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      Before Midterms, Election Officials Increase Security Over Threats

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      In Wisconsin, one of the nation’s key swing states, cameras and plexiglass now fortify the reception area of a county election office in Madison, the capital, after a man wearing camouflage and a mask tried to open locked doors during an election in April.In another bellwether area, Maricopa County, Ariz., where beleaguered election workers had to be escorted through a scrum of election deniers to reach their cars in 2020, a security fence was added to protect the perimeter of a vote tabulation center.And in Colorado, the state’s top election official, Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and a Democrat, resorted to paying for private security out of her budget after a stream of threats.As the nation hurtles closer to the midterm elections, those who will oversee them are taking a range of steps to beef up security for themselves, their employees, polling places and even drop boxes, tapping state and federal funding for a new set of defenses. The heightened vigilance comes as violent rhetoric from the right intensifies and as efforts to intimidate election officials by those who refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election become commonplace.Discussing security in a recent interview with The Times, Ms. Griswold, 37, said that threats of violence had kept her and her aides up late at night as they combed through comments on social media.At a right-wing group’s gathering in Colorado earlier this year, she said, a prominent election denier with militia ties suggested that she should be killed. That was when she concluded that her part-time security detail provided by the Colorado State Patrol wasn’t enough.“They called for me to be hung,” said Ms. Griswold, who is running for re-election. “It’s a long weekend. I’m home alone, and I only get seven hours of State Patrol coverage.”Even in places where there was never a shadow of a doubt about the political leanings of the electorate, election officials have found themselves under threat. In a Texas county that President Donald J. Trump won by 59 percentage points in 2020, all three election officials recently resigned, with at least one citing repeated death threats and stalking.One in five local election officials who responded to a survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice said that they were “very” or “somewhat unlikely” to continue serving through 2024. The collective angst is a recurring theme at workshops and conferences attended by election officials, who say it is not unusual for them exchange anecdotes about threatening messages or harassment at the grocery store. The discussions have turned at times to testing drop boxes — a focus of right-wing attacks on mail-in voting — to see if they can withstand being set on fire.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries winding down, both parties are starting to shift their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Battleground Pennsylvania: Few states feature as many high-stakes, competitive races as Pennsylvania, which has emerged as the nation’s center of political gravity.The Dobbs Decision’s Effect: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of women signing up to vote has surged in some states and the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage are hard to see.How a G.O.P. Haul Vanished: Last year, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans was smashing fund-raising records. Now, most of the money is gone.Digital Pivot: At least 10 G.O.P. candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to former President Donald J. Trump or to adjust their stances on abortion.Benjamin Hovland, a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, described the intimidation campaign as pervasive.“This isn’t a red-state issue or a blue-state issue,” Mr. Hovland said in a recent interview. “This is a national issue, where the professional public servants that run our elections have been subjected to an unprecedented level of threats, harassment and intimidating behavior.”In guidance issued in June, the Election Assistance Commission allowed for federal election grants to be used for physical security services and to monitor threats on social media.A poll worker sorting absentee ballots in Madison, Wis., in August. Officials recently budgeted $95,000 to start designing a more secure election center in the county.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIn Wisconsin’s Dane County, which includes Madison, partisan poll watchers and a brigade of lawyers with the Trump campaign descended in 2020 to dispute the election results. County officials recently budgeted $95,000 to start designing a new and more secure election center.The move came after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted a risk assessment in April on the current election offices for the county and city, which are housed in the same building.“It’s kind of a sieve,” Scott McDonell, a Democrat and the county’s clerk for the past decade, said in an interview. More

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      Abortion and Trump Are Giving Democrats a Shot

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      Forget Hot Girl Summer. We just came off Hot Primary Summer, which featured fewer tequila shots than the Megan Thee Stallion-inspired original — unless, maybe, you were partying with Dr. Oz — but still packed way more drama than you’d expect in a midterm election cycle.Republican voters in Georgia stiff-arming Donald Trump? Democratic House members in New York savaging one another over redrawn districts? John Fetterman winning the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania just four days after suffering a stroke? Sean Parnell exiting the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary after accusations of domestic abuse? Herschel Walker and Eric Greitens sticking with their Senate runs despite accusations of domestic abuse? Democrats capturing a House seat in Alaska, defeating Sarah Palin in the process? Abortion rights supporters winning big in [checks notes] Kansas?It has been quite the ride.With Mr. Trump out of office but still desperate to wield influence over his party like an incumbent president, these 2022 elections were fated to be more edge-of-your-seat than usual. The unofficial Labor Day kickoff of the fall campaign season will only push anxiety levels higher as the parties scramble to game out and shape where the electoral circus is headed.Mary Peltola leaving a voting booth in Anchorage.Mark Thiessen/Associated PressJohn Fetterman with supporters in Erie, Pa.Gene J. Puskar/Associated PressHerschel Walker at a fish fry hosted by the Georgia Republican Party.