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      Doug Mastriano’s Extremely Online Rise to Republicans’ Governor Nominee in Pa.

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

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      Ron DeSantis’s Florida

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      How the Republican governor is turning the swing state into a right-wing laboratory.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who appears to be preparing to run for president in 2024, has achieved a national platform by leaning into cultural battles. He signed laws limiting what teachers can teach about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, and he recently suspended an elected prosecutor who said he would refuse to enforce the state’s anti-abortion laws.DeSantis is up for re-election in November. I spoke to my colleague Patricia Mazzei, who as The Times’s Miami bureau chief has tracked his rise, about how DeSantis has changed life in Florida.German: Where do you see DeSantis’s impact on Florida?Patricia: He was elected by just 32,000 votes or so but has governed as if he had a mandate to reshape the state into a laboratory for right-wing policies.Tuesday’s primary didn’t have big-name Republicans on the ballot, so DeSantis got involved in school board races. These are traditionally nonpartisan and sleepy. But he endorsed 30 candidates, and he campaigned for them. And he succeeded: So far, 20 of his endorsed candidates have won outright, and five are going to runoffs.This is an example of trying to turn the state red — not just at the top level, but by starting at the bottom. That builds the bench of candidates who will back him as they go on to make their own political careers. It’s leaving a longer-lasting legacy of the policies and politics he espouses. School board decisions affect parents’ and their children’s lives on a daily basis by deciding what will be in school curriculums.The focus on schools reminds me of the quote from the conservative Andrew Breitbart that “politics is downstream from culture” — meaning that to win elections, partisans first need to shape culture. Changing what the next generation learns about seems like a clear attempt to change the culture, as does DeSantis signing an education bill that critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” law.I went to one of the campaign events for these school boards last weekend in Miami-Dade County. There, the lieutenant governor — DeSantis’s running mate — said, “Our students should go to school to learn their ABC’s, not their L.G.B.T.’s.”But Florida is not entirely a red state. For example, Miami is often called a gay mecca. How do you reconcile that with DeSantis signing the education law?Generally speaking, the people of Florida are less conservative than their leaders. We’ve seen that in statewide ballot initiatives: Voters went against gerrymandering, passed medical marijuana legalization and a minimum wage hike, and restored ex-felons’ voting rights.It’s just a contradiction in the politics. People who live in strictly red or strictly blue areas of the country may not know this. But where I am, if you go into a family gathering, party, anything, you never assume that everybody thinks the way you do. Even in cities like Miami or Orlando, where people are more liberal, your co-worker, neighbor, cousin and parents may have diametrically opposed political views.How has DeSantis succeeded in this environment? The typical formula has been to act as a moderate, but DeSantis has openly embraced the hard right.He has long been a Trump supporter and was a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus when he was in Congress. He got elected governor in 2018 by winning Trump’s endorsement and running a tongue-in-cheek ad with a jaunty tune and DeSantis exhorting his oldest child to “build the wall” with toy blocks.But he governed his first year by trying to lie low.Then came the pandemic. He tried to keep the state open, and he seemed to take criticisms of his looser pandemic policies personally. He started to score political points by portraying himself as a foe of the “corporate media” that conveyed virus restrictions endorsed by public health experts.You can talk to independents, even Democrats, who may not necessarily vote for him, but they remember the lasting impact DeSantis’s policies had on their children, that they could go to school. They are happy they were able to keep their businesses open.Is there a political risk for DeSantis’s re-election campaign in overreaching?He has so many advantages built in for him. He’s got a lot of money right now. He’s got Republicans down the ticket who are all going to campaign with him and for him. His party is much more organized in Florida, and it has a better operation to get their voters to the polls than the Democrats. It’s a governor election in a midterm year, during which Florida has reliably gone red for almost three decades.So even if there’s a feeling of overreach, is that enough for him to lose? Well, Democrats see a narrow path to victory. But it’s unlikely — it’s an uphill climb.More on Patricia Mazzei: She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and decided to become a reporter after working as a student journalist at the University of Miami, where a professor declared her to be a “muckraker.” She began her career in 2007 and began writing for The Times in 2017.For moreDeSantis is trying to channel the same culture war issues as Donald Trump, but with more discipline, The New Yorker explained in a profile.Florida teachers, worried about violating new state laws, are increasingly nervous about what they can say to their students in schools.DeSantis’s Democratic opponent for governor, Representative Charlie Crist, picked a teachers union leader as his running mate.DeSantis suspended four school board members after a Parkland school shooting report accused them of incompetence. One ousted member called the move “political retribution.”NEWSPoliticsThe redacted F.B.I. affidavit seeking court permission to search Donald Trump’s home.Jon Elswick/Associated PressProsecutors may be pursuing a theory that Donald Trump illegally obstructed Justice Department efforts to retrieve classified documents from him.Intelligence officials will review Trump’s handling of the documents for possible national security risks.President Biden’s student loan plan is the latest example of political limitations forcing Democrats to settle on patchwork solutions to solve economic problems.InternationalUkrainian women have taken on new roles in wartime, including demining and combat.Outrage over videos showing Finland’s prime minister dancing at parties led to a debate over whether she is held to a different standard than older, male leaders.Serbia’s president canceled Europride, a weeklong L.G.B.T.Q. celebration. Organizers pledged to go ahead as planned.HealthAnxious and depressed teens are increasingly prescribed multiple powerful psychiatric drugs, many of them untested in adolescents.Some public health officials expressed concern that the U.S. would fall short on distributing updated Covid vaccines in the coming weeks.Abbott Nutrition said it will resume production of its leading baby formula, months after its plant shutdown triggered a national shortage.FROM OPINIONOn women’s rights, Democrats are in an asymmetrical war. They should act like it, Maureen Dowd argues.Summer sequels are worse than ever — in politics and in movies, Pamela Paul writes.You don’t need an electric car to be as powerful as you might think, Edward Niedermeyer argues.Are you fun? Take Frank Augugliaro’s and Jessica Bennett’s quiz.Talk of secession — or even another American civil war — is escapist fantasy. We’re stuck with each other, says Sarah Vowell.The Sunday question: The way Americans pay for college is broken. What would fix it?President Biden’s plan to cancel student debt is a good start, says Suzanne Kahn, but more government funding for colleges would reduce students’ reliance on loans. Laura Arnold wants more visibility into school quality so students can know whether a loan is worth it.MORNING READSThe Giant Slide in Detroit.“The waxing was a little robust”: A giant slide sent a few too many riders airborne.The office’s last stand: It’s either the end of the flexibility era — or the beginning of rebellion.Chill out: San Franciscans are done apologizing for their cold summers.Sunday routine: An attendant keeps the clock for tennis players at a New York park.Advice from Wirecutter: Bug zappers kill the wrong bugs.A Times classic: How often should you really wash your hair?BOOKSGetting published: The industry is intimidating. How does a writer break in?By the Book: James Hannaham resists the very idea of genres.Times best sellers: “Diana, William, and Harry,” a biography by James Patterson and Chris Mooney, is a hardcover nonfiction best seller. See all our lists here.THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINEArielle Bobb-Willis for The New York TimesOn the cover: Has Coco Gauff’s moment arrived?All the tips: How to do everything.The Ethicist: Is it OK that my friend keeps her anti-abortion views quiet?Eat: The seasonal gems of Japanese fruit sandwiches.Screenland: The app Be-Real captures our nostalgia for a simpler online era.Read the full issue.THE WEEK AHEADWhat to Watch ForNASA will launch a giant rocket on Monday in a first unmanned test of a spacecraft that aims to take astronauts to the moon for the first time in nearly a half-century.The C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky, is expected to decide whether to offer doses of an updated Covid booster after an advisory panel meets Thursday and Friday.The Labor Department will release employment data for August on Friday.The MTV Video Music Awards are tonight. LL Cool J, Nicki Minaj and Jack Harlow are the hosts.Tennis’s U.S. Open will start Monday. The men’s star Novak Djokovic will miss the tournament because he is unvaccinated and was not allowed into New York.What to Cook This WeekDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Hadas Smirnoff.Freed from picky eaters for a week (read: kids at camp), Margaux Laskey rounded up spicy, vegetable-abundant weeknight options, including spicy and saucy cherry tomato pasta, saag paneer and skillet chicken thighs with brown butter corn.NOW TIME TO PLAYHere’s a clue from the Sunday crossword:98 Across: Bridge that’s painted International OrangeTake the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.Here’s today’s Spelling Bee. Here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.Matthew Cullen, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      The Idea That Letting Trump Walk Will Heal America Is Ridiculous

