Elections

The incumbent vs. incumbent Republican House primary in West Virginia’s second district has developed into a near-perfect distillation of the split in the G.O.P., with Representative David B. McKinley, who is soft spoken and intent on getting things done, facing a more hard-edged, Trump-aligned ideological candidate, Representative Alex X. Mooney. Mr. McKinley has an advantage: […] More

The Republican primary is a three-way dead heat between Charles W. Herbster, a businessman backed by former President Donald J. Trump; Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent supported by outgoing Gov. Pete Ricketts; and Brett Lindstrom, a state senator who appeals to the party’s moderate wing. The race has been roiled by allegations that […] More

Representative Alex Mooney handily defeated a House colleague and fellow Republican, David McKinley, in a primary in West Virginia that again proved both the power of an endorsement by former President Donald J. Trump and the weight that right-wing ideology holds with Republican primary voters.Mr. Mooney, a four-term House Republican known more as a conservative warrior than a legislator, used Mr. Trump’s endorsement to overcome a distinct disadvantage: The redrawn district he was running in included far more of Mr. McKinley’s old district than Mr. Mooney’s. The huge margins Mr. Mooney was able to run up in the fast-growing counties from his old district along the Maryland state line proved too great for Mr. McKinley, and the result was called on Tuesday night by The Associated Press. But Mr. Mooney’s victory stretched deep into Mr. McKinley’s home turf, blanketing the new district, including counties in the West Virginia panhandle that jut between Ohio and Pennsylvania.It was a thorough repudiation of Mr. McKinley’s pragmatism, which led him to vote for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill co-written by West Virginia’s centrist Democratic senator, Joe Manchin III, and for the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.“He is a liberal RINO Republican,” Mr. Mooney said of his opponent at his closing rally last week, using the acronym for “Republicans in name only,” a conservative slur. “In order for our party to be successful, we need to take these RINOs out in primaries.” Mr. Mooney promised he “would fight for the values of our country, not go along to get along with the Democrats.”Mr. Mooney’s convincing win is all the more stunning in a state that once revered politicians, such as Senator Robert C. Byrd, who brought back copious amounts of money from Washington to help the impoverished hills and hollers of Appalachia.Mr. Mooney had blanketed the state with radio and television advertisements that featured Mr. Trump offering him the former president’s “complete and total endorsement,” while slamming Mr. McKinley for voting for the infrastructure bill and the Jan. 6 commission.But Mr. Trump did not sweep into the state for a last-minute get-out-the-vote rally, a decision that campaign aides to Mr. McKinley had hoped would keep the race close. Mr. McKinley had the backing of West Virginia’s governor, Jim Justice, and Mr. Manchin. And he had hoped the infrastructure bill would be an asset, not a liability. But that appeared to be a miscalculation, as West Virginia is also a place that gave Mr. Trump 69 percent of the vote in 2020.By turning the primary into a contest between a Trump-focused partisan and an incumbent running on his record of legislating, the two Republicans elevated the race for the Second District into something of a signal of how a possible Republican House majority might govern next year. In the end, ideology won out easily. Mr. Mooney had voted against certifying the 2020 election for President Biden, while Mr. McKinley agreed Mr. Biden had won.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

While conservatives control the courts and key states, the public tends to lean in favor of abortion rights. Democratic leaders are trying to translate that sentiment into victories for the party.In politics, sometimes you need to lose in order to win.Wednesday’s planned vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, Senate Democrats’ bill to codify Roe v. Wade, will fail. Democrats are unlikely to persuade any Republicans to cross party lines, and Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, also opposes abortion, in keeping with the politics of a state Donald Trump won by 39 percentage points in 2020.So why is Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, holding a doomed vote?It’s what’s known in Washington as a “message vote” or a “show vote.” My colleague Annie Karni puts it plainly in her piece today: The move is meant to force Republicans to take a vote that could hurt them in November. Now that the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe, Democrats believe there’s a political opportunity.Which, of course, there is. Democrats are hoping to anchor Republicans to an impending court decision that is well outside the American mainstream.They plan to spend the rest of the campaign season telling voters that if they want to protect the right to abortion — let alone contraception and same-sex marriage — they should expand Democrats’ Senate majority. It’s an argument they believe will appeal to suburban college-educated women, a key swing demographic, among others.Until the leak of the draft opinion on Roe, Democratic strategists I’d spoken with in private had been skeptical that abortion would move many voters in November. That’s changing rapidly.In the Virginia governor’s race last year, for instance, Glenn Youngkin, the eventual Republican winner, appeared to pay no price for his views on reproductive rights even though Terry McAuliffe’s campaign spent several million dollars on abortion-themed television ads. Back then, many voters just didn’t believe that Republicans would really ban abortion.At one point, McAuliffe even said he would encourage companies to move their operations to Virginia to escape restrictive abortion laws in states like Texas, a move that caused Youngkin’s campaign to consider running ads condemning those comments.