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      US midterms 2022: the key candidates who threaten democracy

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      ExplainerUS midterms 2022: the key candidates who threaten democracy In several states Republican candidates who dispute the 2020 election results are running for positions that would give them control over electionsThere are several races on the ballot this fall that will have profound consequences for American democracy. In several states, Republican candidates who doubt the election 2020 election results, or in some cases actively worked to overturn them, are running for positions in which they would have tremendous influence over how votes are cast and counted. If these candidates win, there is deep concern they could use their offices to spread baseless information about election fraud and try to prevent the rightful winners of elections from being seated.What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?Read moreHere’s a look at some of the key candidates who pose a threat to US democracy:Doug MastrianoMastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was the “point person” for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania as lawyers put together fake slates of electors for Trump, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. He also organized an event with Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election in which speakers spread misinformation about the 2020 election. He hired buses and offered rides to the US Capitol on January 6 and was there himself. He has supported the idea of decertifying the presidential race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, which is not possible.If elected, Mastriano would wield considerable power over elections in Pennsylvania. The state is one of a handful where the secretary of state, the chief election official, is appointed by the governor. Mastriano has said he has already picked someone, but hasn’t said who. The Philadelphia Inquirer has speculated he could pick Toni Shuppe, an activist who has spread voting misinformation and theories linked to the QAnon movement. Mastriano has also said he would decertify election equipment and cause all voters in the state to re-register to vote.Mark FinchemFinchem is the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, which would make him Arizona’s chief election official. Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers, was at the US Capitol on January 6. He introduced a resolution earlier this year to decertify the election. In 2020, he was one of several lawmakers who signed a joint resolution asking Congress to reject electors for Joe Biden.He has said, falsely, that Joe Biden did not win the election in Arizona in 2020, which is false. “It strains credibility,” he told Time magazine in September of Biden’s victory. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” When a reporter asked him whether it was possible that people he didn’t know voted for Biden, Finchem said: “In a fantasy world, anything’s possible.”Kari LakeA former news anchor with no prior political experience, Lake made doubting the 2020 election a centerpiece of her successful bid to win Arizona’s GOP nomination for governor.If she wins the governor’s race, Lake would be one of the statewide officials charged with certifying the results of the presidential election. She has called the 2020 election “corrupt and stolen” and said she would not have certified it. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to require ballots in Arizona to be counted by hand, which experts say is unreliable and costly. She has backed ending mail-in voting, which is widely used in Arizona.Jim MarchantMarchant is the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada. He is linked to the QAnon movement; he has said he was pushed to run for the position by Trump allies and a prominent QAnon influencer. He leads a coalition of far-right candidates seeking to be secretary of state in key battleground states.He lost a 2020 congressional race by more than 16,000 votes, but nonetheless challenged the result by alleging fraud. He has since traveled around the state pressuring counties to get rid of electronic voting equipment and instead only hand-count paper ballots. Such a switch would be unreliable – humans are worse at counting large quantities of things than machines – as well as costly, and take a long time, experts say. He has falsely said voting equipment is “easy” to hack and said that Nevadans’ votes haven’t counted for decades. He has claimed there is a global “cabal” that runs elections in Nevada and elsewhere.Kristina KaramoKaramo, the GOP nominee for secretary of state, became nationally known after the 2020 election when she claimed she witnessed wrongdoing as ballots were being counted in Detroit. The allegations were debunked, but Karamo, a community college professor who has never held elective office, went on to rise in conservative circles. She appeared on Fox News and was a witness at a high-profile legislative hearing about election irregularities. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to try to overturn of the election. She has claimed “egregious crimes” were committed during the 2020 election and said on a podcast: “It’s time for us decent people in the Republican party … to fight back. We cannot have our election stolen,” according to Bridge Michigan.Abortion on the ballot: here are the US states voting on a woman’s right to chooseRead moreShe has also come under fire for comments on her podcast comparing abortion to human sacrifice and opposing the teaching of evolution in schools, according to Bridge Michigan.Matthew DePernoDePerno, a lawyer who has never held elected office, became a celebrity in conservative circles for his work after the 2020 election. He helped lead a lawsuit in Antrim county, in northern Michigan, where a clerk made an error and posted incorrect information on election night. He claimed election equipment was corrupted, and a judge authorized an investigation of the county’s election equipment that became the basis of an inaccurate report that Trump allies used to spread misinformation about the election. A Republican-led inquiry into allegations of fraud found his actions to be “​​misleading and irresponsible”. DePerno has said he would arrest Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat serving as Michigan’s top election official, as well as Dana Nessel, his Democratic opponent in the attorney general’s race.DePerno also faces potential criminal charges for unauthorized access to voting equipment. A special prosecutor is investigating the matter.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansPennsylvaniaArizonaNevadaMichiganexplainersReuse this content More

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      Can Latino voters help Democrats hold Arizona in crucial Senate race?

