Elections

A big endorsement was decisive, but a cable news megaphone and a huge infusion of spending helped pave the way to victory.CINCINNATI — It was only hours after J.D. Vance had announced his Senate campaign with an us-against-them speech last July that he stepped off the stage and sat down to make his case on one of the Republican Party’s biggest and most valuable platforms: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News.Speaking from his hometown in Ohio, one that his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” put on the map as a symbol of left-behind Middle America, Mr. Vance lamented the “elites and the ruling class” and how they “have plundered this country.”Mr. Carlson lapped it up — “I love that,” he beamed — and all but endorsed Mr. Vance’s campaign on the spot. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m really glad you’re doing it.”J.D. Vance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last July when he announced his run for Senate.Fox NewsThe victory of Mr. Vance, 37, in the Ohio Senate Republican primary on Tuesday was unquestionably fueled by the April 15 endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, which catapulted Mr. Vance toward victory. But other factors had set the stage for the former president to play such a decisive role.Mr. Vance had received both behind-the-scenes and very public help: from Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son; from the not-so-quiet support of Mr. Carlson; and from the extraordinary and early investment of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is also Mr. Vance’s former boss.In the end, that group — Mr. Thiel, Mr. Carlson, and the two Trumps — formed a powerful alliance. Mr. Thiel’s $15 million appears to be the most ever spent by an individual megadonor to elect a single Senate candidate. Mr. Carlson’s program is the most watched on cable television and a trendsetter for conservative media. And the former president is the most popular politician in the Republican Party.Together, they helped deliver for Mr. Vance everything he would need for his Trump-toned, anti-corporate, nationalist message to succeed: funding, media attention and a late surge of momentum.Mr. Trump’s blessing was uniquely powerful in Ohio, where it effectively absolved Mr. Vance of his previous harsh denunciations of Mr. Trump — the focus of almost all the attacks on his campaign. Every race is different, and even Mr. Trump’s influence has limits: Mr. Vance won just over 32 percent of the vote, meaning most primary voters did not side with the former president’s pick.Still, given Ohio’s Republican leanings, Mr. Vance now enters the fall campaign as a favorite to enter the United States Senate largely owing his seat to the former president’s intervention.Supporters of J.D. Vance at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump last month in Delaware, Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s emergence as a Make America Great Again standard-bearer in 2022 would have seemed unthinkable six years ago, when he was a self-styled “Never Trump” Republican and a fixture of the mainstream news media as a translator for liberals curious about the bombastic New Yorker’s cultural appeal. In early 2021, Mr. Vance sought to make amends. And it was Mr. Thiel who brokered and attended a meeting at Mar-a-Lago at which Mr. Vance began his rehabilitation and reinvention. Additional help came from the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a Trump favorite, who connected Mr. Vance with Andy Surabian, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr.An Inside Look at Fox NewsThe conservative cable news network is one of the most influential media outlets in the United States.Tucker Carlson: The star TV host stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, he transformed Fox News and became Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.What Trump Helped Build: Together, the channel and Donald Trump have redefined the limits of acceptable political discourse.How Russia Uses Fox News: The network has appeared in Russian media as a way to bolster the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine war.Leaving Fox News: After 18 years with the network, the anchor Chris Wallace, who left for the now shuttered streaming service CNN+, said working at Fox News had become “unsustainable.”While rival Ohio Senate contenders pressured, and sometimes pestered, the former president for his support, Mr. Vance’s lobbying effort was more restrained. When four other candidates traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a fund-raiser for a House candidate and were corralled into an impromptu pitch session with Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance was not there. Two people close to him said he had stayed away deliberately, to avoid being seen as just one of a cluster of aspirants.The contrast, at that point, could have been unkind: The early G.O.P. front-runner was Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer and two-time Senate candidate. Two businessmen were also in the race — Bernie Moreno, a car dealer, and Mike Gibbons, a financial executive — as was Jane Timken, a former state Republican chairwoman.All of them, along with Matt Dolan, a wealthy state senator, could draw on millions of dollars of their own or from old campaign accounts. In contrast, Mr. Vance was a first-time candidate with no real national donor network, and was not rich enough to finance his own campaign.His super PAC, which received $10 million from Mr. Thiel months before he even entered the race, would be crucial.But there was a legal complication: Outside groups may not privately coordinate strategy with campaigns. So the super PAC found a workaround, publishing troves of internal data on an unpublicized Medium page where campaign officials knew to find it. The existence of the site was first revealed by Politico.The degree to which the super PAC worked as something of an adjunct to the campaign itself is remarkable. According to documents it posted, the outside group “recruited, vetted and hired staff who later joined” the campaign, sent text messages and robocalls to build crowds for Vance events and even paid for online advertising that directed donations to the Vance campaign.Yet for all his cash, Mr. Thiel absented himself from the super PAC’s operations, never once speaking to Luke Thompson, who ran it, so Mr. Thiel could legally continue to speak with Mr. Vance as an adviser, according to Mr. Thompson.Peter Thiel at a Bitcoin conference in Miami last month.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Thompson called Mr. Thiel’s approach “a venture capital mind-set,” likening the campaign to a start-up. “J.D. is the founder and picks his team,” he said.Even with the early Thiel money, Mr. Vance relied on conservative media for attention, appearing on the programs of Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.Appearances on Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program were most valuable of all.He has appeared on the program 15 times since July, according to Media Matters for America, often drawing heavy praise from the host. “Occasionally, you run into somebody who could actually change things,” Mr. Carlson said during an interview on the eve of the election. “That would be J.D. Vance.”“Tucker was really, really important,” Mr. Thompson said. “It meant that our guy had a platform to go and talk to primary voters in Ohio — and small-dollar donors nationwide.”Then came the attacks.For weeks last fall, the anti-tax Club for Growth, which supported Mr. Mandel, pummeled Mr. Vance for his past denunciations of Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s own super PAC found that Ohioans knew little about him besides that he had once opposed Trump. By December, David McIntosh, the Club for Growth’s president, had repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to back Mr. Mandel, warning him that Mr. Vance’s candidacy was doomed.Josh Mandel conceding the primary race to J.D. Vance on Tuesday night in Beachwood, Ohio.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. McIntosh evidently was persuasive: Speaking with advisers, Mr. Trump mulled whether to get behind Mr. Mandel, saying that Mr. Vance was “dead, isn’t he?”“I like J.D. a lot, but everyone just tells me those ads killed him,” Mr. Trump told one adviser.In hindsight, however, Nick Everhart, a Republican strategist based in Ohio, said that “being shoved out of the first tier of the race” might have been “the best thing that happened to Vance,” because the attacks on him largely stopped.Records from AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm, show that ads attacking Mr. Vance slowed to a trickle in December and then stopped entirely in February.When ads supporting Mr. Vance began to run, he gained traction, though he still trailed. By April 4, his super PAC posted a memo saying Mr. Vance was no longer “primarily associated” with his prior criticisms of Mr. Trump.