“Youngkin’s abortion quotes would lose him that election if it were held today, I think,” said Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster who worked on the Virginia governor’s race. “The court changed all that by making this issue way more real to people.”Of course, how Democrats try to seize the advantage will matter. They can’t just call this vote on Wednesday, pump out some press releases and expect to carry the day. Execution matters.Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Chicago last weekend in support of abortion rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe polling picturePolling shows that abortion rights are popular. But the answers depend heavily on how the questions are worded. The public often shows conflicting impulses: Americans approve of Roe by large margins, but also approve of restrictions that seem to conflict with it.From Opinion: A Challenge to Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Maureen Dowd: Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, which calls for overturning Roe v. Wade, is the culmination of the last 40 years of conservative thinking, showing that the Puritans are winning.Tish Harrison Warren: For many pro-life and whole-life leaders, a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe would represent a starting point, not a finish line.Matthew Walther, Editor of a Catholic Literary Journal: Those who oppose abortion,  should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have some regrettable consequences. Even so, it will be worth it.Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan: If Roe falls, abortion will become a felony in Michigan. I have a moral obligation to stand up for the rights of the women of the state I represent.A Pew Research Center poll taken before the Roe leak is instructive. It found that 19 percent of adults said abortion should always be legal. Just 8 percent said it should always be illegal, with no exceptions. Most Americans are somewhere in between those two poles, though a healthy national majority of about 60 percent say it should be legal in most cases.Republicans would like to force Democrats into that 19 percent corner. Democrats would like to push Republicans into that 8 percent cul-de-sac. And so would each side’s activist community, even though voters tend to see the issue in shades of gray.“Voters are not looking for a change in the status quo on either side,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster who advises House and Senate candidates. But, she added, the nuances in the polls reflect the fact that voters struggle to decide when, and under what circumstances, it is appropriate to end a pregnancy.What is making the abortion issue especially potent now that Roe is likely to be overturned, Murphy said, is that “Republicans now need to defend where their line is.”Regional distinctions are also important. When you break down public opinion on abortion by state, as Nate Cohn recently did, you find large differences between culturally liberal states like Nevada and New Hampshire, where more than 60 percent of the public says abortion should be mostly legal, and culturally middle-of-the-road Georgia, where that number shrinks to 49 percent.Where Democrats are on firmer groundAnother way to gauge the politics of an issue is to ask: Who wants to talk about it, and who doesn’t?Abortion rights seem like a clear political winner for Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat who is defending her seat against several little-known Republican challengers. Hassan did seven interviews the day after Politico published the Roe leak.The favorite candidate of the state’s G.O.P. establishment is Chuck Morse, a state senator who describes himself as “pro-life.” Morse pushed a ban on late-term abortions last year that did not include exceptions for rape or incest. It also required all women to take an ultrasound exam before terminating a pregnancy.Morse issued a statement last week highlighting his role in passing legislation that “settled the law in New Hampshire that permits abortions in the first six months.” Through a spokesman, his campaign has said it prefers to talk about the economy, inflation and immigration.Awkwardness for RepublicansIn other key Senate contests, Republican candidates are scrambling to defend or explain their past comments.In a statement last week, Adam Laxalt, the likely Republican challenger to Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat of Nevada, praised the draft ruling but noted that abortion is already legal in Nevada, “so no matter the court’s ultimate decision on Roe, it is currently settled law in our state.”“He can’t play it both ways. He’s already come out and said he would overturn it,” Cortez Masto said in a brief interview. “He’s already said it was a ‘historic victory.’”In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the G.O.P. nominee, has said that women should bring pregnancies to term “even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” referring to rape and incest. Vance does, however, support exceptions to spare the life of the pregnant woman.Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, has said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case that barred state bans on contraception and established the federal right to privacy, was “wrongly decided.”Masters clarified in a statement that he did not support “any ban on contraception, and that extends to I.U.D.s,” or intrauterine devices, which some abortion opponents view as abortifacients.For both sides, precision mattersRepublicans would much rather talk about late-term abortions, even though nearly nine in 10 abortions take place within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy.An interview this month on Fox News with Representative Tim Ryan, Vance’s Democratic opponent in Ohio, offered a telling example of how this could play out.Pressed twice by the Fox host on whether he supported any limits to abortion, Ryan gave an answer that was faithful to standard Democratic talking points.The State of Roe v. WadeCard 1 of 4What is Roe v. Wade? More

Young voters who had rallied around Leni Robredo during the presidential race gathered to voice their frustration with preliminary results showing her overwhelming defeat.MANILA — Angry young voters gathered in the Philippines on Tuesday to protest against Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son and namesake of the former dictator, who clinched a landslide victory this week in one of the most divisive presidential elections in the country’s recent history.Multiple election observers said they had received thousands of reports of election-related anomalies since the vote on Monday. Malfunctioning voting machines were one of the biggest concerns, with VoteReportPH, an election watchdog, saying the breakdowns had “severely impaired this electoral process.”On Tuesday, Leni Robredo, Mr. Marcos’s closest rival in the race and the country’s current vice president, said that her team was looking into reports of voter fraud. But every opinion poll before the election had predicted that Mr. Marcos would win by a huge margin, and his lead by Tuesday was so overwhelming that reports of fraud and malfunctioning machines were unlikely to sway the result.Mr. Marcos, known by his childhood nickname, “Bongbong,” had racked up nearly 31 million votes by 4:30 p.m., according to a preliminary tally. That was more than double the number of votes that Ms. Robredo had, giving Mr. Marcos the biggest margin of victory in more than three decades. Voter turnout was around 80 percent, an election official said Tuesday.During his campaign, Mr. Marcos appealed to a public disillusioned with democracy in the Philippines, a country of 110 million and the oldest democracy in Southeast Asia. Yet for many Filipinos, the Marcos family name remains a byword for excess and greed, and a painful reminder of the atrocities committed by the father.Riot police were deployed in Manila on Tuesday to protect election commissioners. The vote this week was one of the most divisive presidential elections in modern Philippine history.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesMr. Marcos’s 92-year-old mother, Imelda Marcos, was sentenced to up to 11 years in 2018 for creating private foundations to hide her unexplained wealth, but remains free. She posted bail, and her case is under appeal by the Supreme Court. Critics fear Mr. Marcos could use the presidency to scrap that case and other outstanding cases against the family.Dozens of mostly young voters gathered in a park across from the elections commission building on Tuesday morning to protest the election results and Mr. Marcos, chanting, “Thief, thief, thief!” and “Put Imelda in jail.” Riot police stood watch over the demonstrations.Paula Santos, a doctor in training, confronted the officers: “Personally, I am scared,” she told them. “I am turning 27 and I am scared for our future, especially now that I’m an adult. When I was young, I did not care about politics. But now I am having goose bumps because of fear.”In the months leading up to the election, hundreds of thousands of Ms. Robredo’s young supporters had campaigned door to door, seeking to fight an online disinformation campaign that portrayed the violent Marcos regime as a “golden age” in the country’s history.Ms. Santos told the officers that she had supported the younger Mr. Marcos when he ran against Ms. Robredo for the vice presidency in 2016 “because of the beautifully crafted posts and infographics I saw on YouTube.” “But then I saw other accounts, I did my research,” she said. “Knowing the truth is now in your own hands.”“We’re not here to rewrite history,” she added. “We’re here to learn from it.”In an interview later, Ms. Santos said that she and her 17-year-old sister cried on election night. Both of them had campaigned for Ms. Robredo. “I was expecting a close fight,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be such a big gap between numbers. It was hard to believe.”Members of the Catholic church praying in front of the elections comission building in Manila on Tuesday. Jes Aznar for The New York TimesAcross the country, many voters shared in her disbelief.Recrimination and regret prevailed among some Filipinos as they considered the possibility of another Marcos as president, 36 years after millions of their countrymen ousted the Marcos family for looting billions of dollars from the treasury.Robert Reyes, a Roman Catholic priest who spent every Wednesday for the past 11 weeks outside the elections commission building demanding a clean vote, said the Catholic Church had failed to “denounce evil.” The Catholic church, which has outsize influence in the Philippines, played a crucial role in overthrowing the Marcos dictatorship during the 1986 “People Power” uprising.