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesA rally for a Trump-backed candidate in Arizona.Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesIn terms of the Big Picture, the primaries confirmed some things we already knew, and revealed others that now loom large for the fall.The summer certified that Donald Trump still has his tiny hands wrapped around the throat of the G.O.P. He meddled mightily in the midterms, doling out endorsements and anti-endorsements with promiscuity, and wound up with an impressive win-loss record. Even looking only at the cases where Mr. Trump backed a non-incumbent in a contested primary, his success rate was 82 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.It was unsurprising, if still depressing, to witness how thoroughly the G.O.P.’s moral compass has been shattered. Today’s Republicans will snuggle up with even the creepiest of characters, so long as those characters are Trump-approved. (See: Gaetz, Matt.)In the category of not so much depressing as horrifying: Republican voters elevated legions of election-denying conspiracymongers. In Michigan and Nevada, the party’s nominees for secretary of state are so far down the Stop the Steal Rabbit hole they may never see daylight again, while Pennsylvania Republicans’ choice for governor is so disturbing that some former party officials there are lining up to endorse his Democratic opponent. But for overall wingnuttery, it is tough to beat Arizona, where G.O.P. voters went all in on reality-challenged MAGA ravers up and down the ticket.There were isolated pockets of sanity. Georgia Republicans showed sense and spine in rejecting Mr. Trump’s revenge campaign to oust Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, for having refused to help Mr. Trump steal the 2020 election. And Nebraska Republicans shunned Mr. Trump’s preferred pick for governor there, yet another prince of a guy accused of — you guessed it! — sexual misconduct.On the Democratic side, the big reveal turned out to be that the party isn’t as dead as everyone thought. Democrats overperformed in multiple special elections. The party’s voters are feeling more energized. President Biden’s job approval ratings have ticked up. The political handicappers have tweaked their predictions in Democrats’ direction. November could still go badly for Team Blue, but the once-forecast red wave seems to have lost momentum.There are many reasons for this: gas prices easing, Congress finally passing at least part of the president’s domestic agenda, mediocre-to-awful Republican nominees struggling to find their groove. But perhaps the biggest unforeseen factor: It turns out that American women don’t like being told that they don’t have a right to bodily autonomy.Go figure.Despite Americans’ overwhelming support for at least some abortion access, the Republican Party has long found it useful to exploit social conservatives’ intense passion on the issue. For decades, the G.O.P. has whipped voters to the polls with promises of killing Roe v. Wade, even when the party’s true priorities were slashing taxes and regulations and pursuing other non-culture-war matters. But with the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June, Republicans are the proverbial pooch that finally caught the car — a car now threatening to turn them into a greasy patch of political roadkill. Which would absolutely serve them right.Post-Dobbs, the political outlook has brightened for Democrats. Motivation among their voters has shot up, shrinking the crucial “enthusiasm gap” between the parties. A recent Pew poll found a 13-point jump since March in the number of people who said abortion rights would be “very important” in their midterm vote — a rise driven overwhelmingly by Democrats. The party’s candidates did better than expected in the five federal special elections held since the ruling. In deep red Kansas last month, voters smacked down a measure aimed at stripping abortion protections from the state’s constitution — by a 59-to-41 margin that stunned the nation. Democrats have also gained ground on the generic congressional ballot, where pollsters ask voters which party they prefer.The Democratic Party is still sharply divided between its center, left and far-left factions, with the capacity for rowdy progressives to hurt moderate Democrats in battleground states. But for now, the combination of Dobbs and Trumpism on the march is acting as a pretty potent glue.Republicans are scurrying around, trying to avoid getting hit by the backlash over the end of Roe. Multiple candidates are claiming more nuanced positions and softening their rhetoric as they tiptoe away from the more aggressive stances of their past. At least a couple have scrubbed their websites of anti-abortion statements. (Blake Masters, the MAGA choice for Senate in Arizona, has been particularly slippery.)Democrats, meanwhile, are learning to love their inner culture warrior, going hard at their Republican opponents on the issue. Even Republicans who express support for limited abortion rights are getting hit as Democrats seek to paint the entire G.O.P. as a threat to women’s bodily autonomy — which it mostly is.Multiple states have abortion-related measures on the ballot in November. Typically the anti-abortion side is the one that drives such efforts, as in Kansas. But this year, for the first time in two decades, a smattering of measures are aimed at securing reproductive rights. Other states are eyeing similar efforts for the future, including Arizona, which narrowly missed the deadline for getting something on the ballot this year. Democrats hope these measures will help turn out their voters and boost their candidates — much like the anti-gay-marriage ballot measures in 2004 aided President George W. Bush’s re-election.All of this is a striking departure from the conventional political wisdom, in which Republicans have long been seen as having the upper hand at culture warring. When Team Red spun up conservatives over hot-button topics like abortion and gay marriage, Team Blue struggled to keep the focus on things like health care and the economy. That dynamic has been flipped on its head.The reproductive rights side has long had the numbers, just not the intensity. If Democrats can keep the pressure on, abortion politics could prove increasingly painful and destructive for Republicans, stretching well beyond this crazy election season.Couldn’t happen to a more deserving party.What’s at stake for you on Election Day?In the final weeks before the midterm elections, Times Opinion is asking for your help to better understand what motivates each generation to vote. We’ve created a list of some of the biggest problems facing voters right now. Choose the one that matters most to you and tell us why. We plan to publish a selection of responses shortly before Election Day.

