face of threats has only strengthened their political stock. And the convictions in the Whitmer kidnapping case show that 12 random people can still be found who will set aside their biases and decide a case based on the law and the facts they hear in court. My hunch is that there are more fair-minded people out there who will go to the polls in November.Governor WhitmerPatrick Semansky/Associated PressPragmatic problem-solving still seems to appeal to Michigan voters. Many families’ fortunes are tied inextricably to the auto industry, the health of which can swing sharply with every economic trend. Ms. Whitmer has championed economic development legislation that has helped create 25,000 auto jobs during her administration. She recently made a pitch to leverage federal legislation to lure companies to manufacture semiconductors in Michigan.In a state sometimes referred to as the birthplace of the middle class, labor unions carry more influence with working-class voters than the MAGA movement. From the rebirth of Detroit to the expansion of tourism Up North, Michigan is also a place that has long welcomed newcomers. Whether they be laborers on the assembly lines of Henry Ford or engineers for autonomous vehicles, workers from all over the world have always been needed and accepted as part of the work force, making it more difficult to demonize outsiders as “other.” As a result, voters tend to be less susceptible to the politics of fear that are driving the culture wars. Indeed, Ms. Whitmer was elected with a slogan to “Fix the Damn Roads.”Maybe it is a Midwestern sensibility, but Michiganders seem more interested in candidates who will help advance their financial bottom lines than those who traffic in conspiracy theories. And, four years later, Ms. Whitmer has fixed a lot of the damn roads.By focusing on economic outcomes of working families, Democrats in Michigan have managed to clinch not only the top state offices, but also the state’s two U.S. Senate seats.And while every state is different, politicians in other states could learn from Michigan to ignore the bait Republicans use to demonize them and focus on the bottom line issues that matter to voters.Barbara McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) is a professor of law at the University of Michigan. She served as the U.S. attorney for Michigan’s Eastern District from 2010 to 2017.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s election season in Brazil, and the usual buzz of activity fills the air. The press is eagerly following the campaigns, running profiles of candidates and speculating about future coalitions. Supporters of the candidate in the lead, the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, are heatedly debating who the next cabinet ministers will be. And all involved are crisscrossing the country for rallies, in an energetic effort to get out the vote.Yet Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right president, stands apart. While his challengers have spent months looking forward to the election, he has sought to preemptively discredit it. He has questioned the role of the Supreme Court and cast doubt, volubly and often, on the electoral process. He speaks as if the election is an encumbrance, an irritation. He says he will not accept any result that is not a victory.To some, this looks like the groundwork for a coup. In this view, Mr. Bolsonaro intends to refuse any election result that does not please him and, with the help of the military, install himself as president permanently. The reading is half right: Mr. Bolsonaro doesn’t intend to leave office, regardless of the election results. But it’s not a coup, with its need for elite consensus and eschewal of mass mobilization, he’s after. It’s a revolution.Since the beginning of his term, Mr. Bolsonaro has behaved more like a revolutionary leader than a president. In his first month in office, he said that his role was not to build anything, but to “undo” everything. Rather than run a government, he’s tried to disrupt it. He refused to fill roles in crucial regulatory agencies, placed supporters with no technical expertise in high positions, underfunded social programs, punished civil servants for doing their jobs and neglected to provide a coordinated response to the pandemic, which killed over 680,000 Brazilians.It’s not destruction for its own sake, however. Dismantling the state is how Mr. Bolsonaro galvanizes his supporters. By identifying clear enemies and antagonizing them, he excites his followers and, crucially, enlists their support. Everything he does — decrees, bills, pronouncements, demonstrations, alliances — is framed for the digital infrastructure of YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. The more radical his actions and words, the more engagement he generates.Support for Mr. Bolsonaro may start online, but it leads to the streets. For the past year, Mr. Bolsonaro has conducted a bimonthly “motociata,” a march with thousands of motorcycles that looks very much like a brute show of strength. His presidency, in fact, aspires to be a permanent rally. On Sept. 7 last year, Brazil’s Independence Day, he gathered almost half a million people to protest against the Supreme Court. On the same day this year, he has promised a big military parade to show the army’s support for his government.It’s not just the military. Many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s most fervent supporters are notable for their power over common citizens. He is popular among police officers — a 2021 study estimated that 51 percent of Brazilian street-level police officers were active members of pro-Bolsonaro groups online — and he is also a favored candidate among gun owners. Of those who approve of his government, 18 percent say they already have a gun at home and almost half would like to have one.They may get their wish. One of the major achievements of the