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      Can Latino voters help Democrats hold Arizona in crucial Senate race? The economy with high inflation is a major issue for voters, but Latinos are not a monolithic bloc and shifted slightly right in 2020, a factor that could decide the race this timeIn her back pocket Ana Diaz carries a smooth grey pebble she calls her “knock knocker”. She uses it to get a loud rap on the front doors of the South Phoenix neighborhood where she is canvassing for the Democrats ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections.It’s 110F (43C) in the early afternoon sun and Diaz is aiming to knock on 80 doors in this largely Latino neighborhood and speak to at least 20 people, encouraging them to vote. Diaz, a Los Angeles-based bartender and Unite Here union member, is a familiar face to many in this working-class area. In her T-shirt that reads WORKER POWER she has been knocking on these doors since 2018.Voters are all talking about the economy. Diaz too worries about inflation, her grocery bill is so high she thinks she may have to stop buying beef. But, for her, the Democrats and good union jobs are the answer. “When we get together, we can make them change,” she said.“Donald Trump called us ‘the crazies.’ Well we kicked him out,” she said as we walked the block, chugging water and looking for shade. Not many people were in. Diaz and her colleagues will be back. “We’re not going to stop,” she said.Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona in the 2020 election, beating Trump with 49.4% of the vote to Trump’s 49.1%. As in neighboring Nevada, campaigners like Diaz who got out the Latino vote were crucial to that victory. It’s going to take every vote this time too for the Democrats to hold the state – where a crucial Senate seat is up for grabs and with it control of Congress.But Democrats enter election season with two major handicaps: the incumbent party historically loses seats in the midterms and the economy – the top issue for voters – is a mess.For the first time since 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, inflation is a major electoral issue. For decades the specter of inflation had seemed vanquished – hovering around 2% in the US. Now the shadow of soaring prices hangs over everything. In Phoenix the inflation rate hit an annual rate of 13% in August, a record for any US city in data going back 20 years. The national average is 8.3%.chartHistory tells us that the economy is usually the deciding factor in US elections. But whose economy? If there is one word that economists are using to describe the current state of the US economy, it is “weird”. Inflation is at a 40-year high and yet unemployment is at a 50-year low. There were more than 10m job openings in July in the US, over one and half jobs for every person currently looking for work. Interest rates are rising sharply, the once white-hot housing market looks like it could fall, loan rates are rising, and yet consumers are still spending.Phoenix maps all the contradictory signals the economy is sending. The city’s long economic boom continues. About 200 new residents have moved there every day in recent years, attracted by a lower cost of living and by businesses moving for less regulation and lower taxes. It’s not enough. The construction industry alone needs to add 265,000 qualified workers. Healthcare, financial services, all are struggling to fill vacancies.That pressure cooker environment has led to soaring rents in the city – up 46% over the year – but still lower than many other US cities. The situation is particularly hard for lower wage workers and long-term residents now competing with more moneyed migrants from nearby California and elsewhere. For many, wages are failing to keep up with the cost of living crisis as inflation pushes up the price of everything from gas and food to construction costs.“As cross currents buffet the Arizona economy, it looks different depending on the lens used to view it,” University of Arizona professor George Hammond wrote in his latest report on the state of the state. Hammond is expecting slower growth in 2022 and 2023, which could help with costs but also cost people their jobs. Over the long term, he expects Arizona’s economy will still outpace the rest of the country.Diaz believes the Democrats are best placed to navigate these strange seas. “People are like ‘I really don’t care who gets in.’ But you should. Your streets need cleaning, you have no lights, your alleys are full of trash, we have a problem with homelessness. If we don’t choose the right people to snake these changes, it’s not going to happen,” she says.In Scottsdale, Phoenix’s affluent neighbor that is rapidly being absorbed by Phoenix’s sprawl, others have different views. “Biden is a nut,” says Jim Baumann, 60, shopping in Whole Food in his orange Harley Davidson T-shirt. “He screwed this up.” The retiree’s grocery bill now averages $300 to $350 a month he says, up from $200 before inflation bit. “I didn’t like Trump’s mouth but he was better than Biden.”Like so many other issues in the US, views on the economy are fractured, filtered by political and personal views and not always in line with today’s party doctrine.Immigration is a major issue for Republicans, and one that has big economic consequences in the area. Kari Lake, the Trump-backed candidate for governor, has said the Central American migrants now entering the US “could be terrorists, they could be murderers and they are most likely hardcore criminals”. Blake Masters, running for Senate, has accused Democrats of being pro-immigration to “change the demographics of our country”. Privately some local, Republican-leaning, business leaders are embarrassed by the rhetoric and see immigration reform as essential to solving their worker shortages. At the same time Latino voters are not a monolithic bloc and shifted slightly right in 2020, a factor that could decide the race this time.Then there is abortion. Few decisions have greater economic consequences than the decision whether or not to have a child. In recent elections Republicans have paid the price for the supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional protection of abortion even in deep red states like Kansas. Last month an Arizona judge revived a highly restrictive law, that dates back to 1864, banning almost all abortions. Polls show the majority of Arizonans (Republicans and independents included) are in favor of keeping abortion legal in the state in most cases.All this complexity is exacerbated by the weirding of the economy. “Strange would be an understatement,” said Greg Ayres, president of Corbins and chief operating officer of Nox Group, construction companies that specialise in water and waste management, data centers and work for the semi conductor industry.Prices have soared for the construction industry, talent is in short supply, wages are rising and pandemic-related supply chain issues are still rippling through and causing delays. “Everything is so volatile,” he said. “Almost every project is over budget.” And yet business is good. His biggest immediate issue is finding enough people for all the projects he has on the go.The company employs 750 people at present, up from 650 before the pandemic. He wouldd like to be at 1,000 within the year. “But it’s really competitive,” Ayres said.To attract workers Corbin has upped its training programs, benefits and wages. Across the street from his office is a cavernous gym, recreation and health center with a full-time trainer on staff, added to attract and retain talent. Salaries are rising too. With overtime, Ayres said, a mid-twenties journeyman could make over $104,000 a year. The company will train up as many competent workers as it can get its hands on, he says.It’s the same story across the Valley of the Sun, said Todd Sanders, president of business lobby group the Greater Phoenix Chamber in 2009. “It’s almost like we are defying the laws of physics,” he said. The area is suffering from high inflation like the rest of the county but companies are still moving there in large numbers, he said. “By and large we are seeing an economy that is still very strong. It’s an interesting time.”For some low-wage workers buffeted by