      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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      Ginni Thomas lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn 2020 election

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      Ginni Thomas lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to overturn 2020 election The wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas urged a Wisconsin state senator and representative to do their ‘duty’ Ginni Thomas, the wife of the US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, lobbied lawmakers in Wisconsin as well as Arizona in November 2020, seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victories over Donald Trump in both swing states.Thomas emailed lawmakers in support of Trump’s lie that Biden won thanks to electoral fraud.Cheney and Kinzinger tee up possible January 6 subpoena for Ginni ThomasRead moreThe Washington Post reported Thomas’s efforts in Arizona earlier this summer. On Thursday it detailed her efforts in Wisconsin, citing emails obtained under public-records law.Thomas emailed a Wisconsin state senator and a state representative, both Republican, on 9 November, two days after the election was called for Biden.The messages used the same text as those sent to Arizona officials and were also sent using a form-emailing platform.The subject line read: “Please do your constitutional duty!”The text said: “Please stand strong in the face of media and political pressure. Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our constitution. And then please take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen for our state.”Ginni Thomas did not comment to the Post. Nor did a supreme court spokesperson.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, said: “Ginni Thomas tried to overthrow the government. Clarence Thomas gets to rule on that attempt to overthrow the government. See the problem?”After the deadly attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat, Clarence Thomas was the only justice to say Trump should not have to give White House records to the investigating House committee.Ginni Thomas is now known to have been in touch with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and John Eastman, a law professor who claimed the vice-president, Mike Pence, could stop certification on January 6, about attempts to overturn the election.The House January 6 committee asked Thomas to voluntarily sit for an interview and provide documentation. Her lawyer, the Post said, told the committee she was willing but he did not think she had to.In July, Liz Cheney, the committee vice-chair, told CNN: “The committee is engaged with counsel. We certainly hope that [Thomas] will agree to come in voluntarily but the committee is fully prepared to contemplate a subpoena if she does not.”No subpoena has been issued.Cheney is a stringent conservative but last month she lost her Republican primary in Wyoming, over her opposition to Trump.She has become popular with some on the left but others have grown frustrated, particularly over the lack of an attempt to compel Ginni Thomas to testify.On Thursday, Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for the Nation, tweeted: “Answer the question ‘Why wasn’t Ginni Thomas subpoenaed by the January 6 committee?’ before you ask me to roll with Liz Cheney.”One of the Wisconsin lawmakers who Thomas contacted, the state senator Kathy Bernier, spoke to the Washington Post.She said: “As we went through the process and the legal challenges were made and discounted by the judicial system, there was nothing proven as far as actual voter fraud.”Bernier also said she did not link Ginni Thomas’s actions to her husband’s position.“I was married for 20 years,” she said. “I took on some identity of my husband, but I had my own mind. Just because you’re married to someone doesn’t mean that you’re a clone.”TopicsUS newsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpClarence ThomasUS politicsRepublicansArizonanewsReuse this content More

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      Blake Masters, GOP Senate Candidate, Links Fed Diversity to Economic Woes

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      Blake Masters, the Republican nominee challenging Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, suggested in a sarcastic Twitter post late Sunday that the nation’s economic struggles were connected to increased gender and racial diversity in Federal Reserve leadership.He then dug in on Monday with a video in which he denounced “the Democrats’ diversity obsession” and described Vice President Kamala Harris as a beneficiary of an “affirmative action regime.”“Finally a compelling explanation for why our economy is doing so well,” Mr. Masters wrote on Sunday in response to an Associated Press report that found there were, according to the news agency, “more female, Black and gay officials contributing to the central bank’s interest-rate decisions than at any time in its 109-year history.”The post drew swift backlash, which Mr. Masters alluded to in a follow-up video Monday evening. “Well, this tweet made people mad,” he said, before adding that he didn’t care “if every single employee at the Fed is a Black lesbian as long as they’re hired for their competence” and that he had “never spoken to anyone who can say with a straight face that Kamala was somehow the most qualified candidate for that job.”Ms. Harris is the first woman and the first Black person to serve as vice president and had extensive political experience — including as a United States senator and the attorney general of California — before Joseph R. Biden Jr. chose her as his running mate. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsEvidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is the latest example.Sensing a Shift: Democrats, once beaten down by the prospect of a brutal midterm election, are daring to dream that they can maintain control of Congress, but a daunting map may still cost them the House.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are signaling concern that the midterm sweep they anticipated is complicated by attention on former President Donald J. Trump’s legal exposure.Campaign Ads: In what critics say is a dangerous gamble, Democrats are elevating far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries, believing they’ll be easier to defeat in November. We analyzed the ads they’re using to do it.Some fellow conservatives echoed the sentiment of Mr. Masters’s initial tweet and criticized the focus on diversity at the Fed at a time of high inflation. A number of Republican candidates and elected officials have also disparaged efforts to promote diversity and combat bigotry more broadly, and Republican primary voters have rewarded some nominees who espouse racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic views.Mr. Masters, a venture capitalist endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, has been particularly outspoken. Among other things, he has promoted what experts in extremism describe as a sanitized version