Bolsonaro administration has been to weaken gun control, flooding the country with firearms. In 2018, there were around 115,000 people with special licenses to carry a gun in the country. Now there are over 670,000 people holding these licenses — more than in the police and the armed forces. A substantial number of them adore Mr. Bolsonaro and are organized into a vast network of nearly 2,000 gun clubs.Militant and committed, these are the foot soldiers of any future revolution. There’s a lot we don’t know about how that might come about. But it’s clear that if a contingent of supporters, armed and determined to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power, burst into Brasília, the capital, it would create chaos. In many major cities, it’s not impossible to imagine an insurrection led by police forces — while truck drivers, overwhelmingly pro-Bolsonaro, could block the roads as they did in 2018, creating havoc. Evangelical pastors, whose congregants by large margins support the president, could bless those efforts as part of the fight for good against evil. Out of such anarchy, Mr. Bolsonaro could forge dictatorial order.Who will stop him? Probably not the army. Mr. Bolsonaro, after all, has many supporters in the military and over 6,000 military personnel working in his government, filling civilian roles. For its part, the army seems to be relatively relaxed about a possible takeover and has — to put it mildly — no special attachment to democracy. There is no sign, as far as can be seen, that the armed forces could be protagonists of a coup. But neither is there a sign that they would resist an attempt at revolution.Democratic forces are unlikely to fare much better. For all Mr. da Silva’s popularity, left-wingers seem to have lost their capacity to rally the masses. The 13 years of a left-led government that ended in 2016 did much to disperse and weaken social movements, and they have struggled in the years since to recover their dynamism. Demonstrations against Mr. Bolsonaro, for example, have been poorly attended. And political violence is on the rise: A member of Mr. da Silva’s party, for example, was recently killed by a Bolsonaro supporter. People would certainly think twice before going to the streets to defend a Lula victory.The best bulwark against a revolution, curiously, might be the United States. The Biden administration could make clear the profound costs, in the form of sanctions and international isolation, that would follow any seizure of power. That in turn could frighten big Brazilian businesses — which, as influential backers, can exert considerable pressure on Mr. Bolsonaro — into defending democracy. If the difficulties of executing a revolution are too great and the rewards seem slim, it’s conceivable that Mr. Bolsonaro will back down — or simply stage a performance, as former President Donald Trump did, to maintain control over his followers and prepare the ground for the next election.The last time Brazil experienced similar political chaos was in 1964, when a military coup removed a democratic government that was trying to carry out progressive reforms. It took just a few hours for the United States, then led by Lyndon Johnson, to recognize the new government of Brazil.A lot hinges on the hope that the United States now values democracy a bit more.Miguel Lago is the executive director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies and teaches at Columbia University.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. 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John Fetterman’s race for Senate in Pennsylvania has employed an unusual campaign strategy.John Fetterman, the cartoonishly imposing progressive lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania who is running for a Senate seat, hasn’t spent much time campaigning since having a stroke in May. It’s an easy thing to forget. Fetterman, a Democrat, only recently resumed public appearances. Before that, though, he managed to keep attention on the Republican contender — Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon once championed by Oprah Winfrey and now endorsed by Donald Trump — through probably the most modern means available: trolling. For much of the summer, Fetterman’s campaign sustained a viral media narrative that depicted Oz not just as a wealthy, out-of-touch celebrity with a tenuous connection to Pennsylvania, but as something that is, both regionally and nationwide, way more loathed: a guy from New Jersey.Oz was born in Ohio and raised in Delaware and has lived in New Jersey for decades. In February 2020, an article in People magazine led readers into the Mediterranean-influenced mansion that he and his wife “built from scratch 20 years ago” in Cliffside Park, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan, where Oz works. It was a flattering story that would soon enough backfire. Later in 2020, Oz formally adopted a Pennsylvania address — but early this summer, when he released a campaign video, the home he was speaking from looked a lot like the one he’d invited a magazine to photograph. Fetterman tweeted a tip: “Don’t film an ad for your Pennsylvania Senate campaign from your mansion in New Jersey.”From there, Fetterman escalated. He paid for a plane to fly over the New Jersey coastline, trailing a banner that read, “HEY DR. OZ. WELCOME HOME TO N.J.! ♥ JOHN.” (Funnily, this seemed to be targeting vacationing Pennsylvanians.) He used Cameo, the service where you can shell out some cash to have a lower-tier celebrity wish your friend a happy birthday, to hire Nicole Polizzi, better known as Snooki from MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” to goad Oz some more: “I heard that you moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to look for a new job,” she told the camera. (Fetterman’s campaign would go on to release a similar video with Steven Van Zandt, known both for