“J.D. showed a lot of resilience in this race — and when the political class in the Beltway wrote him off as dead in the water earlier this year, he clawed his way back into contention to get President Trump’s endorsement and ultimately win through his sheer determination and natural political talent,” said Mr. Surabian, who, along with Jai Chabria, ran Mr. Vance’s campaign. Indeed, Mr. Trump was swayed in part by how Mr. Vance handled himself on television. In one debate, when Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons went toe to toe, Mr. Vance scolded them, rising above the fray — and impressing Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump was on a golf course, editing his statement endorsing Mr. Vance, when NBC News reported he was about to issue it. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, working with Mr. Vance’s opponents, were lobbying the former president not to, but the report only solidified his decision.Mr. Vance also benefited from a more accurate picture of the electorate.Mr. McIntosh, of the Club for Growth, repeatedly argued to Mr. Trump that the former president’s pollster, Anthony Fabrizio, who was also working for Mr. Vance, had modeled the Ohio primary electorate inaccurately.The Club for Growth’s polling last weekend showed Mr. Vance receiving 26 percent of the vote. Mr. Fabrizio’s polling had Mr. Vance at 32 percent.Mr. Vance finished with 32.2 percent.Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist who worked with the Club for Growth in Ohio, called Mr. Trump before the polls closed on Tuesday to concede. He told Mr. Trump that the former president was “100 percent responsible” for Mr. Vance’s win, according to a person briefed on the conversation.In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Vance thanked, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and, of course, the former president.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati, and Maggie Haberman from New York. More

Donald Trump Jr testifies before the committee on the events of January 6House panel also released text messages in which Donald Trump’s son begged the White House to get his father to condemn the riot Donald Trump’s oldest son has met with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.The interview Tuesday with Donald Trump Jr comes as the bipartisan House committee moves closer to the former president’s inner circle of family members and political advisers.The younger Trump is of likely interest to the committee because of his proximity to his father on the day of the riot. Donald Trump Jr was seen backstage at the rally on the White House Ellipse that took place shortly before supporters of the then-president marched to the Capitol and breached the building.Militia group leader tried to ask Trump to authorize them to stop the transfer of powerRead moreIn several social media videos posted at the time of the January 6 attack, Trump Jr was seen with Kimberly Guilfoyle – then his girlfriend, now his fiancee – and other members of his family as his father prepared to make a speech that investigators believed rallied supporters to act violently that day.The House committee has also released text messages from 6 January 2021 in which Trump Jr pleaded with the White House to get his father to forcefully condemn the riot.“We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,” Trump Jr wrote to Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff.Trump Jr is one of nearly 1,000 witnesses the committee has interviewed as it works to compile a record of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. He is the second of Trump’s children known to speak to the committee; Ivanka Trump sat down with lawmakers for eight hours in early April. Her husband, Jared Kushner, has also been interviewed by the committee.Other allies of the former president have defied subpoenas from the committee and been referred to the justice department for potential prosecution on contempt of Congress charges. One of them, Stephen Bannon, was indicted last year after he refused to cooperate. That case is pending.The committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans is looking to wrap up its nearly 11-month investigation and shift into the public hearing phase. Hearings are set to begin 9 June and go on for four weeks. Lawmakers expect to bring out witnesses and present evidence in an effort to educate the public on the full scope of the attack and Donald Trump’s role in it.Trump Jr is no stranger to congressional investigations, having testified at least three times in House and Senate investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.The two people who confirmed Trump Jr’s interview were granted anonymity to discuss the private session, which was not announced by the committee. TopicsDonald Trump JrUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Georgia’s race for governor perfectly captures the degree to which the classroom has become a conservative battleground.On Sunday, the Republican candidates gathered for their third and final debate before the May 24 primary. Some promoted the lie that Donald Trump had won in 2020 and called for tighter election security (another way of articulating a desire to suppress votes). Several railed against Covid mandates (especially masks) and stoked fears of rising crime.There were the obligatory mentions of the “woke mob” and random mentions of George Soros. There was even a reference to “the communist, liberal, leftist agenda of the Green New Deal.” (One candidate suggested that the government was pushing Chinese solar panels on Georgia farmers as part of its “communist” agenda.)But, more than anything else, the supposed indoctrination of children in schools took center stage.I’m not sure that liberals and Democrats fully appreciate the degree to which Republicans are promoting parental rights as a way of wooing back some of the suburban white women who strayed from the party during the Trump years.Democrats wave their list of policies at voters like a self-satisfied child waves their homework. But instead of being met with praise and stickers, they are met by an electorate in which an alarming number frowns on fact and is electrified by emotions — fear, anger and envy.There were five candidates onstage during the debate, and four of the five — including the sitting governor, Brian Kemp, and his chief competitor, former Senator David Perdue — rattled on about classroom indoctrination.As Kemp put it: “We’re going to make sure that we pass a bill this year that our kids aren’t indoctrinated in the classroom. That we protect them from obscene materials and a lot of the other things.”Perdue followed up by going even further: “Right now, the No. 1 thing we can do for our teachers and our parents and most of all our children is to get the woke mob out of our schools in Georgia. I mean, that’s what’s happening right now. We have a war for the minds of our children. When they’re trying to teach first graders about gender choice, that’s the thing that we’ve got to stand up to.”On the debate stage, from left, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, former Senator David Perdue and Kandiss Taylor.Pool photo by Brynn AndersonAnother candidate, Kandiss Taylor, an educator herself, went further still. “We not only have C.R.T. and S.E.L. and comprehensive sex education teaching transgender perversion to our children,” she said, referring to critical race theory and social-emotional learning, “we also have anti-white racism that has not been addressed by the current administration. It has taken over our schools, and it’s ruining the students. It’s ruining the environment.”S.E.L. is a teaching technique that, research suggests, can boost academic performance. But it is a practice that conservatives view with suspicion, thinking it could abet lessons about race and gender. God forbid children should become more emotionally intelligent. Their empathy might grow, and with it a better understanding of others. In that way, I can understand why it would unnerve oppressors.In her closing comments, Taylor ratcheted up her inflammatory language: “We’re going to ensure that boys aren’t in our girls’ bathrooms and girls aren’t in our boys’ bathrooms, and people aren’t being raped. And we’re going to get rid of kindergarten teachers — men with beards and lipstick and high heels — teaching our children. We’re going to get back to being moral in Georgia.”As a white woman, and mother of three, Taylor is in the demographic that Republicans are trying to attract. But she is also a near-perfect encapsulation of the party’s fringe.During the debate, she