of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory — claiming that Democrats are trying to bring more immigrants into the country in order to dilute the political power of native-born citizens — and characterized the United States’ gun violence problem as “people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other — very often, you know, Black people, frankly.”Mr. Masters’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment Monday. His campaign manager said last month, in response to criticism of the candidate’s immigration views, that voters were “tired of being sorted into color boxes and prefer substance to identity pandering” — echoing how many on the right seek to paint efforts that combat racism, sexism and other forms of bias as “identity politics” and “wokeness.”Republican voters seemed unmoved by a string of revelations about Mr. Masters’s views ahead of his Aug. 2 primary, including youthful writings that his opponent, Jim Lamon, had criticized as antisemitic. Mr. Masters handily defeated Mr. Lamon.But whether Mr. Masters can appeal to voters beyond his right-wing base in November seems to be weighing on party leaders: Senate Republicans’ political action committee canceled $8 million of television, radio and digital advertising in Arizona last week, signaling increasing pessimism about Mr. Masters’s ability to win a race that Republicans once saw as a relatively easy pickup en route to retaking a Senate majority.Mr. Masters has stripped hard-line abortion policies from his website — an implicit recognition of the backlash Republicans are facing over the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and released an ad in which he sought to cast his abortion platform as “common sense.”The website changes, reported by NBC News on Thursday, removed language in which Mr. Masters described himself as “100 percent pro-life” and called for a constitutional amendment that would give fetuses the same legal rights as an infant or adult.The anti-abortion movement is pursuing such measures, known as fetal personhood laws, as a way to criminalize abortion as murder and to eliminate the exceptions included in many current abortion bans. But a growing volume of data shows the political perils of that policy. Republican candidates have underperformed in special elections held since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, and voters in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislators to ban or severely restrict abortion.More Republicans have shifted away from hard-line abortion positions in recent weeks. Mr. Masters’s ad, which focused on rare third-trimester abortions and said Mr. Kelly supported an “extreme” policy, was in line with a longtime anti-abortion strategy of centering public messaging on abortions later in pregnancy — even though more than 90 percent of abortions take place at or before 13 weeks’ gestation, and the state laws that have taken effect since June generally ban the procedure early in pregnancy, or at any point. More

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      Donald Trump’s Death Grip Has Upended the G.O.P. Senate Map

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      As today’s politicians go, Senator Michael Bennet is kind of boring. Ideologically moderate. Dispositionally low-key. Scandal-free. A sensible technocrat rather than a charismatic ideologue. Heck, when Mr. Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, ran for president in 2020, he joked that a perk of electing him would be that people could simply forget about him for days on end.It is a tribute to the weirdness of this political season, then, that Mr. Bennet’s re-election race is shaping up to be one of the midterms’ more interesting and illuminating contests. It isn’t considered a first-tier nail-biter like Georgia’s or Nevada’s, but it promises to be a more serious fight than many had anticipated in largely blue Colorado.Like Democratic candidates everywhere, Mr. Bennet had already been bracing for electoral headwinds having little to do with his job performance. Among the big-picture fundamentals working against his party are inflation, pandemic fatigue, President Biden’s unpopularity and a thermostatic electorate that, even in less surly times, tends to punish a first-term president’s team in the midterms.More recently, though, Mr. Bennet’s fortunes have been threatened because of trouble brewing on the Republican side. Specifically, this November’s Senate election map has grown more pear-shaped for the G.O.P. A mix of broad political developments (more on those in a minute) and weak nominees in key battlegrounds is making Republican leaders twitchy — they need a net gain of one seat to control the Senate — prompting them to look around for other places where they could flip Democratic-held seats. Colorado is one of those places. And so Mr. Bennet finds himself navigating the unpredictable crosscurrents roiling the national scene and making this election cycle unsettling for both parties.Things weren’t supposed to be this complicated. Cruising into the summer, Republicans were feeling feisty, their heads filled with visions of total congressional domination. But then the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade, firing up many, many women voters. Gas prices started creeping down. Congressional Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act (which is more about tackling climate change and the price of prescription drugs than reducing inflation, but why quibble?). The next thing you know, Democratic voters are feeling more motivated to go to the polls, shrinking the so-called enthusiasm gap between the parties.Now layer onto this a G.O.P. roster of not-so-sparkling Senate nominees — for which Republicans overwhelmingly have a certain ex-president to thank.In some cases, Donald Trump’s death grip on his party hurt efforts to recruit broadly appealing candidates. The most notable failures were in New Hampshire and Arizona, where the states’ Republican governors declined to debase themselves in the manner required to woo the Trump-addled base in Senate runs.Worse, the primary process — in which Mr. Trump meddled heavily — served up multiple nominees of questionable experience, appeal or basic competence.Take Blake Masters, Mr. Trump’s man in Arizona. A darling of the hard right, Mr. Masters has a tendency to do things like blame Black people for America’s gun violence and accuse Democrats of trying to change “the demographics of our country” by flooding it with immigrants. (For a really wild ride, check out his online musings circa 2007.) Playing footsie with racists and replacement-theory nutters may delight many in the MAGAverse, but it feels a little edgy for a purple state like Arizona.In Pennsylvania, the Trump-approved Dr. Oz is getting pantsed pretty much every week for being a rich, out-of-touch celebrity carpetbagger. (Crudité, anyone?) In Ohio, J.D. Vance has so far run such a nothingburger of a campaign that one could be excused for forgetting that he is the nominee. And, lordy, what is there to say about Herschel Walker in Georgia? Come for the abuse allegations and incoherent babbling. Stay for the candidate’s fountain of fabrications about his academic achievements and business record.Recent polling shows Dr. Oz, Mr. Masters and Mr. Walker trailing their Democratic opponents. A couple of public polls show Mr. Vance with a strikingly narrow lead in solidly red Ohio, while FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has him one point behind. Also lagging is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who lost his soul — and his grip on reality — to Trumpism and has spent the past couple of years as the Senate’s foremost conspiracymonger.Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sounds less smug than usual, recently noting that flipping the chamber could prove challenging, in part, because of “candidate quality.”It’s hard to think of a defeated president who has taken a more aggressive role in undermining his party’s electoral edge. Well played, sir.In the midst of this Trump-fueled chaos, Colorado has caught Republicans’ eye. In a departure from the cycle’s norm, Republicans there chose a Senate nominee who isn’t a MAGA wing nut: Joe O’Dea, a self-made construction magnate. By the standards of today’s G.O.P., his politics are moderate, and he has little patience for Mr. Trump’s shenanigans. Mr. O’Dea has rejected the election-denial insanity and said he hopes Mr. Trump does not run again in 2024. Mr. O’Dea is pitching himself as a political outsider above rank partisanship.This is precisely the kind of challenger that Democrats did not want to be facing — and fought to avoid. As they did in multiple states, Democrats tried to manipulate Colorado’s Republican primary, in this case spending millions to paint Mr. O’Dea as a wishy-washy RINO. The presumed aim was to drive conservative voters into the arms of a more MAGAfied candidate who, Democrats figured, would be easier to beat in a general election.Whatever your views on the overall strategy, it flopped in Colorado. And Mr. Bennet is now saddled with a Republican opponent whom members of his own party worked to brand as a reasonable moderate.Eager to redefine Mr. O’Dea, Team Bennet is turning to the hot topic of abortion, hitting the Republican as an enemy of reproductive rights. This brings its own challenges, since Mr. O’Dea says he supports abortion access up to 20 weeks and beyond that under extenuating circumstances. Team Bennet is stressing that Mr. O’Dea would have voted to confirm the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe and is clearly looking for the post-Roe energy to drive voters away from the G.O.P. in general.Suddenly, even the most cautious Democrats are aspiring culture warriors.Election Day is still a political eternity away, and it’s tough to know how seriously Republicans will wind up playing in Colorado. Last month at a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser for Mr. O’Dea, Mr. McConnell pledged to go “all in” on the Colorado race. In early August the National Republican Senatorial Committee threw a bit of money into advertising there — a modest quarter million but enough to serve as a warning shot. In mid-August the race got shifted from “likely Democrat” to “leans Democrat” by the handicappers at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.Colorado is still Colorado. And Mr. O’Dea is still the underdog. But Mr. Bennet and his party have been put on notice not to take this race for granted. In this highly fluid political moment, not even solid, inoffensive incumbents are safe.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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      Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’

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      InterviewOusted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’ Ed Pilkington in Mesa, Arizona Rusty Bowers was speaker of Arizona’s house of representatives when he stood up to the former president’s demand that he overturn the election result. He paid the price but has no regretsRusty Bowers is headed for the exit. After 18 years as an Arizona lawmaker, the past four as speaker of the state’s house of representatives, he has been unceremoniously shown the door by his own Republican party.Arizona Republican who defied Trump and lost primary: ‘I’d do it again in a heartbeat’Read moreLast month he lost his bid to stay in the Arizona legislature in a primary contest in which his opponent was endorsed by Donald Trump. The rival, David Farnsworth, made an unusual pitch to voters: the 2020 presidential election had not only been stolen from Trump, he said, it was satanically snatched by the “devil himself”.Bowers was ousted as punishment. The Trump acolytes who over the past two years have gained control of the state’s Republican party wanted revenge for the powerful testimony he gave in June to the January 6 hearings in which he revealed the pressure he was put under to overturn Arizona’s election result.This is a very Arizonan story. But it is also an American story that carries an ominous warning for the entire nation.Six hours after the Guardian interviewed Bowers, Liz Cheney was similarly ousted in a primary for her congressional seat in Wyoming. The formerly third most powerful Republican leader in the US Congress had been punished too.In Bowers’s case, his assailants in the Arizona Republican party wanted to punish him because he had steadfastly refused to do their, and Trump’s, bidding. He had declined to use his power as leader of the house to invoke an “arcane Arizonan law” – whose text has never been found – that would allow the legislature to cast out the will of 3.4 million voters who had handed victory to Joe Biden and switch the outcome unilaterally to Trump.Bowers has a word for that kind of thinking. “The thought that if you don’t do what we like, then we will just get rid of you and march on and do it ourselves – that to me is fascism.”Come January, Bowers will no longer be an Arizona politician. He can now speak his mind. He did just that, for more than two hours in an interview with the Guardian this week.He spoke his mind about the phone conversations he had with Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the height of the stolen election mayhem in 2020. He spoke about the “clown circus” of Trump loyalists who tried to bully him into subverting the election, and about the “emotional violence” that has been embraced by increasingly powerful sections of the Republican party in Arizona and nationally.He spoke his mind too about the very real danger facing democracy in America today – to his astonishment, at the hands of his own party.“The constitution is hanging by a thread,” he told me. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”‘I’m not a man of means’Bowers will talk about all that, and much more. But first, he wants to show me around his spiritual home. He arranged to meet me at his family’s ranch, “so you can see a bit of why I think the way I do”.The ranch is nestled in a hollow among desert hills about 90 minutes’ drive east of Phoenix, at the end of five miles of dramatically snaking dirt road. Fifteen months ago a wildfire swept through the area, destroying majestic cottonwoods and sycamores and sending flames high up above the hills. The main house came within 10 feet of being destroyed and his art studio, replete with many of his landscape paintings and a large portion of his legislative papers, were burnt to ashes.I ask him what this extraordinarily beautiful and harsh landscape reveals about his political character. “Well, I’m not a man of means,” he said. “We pay for things as we go. We are compelled to work, to do things with our hands. That gives you a different appreciation of life. Things have a bigger meaning.”Bowers said that his core values were instilled in him as a child growing up within a conservative Republican tradition. He is the father of seven children, one of whom, Kacey, died last year. “Family, faith, community – these are values at a very core level. You don’t survive out here, on land like this, alone.”A fourth-generation Arizonan, Bowers, 69, grew up within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church. His faith, along with his other great passion for art – he is a painter and sculptor – is visible all around. The front of the main house is lined with three large bronzes depicting the epic 1,100-mile journey across America that the Mormons undertook in 1846-47.From the beginning, conservatism and the Republican party were interchangeable for Bowers. “Belief in God, that you should be held accountable for how you treat other people, those were very conservative thoughts and the bedrock of my politics.”He identifies as “pro-life”, sees the US constitution as being inspired by God, and voted for Trump in the 2020 election. “I campaigned for Trump, I went to his rallies, I stood up on the stage with him,” he said.Somewhere along the line, though, things started to come unstuck. A rift opened up between his old-school Republican values and those of a new cadre of activists who were energized by Trump and his embrace of conspiracy theories and strongman politics.In hindsight, Bowers now recognizes that the opening shots of the conflict were fired not around the 2020 presidential election but earlier in the year, in the initial days of Covid. Trump-fanatical Republicans in the Arizona house displayed in their anti-mask antics the same disdain for the rules, the same bullying style, that was later to erupt in the stolen election furor.“It was like a prep show,” he said.Then came the first signs of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. Bowers himself always expected that the presidential race in Arizona would be close. “We were very much aware that a demographic of women, 18 to 40, college-educated, professional, with small children, were not voting for Donald Trump,” he said.When the results were confirmed, and Biden had won by 10,457 votes, the slimmest margin of any state, Bowers was unsurprised. But such was the brouhaha as armed Trump supporters protested outside counting centers in Maricopa county demanding “audits” that he decided to take a look for himself.He gathered a group of trusted lawyers and went to investigate the counting process close up. “I saw incredible amounts of protocols that were followed and signed off by volunteers – Democrats, Republicans, independents. Yes, Republicans for crying out loud! And they did it by the book.”On 22 November 2020, two weeks after Biden had been declared the next president of the United States, Bowers received a call from the White House. Trump and Giuliani were on the line.After exchanging niceties, they got down to business. Giuliani said they had found 200,000 illegal immigrants and 6,000 dead people who had voted in Arizona. “We need to fix that,” Giuliani told him, cajoling him to call a special committee of the Arizona legislature to look into the supposed fraud.Bowers remembers vividly how Trump and Giuliani played good cop and bad cop on that call. “Trump, you know, he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t threatening. He never said to me, ‘I’m going to get you if you don’t do this.’ Giuliani, he was the bulldog.”In return, Bowers was polite but firm. He told the duo that they had to provide hard evidence. “I said, ‘I’m not doing anything like this until you bring me something. Let’s see it. I’m not going to have circus time at the house of representatives.’”That’s when Trump and Giuliani unveiled their second, even more incendiary, proposal. They had heard that there was an “arcane Arizona law” that would allow the Republican-controlled legislature under Bowers to throw out Biden’s electors and send Trump alternatives to Congress in their place.It took a moment for the penny to drop. Bowers was being asked to overturn the election through diktat.“I’m not a professor of constitutional law, but I get the idea. They want me to throw out the vote of my own people,” he recalls thinking. “I said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. So now, you’re asking me to overthrow the vote of the people of Arizona?”Bowers’s response to the good cop, bad cop routine was categoric. He told them: “I took an oath to the American constitution, the state constitution and its laws. Which one of those am I supposed to break?”It didn’t stop there. Bowers was pounded by wave after wave of demands that he subvert the election, some coming from the White House, some from “America First” politicians closer to home.The speaker continued to be lobbied right up to the eve of January 6 when John Eastman, the conservative law professor advising Trump on his attempted electoral coup, rang him and exhorted him to “decertify” the electors. “Just do it and let the courts figure it all out,” Eastman said.Bowers was direct on that occasion too. “No,” he said.As January 6 approached, and the cries of stolen election reached fever pitch, the attacks on Bowers became personal. A “Trump train” of angry fanatics blaring their horns in pickup trucks festooned with Maga flags turned up at his home in Mesa, some bearing digital boards proclaiming him to be a pedophile.To protect his family, he would step outside the house and confront the protesters. One man had three bars on his chest, signalling he was a member of the far-right militia group the Three Percenters. The man was screaming obscenities and carrying a pistol. “I had to get as close to him as I could to defend myself if he went for the gun.”The worst of it was that during several of these menacing protests, his daughter Kacey was inside the house mortally ill in bed with liver failure. “She would say, ‘What are they doing out there?’ She was emotional. She told me, ‘I’m going to die.’ I said, ‘Honey, you’re not going to die.’ So she had feelings, we were trying to keep her positive.”Kacey Bowers did die, on 28 January, three weeks after the insurrection at the US Capitol.I asked Bowers whether, through all this, he had ever doubted his strength to stand up to the onslaught. Were his values tested?