Elections

The prime-time speech comes amid deep national divisions. According to a recent poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction.WASHINGTON — When President Biden travels to Philadelphia on Thursday, he will turn his attention to the threat to American democracy, the very issue he said drove him to run for the presidency in the first place.More than a year and a half after Mr. Biden pledged during his inauguration to “restore the soul and to secure the future of America,” he still believes democracy is in peril.White House officials said Mr. Biden is expected to use the prime-time speech to take direct aim at the Republican Party as Democrats fight to retain their hold on Congress in the midterm elections in November.In recent days, Mr. Biden has replaced his usual calls for unity with sharp condemnations of “MAGA extremists,” saying Republicans have embraced “semi-fascism” by staying loyal to former President Donald J. Trump.“The MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary. She said they present “an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights. They just don’t respect the rule of law.”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAn Upset in Alaska: Mary Peltola, a Democrat, beat Sarah Palin in a special House election, adding to a series of recent wins for the party. Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is one of the latest examples.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust their uncompromising stances on abortion.Republicans have cited Mr. Biden’s rhetoric as evidence that he has fallen short of his promise to bring the nation together.“Biden has pitted neighbors against each other, labeled half of Americans as fascist, and tarnished any idea of his promise of ‘unity,’” Emma Vaughn, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, said in a statement.Thursday will be Mr. Biden’s second visit to Pennsylvania in three days, and he is expected to make a third on Labor Day. Pennsylvania, a swing state, will hold crucial races for the House and Senate as well as a closely watched governor’s race.During Mr. Biden’s first year in office, he promised to bring a sense of normalcy to the White House and he largely ignored former President Donald J. Trump. But Mr. Trump is once again at the fore, with investigations into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and an F.B.I. search of his Florida home for classified documents, and Mr. Biden is trying to frame a vote for Republicans as a vote for extremism.The speech comes at a time of deep national divisions.According to an NBC News poll released last month, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction. The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security have issued multiple warnings about false claims about election fraud motivating extremists attacks.“We are in a crisis in this country. There’s no doubt about it. Not just in terms of the sanctity of the vote or trusting our votes will be counted,” said Allida Black, a University of Virginia historian who had a private meeting with Mr. Biden to discuss the state of democracy last month. “We seem to attack rather than embrace responsibility and accountability.”It is not the first time Mr. Biden has delivered a speech that is not about policies or campaigns but rather the morality of the nation. He said he was inspired to run for office when white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He had a “soul of the nation” bus tour during the presidential campaign and committed to unifying the nation during his inauguration.Ms. Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday that Mr. Biden was working with senior advisers on drafts of his speech for Thursday.“He sees the challenges increasing. He sees the threats increasing,” Ms. Black said, adding that the speech was a way for Mr. Biden to convey “I’m not backing down.” More

President Biden is spending less time hailing the virtues of unity and more time calling out Republicans and dangers to democracy.WASHINGTON — President Biden likes to say there is nothing America cannot do if the country is united and its rival parties are willing to work together.But with just two months until the midterm elections, Mr. Biden is purposely spending less time hailing the virtues of compromise and more time calling out dangers to democracy — using some of the sharpest and most combative language of his presidency.He has accused Republicans of embracing “semi-fascism” by paying fealty to former President Donald J. Trump. He has blasted the party for being “full of anger, violence, hate and division.” And he has warned that the danger from Republicans loyal to Mr. Trump went far beyond differences in policy.“They’re a threat to our very democracy,” he said of a party that he has spent a half-century working with to find common ground. “They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence.”After weeks of internal White House strategy sessions, the president and his aides have devised a confrontational election-season approach that focuses on Mr. Biden’s accomplishments coupled with an aggressive political assault on the G.O.P., including the poll-tested phrase he began using this spring: “ultra-MAGA Republicans.”Now, with Mr. Trump once again at the center of a criminal investigation, this time over his handling of classified documents, Mr. Biden has seized the moment to press a case that voters cannot risk a return to a party in the thrall of the former president.As the campaign season become more intense, Mr. Biden plans to deliver a prime-time speech on Thursday in Philadelphia in which aides say he will argue that Americans are in the grips of a “battle for the soul of the nation,” returning to a theme he has often used to describe his motivation for becoming a presidential candidate. Recent events have made the speech more urgent for the president, but a Democratic official said Mr. Biden had been thinking of delivering the address since early summer.