these economic riptides “interesting” doesn’t even begin to describe it.People know Jarvis Johnson in Phoenix. He went viral for his high-octane audition on reality show So You Think You Can Dance and again for his dedication to Black Friday bargain shopping. His friends describe him as a “ball of energy” and an “eternal optimist”. But when I caught up with him between jobs he seemed tired. It’s not surprising.Johnson, 32, has been working three jobs in order to support his wife and his three young children. His day starts at 3.30am at a Covid testing center, at 11am he starts his shift at a senior living center. Often he isn’t home before at 8pm. He also puts in shifts at a local gas station and is hoping to increase his hours there now that the Covid work is tapering off.All of the jobs pay better than Arizona’s minimum wage of $12,80 an hour. The testing job paid $25 an hour during the worst of the pandemic and at one point Johnson was working there 40 hours a week. But even then, his wages were barely keeping up with the cost of living.Two years ago when he moved into his apartment, he was paying $960 a month in rent. Now it’s close to $1,500. Gas prices have fallen in Arizona, as they have across the US, but are still about $4.90 a gallon, up from just over $3 a year ago. The couple have two cars and it costs $160 to fill them. Food is more expensive. His wife could go to work but daycare costs would wipe out her wages. “It’s crazy. Everything has got more expensive,” he said.“It’s hard. It’s hard right now. I’m just trying to keep my head up and not let my kids see I’m struggling,” he said. “I have to work my butt off to make it. I’m getting by but it’s still not enough.”Biden has promised a fairer, more equitable economy. His administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act which will increase taxes on the US’s largest companies and cut prescription drug prices. He’s also pouring money into solar energy and silicon chip production – both of which will benefit Arizonans. But will it be enough to persuade voters he really has a plan to steer them through this strange economic landscape?Johnson says he will vote Democrat but he doesn’t believe either party has the solution. “They can’t do nothing for me, these employers, they need to pay their people,” he says. “People are struggling.”He wants to start his own business, a hot dog food truck. “I think I’d make more money working for myself, to be honest,” he said. At the moment he has about $1,000 saved but it’s not enough and he’s worried that an incident, a broken car or worse, could wipe out his savings. “Anything can happen,” he said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022ArizonaUS politicsUS economyInflationEconomicsJoe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Five Takeaways From the Arizona Senate Debate

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      PHOENIX — It was a battle over whether Arizona is still the conservative-leaning state of Barry Goldwater and John McCain.Senator Mark Kelly faced his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, on Thursday in the first and only debate of the race that will help decide whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate, which they hold by the barest of margins. Mr. Kelly repeatedly emphasized his independent image, referring frequently to his disagreements with members of his own party, including President Biden.The two men, who have spent months attacking each other on issues including abortion, border security, inflation and election integrity, were also joined by Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, who has not reached double digits in polls.The debate did little to cover new ground on the most contentious issues, but the moderator asked pointed, direct questions in a bid to force the candidates to clarify their sometimes murky positions. Mr. Masters tried to straddle the line between his previous hard-line stances and his more recently adopted softer tone — but continued to largely play to his base, even if it required some winks and a nod or two.Abortion becomes a flash point.Abortion has vaulted to the front of many voters’ minds in Arizona, not just after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this June, but because a state judge revived a total ban on abortions from 1864 that had sat dormant for decades. Abortions in the state, already on shaky ground, halted abruptly.So on Thursday, each candidate tried to paint the other as an abortion extremist. Mr. Kelly pointed to statements where Mr. Masters had called abortion “demonic,” and said Mr. Masters wanted to punish doctors and ban abortions in cases of rape.Mr. Masters said he was proud to call himself one of the most pro-life candidates running for Senate, and quickly leveled a misleading accusation that Mr. Kelly supported late-term abortions up until the moment of birth. In reality, abortions late in pregnancy are rare and often occur because of a devastating health problem in an otherwise wanted pregnancy.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.It’s always 2020 in Arizona.Faced with a direct question about whether Mr. Masters believed the 2020 vote was stolen, he seemed to blink. He talked of collusion between tech companies, the news media and F.B.I. to suppress negative news about President Biden’s son Hunter.“But not vote-counting, not election results?” asked the moderator, Ted Simons, a host on the Arizona PBS station.“Yeah, I haven’t seen evidence of that,” Mr. Masters replied.During the Republican primary, Mr. Masters won an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump and earned legions of conservative followers by fanning the falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen and Mr. Trump was its rightful winner.But some of that language has been scrubbed from his campaign website since Mr. Masters entered the general election, where such conspiracy theories don’t play as well with independent voters, who either trust Arizona’s popular mail-in voting systems or simply want to move on.Mr. Kelly said Mr. Masters’s peddling of “conspiracy theories” was undermining American democracy.“I’m worried about what’s going to happen here in this election and 2024,” he said. “We could wind up in a situation where the wheels come off of our democracy.”Both see a crisis at the southern border.Political veterans in Arizona believe that inflation and the southern border are Republicans’ two strongest issues, and Mr. Masters hammered both early and often. He painted a Dante-esque picture of the border — beset with cartels, overflowing with fentanyl and wide-open for millions of “illegals” to sweep through.“Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, they laid out the welcome mat,” Mr. Masters said. “They surrendered our southern border. They’ve given it up to the Mexican drug cartels.”Crossings at the southern border have surged to their highest levels in decades as migrants flee gangs and political and economic turmoil in Venezuela, Central America and elsewhere. Many of those migrants are turning themselves directly over to American authorities to plead their cases in immigration courts.Mr. Kelly called the border “a mess” of chaos and crisis, but said he had worked to get money for more Border Patrol agents and technology to screen for drugs at ports of entry.Don’t California my Arizona.Like other Republicans in the Southwest, Mr. Masters frequently uses California as a kind of foil, making the state a stand-in for liberalism gone wild. And one reliable way to rile residents in other parts of the West? Bring up the notion that the nation’s most populous state — which is in a near constant drought — is taking too much water from the Colorado River.“I’m tired of Senator Kelly acting like the third senator from California,” Mr. Masters said onstage Thursday, echoing a refrain he has made throughout the campaign. “We need someone in there with sharp elbows who’s going to fight for our water.”“Why is California even putting its straw into the Colorado River?” he added, arguing that the state should instead rely on desalination and the Pacific Ocean.Left unsaid was the more basic implied attack: Mr. Masters is the protector of the state; Mr. Kelly is merely a liberal in disguise.A third-party candidate for a third of voters?The vast majority of voters would have trouble naming Mr. Victor — he has struggled to raise money or capture media attention. But he held his ground Thursday night, insisting that the moderator allow him to answer all the same questions as Mr. Kelly and Mr. Masters.For the most part, Mr. Victor took a predictable Libertarian pox-on-both-their-houses approach, and portrayed himself as the outsider who would not be beholden to either President Biden or Mr. Trump. And there could be a receptive audience for that message: Roughly a third of Arizona’s voters are not registered as Republicans or Democrats, and many view themselves as moderates or describe themselves as leaning libertarian.Mr. Victor could easily attract enough voters to act as a kind of spoiler for Mr. Masters, denying him just enough votes to push Mr. Kelly over the edge. Indeed, at several points during the debate, Mr. Victor attacked Mr. Masters for waffling on his stances and leaped to the defense of Mr. Kelly. More