playing guitar in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and for playing Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos.”) When Oz visited Geno’s Steaks in South Philadelphia, Fetterman proclaimed it “a rite of passage for every tourist.” Taking things to an intensely local level, he even joked about Oz not pumping his own gas. (New Jersey law requires stations to do it for you.)Oz has not always helped his case. A video he filmed at a grocery store, trying to underline the effect of inflation, resurfaced recently: In it, he mispronounces the name of the regional chain before wandering the produce section without a basket, awkwardly piling his arms with ingredients for a crudité platter. The online ridicule this received led to a fund-raising windfall for Fetterman — and a surprisingly venomous attack from the Oz campaign, which said that if Fetterman had “ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke.”Questions about politicians’ authentic relationships to their constituencies are not rare, and the news media has been particularly attentive to them during the current midterm elections. CNN wondered if “charges of carpetbagging still matter,” especially for “a hyperpartisan electorate where party identification is the most important factor in the minds of voters”; a New York magazine column declared 2022 “the year of the political carpetbagger.” The year’s debates have mainly focused on candidates returning to homes that some see them as having abandoned. Ryan Zinke, who served as a Montana congressman until Trump tapped him to be the interior secretary, is seeking one of the state’s two House seats as accusations swirl that his primary residence might be in California. The globe-trotting Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was prevented from running for governor of Oregon because he did not meet a three-year residency requirement. Kelly Tshibaka, a Trump-backed Republican running against the center-right Lisa Murkowski in Alaska’s Senate race, was denied a sport-fishing license because she has not resided in the state for at least year. Nobody in Georgia seems especially bothered that the Republican Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, who grew up in the state and played college football there, has spent most of his adulthood in Texas.The reflexive attitude of New Jersey residents is a kind of friendly middle finger: Feel free to not like it here, but you’ll always be welcome.Charges that a candidate is “not really from here” typically carry an undertow of class or ideology or, in darker moments, ethnicity. Fetterman’s, of course, is not remotely the xenophobic attack you might imagine a Muslim candidate like Oz facing. (Though an Armenian lobbying group has targeted Oz’s Turkish background and dual citizenship.) Neither is it primarily ideological. And while there is an implied class element — the celebrity doctor, looking down on Manhattan from an estate atop a literal cliff — this has not been the most palpable aspect of the snipe. Fetterman’s insults are laced with a specific regional animus that’s hard to imagine working the same way anywhere else. (Not even when Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator, ran for a Senate seat in bordering New Hampshire in 2014.) It is, specifically, the idea that Oz is from New Jersey — a place that the rest of the country finds annoying and distasteful, and whose neighbors find it especially so — that resonates above all else.This mockery works, in part, because New Jersey itself accepts and revels in the region’s, and the nation’s, collective disdain. Many natives, myself included, know that there is no way to stave off the stereotypes, no matter how unfair or exaggerated they may be. The beaches are beautiful, sure, but they are usually crowded, sometimes rowdy and can even feature Chris Christie haranguing a constituent while brandishing an ice cream cone. Outsiders tend to see an obnoxious land of corrupt lawmakers, oil refineries and expensive tolls, the area you pass through on your way from Philadelphia to New York City. The state is less second rate than it is second place, constantly defined by what it is not (i.e., New York City) rather than what it actually is. New Jersey even struggles to lay claim to things that are genuinely its own: Ask somebody where the Giants and the Jets play football. Eric Adams, campaigning for mayor of New York City, nearly fell victim to this perceived uncoolness, accused of living primarily in a co-op across the Hudson in Fort Lee. The reflexive attitude of New Jersey residents, then, is a defensive posturing, a kind of friendly middle finger, a brash self-regard: Feel free to not like it here, but you’ll always be welcome. And anybody from the Garden State who pretends to be untouched by all this will ultimately face the same treatment Oz has received: There’s no use pretending. You’re just like the rest of us.New Jersey, in other words, is willing to go along with it. It’s not just Snooki or Little Steven. Bill Pascrell Jr., a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, tweeted that he would nominate Oz for the New Jersey Hall of Fame, where the doctor could join such luminaries as “Albert Einstein, Danny DeVito, Vince Lombardi, Meryl Streep, Bruce Springsteen and Yogi Berra.” What other state’s residents would so happily leverage how little their neighbors think of them? “There’s two types of people,” Anthony Bourdain once said. “People who come from New Jersey and admit it, and people who come from New Jersey and are lying.”Source photographs: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images; kali9/Getty Images; Michelle Gustafson/Bloomberg, via Getty Images. More

Katie Glueck
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Katie Glueck
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Katie Glueck
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