“After a successful past couple of months, the president and Democrats have effectively turned this midterm into a choice, when it’s typically a referendum on the party in the White House,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist. “The president now is articulating that choice, pretty damned well and at just the right time.”She added, “The choice couldn’t be clearer — a reminder of what people rejected just two years ago.”The speech will also be an opportunity for Mr. Biden to focus on falling gas prices, a booming job market and legislative victories on climate change, drug prices, infrastructure improvements and veterans’ health care.The Biden PresidencyWith midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.On the Campaign Trail: Fresh off a series of legislative victories, President Biden is back campaigning. But his low approval ratings could complicate his efforts to help Democrats in the midterm elections.‘Dark Brandon’ Rises: White House officials recently began to embrace this repackaged internet meme. Here is the story behind it and what it tells us about the administration.Questions About 2024: Mr. Biden has said he plans to run for a second term, but at 79, his age has become an uncomfortable issue.A Familiar Foreign Policy: So far, Mr. Biden’s approach to foreign policy is surprisingly consistent with the Trump administration, analysts say.But Mr. Biden is leaning into more political attacks, aides and allies said, in part because of what he sees as a growing embrace of violent political speech by Republicans and a threat to the democratic process of governing. The aides said he was dismayed by the number of Trump-backed election deniers who have won Republican primaries for governor or secretary of state across the country.Mr. Biden, whose own approval ratings have begun to improve slightly since lows earlier this summer, is hoping that his party can maintain control of Congress and deliver a forceful rebuke to Mr. Trump and his followers.It is a moment, one adviser said, to make sure people understand what is at stake.“Given everything that is happening right now, I have to imagine that this is weighing on him very heavily,” said Symone D. Sanders, who served as the chief spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris and now hosts a new MSNBC show. “He feels as though he needs to ring the alarm, sound the alarm as he did throughout all of 2019, throughout all of 2020 in the lead-up to the election.” More

President Jair Bolsonaro has claimed that Brazil’s voting machines are vulnerable to fraud, with little evidence. Election officials agreed to explore changes to security tests before the October election.BRASÍLIA — President Jair Bolsonaro has made Brazil’s electronic voting machines the center of his attacks on the country’s electoral system, despite little evidence that the machines are at risk, raising concerns he will contest the presidential election results if he loses in October.But it now appears that, after quarreling for months, the president’s allies and Brazil’s election officials are starting to make peace.In a private meeting on Wednesday, Brazil’s elections chief and the country’s defense minister agreed to explore changes to security tests of the voting machines that the armed forces have sought for months, according to election officials.While the two sides have not yet finalized the details, Alexandre de Moraes, Brazil’s elections chief, said he would try to have some tests carried out on Election Day on machines that had just been used by voters, as the military has requested, according to a person involved in the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.Fábio Faria, Brazil’s communications minister and a senior adviser to Mr. Bolsonaro, said in a text message that Mr. Faria felt the issue had been resolved.With less than five weeks left before the election, the agreement represented a notable détente that could weaken the president’s ability to claim voter fraud.Brazil’s armed forces have been a key ally of Mr. Bolsonaro in his criticism of the voting machines as vulnerable to fraud, despite little evidence. Mr. Bolsonaro, in turn, has said that he trusts the armed forces to ensure the elections are safe. In recent interviews, military officials have said that the security tests were their principal remaining concern. And now it appears that election officials are trying to comply with the military’s requests.The easing of tensions is positive for the outlook of Brazil’s elections, but Mr. Bolsonaro has agreed to similar truces in the past and then later continued his criticism of the electoral system.Brazil’s election officials have been planning to run security tests on 600 voting machines on Election Day by simulating the voting process on each machine. Those tests are scheduled to be completed in a controlled room outside voting stations.The military has said it is concerned that sophisticated malicious software could evade such simulated tests. For example, hacking software could be designed not to activate unless a real voter unlocked the machine with a fingerprint.Judge Alexandre de Moraes at his inauguration as head of the country’s Superior Electoral Tribunal, in mid-August.Antonio Augusto/Superior Electoral Tribunal, via Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesElection security experts in Brazil have said such a scenario is technically possible but highly unlikely because of other controls in the voting machines. There has been no evidence of material fraud in Brazil’s voting machines.To solve for the hypothetical, the military has asked for security tests to be completed in actual voting centers during the election, on machines that were just used by actual voters.Elections officials had previously said such changes to the security tests so close to Election Day were not feasible. But on Wednesday, Mr. Moraes told Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, Brazil’s defense minister, that he would try to change the security tests for a limited number of machines. Military officials have suggested changing the tests for two to four machines per state in Brazil, but Mr. Moraes said Wednesday that he needed to discuss the issue with other elections officials to determine how many would be possible, according to the person involved in the meeting.The meeting over coffee between Mr. Moraes and Mr. Nogueira was positive and cordial, the person said.Military officials have said that they want certainty that there is no malicious software installed on the machines because Brazil’s voting system lacks paper backups for potential audits if there is suspicion of fraud.Mr. Bolsonaro has repeatedly claimed that the voting machines can be hacked, but when pressed for evidence, he has cited a 2018 hack of election officials’ computer network, which is not connected to the voting machines. A federal investigation into that hack concluded that the hackers could not gain access to any voting machines. Mr. Bolsonaro has not presented other evidence of past fraud. More