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      How to Watch Arizona Senate Debate With Kelly and Masters Tonight

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

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      In Arizona Governor’s Race, a Democrat Runs on Abortion

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      PHOENIX — Here was a debate that Katie Hobbs wanted to have.For weeks, critics heckled Ms. Hobbs as a “coward” and “chicken” for refusing to share a debate stage with her combative, election-denying Republican rival in the race to become Arizona’s next governor. Some fellow Democrats fretted it was a dodge that risked alienating undecided voters who could tip the razor-thin race.Then last Friday, a judge upended the campaign by resurrecting an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions across Arizona, a ruling made possible by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And Ms. Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, seized what Democrats in this battleground state hoped would become a galvanizing moment.She scrapped a campaign event and scrambled to arrange a news conference outside the office of the Republican state attorney general who had argued to reimpose the Old West-era abortion law. She vowed to repeal the ban and taunted Republicans for their muted responses to the abrupt halt of all abortions across Arizona.She also spoke in starkly personal terms about how she had once had a miscarriage, and had needed a surgical procedure now being denied to women in states that have outlawed abortion. Ms. Hobbs says any abortion decisions should “rest solely between a woman and her doctor, not the government.”“It’s difficult,” Ms. Hobbs said later about sharing her own story. “But there’s too much at stake in this election not to talk about that.”The race for an open governor’s seat in Arizona has swelled into a bruising struggle over the evolving political identity of a traditionally conservative state that sends Democrats to Washington, while keeping Republicans in power at home.Abortion rights supporters protest in Phoenix, after the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.Joel Angel Juarez/USA Today Network/Via ReutersThe question now is whether Arizona will move left with Ms. Hobbs, a soft-spoken social worker and state politician, or veer deeper into MAGA territory by electing Kari Lake, a former local news anchor running on militarizing the nation’s southwestern border and amplifying falsehoods about the 2020 election.“I really think this is a battle between two competing narratives,” said Kirk Adams, a Republican former speaker of the Arizona House and former chief of staff for the outgoing Republican governor, Doug Ducey. “Abortion rights and saving democracy on one hand and inflation and border security and a stolen election on the other.”As secretary of state during the 2020 presidential election, Ms. Hobbs became a hero to Democrats for defending Arizona’s voting system from an onslaught of false accusations of fraud. She vaulted to the front of the Democratic primary for governor while also becoming a target of death threats and protests.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.Her supporters cast the race against Ms. Lake as “sanity versus chaos,” and said Ms. Hobbs would take a bipartisan approach to tackling Arizona’s water shortages, meager school funding and spiraling housing costs. But even some supporters doubt whether her mild manner can stand up to Lake’s bolder one.“I don’t think she has done as well as she should have,” said Claudia Underwood, a retired lawyer and Democrat in a corner of Phoenix with enviable views of Camelback Mountain, the city’s most famous peak. “She is not coming across as strong as I think she should.”Ms. Lake has spent the race lobbing verbal grenades at Ms. Hobbs with a delivery honed during years anchoring local Fox newscasts. She has called for Ms. Hobbs to be jailed and needles her as “Katie.” Ms. Hobbs uses Ms. Lake’s full name or formally calls her “my opponent.”While Ms. Lake has given speeches in front of roaring crowds at Trump rallies, Ms. Hobbs has run a campaign centered on smaller events with local and tribal leaders and student organizers, and house parties with supporters.Supporters say she is genuine and caring, but even on the most comfortable terrain, she sometimes sticks to the script. At a recent roundtable with abortion-rights supporters, she hewed largely to prepared statements.“She’s not going to get up at a rally like Ms. Lake does and get the crowd all stirred up,” said State Senator Lela Alston, a Democrat who once ran with Ms. Hobbs and U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema for their state legislative seats. “She’s much more thoughtful and available to people all over the state. I’m hoping the message gets out.”Arizona Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake greets supporters at a rally in Tucson.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA handful of Democrats running for state legislative races said they had yet to get an invitation to campaign with her or appear together at an event. By contrast, Ms. Lake had two Republican state legislative candidates introduce themselves before she appeared at a friendly question-and-answer session with supporters.“We have a candidate who isn’t out campaigning, so it’s hard to break through and keep those issues relevant if there’s nobody out there talking about them,” said Marco Lopez, Ms. Hobbs’s Democratic primary opponent.Billy Grant, a consultant for Ms. Lake, has said that her campaign has focused on showing the clear contrasts between the two candidates and that she considered the border to be the top issue for voters in Arizona.“Katie Hobbs was convinced she could win with the Joe Biden strategy of just running TV ads and hiding out from the public,” he said. “That is just not going to happen.”Other Democrats argued Ms. Hobbs was right in running her own campaign and declining to debate an opponent who wrongly insists the 2020 election was stolen. The Republican nominees for Arizona’s most powerful statewide office this November have all made repeated false claims that the 2020 vote was fraudulent and rightfully won by Mr. Trump.Racism and discrimination have also come up in uncomfortable ways for Ms. Hobbs. In November, a jury awarded $2.75 million to a Black staff member who worked under Ms. Hobbs in the State Senate, and who was fired in 2015 after complaining about her unequal pay.The former staffer, Talonya Adams, has become a vocal critic of Ms. Hobbs, and Ms. Lake has used the lawsuit to call Ms. Hobbs a “convicted racist.” Ms. Hobbs released a statement apologizing to Ms. Adams.Now, about two weeks before ballots are mailed out, interviews with voters across Arizona suggest that people’s priorities are splintered. While many Democrats cite abortion and democracy as top concerns, others who are just now tuning into the race say they are most worried about soaring food and rent costs and an increase in migrants attempting to cross Arizona’s southern border.Jon Hernandez, 22, who says he is undecided but leaning toward voting for Ms. Lake, has spent the summer living at home with his parents and doing the “soul draining” work of a failed job hunt. He said he supported the Clinton-era pitch that abortion should be legal, safe and rare. But he said abortion was a lesser concern.