“I never had the thought of giving up,” he said. “No way. I don’t like bullies. That’s one constant in my life: I. Do. Not. Like. Bullies.”Primary defeatIn July, the executive committee of the Arizona Republican party censured Bowers. Its chairwoman, Kelli Ward, a Trump devotee, said that he was “no longer a Republican in good standing”.Then on 28 July, Bowers was effectively turfed out of the Arizona legislature when he was defeated in the primary by the Satan-evoking Farnsworth. That same night, the slate of election deniers standing for statewide positions won a clean sweep.Republican nominations for governor, a US Senate seat, state attorney general and secretary of state all went to enthusiastic backers of Trump and his 2020 attempted coup. They included Mark Finchem, who was present at the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 and who continues to try to decertify Biden’s presidency to this day.Finchem is now the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Should he win in November, he would be in charge of Arizona’s election administration through the 2024 presidential contest, in which Trump has indicated he is likely to be competing.The ascent of election deniers across the board marks the final transformation of the Republican party in the state. Trump’s grip is now complete; the strain of constitutional conservatism epitomized by Bowers is in the wilderness.“I think it’s a shame,” was his rueful reflection on that transition. “The suite of candidates that we now have representing what used to be a principled party is just like, wow … It’s like being the first colonizer on Jupiter.”In February, a mega “election integrity” bill was introduced into the Arizona legislature that was the culmination of the anti-democratic drift of the party. House bill 2596 would have given the Republican-controlled legislature the power to reject any election result that the majority group didn’t like.Bowers resoundingly killed off that bill by sending it to languish not in just one house committee, but in all 12 of them. “I was trying to send a definitive message: this is hogwash. Taking away the fundamental right to vote, the idea that the legislature could nullify your election, that’s not conservative. That’s fascist. And I’m not a fascist.”Bowers said he remains optimistic that the party will one day find its way back on to the rails. He draws succor from the many people who have come up to him since his defeat telling him – quietly, so that nobody can hear – that they admire him and back him.“It’s not like I’m alone in the wilderness. There’s a lot of people from all over the United States thanking me.”But for now, he accepts that things are likely to get much worse before they get better. I ask him, at this moment, is the Republican party in Arizona lost?“Yeah,” he said. “They’ve invented a new way. It’s a party that doesn’t have any thought. It’s all emotional, it’s all revenge. It’s all anger. That’s all it is.”He held the thumb and digit finger of his right hand so close together that they were almost touching. “The veneer of civilization is this thin,” he said. “It still exists – I haven’t been hanged yet. But holy moly, this is just crazy. The place has lost its mind.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansArizonaUS elections 2020Donald TrumpinterviewsReuse this content More

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      A Former Fox News Insider Spills the Beans

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      Chris Stirewalt was part of a pivotal decision to declare Joe Biden the winner of Arizona in 2020. Now he’s speaking out about a network he says incites “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.”Today’s newsletter is a guest contribution by Jeremy W. Peters, who writes for The Times’s media desk. He got his hands on a forthcoming book by Chris Stirewalt, a former senior journalist at Fox News, and shares its highlights here.After a decade at Fox News, Chris Stirewalt was suddenly shown the door in January 2021, becoming a casualty of restructuring — or, at least, that was how Fox described his and other layoffs that swept out longtime journalists who were part of the network’s news division.Stirewalt, who was part of the team at Fox News that projects election results and who testified before the House Jan. 6 committee this summer, suspects there was a bigger reason behind his firing, which he explains in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” to be released next week.“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers — including the then-president of the United States — became furious when our Decision Desk was the first to project that Joe Biden would win the former G.O.P. stronghold of Arizona in 2020,” Stirewalt writes.Coming at 11:20 p.m., well before the other networks declared that Biden would win the state, the Fox call was extremely controversial and consequential. It infuriated Donald Trump and threw a wrench into his attempt to falsely declare himself the winner of the 2020 election. He ordered his campaign aides to demand that Fox retract the call, to no avail.Despite the pressure to reverse its decision, and the ratings crash Fox suffered in the next few weeks after Trump urged people to watch other networks, the network didn’t buckle because the Decision Desk analysts insisted that the data backed up their projections. And they were right.A spokeswoman for Fox News said, “Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevance knows no bounds,” and disputed the idea that his departure from the network had anything to do with the Arizona call. She added that Arnon Mishkin, the head of the Decision Desk, would be returning for the November midterm elections.Green beans and ice creamStirewalt’s book is an often candid reflection on the state of political journalism and his time at Fox News, where such post-mortem assessments are not common — either because of the strict confidentiality agreements in place for employees, or the loyalty that some network insiders continue to feel even after they’ve left.In Stirewalt’s view, the network has played a leading role in the coarsening of American democracy and the radicalization of the right. At one point in the book, he accuses Fox of inciting “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.”He describes how, over his 11 years at the network, he witnessed Fox feeding its viewers more and more of what they wanted to hear, and little else. This kind of affirming coverage got worse during the years that Trump was president, he says, and turbocharged the reaction of Trump supporters once Fox called Arizona for Biden.“Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations,” he writes. “Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”He describes the “rage” directed at him and the rest of the Decision Desk team, writing, “Amid the geyser of anger in the wake of the Arizona call, Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, called for my firing and accused me of a ‘cover-up.’”He goes on, “Covering up what, exactly? We didn’t have any ballots to count and we didn’t have any electoral votes to award.”Supporters of Donald Trump outside the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix shortly after the 2020 election.