In an upset with the potential to reverberate nationally, Mary Peltola has won a special House election in Alaska, according to The Associated Press, and will finish the remaining few months of the term of Representative Don Young, who died in March after serving nearly 50 years as his state’s lone congressman.Ms. Peltola, a Democratic former state lawmaker and Alaska Native, defeated two other candidates who survived the raucous special primary election in June: Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential nominee, and Nicholas Begich III, a Republican from the state’s most prominent Democratic political family. Voters participated in a new system, ranking the three in order of preference.Ms. Peltola’s victory adds to a series of recent wins for Democrats, most notably the special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District. Democrats have grown more confident about their chances of holding on to the Senate in November as Republicans squabble among themselves, although most acknowledge that retaining control of the House will be more difficult.David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who is now the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, said Ms. Palin’s defeat and the Republicans’ loss of Mr. Young’s seat “would be read as a huge victory for Democrats and defeat for MAGA Republicans.” He added: “Obviously, there are mitigating factors that should temper the impulse to generalize.”At 49, Ms. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, albeit only temporarily — unless she wins a full term in November.She ran a relentlessly upbeat campaign that implicitly contrasted her reputation for kindness with the bombast and penchant for drama associated with Ms. Palin, even though the two women have been friends since serving together in the Statehouse as expectant mothers. They even exchanged text messages on the day of the general election for the temporary seat, with Ms. Palin advising Ms. Peltola to dress warmly for her final round of canvassing.“I think respect is just a fundamental part of getting things done and working through problems,” Ms. Peltola told reporters as the first votes rolled in on Aug. 16.Al Gross, an independent candidate who previously ran for Senate in 2020 against Dan Sullivan, a Republican, dropped out after the primary and endorsed Ms. Peltola, who also finished ahead of write-in candidates, including Tara Sweeney, a former Trump administration official.Ms. Peltola cobbled together a winning coalition in the special election by appealing to the same independent streak and devotion to Alaskan interests that Mr. Young was known for. Her father and the longtime congressman were close friends, and, as a young girl, she would tag along as he campaigned for Mr. Young. But she sharply diverges from Mr. Young and her top Republican opponents, including Ms. Palin, in her support for abortion rights, her concern about climate change and her calls for developing Alaska’s resources with greater sensitivity to the needs of local communities.Ms. Peltola has sought to highlight her Native roots in a state where more than 15 percent of the population identifies as Indigenous. As a Yup’ik woman, she said, she has sought to use the teachings of her community in her broader appeals for bipartisanship. “Dry fish and pilot bread — that is how I got other legislators in the room when I was rebuilding the bipartisan Bush caucus,” she said in an ad introducing herself to voters. (“Bush caucus” refers to a group of legislators from rural Alaska.)Ms. Peltola served in the Alaska House from 1999 to 2009 before becoming the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which works with tribes to manage salmon resources. She has also served as a councilwoman in Bethel, a small city in western Alaska, and as a judge on the Orutsararmuit Native Council Tribal Court.She made that experience central to her campaign message, a uniquely Alaskan appeal to voters in a state where many rural communities depend on reliable stocks of fish for their very subsistence. Ms. Peltola’s ads were critical of out-of-state trawlers — high-volume fishing ships, often from China or Russia, that sweep up prized salmon and halibut along with lower-value species such as pollock.The Supreme Court’s move in June to overturn Roe v. Wade was another major theme of Ms. Peltola’s campaign. More than 60 percent of Alaskans favor abortion rights, breaking with the position held by Republicans like Ms. Palin, who hailed the decision as a victory for states’ rights. Abortion remains legal in Alaska, though the law requires that a patient receive counseling intended to discourage the practice.Ms. Peltola will face voters again this fall as she tries to retain the seat in Congress beyond the remainder of Mr. Young’s term.Voters in November will rank their choices from the top four finishers of the regular primary on Aug. 16. Ms. Peltola finished ahead of Ms. Palin in that primary, followed by Mr. Begich.Ms. Palin’s defeat in the special election is likely to raise doubts about her viability in November.Former President Donald J. Trump visited Anchorage in July to hold a rally for Ms. Palin, whose campaign was being managed by one of his longtime political lieutenants, Michael Glassner. Mr. Trump hailed her as “legendary.”At that rally, Ms. Palin attacked Mr. Begich, her chief Republican opponent, as a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only. And she nodded in jest to the complaints of her critics, who have accused her of erratic behavior and of abandoning the state after her 2008 loss.