chastised Kemp for not contesting the 2020 results in Georgia, saying: “Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Governor Kemp failed.” The idea that Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running the country is a central belief of QAnon.The day after the debate, Taylor tweeted a video with a caption that read in part: “I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal. Elect me governor of Georgia, and I will bring the Satanic Regime to its knees.”As ominous music plays in the background, she shifts from satanic cabals to human sacrifice, saying: “Back in biblical times, human sacrifice was a form of demonic worship. We’re still doing it, in present day, by killing our unborn. It’s the same demons. It’s the same sacrifice. It’s the same sin. It’s just a different time.”She is endorsed by Mike Lindell, the Trump-supporting MyPillow C.E.O., and L. Lin Wood, the Trump lawyer who spun ludicrous conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.It might be tempting to laugh off people like Taylor as fringe candidates and thinkers, but Republicans have a way of folding those people’s ideas — scrubbed of the originators’ taint — into the mainstream. Even when the messenger is wrong, the party often views the message as right.Maybe the fact that the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade will dramatically alter the outcome of this year’s elections, pushing women — including many of the suburban white women Republicans are so desperate to win over — to vote against the Republicans in protest. Maybe.It could affect not only party alignments, but also turnout.But Republicans are more than a year into this parental rights campaign, so I doubt their strategy will be much altered. The question will be whether the oppression of women’s rights will outweigh what the Republicans are pushing: oppression as a parental right.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

During a seismic week in American politics, one clear winner has emerged: former President Donald Trump. The three Supreme Court justices he nominated appear poised to deliver a long-sought victory to the right by overturning Roe v. Wade, after a draft of the anticipated Dobbs decision was leaked Monday evening. The next day, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance won his race in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio after Mr. Trump’s endorsement resuscitated his sluggish campaign. What do the events of this week mean for both parties as they look ahead to the midterm elections? The Times Opinion writers Jane Coaston, Michelle Cottle and Ross Douthat discuss what this moment means for the U.S. political landscape with the Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.Four Opinion Writers Ask After Vance Win and Roe Leak: ‘Is This Trump’s World Now?’The following conversation has been edited for clarity.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Before we get to the Ohio race, I think we really need to understand this leaked opinion and how it sets the stage for red states and red races.I think what’s been stunning to me is how surprised everyone is that this Supreme Court — with five conservative members who seem to have been expressly picked to deliver the end of Roe — seems ready to effectively end abortion access for millions of women.Obviously the leaked opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, published by Politico, is not a final draft. No official court ruling has come out. But it seems to me that far from ending the debate over abortion, this might supercharge it. What do you think? Do you think it’s going to be the galvanizing issue liberals hope it will be?Ross Douthat: First, I just want to stress that this is a leak of a draft opinion. Including on abortion, Supreme Court decisions have changed between the initial draft and the final ruling.However, I agree that it was always quite likely that you would get this kind of ruling from a conservative Supreme Court, and its effects are going to be the return of real abortion politics for the first time in decades. That will have some kind of supercharging effect just inevitably. Because if Roe falls, you immediately have laws on the books in various states that restrict abortion or make it illegal that will create debates within those states.But I think the reality is because we haven’t had these kinds of debates in so long, they are — even by the standards of our unpredictable politics — really hard to predict. I personally have been surprised, in a way, at how stable Texas politics has been since the Supreme Court allowed Texas effectively to restrict abortion after six weeks.My general assumption has been that there would be a substantial backlash and a big political opportunity for Democrats. But the evidence from state politics so far doesn’t prove that that’s real. To some extent, we’re just going to have to see what happens without having any recent analogies to tell us what’s likely to take place.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to play this tape of Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking about the possible end of Roe at a rally here in Washington:I am angry because we have reached the combination of what Republicans have been fighting for, angling for, for decades now. And we are going to fight back.Speaking of opportunities for Democrats, as Ross has pointed out and as Senator Elizabeth Warren there says, this has been decades in the making. But fight back how? Options seem limited right now.Michelle Cottle: It looks like this is going to wind up being an issue that gets fought in the states for a while. There is legislation floating around Capitol Hill, but what the Democrats have passed in the House of Representatives is not going anywhere. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have a pared-down codification of Roe, but that’s unlikely to go anywhere right now. It’s one of these things that I think at the federal level is just going to flummox people.Democrats are hoping that this will give them a boost in the midterms come November, but I don’t expect it to have a huge impact this time around. I think it could, though, going forward.The place where you might see it in November would be in the primaries, where Representative Henry Cuellar, who is a pro-life Democrat on the Texas border, is in a fight with a pro-choice challenger. Could this tilt that race just enough for Cuellar to lose and have a different Democrat going into the generals? I don’t know, but I don’t expect it to have a huge impact on the midterms in November.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: We know from our history in this country and what we see in other places where there isn’t abortion access, that women who don’t have abortion access will resort to illegal abortions, putting their lives at risk.It strikes me that all of this is happening while we have a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House. Is there going to be a feeling that Democrats haven’t only fumbled, they’ve also roundly been beaten, and it could lead to a decline in support from their base? It could have the opposite effect of galvanizing them.Jane Coaston: It’s a complicated issue. A Gallup poll from 2021 found that the poorest Americans, who are most likely to suffer from a lack of access to abortion, are also more likely to believe that abortion is morally wrong.It’s worth remembering that this has been the carrot waved in front of social conservatives for 50 years. And now you’re hearing from a lot of conservatives that actually nothing will change. A conservative writer, Erick Erickson, said yesterday that this isn’t a big deal because nothing will change. They didn’t call them “Students for a 12-week abortion ban.” They didn’t call it “March for a 15-Week Abortion Ban.”This is going to be complicated for a lot of people, especially because they will see that there’ll be a clear difference between states like Connecticut and Colorado that have already provided abortion protections and Republican states that attempt to have an abortion ban, whether it will be a Texas-like system in which you are asking people to essentially inform on others, or just a straight-up ban.Voters have very conflicted views on abortion, but generally, they support people having some access to abortion.