“Hopefully this will wake up the church,” Father Reyes said. “Because what moral authority does the son of a dictator who has not returned what his father has stolen have? What authority does he have to govern a country whose people were plundered by his father?”Ms. Robredo has stopped short of formally conceding the race. On Tuesday, she told her supporters to accept “whatever the final result will be.”“I do not consider this a loss because we have achieved many things this election season,” she said, speaking during a Catholic Mass in Bicol Region, where she is from.She has hinted at a bigger role for her broad-based movement, which she said “will not die at the close of counting.”Vote counting could continue through the end of the week. By Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Marcos had yet to deliver a victory speech. But in a statement, Victor Rodriguez, Mr. Marcos’s spokesman, said his “unassailable lead” meant that “the Filipino people have spoken decisively.”“To those who voted for Bongbong, and those who did not, it is his promise to be a president for all Filipinos,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “To the world, he says: Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions.”Demonstrators faced off with riot police officers in Manila on Tuesday.Jes Aznar for The New York TimesSara Duterte, the daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte and Mr. Marcos’s running mate, had garnered 31.5 million votes by Tuesday, more than triple the votes of Senator Francis Pangilinan, who ran as vice president in support of Ms. Robredo.Mr. Duterte has been accused of rolling back democratic institutions during his six years as president. Opponents have warned that the alliance between the Marcoses and the Dutertes could usher in a new era of autocracy in the Philippines.Mr. Marcos and Ms. Duterte are expected to take office on June 30.As the protests continued outside the elections commission building on Tuesday, demonstrators held up signs that said, “Never again,” and “Fight Marcos, reject Duterte.”Maria Socorro Naguit, 72, a freelance writer at the protest, said she was 22 when the Marcos regime, during a crackdown on the press, shut down the magazine she worked for. “I’m here because it’s too much, you know?” Ms. Socorro Naguit said. “Honestly, I cannot countenance the return of the Marcoses.”Watching the results come in on Monday night, Ms. Socorro Naguit said her first reaction was letting out curse words. “And I thought of the republic. Oh my god,” she said.For Mirus Ponon, a first-time voter in Manila, Election Day was marked by excitement. The 20-year-old university student and civil rights activist stood in line for five hours to cast his vote for Ms. Robredo.The euphoria didn’t last long. Several hours later, he was crying.“You could see it coming from a standpoint of the structured propaganda and the machinery of the Marcoses,” he said. “But it’s something that makes you so depressed, as someone who loves the country. You want to continue to fight, yet the country and its people fail you.”Camille Elemia More

WASHINGTON — In Kansas, the Democratic governor has been pushing to slash the state’s grocery sales tax. Last month, New Mexico lawmakers provided $1,000 tax rebates to households hobbled by high gas prices. Legislatures in Iowa, Indiana and Idaho have all cut state income taxes this year.A combination of flush state budget coffers and rapid inflation has lawmakers across the country looking for ways to ease the pain of rising prices, with nearly three dozen states enacting or considering some form of tax relief, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank.The efforts are blurring typical party lines when it comes to tax policy. In many cases, Democrats are joining Republicans in supporting permanently lower taxes or temporary cuts, including for high earners.But while the policies are aimed at helping Americans weather the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years, economists warn that, paradoxically, cutting taxes could exacerbate the very problem lawmakers are trying to address. By putting more money in people’s pockets, policymakers risk further stimulating already rampant consumer demand, pushing prices higher nationally.Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University who was an economic adviser under the Obama administration, said that the United States economy was producing at full capacity right now and that any additional spending power would only drive up demand and prices. But when it comes to cutting taxes, he acknowledged, the incentives for states do not always appear to be aligned with what is best for the national economy.“I think all these tax cuts in states are adding to inflation,” Mr. Furman said. “The problem is, from any governor’s perspective, a lot of the inflation it is adding is nationwide and a lot of the benefits of the tax cuts are to the states.”States are awash in cash after a faster-than-expected economic rebound in 2021 and a $350 billion infusion of stimulus funds that Congress allocated to states and cities last year. While the Biden administration has restricted states from using relief money to directly subsidize tax cuts, many governments have been able to find budgetary workarounds to do just that without violating the rules.Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a $1.2 billion tax cut that was made possible by budget surpluses. The state’s coffers were bolstered by $8.8 billion in federal pandemic relief money. Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, hailed the tax cuts as the largest in the state’s history.