“We have been mocked and ridiculed and falsely accused and told to sit down and shut up,” she said. “The stuff that you’ve heard about me — it’s a lie. I’m way worse than what you’ve heard.”Mr. Trump expended most of his energy at the rally attacking Senator Lisa Murkowski, who broke with him frequently on abortion and other issues and who voted for his impeachment after the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Both Ms. Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka, whom Mr. Trump endorsed, advanced in the state’s Senate primary race and will face off again in November.Mr. Trump is a divisive figure in Alaska, which has long had an independent streak. He remains highly popular among hard-core Republican voters but has alienated thousands of more moderate Republicans and independents.Although Mr. Trump won Alaska by 10 percentage points in 2020, besting Joseph R. Biden Jr., those results represented a decrease from his commanding 15-point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mr. Trump’s waning overall popularity has led some analysts to speculate that his endorsement of Ms. Palin could do as much to mobilize his political opponents against her this fall as it could to help her. And Ms. Palin’s starkly low approval ratings in her quest to win Mr. Young’s former seat permanently indicate that another candidate might squeak through in November. If the special election and Aug. 16 primary results are any indication, Ms. Peltola appears well positioned to do so.Jazmine Ulloa More

For months, the campaign website for Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, greeted visitors with a huge banner exalting his endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump in all capital letters. Now, that information is nowhere on his home page.Representative Ted Budd, the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina, also made Mr. Trump’s endorsement far less prominent on his website last month. And Blake Masters, the party’s Senate nominee in Arizona, took down a false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump and softened his calls for tough abortion restrictions.Republican leaders are increasingly worried that both Mr. Trump and the issue of abortion could be liabilities in November, threatening the advantages the party expected from President Biden’s unpopularity and voters’ distress over inflation. At least 10 Republican candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to downplay their ties to Mr. Trump or to adjust uncompromising stances on abortion. Some have removed material from their websites altogether.The changes to the websites for Mr. Laxalt and Mr. Budd have not been previously reported. Mr. Masters’s overhaul, in which he deleted, among other elements, a call for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment that would give fetuses the same rights as infants and adults, was first reported by NBC News and CNN. Other news outlets have identified editing by several House candidates, including Yesli Vega in Virginia and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado, Bo Hines in North Carolina and Tom Barrett in Michigan.Candidates have long adjusted their messaging after winning primaries, appealing to general-election voters by toning down the hard-line stances they took to win over their party’s base. But now, such shifts are more visible. “Having all this stuff in writing makes it a little more challenging to make the pivot,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster who is working with a super PAC supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, among other groups. But, he added, “there are a couple of unusual elements that do make this a bit different, with the Dobbs decision and Trump’s continual prominence in the news.”Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is working with several campaigns, including Mr. Masters’s opponent, Senator Mark Kelly, said that “the magnitude of the changes and the volume” among Republicans were well beyond what she had seen in past election cycles.Mr. Laxalt, who is running against Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in a race that Republicans see as one of their best chances to pick up a Senate seat, updated his website sometime between July 10 and Aug. 3, according to archived versions reviewed by The New York Times — putting the changes at least a month beyond his June 14 primary win.Adam Laxalt’s website on July 10.Mr. Laxalt’s website on Aug. 31.Brian Freimuth, a spokesman for Mr. Laxalt, called inquiries about the website changes — which moved mention of Mr. Trump’s backing to an “endorsements” page — “ridiculous” and said, “We are proud of our Trump endorsement.”He added that the banner images on Mr. Laxalt’s Twitter and Facebook pages had “remained the same, emphasizing Trump’s endorsement.” Those banners, composite images of Mr. Laxalt, Mr. Trump and 12 other Republicans, feature Mr. Trump prominently but do not mention the endorsement.Mr. Budd updated his website in late July, well after North Carolina’s May 17 primary, according to archived pages reviewed by The Times.Until July 22, his home page featured a prominent, all-caps message that read “endorsed by President Donald J. Trump,” above a photo of Mr. Budd with the former president and a sign-up form urging voters to “join President Trump in supporting” him.Ted Budd’s website on July 22.Mr. Budd’s website on Aug. 31.But since July 23, it has instead featured a rotating slide show of endorsers, starting with Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina and circulating through former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee before reaching Mr. Trump. A viewer would need to look at that spot on the page for about 20 seconds to see Mr. Trump.“It’s pretty basic — general elections have different dynamics than primary elections,” Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Mr. Budd’s campaign, said in an email.