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to pick up on something you said. It is true that something like 80 percent of Americans think there should be some access to abortion. What that access should look like is unclear. But if Roe is overturned, that means that states will have the right to legislate on abortion access.Red states already have “trigger” laws in place that will immediately curtail abortion access for their residents if that happens. Some states are going to be doing one thing and other states are going to be doing a different thing. What does that mean for the unity of this country, where some citizens will have some rights and others won’t?Ross Douthat: I’m sorry to keep pleading agnosticism, but I don’t think we know. If you go back to the period before Roe was decided, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, this was basically the system that we were heading toward.There had been some liberalization of abortion laws in a number of states. There was a nascent pro-life movement that had pushed back against that and had halted and reversed that trend in other states. At that point, if you were looking at the landscape, you would have said, Well, this is sort of the federalist solution, right? This is the way the American system is set up to negotiate some deeply polarizing social issues.Now, that was also a landscape in which abortion had not been nationalized by the Supreme Court and had not then become a key driver of polarization between the parties. Back in the 1970s, you had lots of pro-choice Republicans and you had lots of pro-life Democrats, including Joseph Robinette Biden, now the pro-choice president of the United States.You had a landscape where you could imagine abortion policy being federalized, in the sense of being different from state to state, and also the two political parties not dividing over it.The fact that now the parties have divided over it so completely makes me suspect that the federalist strategy will be somewhat unstable and you will have constant pressure to have a national abortion policy from both sides, which will then implicate debates over the filibuster and everything else.The flip side of that is that lots of national Republican politicians have never been enthusiastic about talking about abortion, let alone legislating on it. A lot will depend on what happens in some of the bigger red states like Florida and Texas. Does the pro-life movement consider that an at least temporary victory?Or is that politically unstable? Is there a big backlash? Democrats have assumed that Texas is supposed to trend blue for a long time. So in theory an overreaching abortion ban in Texas could provoke the kind of backlash that Democrats have been looking for.Jane Coaston: It’s worth noting here that we don’t know what this will look like. We’ve seen that Senate Republicans passed around a memo on potential talking points and some of them include things like saying, We don’t want to put doctors in jail. We would never take away anyone’s contraception or health care. But you are hearing from other Republicans who are saying, for example, We do want to go after Griswold.Ross Douthat: Wait a minute. Which Republicans — outside of some traditionalist Catholic blog or something — are saying that they want to pass a law banning contraception?Jane Coaston: Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. She brought up Griswold as being constitutionally unsound.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Griswold v. Connecticut, of course, is the case where the Supreme Court ruled that marital privacy protects couples against state restrictions on contraception.Jane Coaston: My point is that when you have something that you’ve been fighting over for 50 years, there are lots of tangential pieces that people have been arguing about. For instance, telemedicine and access to abortion-causing medications. And there are Catholics who argue that some forms of birth control are themselves abortion-causing medications.Michelle Cottle: We have no idea how this is going to play out, even with just the abortion restrictions. You were asking about rights and different rights for people in different states. I mean, the reality is there are some states where it’s virtually impossible already to get an abortion — where there’s one abortion clinic for the entire state. If you’re talking about surgical abortions, that has already become a matter of where you live.An interesting thing that we’re going to watch play out here — and it’s going to get really sticky, really fast — are medication abortions. Are you going to have a black market? How are states going to determine who’s getting what? When there are certain rules in place that allow for medication abortions, which now are upward of 50 percent of abortions. That’s one thing. But if you have states that have just outlawed them, it starts to get really complicated. Who are you going after? How are you going to enforce this? What happens if somebody crosses state lines to get these meds?We have no idea what the future landscape will look like, much less one step down the road with abortifacients or anything like that.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: What we have seen in other countries that restrict abortion is that women have illegal abortions and get their health put at risk. It’s not that the numbers of abortions necessarily go down. It’s that they may not be as safe.When you’ve had 50 years of abortion access, as you’ve had in the United States, if you take away those rights, as will happen to women in many red states, that is going to have serious repercussions. I don’t think that this will be the end of it. And I think it’s naïve to think that it will.Ross Douthat: I have to argue with you very briefly. There is a frequent pro-choice argument along the lines of: “Abortion restrictions don’t reduce abortion rates. They just lead to more illegal abortions.”We have a lot of evidence from the developed world — from the United States and Western Europe — that that is not true: that rich nations or states that have restrictions on abortions have fewer abortions. The abortion rate is higher in Scandinavia, which has more liberal abortion laws, than it is in Germany, which has more restrictive abortion laws in general.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Rich people will be able to get abortions, sure. But the disadvantaged will not.Ross Douthat: That’s not what I’m saying. I’m including the poor people within those rich countries.Jane Coaston: That’s a point worth making, as is the point that abortion rates in the United States have actually been going down. They reached a high, I believe, in the early 1980s.Ross Douthat: Yes.Jane Coaston: Each year we keep hitting record lows in the number of abortions.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Because we have sex education and contraception.Ross Douthat: That’s not what’s driving it.Jane Coaston: Also, fewer people are having sex in general — yay! [LAUGHS]Ross Douthat: That’s more of what’s driving it. The reason that the pro-life side supports restrictions on abortion is that there is a lot of evidence that restrictions reduce abortion rates. This is where I completely agree that the question of who is getting prosecuted, what is done with state power, makes a really big difference.But right now, you have states in the U.S. and countries around the world, including places like Chile, that have had restrictive abortion laws that have very low maternal mortality rates and very good records on women’s health. It is possible to restrict abortion without having the massive maternal mortality nightmare that gets brought up. It just requires public spending and sensible policymaking.Michelle Cottle: Which has no bearing on this society.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Indeed. If the pandemic showed us anything.Ross Douthat: Well, this is the United States of America.Jane Coaston: There have been conversations among social conservatives about a post-Roe environment. All of them seem to recognize that it would require spending choices that Republicans have historically not wanted to make. Expanding access to WIC, for example.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: WIC, the federal nutrition program that supports women, infants and children.Jane Coaston: Yeah. Expanding access to maternal care, because again, maternal mortality risks, especially around African American women, are very bad in the United States.