“It’s nowhere near as important,” he said. “If we don’t get control of rampant inflation and gas prices, that spells disaster for much more of the population. It’s like tiers of priorities.”In an interview, Ms. Hobbs made a point of criticizing Ms. Lake’s anti-abortion stance as “extreme and out of touch.” Ms. Lake has called the 1864 ban “a great law” and has said she would support further anti-abortion measures as governor.Kari Lake supporters gather in Tucson.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesNew polls of the governor’s race — a virtual dead heat — suggest that those laws are out of step with an electorate that is getting younger, increasingly Latino and pulling a traditionally conservative state closer to the political center.On her website, Ms. Lake pledges to support all forms of birth control, as well as state government programs to help pregnant mothers seek alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and provide resources for parental support and guidance. She also says fathers must be “held accountable.”Some 90 percent of Arizona voters said abortion should always be legal, or should be legal in some circumstances, according to a survey conducted in early September by the Phoenix-based firm OH Predictive Insights. And 45 percent said that a candidate’s stance on abortion had a strong impact on their vote.“It’s just scary,” said Andrea Luna Cervantes, a reproductive-rights activist in Phoenix. “Because you’re a woman, because you’re a person who can give birth, your rights can be just stripped.”Ms. Cervantes said she got involved in abortion-rights activism after seeing people she knew face pregnancies with few resources or options other than carrying them to term. She said she planned to vote for Ms. Hobbs, but some family members back in Yuma were unconvinced.The ban struck a chord with some Indigenous voters, who make up 5 percent of the state’s population. Anjeanette Laban, a member of the Hopi Tribe, said reproductive health care was already dangerously scarce and distant. She saw the end of abortion access in Arizona as another colonial oppression. She said that she knew little about the candidates running, but that the abortion issue would determine her vote.“They’re still trying to dictate what we can do, how they can limit us,” she said.In recent weeks, Ms. Hobbs has been leaning into the issue of abortion in email blasts to supporters, and the Arizona Democratic Party has released a new television ad slamming Ms. Lake for saying she did not believe abortion should be legal.“Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Arizona has reverted back to a 100-year-old law that criminalizes abortion, and Kari Lake — she supports that,” Chris Nanos, the Pima County sheriff, says in the ad.After the abortion ban ruling, Ms. Lake called Ms. Hobbs “radical” on the issue during an interview on Fox News. On Monday, she emailed supporters keeping up her critique of Ms. Hobbs on immigration. The subject line was “Open Borders Katie.” More

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      Which Midterm Polls Should We Be Taking With a Grain of Salt?

      by

      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, to discuss the state of polling and of Democratic anxiety about polls ahead of the midterms.Frank Bruni: Amy, Patrick, as if the people over at Politico knew that the three of us would be huddling to discuss polling, it just published a long article about the midterms with the gloomy, spooky headline “Pollsters Fear They’re Blowing It Again in 2022.”Do you two fear that pollsters are blowing it again in 2022?Patrick Ruffini: It’s certainly possible that they could. The best evidence we have so far that something might be afoot comes from The Times’s own Nate Cohn, who finds that some of the Democratic overperformances seem to be coming in states that saw large polling errors in 2016 and 2020.Amy Walter: I do worry that we are asking more from polling than it is able to provide. Many competitive Senate races are in states — like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that Joe Biden won by supernarrow margins in 2020. The reality is that they are going to be very close again. And so an error of just three to four points is the difference between Democratic and Republican control of the Senate.Ruffini: This also doesn’t mean we can predict that polls will miss in any given direction. But it does suggest taking polls in states like Ohio, which Donald Trump won comfortably but where the Republican J.D. Vance is tied or slightly behind, with a grain of salt.Bruni: So what would you say specifically to Democrats? Are they getting their hopes up — again — in a reckless fashion?Walter: Democrats are definitely suffering from political PTSD. After 2016 and 2020, I don’t think Democrats are getting their hopes up. In fact, the ones I talk with are hoping for the best but not expecting such.Ruffini: In any election, you have the polls themselves, and then you have the polls as filtered through the partisan media environment. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. On Twitter, there’s a huge incentive to hype individual polling results that are good for your side while ignoring the average. I don’t expect this to let up, because maintaining this hype is important for low-dollar fund-raising. But I do think this has led to a perhaps exaggerated sense of Democratic optimism.Bruni: Great point, Patrick — in these fractured and hyperpartisan times of information curation, polls aren’t so much sets of numbers as they are Rorschachs.But I want to pick up on something else that you said — “polls will miss in any given direction” — to ask why the worry seems only to be about overstatement of Democratic support and prospects. Is it possible that the error could be in the other direction and we are understating Republican problems and worries?Ruffini: In politics, we always tend to fight the last war. Historically, polling misses have been pretty random, happening about equally on both sides. But the last big example of them missing in a pro-Republican direction was 2012. The more recent examples stick in our minds, 2020 specifically, which was actually worse in percentage terms than 2016.Walter: Patrick’s point about the last war is so important. This is especially true when we are living in a time when we have little overlap with people from different political tribes. The two sides have very little appreciation for what motivates, interests or worries the other side, so the two sides over- or underestimate each other a lot.As our politics continue to break along educational attainment — those who have a college degree are increasingly more Democratic-leaning, those with less education increasingly more Republican-leaning — polls are likely to overstate the Democratic advantage, since we know that there’s a really clear connection between civic voting behavior and education levels.Ruffini: And we may be missing a certain kind of Trump voter, who may not be answering polls out of a distrust for the media, polling and institutions generally.Bruni: Regarding 2016 and 2020, Trump was on the ballot both of those years. He’s not — um, technically — this time around. So is there a greater possibility of accuracy, of a repeat of 2018, when polling came closer to the mark?Ruffini: The frustrating thing about all of this is that we just don’t have a very good sample size to answer this. In polls, that’s called an n size, like n = 1,000 registered voters. There have been n = 2 elections where Trump has been on the ballot and n = 1 midterm election in the Trump era. That’s not a lot.Bruni: We’ve mentioned 2016 and 2020 versus 2018. Are there reasons to believe that none of those points of reference are all that illuminating — that 2022 is entirely its own cat, with its own inimitable wrinkles? There are cats that have wrinkles, right? I’m a dog guy, but I feel certain that I’ve seen shar-pei-style cats in pictures.Walter: First, let’s be clear. Dogs are the best. So