“We face a female opponent, so we’ve added prominent female politicians who have endorsed Ted,” Mr. Felts said. (Mr. Budd’s Democratic opponent is Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.)Other differences have been more subtle. Mr. Budd, for example, has made no changes to a page that outlines his views on abortion, but he has moved the link to that page lower on his website’s list of his positions; it was second as of July 23, but is now fifth.J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, once listed abortion sixth on his “issues” page, but now lists it 10th.Sometime between Aug. 7 and Aug. 26, Mr. Vance also expanded his abortion language on that page to emphasize government support — including an expanded child tax credit — to ensure “that every young mother has the resources to bring new life into the world.” He has made no changes, however, to his description of himself as “100 percent pro-life.”Recent polls and elections underscore the dangers of the current political environment for Republicans. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and abortion bans took effect in many states, Democrats have exceeded expectations in four special House elections, and Kansans decisively rejected a constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for an abortion ban or major restrictions.And now, the widening F.B.I. investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents is shining a light on the former president when Republicans would rather have voters focus on the current one.A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that Mr. Biden’s approval rating, while still low at 40 percent, had increased nine percentage points since July and exceeded Mr. Trump’s 34 percent rating, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.The poll also found that 76 percent of respondents were following the news about the removal of classified documents from Mr. Trump’s home somewhat or very closely and that 64 percent considered the allegations against him somewhat or very serious.Eighty-three percent of Americans polled said it was important that candidates share their views on abortion, and 64 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Republicans are not alone in recognizing the salience of the issue; Democrats have also taken note, adjusting their own messaging and spending millions of dollars on abortion-related advertising.“It could be the case that in a tight race, the abortion issue could tip the balance,” said Mary C. Snow, a Quinnipiac polling analyst. More

Americans on the left end of the political spectrum have become less anxious about Covid.Almost six months ago, when my Morning colleagues and I released our last poll about Covid, the deep anxiety among Americans identifying as “very liberal” was one of the main findings.Forty-seven percent of very liberal adults said that they believed Covid presented a “great risk” to their own personal health and well-being. That was a significantly larger share than among conservatives, moderates or even liberals who stopped short of calling themselves very liberal. Particularly striking was the level of concern among liberals under age 45, even though the virus’s worst effects have been concentrated among older people.I understand why attitudes about the virus vary so sharply by ideology. Our country is polarized on most high-profile issues today. In the case of Covid, Donald Trump and some other Republicans exacerbated the divide by making a series of false statements that downplayed the threat or misrepresented the vaccines.To many liberals, taking Covid seriously — more seriously, at times, than the scientific evidence justified — became an expression of identity and solidarity. As one progressive activist tweeted last year, “The inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.”This morning, we’re releasing the results of our latest Covid poll (which, like the earlier ones, was conducted by Morning Consult). This time, one of the central findings is how much attitudes have changed since the spring. Americans are less worried about the virus today — and driving that decline is the receding level of anxiety among the very liberal, including many younger adults.The share of the very liberal who say the virus presents a great risk to their own personal health has fallen to 34 percent. The 13-point drop since March was larger than the drop among any of the six other ideological self-identifications in the poll:Share of adults who say Covid presents a great personal risk More

BLOOMSBURG, Pa. — In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Diane Fisher, a nurse from Weatherly, Pa., was surfing through videos on Facebook when she came across a livestream from Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator.Starting in late March 2020, Mr. Mastriano had beamed regularly into Facebook from his living room, offering his increasingly strident denunciations of the state’s quarantine policies and answering questions from his viewers, sometimes as often as six nights a week and for as long as an hour at a stretch.“People were upset, and they were fearful about things,” Ms. Fisher said. “And he would tell us what was going on.”Ms. Fisher told her family and her friends about what Mr. Mastriano billed as “fireside chats,” after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts during the Depression and World War II. “The next thing you knew,” she recalled, “there was 5,000 people watching.”Mr. Mastriano’s rise from obscure and inexperienced far-right politician to Republican standard-bearer in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race was swift, stunning and powered by social media. Although he is perhaps better known for challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election and calling the separation of church and state a “myth,” Mr. Mastriano built his foundation of support on his innovative use of Facebook in the crucible of the early pandemic, connecting directly with anxious and isolated Americans who became an uncommonly loyal base for his primary