“Florida’s economy has consistently outpaced the nation, but we are still fighting against inflationary policies imposed on us by the Biden administration,” he said.Adding to the urgency is the political calendar: Many governors and state legislators face elections in November, and voters have made clear they are concerned about rising prices for gas, food and rent.“It’s very difficult for policymakers to see the inflationary pressures that taxpayers are burdened by right now while sitting on significant cash reserves without some desire to return that,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects with the Center for State Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation. “The challenge for policymakers is that simply cutting checks to taxpayers can feed the inflationary environment rather than offsetting it.”The tax cuts are coming in a variety of forms and sizes. According to the Tax Foundation, which has been tracking proposals this year, some would be phased in, some would be permanent and others would be temporary “holidays.”Next month, New York will suspend some of its state gas taxes through the end of the year, a move that Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said would save families and businesses an estimated $585 million.In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has called for gradually lowering the state’s corporate tax rate to 5 percent from 10 percent — taking a decidedly different stance from many of his political peers in Congress, who have called for raising corporate taxes. Mr. Wolf said in April that the proposal was intended to make Pennsylvania more business friendly.States are acting on a fresh appetite for tax cuts as inflation is running at a 40-year high.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Furman pointed to the budget surpluses as evidence that the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package handed too much money to local governments. “The problem was there was just too much money for states and localities.”A new report from the Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, said total state revenues rose by about 17.6 percent last year. State rainy day funds — money that is set aside to cover unexpected costs — have reached “new record levels,” according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.Yet those rosy budget balances may not last if the economy slows, as expected. The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates in an attempt to cool economic growth, and there are growing concerns about the potential for another recession. Stocks fell for another session on Monday, with the S&P 500 down 3.2 percent, as investors fretted about a slowdown in global growth, high inflation and other economic woes.Cutting taxes too deeply now could put states on weaker financial footing.The Tax Policy Center said its state tax revenue forecasts for the rest of this year and next year were “alarmingly weak” as states enacted tax cuts and spending plans. Fitch, the credit rating agency, said recently that immediate and permanent tax cuts could be risky in light of evolving economic conditions.“Substantial tax policy changes can negatively affect revenues and lead to long-term structural budget challenges, especially when enacted all at once in an uncertain economic environment,” Fitch said.The state tax cuts are taking place as the Biden administration struggles to respond to rising prices. So far, the White House has resisted calls for a gas tax holiday, though Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in April that President Biden was open to the idea. The administration has responded by primarily trying to ease supply chain logjams that have created shortages of goods and cracking down on price gouging, but taming inflation falls largely to the Fed.The White House declined to assess the merits of states’ cutting taxes but pointed to the administration’s measures to expand fuel supplies and proposals for strengthening supply chains and lowering health and child care costs as evidence that Mr. Biden was taking inflation seriously.“President Biden is taking aggressive action to lower costs for American families and address inflation,” Emilie Simons, a White House spokeswoman, said.The degree to which state tax relief fuels inflation depends in large part on how quickly the moves go into effect.Gov. Laura Kelly backed a bill last month that would phase out the 6.5 percent grocery sales tax in Kansas, lowering it next January and bringing it to zero by 2025. Republicans in the state pushed for the gradual reduction despite calls from Democrats to cut the tax to zero by July.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”To state the obvious: This is not what political speech in Nebraska used to sound like.Mr. Herbster is challenging the allegations of eight women that he groped them.Mary Anne AndreiFor half a century, from 1959 to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, my home state, the state near the geographical middle of the country, prided itself on being politically centrist as well. Over that span, it elected four Democrats and three Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We had six Republican governors and five Democratic. The congressional delegations were predominately Republican, but Omaha and Lincoln elected Democrats as their mayors more often than not. The Nebraska Legislature remains officially nonpartisan, and as the country’s only unicameral legislature, it forced lawmakers for many years to engage in a politics of pragmatism.Now, Nebraska is so unfailingly Republican that the party’s primaries most often determine the outcomes of statewide races. How did the