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: As much as I’ve enjoyed this debate, we have something else to argue about, which is Trump and the Ohio race on Tuesday. Here is the victorious J.D. Vance after he won the Republican primary:Thanks to the president for everything, for endorsing me. And I got to say, a lot of the fake news media out there, and there are some good ones in the back there, there’s some bad ones, too, let’s be honest, but they wanted to write a story that this campaign would be the death of Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. Ladies and gentlemen, it ain’t the death of the “America First” agenda.I think this story connects to our first conversation because we were talking about abortion, one of the original culture war issues. And here we have, with Vance victorious, someone who’s embodying Trump and his “America First” agenda.Michelle, you were just outside Cincinnati with J.D. Vance on the campaign trail, and with Donald Trump Jr. What stood out to you the most about the campaigning you saw?Michelle Cottle: The Vance clip you played basically captures the whole thing. The minute he got the nod from Trump, this race didn’t have anything to do with J.D. Vance or any of the other candidates. It became a referendum on Trump and Trump’s king-making ability.I watched Don Jr. appear at these events, and it was all about how Vance was the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race. It was all about Trump, which is a testament to how far J.D. Vance has bent over to smooch Donald Trump’s backside, which is what a lot of the party has done — in fact, what most of the party has done. But it is still galling to watch.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, you are from Ohio.Jane Coaston: Cincinnati, stand up!Lulu Garcia-Navarro: What does what Michelle is saying tell you about not only your home state but the direction of the G.O.P.?Jane Coaston: I talked to J.D. Vance back in 2016 when he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” and he told me that white working-class voters were frustrated and hungry for political leadership and that a lot of “political elites” hadn’t picked that up. He has since taken on the mantle of being a jerk. He has taken on talking about cat ladies and arguing about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, because you have to sound like Trump in order for Trump to see you as being part of him.There is an idea that this is a part of Ohio, north of Cincinnati, where, in Vance’s view, things used to be better and now they are bad. And that it is the responsibility of someone — Vance or somebody else — to fix it, to make things better. And there is an idea that this was the fault of globalization or NAFTA or big business or something like that. And that the people who were like Vance used to be better. And now they aren’t better, but it’s not their fault.There are people who wax rhapsodic about working-class jobs, many of whom have never actually worked. You hear this when people talk about manufacturing jobs. My grandpa worked in a copper mill. It sucked and he died at 48. There’s this idea, this halcyon concept of an Ohio that once was. A Cincinnati that used to be.Michelle Cottle: This is what the Trump appeal was in general, the idea that these people had been left behind. This is why he played well in Pennsylvania. That is not an unusual concept. The problem with Trumpism is they’ve taken this kind of populist impulse and turned it into: “It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s the Black people’s fault.” They’re blaming it on somebody else.Jane Coaston: It’s “the other.”Michelle Cottle: Yeah, they’re blaming it on China, too. It’s “the other.”Jane Coaston: It’s me, essentially. I did it. [LAUGHS]Michelle Cottle: At these rallies you don’t hear about abortion. You hear about how immigrants have turned central Ohio into the child trafficking capital of the world. It’s completely shamelessly, xenophobic.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ross, you have made no mystery of your distaste for Trump’s style and its impact on the tenor of the G.O.P. What do you make of Vance’s win and what it signals about the post-Trump presidency era of the Republican Party?Ross Douthat: I should say, just as a preface, that I know J.D. Vance and so I’m trying to offer detached analysis. But the listeners should know that I do in fact know him.Jane’s narrative is broadly right: There’s a basic continuity in populous worldview between the Vance who was extremely critical of Trump, in ways that I still agree with, and the Vance who won his endorsement.But there is a difference, too. “Hillbilly Elegy” is more about an internal pathology in white working-class America than it is about the elite policy mistakes that hollowed out American industry. So there’s been some shift in emphasis, but the basic narrative of elite betrayal of the American heartland — I don’t think that’s something that Vance has flip-flopped on.Even when he was damning Trump in the past, the argument was always, Trump is tapping into real and legitimate grievances, but he is essentially the political opioid of these communities that have been hit so hard by fentanyl.That’s the background. Then Vance ran a campaign in which — unlike Josh Mandel, his big rival — he spent less time personally appealing for Trump’s support and more time in the MAGA-extended universe of Steve Bannon’s show, Tucker Carlson’s show, various podcasts and so on that are all extremely right-wing and extremely Trumpy.Politico had a really good piece about how the Trump endorsement came about. Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t respond well to Mandel and others begging for his endorsement, and he seems to have decided to endorse Vance because he watched the debates and thought that Vance looked the best on TV, which, as we know, is the most important thing for anything connected to Trump. That, and he saw Vance play golf and liked his swing. The entire future history of American politics may turn on whether Trump likes a Senate candidate’s golf swing.Jane Coaston: Ohio’s political winds have shifted significantly. I do think it will be interesting to see how Vance attempts to get at a broader audience, if he even attempts to. That is going to be a bigger audience, and one accustomed to Ohio Republicans like Rob Portman or Steve Chabot, who are definitely more Ohioan. We’re Midwesterners! We tamp down our feelings with lasagna. But that’s not what Vance does. His kind of online anger and online ire — I am curious to see how that plays out when he’s having to make an appeal to, well, not my parents, but people like my parents.Michelle Cottle: That’s one of the problems we’re looking at with America in a foul mood, though, right? Whether you think it’s because of the pandemic or inflation or whatever, Americans are sour, and when you are sour, you are spoiling for a fight and you are looking for someone to come and tell you: “You are right to be angry. This is not your fault. You have been taken advantage of, and I’m going to fix it for you.” Those are the headwinds that the Democrats are looking at.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to wrap this up by asking for predictions, which I know everyone loves to do. This is mine: If politicians like J.D. Vance are elected into office in the fall, on the G.O.P. side, we’re going to have more of the strong culture-war G.O.P. presidential nominees in 2024, probably Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who are drawn to these divisive issues. The Democrats have had trouble countering those narratives.What do you see coming down the line, in terms of our political landscape and what it might portend?Michelle Cottle: Historical trends made it hard for the Democrats not to lose ground in this midterm. They have not had a break with the pandemic or inflation or anything like that. I think they’re going to have a rough midterm, and then going into 2024, if for some reason Trump does not run, I think DeSantis immediately moves to the head of line and we’re looking at somebody like that from the Republican side. There’s no real indication that the Republicans want to move away from Trumpism in the near future.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ross? Trump is king?Ross Douthat: There’s no indication at all. For Republican voters in Ohio, the fundamental choice was between Josh Mandel, who was basically the Trump attitude but with the pre-Trump mix of economic policies — that’s why Mandel was endorsed by the Club for Growth and they poured all this money into defeating Vance — or Vance, who was channeling the Trump attitude, but with policies on trade and immigration and foreign policy that were much more like the shift that Trump brought.Michelle Cottle: They could have gone with Matt Dolan, who was running and who came in a tight third behind Mandel.Ross Douthat: Right. But that suggests that it’s not just the Trump attitude. There is a constituency for Trump’s issues in the G.O.P. that remains very powerful.Fundamentally, the Democrats’ problems are about inflation and the post-Covid recovery turning into an inflationary spiral that has real wages going down, even as people are making more money on paper. That’s the biggest problem.With the culture war stuff, those battles are a cycle of overreach and backlash. What we’re living through right now, especially with the critical race theory debates and gender in schools debates, is a backlash against the sweeping leftward movement that we saw late in the Trump era, where there was a transformation of elite institutions, particularly in the summer of 2020, along more dramatically progressive lines. The backlash to that was always going to have a certain amount of political running room.The question is — whether it’s abortion or transgender issues or anything else — where does that backlash end up overreaching in its turn? Or do Republicans have room to have a backlash and still win because Democrats haven’t found a good way to get back to the center themselves?Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, I’m going to leave the last word to you.Jane Coaston: I’m so interested in how Republicans are using this moment to respond to cultural trends with politics. At a certain point you just can’t make everything you don’t like illegal. If you do, people will respond poorly because legally, that’s questionable. That’s morally questionable, too.A politics that’s “I just don’t want anyone to do something I don’t like” is going to make people mad.I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the midterms, but these trends of overreach speak to an idea. If Republicans have control of the Supreme Court or the House and Senate, will they still be thinking: “Why are people not more like us? Why are people not doing what we want?” And liberals can see that Democrats right now have perceived control and are saying: “Why can’t we do anything? We have nothing!” Both sides screaming at each other, “You have everything and we have nothing.”That’s a really bad state for our politics to be in, because it means that no one takes any responsibility for anything. That’s what makes me worried.Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Jane Coaston is the host of “The Argument” podcast. Michelle Cottle is a member of the editorial board. Ross Douthat is a Times columnist.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.Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Alison Bruzek and Phoebe Lett. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Adrian Rivera and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to James Ryerson, Jenny Casas, Vishakha Darbha and Patrick Healy. More

A dramatic account of how the militia leader, Stewart Rhodes, tried to reach Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6 with a message that the group could help keep him in power was revealed in federal court.Even as the beleaguered police were still trying to disperse a violent mob at the Capitol last January, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, undertook a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in the White House, according to court papers released on Wednesday.In a suite at the Phoenix Park Hotel, just blocks from the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes called an unnamed intermediary and, the papers said, repeatedly implored the person to ask Mr. Trump to mobilize his group to forcibly stop the transition of presidential power.But the person refused to speak with Mr. Trump, the papers said. And once the call was over, Mr. Rhodes, turning to a group of his associates, declared, “I just want to fight.”Witnessing this scene, which unfolded in the twilight hours of Jan. 6, 2021, was William Todd Wilson, a midlevel Oath Keepers leader from North Carolina. On Wednesday, Mr. Wilson, 44, pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to charges of seditious conspiracy and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of the Oath Keepers’ role in the Capitol attack.Mr. Wilson’s tale of what took place at the Phoenix Park — the same hotel that Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys, had stayed at days earlier — was among the most dramatic accounts to have emerged so far in the government’s monthslong investigation of the Oath Keepers.Phillip Linder, a lawyer for Mr. Rhodes, said he did not know who his client had called from the hotel in his effort to reach Mr. Trump.In a 15-page statement of offense released in conjunction with his plea, Mr. Wilson also admitted to helping stockpile weapons in hotel rooms in Virginia for a so-called quick reaction force assembled to “provide firearms or cover to co-conspirators” who were “operating inside of Washington” on Jan. 6.With his guilty plea, Mr. Wilson, a military and law enforcement veteran, became the third member of the Oath Keepers charged with sedition to reach a deal with the Justice Department to help in its most serious criminal case connected to the Capitol attack. As part of their inquiry, prosecutors have fanned out across the country interviewing dozens of members of the group. More than 20 Oath Keepers have been charged.The new court papers paint a picture of Mr. Wilson as a man enraged by the results of the 2020 election. In early November, for example, he expressed outrage in an Oath Keepers group chat after Georgia was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.“Rigged,” he wrote. And then, “I’m ready to go coyote hunting.”On Dec. 14, 2020 — the day that a majority of electors cast their votes for Mr. Biden in the Electoral College — Mr. Wilson saw an article posted in the group chat that was written by Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s onetime national security adviser. The article warned about “unelected tyrants,” and Mr. Wilson wrote to his compatriots, “It is time to fight.”After several phone calls with Mr. Rhodes in early January, Mr. Wilson admitted driving from North Carolina to the Washington area on Jan. 5 with an AR-15-style rifle, a 9-milimeter pistol, 200 rounds of ammunition, body armor, pepper spray and a pocketknife. As he traveled, court papers say, he posted a message in the group chat, saying, “It’s going to hit the fan tonight!”On the day of the attack, the papers said, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers bypassed barricades at the Capitol, unlawfully entering a restricted area. As plumes of smoke rose from the ground, the papers said, Mr. Wilson heard Mr. Rhodes declare that they were in the middle of a “civil war.”Moments later, the papers say, Mr. Wilson entered the Capitol armed with his pocketknife — the first Oath Keeper to have breached the building. He admitted that his goal in entering the building was to gather intelligence and to disrupt the final certification of the Electoral College count.The sedition case against the Oath Keepers — one of two separate cases brought against members of the group — was made public in January with the arrest of Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper who went on to earn a law degree at Yale. In an indictment of Mr. Rhodes and 10 of his subordinates, prosecutors fleshed out a detailed portrait of a plot to disrupt the transfer of power from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden, starting shortly after Election Day and continuing even after the Capitol was attacked.Just two days after voting ended, prosecutors say, Mr. Rhodes told several members of his group to refuse to accept Mr. Biden’s victory — by force, if necessary.“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he wrote on the encrypted chat app Signal. “Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.”Throughout November and December, Mr. Rhodes issued an increasingly threatening — and paranoid — series of communiqués, calling on Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and saying he had men stationed outside Washington ready to act on the president’s command. In the days leading up to the storming of the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes went on a gun-buying spree, spending thousands of dollars on military-grade firearms, ammunition and other tactical gear, prosecutors say.While Mr. Rhodes never entered the Capitol, several members of the Oath Keepers did. Some have been accused of seeking to hunt down Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Others have been charged with assaulting police officers.Through their lawyers, those facing charges have repeatedly said they converged on Washington just before Jan. 6 not to attack lawmakers, but instead as part of a security detail tasked with protecting conservative celebrities like Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime ally of Mr. Trump.According to the group’s internal communications, the Oath Keepers sometimes performed security work in the chaotic postelection period with another far-right paramilitary outfit, the 1st Amendment Praetorian.By pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors, Mr. Wilson appeared to put Mr. Rhodes in even more legal jeopardy.He will most likely be able to help the government better understand the composition and mission of the quick reaction forces, which were stationed in Virginia and were said to have been poised to aid the Oath Keepers at the Capitol if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act. According to the new court papers, Mr. Wilson also heard Mr. Rhodes discussing the need on multiple occasions to “engage in force, up to and including lethal violence, in order to stop the transfer of power.”Mr. Wilson joins two other Oath Keepers charged with sedition — Brian Ulrich and Joshua James — in reaching cooperation deals with the government. In the past month or so, prosecutors have also struck similar arrangements with three key members of the Proud Boys, which also played a crucial role in the Capitol attack.When Mr. Ulrich, 44, pleaded guilty last week, he admitted to rushing to the Capitol with five compatriots in golf carts then marching into the building while the police were trying to clear it. In the days leading up to the attack, he also acknowledged sending messages in a private Oath Keepers group chat, saying that “civil war” would be necessary if Mr. Biden took office.