campaign.He is now the G.O.P. nominee in perhaps the most closely watched race for governor in the country, in part because it would place a 2020 election denier in control of a major battleground state’s election system. Both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are making campaign appearances in Pennsylvania this week. As the race enters its last months, one of the central questions is whether the online mobilization that Mr. Mastriano successfully wielded against his own party establishment will prove similarly effective against Josh Shapiro, his Democratic rival — or whether a political movement nurtured in the hothouse of right-wing social media discontent will be unable or unwilling to transcend it.Mr. Mastriano has continued to run a convention-defying campaign. He employs political neophytes in key positions and has for months refused to interact with mainstream national and local reporters beyond expelling them from events. (His campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)A Mastriano event this month in Pittsburgh. His base is animated, but he has not yet sought to reach the broader electorate.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesHe grants interviews almost exclusively to friendly radio and TV shows and podcasts that share Mr. Mastriano’s far-right politics, and continues to heavily rely on Facebook to reach voters directly.“It is the best-executed and most radical ‘ghost the media’ strategy in this cycle,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser, who said other Republican strategists were watching Mr. Mastriano’s example closely.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsEvidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is the latest example.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.A Surprise Race: Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat seeking re-election in Colorado, is facing an unexpected challenge from Joe O’Dea, a novice Republican emphasizing more moderate positions.Campaign Ads: In what critics say is a dangerous gamble, Democrats are elevating far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries, believing they’ll be easier to defeat in November. We analyzed the ads they’re using to do it.“It’s never been done before. He’s on a spacewalk,” he said. “And the question we’re all asking is, does he make it back to the capsule?”Although Mr. Mastriano no longer hosts fireside chats, his campaign posts several times more often a day on Facebook than most candidates, according to Kyle Tharp, the author of the newsletter FWIW, which tracks digital politics. His campaign’s Facebook post engagements have been comparable to those of Mr. Shapiro, despite Mr. Shapiro’s spending far more on digital advertising.“He is a Facebook power user,” Mr. Tharp said.But Mr. Mastriano’s campaign has done little to expand his reach outside his loyal base, even as polls since the primary have consistently shown him trailing Mr. Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, albeit often narrowly. And Mr. Mastriano’s efforts to add to his audience on the right through advertising on Gab, a platform favored by white nationalists, prompted a rare retreat in the face of criticism last month.A career Army officer until his retirement in 2017 and a hard-line social conservative, Mr. Mastriano won a special election for the State Senate in 2019 after campaigning on his opposition to what he described as the “barbaric holocaust” of legal abortion and his view that the United States is an inherently Christian nation whose Constitution is incompatible with other faiths. But he was known to few outside his district until he began his pandemic broadcasts in late March 2020.In the live videos, Mr. Mastriano was unguarded and at times emotional, giving friendly shout-outs to familiar names in the chat window. His fireside chats arrived at a fertile moment on the platform, when conservative and right-wing activists were using Facebook to assemble new organizations and campaigns to convert discontent into action — first with the Covid lockdowns and, later, the 2020 election outcome.Mr. Mastriano linked himself closely to these currents of activism in his home state, speaking at the groups’ demonstrations and events. A video he livestreamed from the first significant anti-lockdown rally on the steps of the State Capitol in Harrisburg in April 2020, armed with a selfie stick, eventually racked up more than 850,000 views.Mr. Mastriano on Nov. 7, 2020, the day Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected. It was the first “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg.Julio Cortez/Associated PressAfter the presidential election was called for Mr. Biden on Nov. 7, 2020, Mr. Mastriano was greeted as a star at the first “Stop the Steal” rally at the capitol in Harrisburg that afternoon. He became one of the most prominent faces of the movement to overturn the election in Pennsylvania, working with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to publicize widely debunked claims regarding election malfeasance and to send a slate of “alternate” electors to Washington, on the spurious legal theory that they could be used to overturn the outcome. (He would later be present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, though there is no evidence that he entered the building.)When Republican colleagues in the State Senate criticized those schemes and Mr. Mastriano by name, he pointed to the size of his online army.“I have more followers on Facebook alone than all 49 other senators combined,” Mr. Mastriano told Steve Turley, a local right-wing podcast host, in an interview. “That any colleague or fellow Republican would think that it would be a good idea to throw me under the bus with that kind of reach — I mean, they’re just not very smart people.”Mr. Mastriano was eventually removed from the chairmanship of a State Senate committee overseeing an investigation he had championed into the state’s election results, and he was later expelled from the Senate’s Republican caucus — episodes that burnished his credentials with supporters suspicious of the state’s G.O.P. establishment. His campaign for governor, which he formally announced this January, has drawn on not only the base he has cultivated since 2020 but also on the right-wing grass-roots groups with whom he has made common cause on Covid and the 2020 election.