state become so right wing and devoted to Mr. Trump?Part of the answer is that Nebraska’s Democrats of a generation ago were never very liberal. They were usually socially moderate, pro-business, pro-military white guys, making them all but indistinguishable from old-line, Chamber of Commerce Republicans from the coasts. Senator Edward Zorinsky aggressively advocated military aid for Nicaragua during the Carter years. Senator Bob Kerrey voted for NAFTA. Senator Ben Nelson cast his vote in favor of Obamacare only after Senator Harry Reid promised him tens of millions in federal funding for Nebraska that came to be known as the Cornhusker Kickback.But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were middle of the road. Even our Republican senators were sometimes so moderate that you could barely distinguish them from centrist Democrats. Chuck Hagel, for example, was a two-term Republican senator during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies but later was Mr. Obama’s secretary of defense. Likewise, our Republican governors were fiscally and socially conservative, but they generally avoided the culture wars.Mr. Herbster told the crowd in Wahoo that that era is over. “This isn’t the good-old Dave Heineman days. This isn’t the good-old Charles Thone days. This isn’t the good-old Exon days,” he said, invoking the names of three centrist Nebraska governors, including J. James Exon, a Democrat who won over many Republicans by opposing tax increases and gay rights during the Carter administration.For half a century, Nebraska was politically centrist. According to Mr. Herbster, that era is over.Mary Anne AndreiIn Nebraska — as in the rest of the country — the polarization seemed to hasten about the time that Mr. Obama won the presidency. To be sure, much of the hardening against the Democratic Party specifically and ideals of tolerance and diversity more generally can be attributed to an unholy stew of angry commentary on Fox News, algorithmic political siloing on Facebook and the subsuming of Nebraska’s independent newspapers and television stations by Lee Enterprises and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.First, now cash-poor, the committee began to spend more selectively. In Nebraska, the monthly allotment went from $25,000 to $2,500. That 90 percent cut in party funding, Ms. Kleeb said, meant that Republican talking points often went unchallenged. “You’re not doing any organizing,” she said, “not because you don’t want to, not because you don’t know how to organize or create good messages, but because you don’t have the money to do it.”Second, Democrats were forced to push hard for bipartisan support on key issues, which often further muddled their messaging. Left-leaning state senators in Nebraska, for example, joined with conservative senators to ban the death penalty in 2015. (A subsequent ballot measure restored it.) In 2016 and 2017, the progressive environmentalist and pro-small-farm group Nebraska Communities United fought against the construction of a massive poultry-processing plant on the flood plain of the Lower Platte River by partnering with a local group that was afraid the plant would be staffed by Black Muslim immigrants from Somalia. Ms. Kleeb herself, when she was the director of Bold Nebraska, one of those progressive groups, helped to block the Keystone XL pipeline not by talking about its climate impact but by joining with conservative ranchers who were outraged that the power of eminent domain had been granted to a foreign corporation. The problem with that strategy over time, Ms. Kleeb acknowledges now, is that voters often walked away confused. “They don’t even know where the Democratic Party stands,” she said.Without a Democratic counterbalance, Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska, so candidates are pulled further and further to the right in order to appease and appeal to an increasingly radical and angry base. In this year’s governor’s race, for example, Mr. Herbster’s top competitor, Jim Pillen, would seem to check all of the appropriate boxes for a Republican nominee in Nebraska. He’s endorsed by the current governor, Pete Ricketts. He is one of the largest hog producers in the country. He even played football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers during the glory years under Tom Osborne, who later represented Nebraska’s Third Congressional District.But as Mr. Herbster’s poll numbers have surged, Mr. Pillen has veered to the right, attacking “liberal professor groups” (though he is a member and former chair of the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents) and running TV ads with an endorsement from the comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Last week, he posted on Twitter that he was the “only candidate to take action against CRT,” the “only candidate willing to fight the radical transgender agenda” and the “only candidate willing to call abortion what it is — murder.” (A third major candidate, Brett Lindstrom, has struck a less strident tone but holds many of the same beliefs.)Donald Trump praised Mr. Herbster at a rally in Greenwood, Neb., on May 1.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesThe crowd where Mr. Trump spoke.