“Trump acts now a few hundred radicals die trying to burn down cities,” Mr. Ulrich wrote in the chat on Dec. 19, 2020 — the same day Mr. Trump posted a tweet urging his supporters to go to Washington for a “wild” protest. “Trump sits on his hands Biden wins … millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.”During his own guilty plea in March, Mr. James, the leader of an Alabama Oath Keepers chapter, said he had gone with Mr. Ulrich to the Capitol in a golf cart and assaulted a police officer in the building. After the riot, Mr. James acknowledged helping Mr. Rhodes get out of Washington by taking some of the arms and ammunition that the Oath Keepers leader had stored in his vehicle.Mr. James, 33, has admitted to being involved in meetings with Mr. Rhodes within weeks of the election where he learned about the Oath Keepers’ “plans to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power,” court papers say. He has also acknowledged helping Mr. Rhodes arrange a conference call on the online meeting site GoToMeeting to “facilitate planning” for Jan. 6.While Mr. James served on Mr. Stone’s protective detail before the Capitol was stormed, it remains unclear if he has provided prosecutors with any information about the longtime Trump adviser. According to private group chats seized by the government, the leader of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter, Kelly Meggs, reached a deal to protect Mr. Stone in early January. More

Militia group leader tried to ask Trump to authorize them to stop transfer of powerJustice department alleges Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhodes called unidentified presidential confidant on January 6 to make request Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers militia group leader charged with seditious conspiracy over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, asked an intermediary to get Donald Trump to allow his group to forcibly stop the transfer of power, the justice department has alleged in court papers.The previously unknown phone call with the unidentified individual appears to indicate the Oath Keepers had contacts with at least one person close enough to Trump that Rhodes believed the individual would be a good person to consult with his request.Capitol attack committee requests cooperation from key Republican trioRead moreOnce the Oath Keepers finished storming the Capitol, Rhodes gathered the Oath Keepers leadership at about 5pm and walked down a few blocks to the Phoenix Park hotel in Washington, the justice department said on Wednesday in a statement of offense against Oath Keepers member William Wilson.The group then huddled in a private suite, the justice department said, where Rhodes called an unidentified person on speakerphone and pressed the person to get Trump to authorize them to stop the transfer of power after the Capitol attack had failed to do so.“Wilson heard Rhodes repeatedly implore the individual to tell President Trump to call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power,” the document said. “This individual denied Rhodes’ request to speak directly with President Trump.”The extraordinary phone call indicates that Rhodes believed two important points: first, that he was close enough to the Trump confidant that he could openly discuss such a request, and second, that the confidant was close enough to Trump to be able to pass on the message.James Lee Bright, a lawyer for Rhodes, told the Guardian that he was uncertain about who his client called or whether the call took place.The previously unknown phone call surfaced on Wednesday in charging documents against Wilson, the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Oath Keepers, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding as part of a plea agreement.The statement of offense said that Wilson was involved in efforts to prepare for January 6 with the national leadership of the Oath Keepers, and how Rhodes added Wilson to the “DC OP: Jan 6 21” group chat on the encrypted Signal messaging app.“Rhodes, Wilson, and co-conspirators used this Signal group chat and others to plan for January 6, 2021,” the justice department said.On the morning of the Capitol attack, Rhodes confirmed on the group chat that they had several well equipped QRFs outside DC – a reference to quick reaction forces, that the government said it believes were on standby to deploy to the Capitol with guns and ammunition.At about 2.34pm, the justice department said, Wilson stormed into the Capitol through the upper West Terrace doors as one of the first co-conspirators to breach the building, and by 2.38pm, was helping to pry open the doors to the rotunda from the inside.The seditious conspiracy charge against Wilson – an offense that carries up to 20 years in federal prison – is the latest in a string of recent such indictments to members of the Oath Keepers. Wilson is cooperating with the the justice department in its criminal investigation into January 6.As part of the criminal investigation into January 6, the justice department is also examining connections between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, another militia group, having obtained text messages showing the two groups were in touch before the Capitol attack.The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack also believes the Capitol attack included a coordinated assault perpetrated by the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, the Guardian first reported last month.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS justice systemnewsReuse this content More

When J.R. Majewski emerged as the surprise winner of a Republican House primary election on Tuesday in northern Ohio, Democrats supporting the longtime incumbent congresswoman in the district, Marcy Kaptur, celebrated.That was because Mr. Majewski had beaten out two lower-key Republicans for the nomination, both of whom Democrats worried could have posed serious problems for Ms. Kaptur in the conservative-leaning Ninth Congressional District in a challenging election year for her party.Mr. Majewski is anything but low key.A hulking Air Force veteran who works in the nuclear security field, he first gained attention in Ohio by turning his lawn into a 19,000-square-foot “Trump 2020” sign.During his campaign, he ran one ad showing him carrying an assault-style rifle in which he says, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory,” adding, “If I’ve got to kick down doors, well, that’s just what patriots do.”He also posted a “Let’s Go Brandon” music video on his website in which he raps a verse, warning, “Just try to put a mask on me, you’ll see red, white and blue.”Understand the Ohio and Indiana Primary ElectionsTrump’s Grip: J.D. Vance’s win in Ohio’s G.O.P. Senate primary was a strong affirmation of the former president’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.Vance’s Rise: The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” owes his ascendant political career in large part to Donald J. Trump, whose style he has tried to emulate.Ohio Takeaways: It was a good night for Mr. Trump, and not just because of Mr. Vance. Here’s why.Winners and Losers: A progressive challenger was defeated (again) in Ohio, and a Trump-endorsed Pence (not that one) won in Indiana. These were some of the key results.Mr. Majewski has a shot at winning in November: After the recent redistricting process, Ohio’s Ninth District went from being strongly Democratic to leaning Republican.But as his political profile has risen, he has expressed several conspiratorial and fringe views.In addition to advancing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen — now a common belief among Republicans — and floating doubts that the Capitol riot was driven by Trump supporters, he has expressed sympathy for believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. He said last year that one of their false claims about a prominent Democrat being a pedophile was “plausible.”Mr. Majewski, who did not respond to requests for comment, told a right-wing radio host in January that he had gone to Washington on the day of the Capitol riot, but had not participated in any violence.