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesStirewalt also writes: “Had viewers been given a more accurate understanding of the race over time, Trump’s loss would have been seen as a likely outcome. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the shocking upset that it was, viewers were told to assume that polls don’t apply (unless they were good for Trump) and that forecasters like me were going to be wrong again.”Stirewalt names names, taking particular aim at Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox’s highest-rated prime time show and a frequent fanner of flames in the nation’s cultural battles. He paints Carlson and Fox management as hypocrites who claim to be standing up against big corporate media despite being part of a gigantic corporate media enterprise.“Carlson is rich and famous,” Stirewalt writes. “Yet he regularly rails about the ‘big, legacy media outlets.’ Guests denounce the ‘corporate media’ on his show and Fox’s C.E.O. calls Carlson ‘brave’ for discussing controversial topics. Yet somehow, nobody even giggles.”He adds, “It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”What Fox wantsStirewalt also offers a counterintuitive take on what Fox News ultimately wants to achieve by offering content that tilts hard to the right. It’s not to elect Republicans or really even to help them at all, he says.Rather, it’s about making money.Hosts like Sean Hannity and analysts like Dick Morris, the former Clinton aide who became a fixture on Fox, for years propagated falsehoods to their audiences about how well Republicans were positioned to win their races, apparently aiming to juice the network’s ratings, Stirewalt writes.“They wanted it to be true because they wanted Republicans to win,” he says, “but keeping viewers keyed up about the epochal victory close at hand was an appealing incentive to exaggerate the G.O.P. chances. It was good for them to raise expectations, but it wasn’t good for the party they were rooting for.”He adds, “Despite all that Fox’s detractors said about the network being a mouthpiece for the Republican Party, the two organizations had fundamentally different aims.”Stirewalt briefly reflects on what his role in all of this might have been, now that he’s been gone for a year and a half. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Bulwark, a publication that has become a locus of anti-Trump energy among disaffected Republicans.“I make no pretense that I have always been on the side of the angels,” he writes. “But I have definitely paid my dues.”What to read on democracyAfter initially keeping their distance, mainstream Republicans are uniting around Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, Trip Gabriel writes. A hard-right Trump loyalist who marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mastriano has raised fears that if elected, he would not certify a Democratic victory in the state’s 2024 presidential contest.More democracies are declining, and even sliding into autocracy, today than at any point in the last century, according to data from V-Dem, a monitoring institute based in Sweden. Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The Times, takes a country-by-country look.In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about how American democracy was never designed to be fully democratic.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you next week.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Senate G.O.P. Campaign Arm Slashes TV Ad Buys in Three States

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      The Republicans’ Senate campaign committee has slashed its television ad reservations in three critical battleground states for the fall, a likely sign of financial troubles headed into the peak of the 2022 midterm election season.The National Republican Senatorial Committee has cut more than $5 million in Pennsylvania, including its reservations in the Philadelphia media market, according to two media-tracking sources.Reservations in Wisconsin, in the Madison and Green Bay markets, have also been curtailed, by more than $2 million. And in Arizona, all reservations after Sept. 30 have been cut in Phoenix and Tucson, the state’s only two major media markets, amounting to roughly $2 million more.So far around $10 million had been canceled as of midday Monday, though more changes to the fall reservations were in progress. The states where ad reservations have been canceled are home to three of the nation’s most competitive Senate contests.In a statement, Chris Hartline, the communications director for the N.R.S.C., said, “Nothing has changed about our commitment to winning in all of our target states.”Mr. Hartline added that the committee had “been spending earlier than ever before to help our candidates get their message out and define the Democrats for their radical agenda. We’ve been creative in how we’re spending our money and will continue to make sure that every dollar spent by the N.R.S.C. is done in the most efficient and effective way possible.”After this article was published online, Mr. Hartline called it “false” on Twitter and said that “there is money being moved from the I.E. side” — independent expenditures that cannot be coordinated with campaigns — “back to the N.R.S.C. side of the wall.”He declined to say how much was being rebooked.In Wisconsin, some ads were being reserved in Milwaukee, for instance, though significantly less than what had been canceled in Madison and Green Bay, as of Monday afternoon.In Pennsylvania, the Senate Republican super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, recently announced it was adding $9.5 million to its fall reservation in the closely watched race between Mehmet Oz, the Republican, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democrat. The super PAC moved up the beginning of its ad buy by three weeks, to Aug. 19, a decision that may have eased pressure on the party committee to keep its reservation.As online fund-raising has slowed for Republicans in recent months, affecting both candidates and party committees, the party is increasingly dependent on major super PACs in the battle for the Senate. Entering July, the Senate Republican super PAC had nearly $40 million more cash on hand than the Democratic Senate super PAC.The Senate party committee said it had already helped fund $17 million in “coordinated” and “hybrid” ads with Republican senators and Senate candidates in Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin, according to the committee, and had spent $36 million on television overall.The N.R.S.C. entered July with $28.5 million in the bank and has millions of dollars reserved in other battleground states.A person familiar with the committee’s planning said some of the money saved by canceling reservations now would eventually be used to rebook advertising time in coordination with the Senate campaigns, which would help stretch the group’s dollars further because candidates are entitled to lower ad prices. Some of the new reservations were already being made on Monday. More