let’s change this to “Is this an entirely different breed?”I’m a big believer in the aphorism that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.Ruffini: Right. Every election is different, and seeing each new election through the lens of the previous election is usually a bad analytical strategy.Walter: But there are important fundamentals that can’t be dismissed. Midterms are about the party in charge. It is hard to make a midterm election about the out-party — the party not in charge — especially when Democrats control not just the White House but the House and Senate as well.However, the combination of overturning Roe v. Wade plus the ubiquitous presence of Trump has indeed made the out-party — the G.O.P. — a key element of this election. To me, the question is whether that focus on the stuff the Republicans are doing and have done is enough to counter frustration with the Democrats.Ruffini: 2022 is unique in that it’s a midterm cycle where both sides have reasons to be energized — Republicans by running against an unpopular president in a time of high economic uncertainty and Democrats by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. It’s really unique in the sweep of midterm elections historically. To the extent there is still an energized Republican base, polls could miss if they aren’t capturing this new kind of non-college, low-turnout voter that Trump brought into the process.Bruni: Patrick, this one’s for you, as you’re the one among us who’s actually in the polling business. In the context of Amy’s terrific observation about education levels and the Democratic Party and who’s more readily responsive to pollsters, what are you and what is your firm doing to make sure you reach and sample enough Republican and Trump-inclined voters?Ruffini: That’s a great question. Nearly all of our polls are off the voter file, which means we have a much larger set of variables — like voting history and partisan primary participation — to weight on than you might typically see in a media poll (with the exception of the Times/Siena polls, which do a great job in this regard). We’ve developed targets for the right number of college or non-college voters among likely voters in each congressional district. We’re also making sure that our samples have the right proportions of people who have registered with either party or have participated in a specific party’s primary before.But none of this is a silver bullet. After 2016, pollsters figured out we needed to weight on education. In 2020 we weighted on education — and we got a worse polling error. All the correct weighting decisions won’t matter if the non-college or low-turnout voter you’re getting to take surveys isn’t representative of those people who will actually show up to vote.Bruni: Does the taking of polls and the reporting on polls and the consciousness of polls inevitably queer what would have happened in their absence? I will go to my grave believing that if so many voters hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton had victory in the bag, she would have won. Some 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the margin of her Electoral College loss — are easily accounted for by overconfident, complacent Clinton supporters.Walter: In 2016, there were two key groups of people that determined the election. Those who never liked Clinton and those who disliked Trump and Clinton equally. At the end, those who disliked both equally broke overwhelmingly for Trump. And, those Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t like her at all were never fully convinced that she was a worthy candidate.Ruffini: I don’t worry about this too much since the people most likely to be paying attention to the daily movement of the polls are people who are 100 percent sure to vote. It can also work in the other direction. If the polls are showing a race in a red or blue state is close, that can motivate a majority of the party’s voters to get out and vote, and that might be why close races in those states usually resolve to the state fundamentals.Bruni: Evaluate the news media in all of this, and be brutal if you like. For as long as I’ve been a reporter, I’ve listened to news leaders say our political coverage should be less attentive to polls. It remains plenty attentive to polls. Should we reform? Is there any hope of that? Does it matter?Ruffini: I don’t think there’s any hope of this getting better, and that’s not the media’s fault. It’s the fault of readers (sorry, readers!) who have an insatiable appetite for staring at the scoreboard.Walter: We do pay too much attention to polls, but polls are the tool we have to capture the opinions of an incredibly diverse society. A reporter could go knock on 3,000 doors and miss a lot because they weren’t able to get the kind of cross-section of voters a poll does.Ruffini: Where I do hope the media gets better is in conducting more polls the way campaigns conduct them, which are not mostly about who is winning but showing a candidate how to win.In those polls, we test the impact of messages on the electorate and show how their standing moved as a result. It’s possible to do this in a balanced way, and it would be illuminating for readers to see, starting with “Here’s where the race stands today, but here’s the impact of this Democratic attack or this Republican response,” etc.Bruni: Let’s finish with a lightning round. Please answer these quickly and in a sentence or less, starting with this: Which issue will ultimately have greater effect, even if just by a bit, in the outcome of the midterms — abortion or gas prices?Walter: Abortion. Only because gas prices are linked to overall economic worries.Ruffini: Gas prices, because they’re a microcosm about concerns about inflation. When we asked voters a head-to-head about what’s more important to their vote, reducing inflation comes out ahead of protecting abortion rights by 67 to 29 percent.Bruni: Which of the competitive Senate races will have an outcome that’s most tightly tethered to — and thus most indicative of — the country’s mood and leanings right now?Walter: Arizona and Georgia were the two closest races for Senate and president in 2020. They should both be indicative. But Georgia is much closer because the G.O.P. candidate, Herschel Walker, while he’s still got some problems, has much less baggage and much better name recognition than the G.O.P. candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.Ruffini: If Republicans are going to flip the Senate, Georgia is most likely to be the tipping-point state.Bruni: If there’s a Senate upset, which race is it? Who’s the unpredicted victor?Walter: For Republicans, it would be Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. They’ve argued that the incumbent, Senator Maggie Hassan, has low approval ratings and is very weak. It would be an upset because Bolduc is a flawed candidate with very little money or history of strong fund-raising.Ruffini: I’d agree about New Hampshire. The polling has shown a single-digit race. Republicans are also hoping they can execute a bit of a sneak attack in Colorado with Joe O’Dea, though the state fundamentals look more challenging.Bruni: You (hypothetically) have to place a bet with serious money on the line. Is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or “other”?Walter: It’s always a safer bet to pick “other.” One of the most difficult things to do in politics is what DeSantis is trying to do: not just to upend someone like Trump but to remain a front-runner for another year-plus.Ruffini: I’d place some money on DeSantis and some on “other.” DeSantis is in a strong position right now, relative to the other non-Trumps, but he hasn’t taken many punches. And Trump’s position is soft for a former president who’s supposedly loved by the base and who has remained in the fray. Time has not been his friend. About as many Republicans in the ABC/Washington Post poll this weekend said they didn’t want him to run as did.Bruni: Same deal with the Democratic presidential nominee — but don’t be safe. Live large. To the daredevil go the spoils. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or “other”?Walter: History tells us that Biden will run. If he doesn’t, history tells us that it will be Harris. But I feel very uncomfortable with either answer right now.Ruffini: “Other.” Our own polling shows Biden in a weaker position for renomination than Trump and Democrats less sure about who the alternative would be if he doesn’t run. I also think we’re underestimating the possibility that he doesn’t run at the age of 81.Bruni: OK, final question. Name a politician, on either side of the aisle, who has not yet been mentioned in our conversation but whose future is much brighter than most people realize.Walter: If you talk to Republicans, Representative Patrick McHenry is someone they see as perhaps the next leader for the party. There’s a lot of focus on Kevin McCarthy now, but many people see McHenry as a speaker in waiting.Ruffini: He’s stayed out of the presidential conversation (probably wisely until Trump has passed from the scene), but I think Dan Crenshaw remains an enormously compelling future leader for the G.O.P. Also in Texas, should we see Republicans capitalize on their gains with Hispanic voters and take at least one seat in the Rio Grande Valley, one of those candidates — Mayra Flores, Monica De La Cruz or Cassy Garcia — will easily be in the conversation for statewide office.Bruni: Thank you, both. I just took a poll, and 90 percent of respondents said they’d want to read your thoughts at twice this length. Then again, the margin of error was plus or minus 50 percent, and I’m not sure I sampled enough rural voters in the West.Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) is a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter and can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) is a co-founder of the Republican research firm Echelon Insights. Amy Walter (@amyewalter) is the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Blake Masters Strains to Win Over Arizona’s Independent Voters

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      PHOENIX — Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, has brightened the music and tone of his television ads. He has erased from his website some of his most emphatically right-wing stances on immigration, abortion and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.But on a recent afternoon in Scottsdale, an affluent Phoenix suburb, Kate Feo, a 40-year-old independent voter, was not buying the shift.“I just don’t think he has an opinion on much until he is pressed for it, and then he kind of just comes up with whatever is popular at the moment,” she said as she strolled through a park with her three young children. She called Mr. Masters “a flip-flopper.”Skepticism from voters in the political center is emerging as a stubborn problem for Mr. Masters as he tries to win what has become an underdog race against Senator Mark Kelly, a moderate Democrat who leads in the polls of one of the country’s most important midterm contests.Independents and voters unaffiliated with either major party matter more in Arizona than in nearly any other battleground state. After roughly tripling in number over the past three decades to 1.4 million, they have helped push the state from reliably red to tossup, and now make up about a third of the voting population. And with early voting beginning in two weeks, it is among this critical electoral bloc that Mr. Masters appears to be struggling the most.Polls show Mr. Kelly leading his rival comfortably among independents: In a survey released this week by The Arizona Republic and Suffolk University, he was ahead by 51 percent to 36 percent. Another September survey, by the Phoenix firm OH Predictive Insights, found that more than half of independents had a negative view of Mr. Masters, and that only 35 percent saw him favorably.In nearly a dozen interviews in Phoenix and Tucson, as well as in the purplish Phoenix suburbs of Arcadia, Chandler and Scottsdale, most independent voters expressed views of Mr. Masters as inauthentic, slippery on the issues and not truly dedicated to Arizona.“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” said Thomas Budinger, 26, an assistant manager at a store in a Tucson mall. A few other independents scrunched their noses or rolled their eyes at the mention of the candidate’s name.Mr. Masters, 36, a venture capitalist and political newcomer once seen as a rising far-right figure, persuaded Republican voters in Arizona to nominate him with help from the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump and the hefty financial backing of Peter Thiel, his billionaire former boss. But now he must win over the kinds of ticket-splitters, moderates and independents who powered the 2018 victories of Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat.Kate Feo, 40, in Scottsdale, Ariz., said of Mr. Masters, “I just don’t think he has an opinion on much until he is pressed for it.”Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. Masters’s allies still see a path to victory in a state where Trump loyalists have taken over the Republican Party machinery and energized base voters in recent years, fueling prolonged efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.In another marquee Arizona race, Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, is trying the opposite strategy from Mr. Masters, relentlessly leaning into her far-right persona and Trump-aligned message. Ms. Lake, a former TV news anchor, is seen as more charismatic than Mr. Masters, and her Democratic opponent as weaker than Mr. Kelly, but Ms. Lake appears to have tapped into a powerful Republican strain.Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant and former Arizona state legislator, said that reawakened movement could be just enough to carry Mr. Masters over the finish line. The more relevant question, he said, might not be, “Where are independents?” but instead, “How big is the ‘America First’ phenomenon?”Mr. Masters’s campaign declined requests for comment. In interviews, he has downplayed or denied any change in his approach to win over moderate and independent voters.Asked by Laura Ingraham of Fox News this month whether he had tweaked his view on abortion, he replied: “More propaganda. I’ve been consistent throughout the whole primary.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Masters entered Arizona politics after years of working with Silicon Valley start-ups, rising to become the president of Mr. Thiel’s foundation and the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, the billionaire’s investment firm. He received $15 million from his former boss as he campaigned in the Republican primary, portraying himself as an internet-savvy insurgent and playing to xenophobic and racist fears among some base voters.In some of Mr. Masters’s earliest television and digital ads, he claimed without evidence that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election and called for a militarization of the United States’ border with Mexico. His immigration ads had a video game-like quality, featuring ominous music, stark desert backdrops and faceless masses of migrants.On his website, as in speeches and podcasts, he echoed a sanitized version of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that Democrats were trying to bring more immigrants into the country to change its demographics and give the party an edge.But since the Aug. 3 primary, Mr. Masters has tried to soften his tone, seeking to focus his bid on inflation, crime and illegal immigration. Before the primary, three of the four television ads that were paid for by his campaign captured him alone in the desert. Since then, two of his campaign’s three ads have featured his wife and children.His website has also undergone a cleanup: A line about Democrats purportedly importing immigrant voters has been removed, and he was one of several Republicans to take down false claims of a rigged 2020 election. His site deleted mentions of his support for some of the most stringent abortion restrictions, including “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed.”A person close to Mr. Masters told CNN last month that the candidate wanted his website to be seen as a “living document,” and he told the radio station KTAR News this month that any changes to it reflected “a new way that we’re talking about something, but it’s not a backtrack or anything