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesEven with that hard-line rhetoric, it will be hard for Mr. Pillen to beat Mr. Herbster’s direct endorsement from Mr. Trump. Thursday night, after the tables and chairs had been put away at the Starlite Event Center, the Herbster campaign hosted a call-in “telerally” with Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Trump praised the businessman as “a die-hard MAGA champ” and guaranteed that Mr. Herbster would “never bend to the RINOs” — Republicans in name only — like “Little Ben Sasse,” Nebraska’s junior senator, and Representative Don Bacon, whom Mr. Trump derided as “another beauty.” During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Sasse voted with him 85 percent of the time. Mr. Bacon voted with him 89 percent of the time. But Mr. Trump has considered both to be insufficiently loyal to him personally, and their political futures may be in jeopardy as a result. If so, they will be replaced by politicians who are more brazen in their contempt for the Democratic Party and for democratic ideals. That’s why the outcome of Nebraska’s Republican governor’s primary is almost immaterial.Yes, whoever emerges with the nomination will most likely become the next governor. And it would appear that Mr. Herbster retains the inside track, thanks to Mr. Trump — just as the former president has buoyed Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker to the top of their primary Senate races in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lifted J.D. Vance from a packed Republican field in the Senate primary in Ohio. But it doesn’t matter whether these candidates actually win or not, because their conspiratorial and inflammatory rhetoric has overtaken the discourse, pushing all Republican candidates further and further toward the fringe. Regardless of how the final balloting turns out in Nebraska on Tuesday, the real victor will be Donald Trump.Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesTed Genoways (@TedGenoways) is the author, most recently, of “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm.” Starting this fall, he will be a president’s professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.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

“John McCain’s lie became mine,” Steve Schmidt wrote about Senator John McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist.The senior strategist for Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign said on Sunday night that he had lied to discredit a New York Times article that reported on Mr. McCain’s close relationship with a female lobbyist, a claim that the candidate and the campaign attacked at considerable length at the time.The statement from Steve Schmidt, which he published in a late-night Substack post, was a remarkable turnabout for a former senior aide who once praised Mr. McCain as “the greatest man I’ve ever known.”More than 14 years after The Times’s article appeared and four years after the Republican senator’s death, Mr. Schmidt let loose a furious personal assault on the credibility of Mr. McCain and his family.“Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people,” Mr. Schmidt wrote, adding, “Ultimately, John McCain’s lie became mine.”Defending his long silence on the matter, Mr. Schmidt said in his post that he “didn’t want to do anything to compromise John McCain’s honor.” His post then questioned Mr. McCain’s judgment in choosing the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate and accused Mr. McCain of cowering before her — “terrified of the creature that he created,” he wrote.In an interview on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he was motivated to speak up now in part because he felt he had been unfairly associated for nearly 15 years with Mr. McCain’s choice of Ms. Palin, which he called “a burden.”Mr. Schmidt also accused Mr. McCain — a self-styled maverick who fought leaders of his own party as he pushed for stricter campaign finance restrictions and ethics rules around political activities like lobbying — of lying about one aspect of the article that particularly angered the senator.The article, published on Feb. 21, 2008, reported that several people involved with Mr. McCain’s first presidential campaign, in 2000, became concerned that he and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, had a romantic relationship. It was an explosive and potentially damaging claim for a presidential candidate who positioned himself as a corruption-fighter committed to exposing Washington’s self-dealing ways.Mr. Schmidt in 2008 behind Mr. McCain, who denied that he had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist years earlier.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThe day after the article was published, Mr. McCain appeared with his wife, Cindy, at a news conference and stated that the article was wrong. “I’m very disappointed in The New York Times piece. It’s not true,” he said.Mr. McCain continued to deny until his death that he had a romantic relationship with Ms. Iseman. Mr. Schmidt, however, said Mr. McCain had privately acknowledged an affair to him after The Times published its article. “John McCain told me the truth backstage at an event in Ohio,” he wrote.Ms. Iseman sued The Times and demanded that it print a retraction of the article on its front page. Less than three months after she filed the lawsuit, she dropped it. The Times appended a note to readers at the bottom of the article that said it “did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust.”Mr. Schmidt did not name Ms. Iseman in his Substack post, though he made several references to private phone calls he had with a “lobbyist” he describes in disparaging terms.Ms. Iseman did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.A spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said the paper stood by the article. “We were confident in the accuracy of our reporting in 2008, and we remain so.”Mr. McCain’s daughter Meghan, a conservative author and former co-host of “The View,” said her family had no comment on Monday. More