“I went to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 and I’m proud of it,” he said. “I didn’t do anything illegal. Unfortunately, there were some that did.”He added, invoking a baseless theory that the federal government had provoked the violence, “But, you know, we all know that a lot of that was driven by the F.B.I. and it was a stage show.”Mr. Majewski has also made multiple appearances on a podcast and Twitch livestream belonging to a man who goes by Zak Paine, or Redpill78, who pushes the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory and has talked about his belief that people are killing children to “harvest” a chemical compound from them.Mr. Paine was barred from Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site, this year under the site’s new misinformation policy, but before that he hosted Mr. Majewski and had asked his audience to donate to the candidate’s campaign.On the streams, the two men vape, talk about Mr. Majewski’s campaign goals and take calls from Mr. Paine’s listeners.“He is exactly the type of person that we need to get in Washington, D.C., so that we can supplant these evil cabal criminal actors and actually run our own country,” Mr. Paine said on one stream.Mr. Majewski has denied being a believer in QAnon, which claims, among other outlandish things, that top Democrats and other government officials are part of a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.“I’ve never read any QAnon drop — what they call the ‘Q-Drop,’” he told The Toledo Blade last year.In an interview in September on a far-right podcast, Mr. Majewski was asked about QAnon. He said he had been called a QAnon adherent, but he rejected that characterization.“God bless the folks that believe in the fact that they think that the Democrats are out killing babies and drinking blood and they have underground tunnels in Alaska and there’s earthquakes in Antarctica,” he said.“That’s fine, if you want to believe it, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m never going to tell you anything otherwise. But if you ask me what my opinion is, I don’t think that happens.”When the podcast host asked Mr. Majewski if he thought John Podesta, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, “is a pedophile,” he replied, “I think there’s, again, a lot of information out there that’s compelling that, you know, is plausible that this guy, you know, is a pedophile.”Mr. Podesta has dismissed QAnon believers’ attempts to connect him to their wild theories.“It’s certainly no fun,” he told CNN last year. He went on, “There’s nothing, I think, to do other than to continue to fight back on the lies, and to really take seriously the issues around domestic violent extremism which we saw play out in the Capitol on Jan. 6.” More

J.D. Vance’s come-from-behind victory in the Ohio Republican primary was the first test of Donald Trump’s influence in 2022 election cycle as well as the future of the Republican Party. Spoiler alert: He’s influential.Mr. Vance was endorsed by Mr. Trump, who has also thrown his considerable influence behind candidates for office all the way from U.S. Senate seats down to state-level insurance and safety-fire commissioner.Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.And some Republicans have also worried that some of the outlandish candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump could lose winnable races.Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates.Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first. What is new this cycle is Mr. Trump’s endorsements of so many federal, gubernatorial, state executive and state legislative candidates. Many of these candidates agree with his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s not unreasonable to assume he’s endorsing these local candidates to lay the groundwork to run in 2024. Who better to help shape the outcome of the next election than Republicans who believe the last election was stolen?On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania was best-known as the former star of “The Dr. Oz Show” and is vulnerable to charges of carpetbagging. The biggest primary endorsement flop is likely to come in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is hoping to unseat Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent governor, with former Senator David Perdue, whose distinction in the race seems to consist mostly of repeating Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.There’s one candidate quality Mr. Trump can’t resist: celebrity. In endorsing Dr. Oz, Mr. Trump said, “When you’re on television for 18 years, that’s like a poll, that means people like you.” Celebrity also brings with it an edge when it comes to public performance. As Axios reported, Mr. Trump “puts a ton of stock in debates” and was “impressed” with Mr. Vance’s debate performances. In one debate, he thought “all the G.O.P. hopefuls were terrible except Vance. Trump says Vance ‘has the look.’”Republicans discount Mr. Trump’s instincts at their peril. I’ll admit to scoffing at his eager endorsement of the former football star Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and Republicans like Mitch McConnell were reportedly skeptical of the candidate, concerned about parts of his personal history. Mr. Walker has admitted, for example, to playing Russian roulette several times and to being “accountable” for what his ex-wife has called abusive behavior. (He said that he has struggled with mental illness in the past and wrote about it in his book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder.”)But when I conducted focus groups in Georgia, I immediately realized that Mr. Trump understood something I didn’t: Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, “He keeps winning.” And indeed, Mr. Walker is going to win the Republican Senate primary easily.In Ohio, before Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance in April, Mr. Vance was in third place, polling at about 10 percent, behind Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons, each at about 21 percent. Without the Trump endorsement, Mr. Vance almost certainly languishes at around 10 percent and finishes fourth.The other characteristic of many of those Mr. Trump has endorsed is their unreserved embrace of “Stop the Steal.” It’s apparent why: When you listen to Trump voters — as I’ve discovered conducting regular focus groups with them — their beliefs are crystal clear. A majority believe the 2020 election was stolen and would like to see Mr. Trump run again in 2024, and even those who don’t want him to run still want him to play a big role in the G.O.P.Inevitably, many of Mr. Trump’s chosen will wind up in office. And whenever one of the candidates loses, there will be a horde of Republican political operatives ready to tell reporters — on deep background, of course — how this or that defeat signals that the Republican Party is finally ready to move beyond Mr. Trump.The problem is that I see absolutely no evidence of this being true. We can tally Mr. Trump’s endorsement wins and losses, but we cannot fail to grasp a key point: Mr. Trump has already won.Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy. If Brian Kemp and a handful of the elected officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump survive their primaries, it will be good for democracy. But it will not be sufficient to blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party.For that to happen, scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election. Only sustained defeat delivered by high Democratic turnout and right-leaning, college-educated suburban voters refusing to support these Trumpy candidates will change the current trajectory of the Republican Party.Unfortunately, for reasons historical (the party in power almost always loses seats in a midterm) and practical (inflation, violent crime and more), it’s shaping up to be a difficult election cycle for Democrats. Still, some key opportunities exist for Democrats, especially in swing-state gubernatorial and secretary of state races.Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s win-loss record is likely to be mixed. And that won’t be enough to pull the Republican Party from his grip, not in this cycle. On the existential question, Mr. Trump has already won — for now.Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) is a founder of Defending Democracy Together, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project, the publisher of The Bulwark and the host of “The Focus Group,” a podcast.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