“That whole movement is rock-solid behind him,” said Sam Faddis, the leader of UnitePA, a self-described Patriot group based in Susquehanna County, Pa.When UnitePA hosted a rally on Aug. 27 in a horse arena in Bloomsburg, bringing together a coalition of groups in the state dedicated to overhauling the election system they insist was used to steal the election from Mr. Trump, many of the activists who spoke offered praise for Mr. Mastriano and his candidacy. From the stage, Tabitha Valleau, the leader of the organization FreePA, gave detailed instructions for how to volunteer for Mr. Mastriano’s campaign.The crowd of about 500, most of whom stayed for all of the nearly six-hour rally, was full of Mastriano supporters, including Ms. Fisher. “He helped us through a bad time,” she said. “He stuck with his people.”Charlie Gerow, a veteran Pennsylvania Republican operative and candidate for governor who lost to Mr. Mastriano in May, said this loyal following was Mr. Mastriano’s greatest strength. “He’s leveraged that audience on every mission he’s undertaken,” he said.An anti-vaccine and anti-mask rally in Harrisburg in August 2021. Mr. Mastriano built his early support around people angry at government efforts to control the pandemic.Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesBut with recent polls showing Mr. Mastriano lagging between 3 and 10 points behind Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Gerow is among the strategists doubting his primary strategy will translate to a general electorate.“I think it’s going to be important for him to run a more traditional campaign, dealing with the regular media even when it’s unpalatable and unfriendly,” Mr. Gerow said.Mr. Mastriano has also drawn criticism for his efforts to expand his social-media reach beyond Facebook and Twitter into newer, fringier spaces on the right.In July, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters noted that Mr. Mastriano, according to his campaign filings, had paid $5,000 to the far-right social media platform Gab, which gained notoriety in 2018 after the suspect charged in the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 people were killed, used the platform to detail his racist and antisemitic views and plans for the shooting. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, who lives in Pennsylvania, has made antisemitic statements himself and appeared at a white nationalist conference this spring.Mr. Torba and Mr. Mastriano had praised each other in a podcast interview in May, after which Mr. Mastriano had spoken hopefully of Gab’s audience. “Apparently about a million of them are in Pennsylvania,” he said on his own livestream, “so we’ll have some good reach.”Campaign signs at a Pittsburgh rally. Democrats are cautioning not to underestimate Mr. Mastriano.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Torba, who did not respond to emailed requests for comment, has continued to champion Mr. Mastriano, describing the Pennsylvania governor’s race as “the most important election of the 2022 midterms, because Doug is an outspoken Christian,” in a video he posted in late July. He added, “We’re going to take this country back for the glory of God.”But after initially standing his ground, Mr. Mastriano finally bowed to sustained criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike and closed his personal account with Gab early this month, issuing a brief statement denouncing antisemitism.This month Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, spent $1 million on TV ads highlighting Mastriano’s connections to Gab. “We cannot allow this to become normalized — Doug Mastriano is dangerous and extreme, and we must defeat him in November,” said Will Simons, a spokesman for the Shapiro campaign.The push reflected a view that one of Mr. Mastriano’s core vulnerabilities lies in his vast online footprint, with its hours of freewheeling conversation in spaces frequented by far-right voices.Still, some Democrats who watched Mr. Mastriano’s rapid rise at close range have cautioned against counting him out. “Mastriano’s been underestimated by his own party,” said Brit Crampsie, a political consultant who was until recently the State Senate Democrats’ spokeswoman. “I fear him being underestimated by the Democrats. I wouldn’t rule him out.” More

“The Unfolding” takes readers inside the homes and meeting rooms of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with big plans for change.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. HomesWe are living in fractious times. Two decades into the new century, our nation is bitterly divided and our political institutions have never seemed more fragile. The genesis of these fissures in the American body politic is the central concern of “The Unfolding,” a sharply observed, wickedly funny political satire by the reliably brilliant A.M. Homes.The novel opens on election night, 2008. Candidate John McCain has just conceded to Barack Obama, and not everyone is celebrating. In a Phoenix hotel bar, our protagonist — a 60-something business tycoon referred to only as the Big Guy — is drowning his sorrows and contemplating next steps. “Something big,” he tells a stranger he meets in the bar. “A forced correction.” He scribbles notes on a napkin: “A patriot’s plan to preserve and protect.”The Big Guy is an old-school Republican — in his own words, “the last of an era.” His conservatism is sentimental, backward-looking, patriotic to its core. Fantastically rich, he bounces between Palm Springs and his ranch in Wyoming, an affable fellow who adores his teenage daughter and is largely faithful to Charlotte, his clever, acerbic and extravagantly alcoholic wife. For the Big Guy, McCain’s defeat sparks an existential crisis. “I can’t live like this,” he tells Charlotte. “I can’t spend the next 30 years watching it all come undone.” The “it” in question is an idealized version of the American past. Though the phrase is never uttered, it’s clear that the Big Guy hopes to Make American Great Again.Homes is a gifted satirist, a keen observer of bourgeois manners and mores. Here, she nails the psychic particularities of the politically conservative American male: the glorification of American military conquests, the quasi-religious reverence for the Founding Fathers. (“How much do you love George Washington?” the Big Guy’s daughter teases him.) Hoping to school her in his ideals, “he doesn’t talk about himself or his childhood. He talks about historical figures, battles, wars, treaties and the three branches of government.”In one of the novel’s most indelible scenes, the Big Guy indulges in his favorite pastime — staging miniature battle re-enactments on his basement pool table, with toy soldiers and orange Jell-O powder standing in for Agent Orange. “This is his idea of a good time, re-enactments, skirmishes,” Homes writes. “His men are the highest quality, tin, lead, mixed metal.”As he plays, the Big Guy ruminates on military strategy and ethics: “Today he is using rainbow herbicides, orange and strawberry mixed together, to defoliate the trees. People were allergic to it. Vietnamese babies were born deformed. Soldiers claimed it gave them everything from acne to diabetes to heart disease. Maybe the stuff wasn’t perfect or wasn’t handled properly, but people have to quit complaining; they can’t be expecting everyone to take care of them. This is war.”While the Big Guy plays with his Army men and ponders the future of the nation, his family is quietly coming apart. His daughter goes AWOL from boarding school and begins to question his conservative values. After finding Charlotte drunk and nearly drowned in the family pool, he packs her off to the Betty Ford Center. (Gerry and Betty were family friends.) Thus unencumbered, he is free to devote all his energies to saving America from ruin.He assembles a quorum of consiglieri reminiscent of the Eisenhower Ten, the group of civilians secretly tapped by the president to run the government in case of national emergency. Ike’s picks were titans of corporate America, captains of industry. The Big Guy chooses billionaires, a rogue general, a speechwriter and a tax attorney. The group’s first meeting is “like a eulogy for an America that perhaps never was. The air is awash with the unsmoked scent of cigars chewed on, gone wet — damp with the drool of men still dreaming.”To fans of the overheated telenovela that is American politics, “The Unfolding” is studded with Easter eggs, miniature romans à clef: a defeated John McCain thanking his supporters on election night, Condoleeza Rice eating Thanksgiving dinner, George W. Bush cleaning out his desk in the Oval and gifting the Big Guy’s daughter several boxes of commemorative White House M&M’s.Fittingly, the novel ends on Inauguration Day. At a restaurant in Great Falls, Virginia, the Big Guy’s cronies plot ways to foment revolution, swapping dire predictions of the chaos to come. “A slow-moving wave, a coup of sorts that will sweep across the country largely unnoticed until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually and spiritually,” says one of his co-conspirators. (Which one is hard to discern and doesn’t really matter; like characters in a David Mamet play, they all speak in the same voice.) “People will be ordered to stay home, not to congregate. It will be difficult to reach consensus about anything; no one will know what is fact and what is fiction. Between the plague and the toxic waste and the decentralization of the government, America will be a dead zone.”The Big Guy finds these predictions appalling. “We’re not here to self-destruct,” he protests. “We are here to protect and preserve.”“Sometimes you have to rebreak a bone to set it right,” his henchman counters. “We are breaking the back of America to set it straight.”In “The Unfolding,” Homes puts her finger on the fault line, giving voice to the nebulous fears and fantasies of the old Republican plutocracy. At the root of it all, the novel suggests, is race. With characteristic aplomb, the Big Guy sums up his current existential crisis: “My wife is a drunk, my kid is running off into the woods and the people elected an African as president.”His racism is presented as fact but never explored — a missed opportunity and ultimately, the novel’s greatest failing. From the outset, Homes walks a fine line between realism and caricature. By choosing not to examine her protagonist’s racism, she denies us full access to his psyche. This lack of particularity has a flattening effect: the Big Guy is racist not because of his own specific background and experience and psychological idiosyncrasies, but because he’s the kind of person who would be racist. Instead of a deeply imagined, fully human character, rife with complexities and contradictions, The Big Guy is reduced to a type.Novel-writing is a slow business. Producing a good one — or even a bad one — takes such an ungodly long time that any relevance to the current moment is largely a matter of luck. And indeed, “The Unfolding” — Homes’s first novel in 10 years — reads like a story conceived in another era. After all the nation has lived through in the Trump years, the 2008 election seems very far away.The publisher’s marketing copy attempts to address this, calling the book “prescient.” It’s a puzzling claim — “The Unfolding” was written long after its characters’ predictions had already come to pass — that ultimately does the book a disservice. Homes isn’t trying to predict the future. Her intentions are forensic. Obama vs. McCain may seem like a lifetime ago, but this witty, perceptive novel underscores its continuing relevance. Like an insurance investigator reconstructing an accident, Homes is interrogating the recent past. In “The Unfolding,” she connects the dots for us, tracing the tortuous path that got us where we are.Jennifer Haigh’s most recent novel, “Mercy Street,” was published in February.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. Homes | 416 pp. | Viking | $28 More