like that.”Mr. Masters, who often appears with Ms. Lake, has not completely abandoned his combative instincts. He recently drew criticism for describing Vice President Kamala Harris as a beneficiary of an “affirmative action regime.” This month, he declined to commit to accepting this year’s election results.Mr. Masters’s supporters are unfazed by his attempts at moderation. They still see him as a potential bulwark against President Biden and what they describe as “radical” Democrats who want to regulate guns, open the border and take control away from parents in schools.At her home in Arcadia recently, Barbara Bandura, 42, said her support for Mr. Masters came down to her stances against abortion and new gun safety laws. “He’s not Mark Kelly,” she said, adding that she did not entirely believe news reports that Mr. Masters had deleted old positions from his website.Kirk Adams, a Republican former speaker of the Arizona House and a former chief of staff to Mr. Ducey, said that Mr. Masters was smartly trying to appeal to moderate Republicans in the image of former Senator John McCain, as well as the party’s Trump wing. “Blake, I think, is working hard to build a coalition, and time will tell if it is enough,” Mr. Adams said.Kirk Adams, a Republican former speaker of the Arizona House, said, “Blake, I think, is working hard to build a coalition, and time will tell if it is enough.” Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThere are signs Republicans see the race as less winnable than other key Senate matchups. Mr. Thiel has rebuffed requests from Republicans to spend any more on the contest, though he is hosting a campaign fund-raiser for Mr. Masters this month.In a letter, Arizona Republicans recently urged Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, to shore up his support for Mr. Masters. But the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Mr. McConnell, has canceled $17.6 million in television ads, backing out of eight weeks of reserved airtime from Sept. 6 until Election Day. Last week, it cut a further $308,000 in time reserved for radio ads. (Steven Law, the group’s chief executive, contended that money from other Republican groups would help Mr. Masters make up the difference.)The moves have left Mr. Masters short on cash. He ended the last campaign finance reporting period, in July, with only about $1.6 million in cash on hand, compared with $24.8 million for Mr. Kelly. Democrats have far outspent Republicans in television ads on the race. Mr. Kelly has combined with Senate Democrats’ super PAC and campaign arm to spend nearly $60 million alone.In interviews, some independents waved off concerns about Mr. Masters. Smoke Hinson, 53, a natural gas pipeline inspector in Phoenix, said he planned to vote for him, arguing that children should not be taught about gender identity or “how to pray in the Muslim religion” in schools, that illegal immigration was out of control and that the F.B.I. was headed in the wrong direction.“Blake Masters is about law enforcement, the border, parents’ rights, the Second and First Amendment,” Mr. Hinson said.But more common were perceptions of Mr. Masters like that of Hector Astacio, another independent who called him a “flip-flopper.” Mr. Astacio, 62, a manufacturing engineer in Chandler, said he did not like that Mr. Masters seemed to echo Mr. Trump’s bigotry in his immigration messaging.Originally from Puerto Rico, Mr. Astacio said he had been kicked out of bars in Georgia because of his skin color and had been racially profiled by the police in Arizona. “I see the racism — if you are Hispanic, if you are of a different color,” he said. “It does not sit well with me.” More

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in Arizona

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in ArizonaSeveral clinics halt procedure as dual measures, including 19th-century ban with no exception for rape or incest, take effect Almost all abortions became illegal in Arizona on Saturday, after a new law banning abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy took effect and a judge lifted an almost 50-year-old injunction that blocked a near-total ban on abortions from being enforced in the state.Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima county’s superior court released a ruling on Friday that allowed the enforcement of the decades-old ban, a day before a new law that would ban most procedures after 15 weeks was scheduled to take effect, reported the Washington Post.The law Johnson reinstated dates from 1864 and bans all abortions with no exception for rape or incest. The only exception involves a recipient whose life is in danger.The law was later updated and codified in 1901, before the 1973 US supreme court decision known as Roe v Wade that established nationwide abortion rights. Many states failed to update their laws after the provision of those federal abortion protections, which the US supreme court’s current conservative majority eliminated in June.Immediately after Johnson’s ruling, several Arizona clinics that provided abortions stopped carrying out the procedure to avoid criminal charges for their medical professionals, forcing almost all patients in need of an abortion to travel out of state.Those who have already stopped offering abortions included Planned Parenthood along with two other abortion providers, the Associated Press reported.Under Arizona’s new anti-abortion law, doctors or other healthcare professionals who terminate pregnancies could face between two and five years in prison.Abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators condemned the new law in Arizona as well as Johnson’s ruling.The president and CEO of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, Brittany Fonteno, called the ban “archaic” and said it was “sending Arizonians back nearly 150 years”, referring to when the law was first written, according to the Arizona Republic.The Arizona senator Krysten Sinema called out Johnson’s ruling on Twitter, writing in part: “A woman’s healthcare decisions should be between her, her family, and her doctor. Today’s decision removes basic rights Arizona women have relied upon for over a century and endangers their health, safety, and wellbeing.”Arizona’s other US senator, Mark Kellyposted on Twitter: “Repealing Roe v Wade set Arizona women’s rights back decades. This decision sets them back 158 years, to before Arizona was even a state. I won’t stop until we restore abortion rights so my granddaughter can have the same freedoms my grandmother did.”What’s the difference between miscarriage and abortion? For some women, it’s hard to tellRead moreJohnson’s ruling has also caused confusion statewide, with some calling for the enforcement of the harsher ban codified in 1901 and others wanting only the 15-week ban to be enforced, reported the Post.The Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who filed to have the injunction blocking the older ban lifted, has argued that the harsher of the two laws will take precedent, reports the New York Times.Meanwhile, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, has stated the 15-week ban will be followed, with a representative of his office telling the Times that the governor is proud to have signed the ban. However, Ducey has not clarified whether the more restrictive law will be enforced.Johnson, for her part, has indicated that the more restrictive law should be followed versus the 15-week ban.“Most recently in 2022, the legislature enacted a 15-week gestational age limitation on abortion,” the judge wrote. “The legislature expressly included in the session law that the 15-week gestational age limitation” would not “repeal” the previous ban.Legal experts have also warned that the previously approved 15-week ban may no longer be tenable, with Loyola Marymount University family law professor Kaiponanea Matsumura telling the Post that Brnovich’s position as attorney general “opens the door to prosecutions under that law”.Arizona is now among at least 14 states which have outlawed most abortions. Several more have similar bans that are temporarily blocked amid legal wrangling over whether or not they can be enforced.TopicsArizonaAbortionUS politicsWomenHealthnewsReuse this content More