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      The main argument against prosecuting Donald Trump — or investigating him with an eye toward criminal prosecution — is that it will worsen an already volatile fracture in American society between Republicans and Democrats. If, before an indictment, we could contain the forces of political chaos and social dissolution, the argument goes, then in the aftermath of such a move, we would be at their mercy. American democracy might not survive the stress.All of this might sound persuasive to a certain, risk-averse cast of mind. But it rests on two assumptions that can’t support the weight that’s been put on them.The first is the idea that American politics has, with Trump’s departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy. Under this view, a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace. But the absence of open conflict is not the same as peace. Voters may have put a relic of the 1990s into the Oval Office, but the status quo of American politics is far from where it was before Trump.The most important of our new realities is the fact that much of the Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy. The Republican nominee for governor in Arizona — Kari Lake — is a 2020 presidential election denier. So, too, are the Republican nominees in Arizona for secretary of state, state attorney general and U.S. Senate. In Pennsylvania, Republican voters overwhelmingly chose the pro-insurrection Doug Mastriano to lead their party’s ticket in November. Overall, Republican voters have nominated election deniers in dozens of races across six swing states, including candidates for top offices in Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.There is also something to learn from the much-obsessed-over fate of Liz Cheney, the arch-conservative representative from Wyoming, who lost her place on the Republican ticket on account of her opposition to the movement to “stop the steal” and her leadership on the House Jan. 6 committee investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election to keep himself in office. Cheney is, on every other issue of substance, with the right wing of the Republican Party. But she opposed the insurrection and accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election. It was, for Wyoming voters, a bridge too far.All of this is to say that we are already in a place where a substantial portion of the country (although much less than half) has aligned itself against the basic principles of American democracy in favor of Trump. And these 2020 deniers aren’t sitting still, either; as these election results show, they are actively working to undermine democracy for the next time Trump is on the ballot.This fact, alone, makes a mockery of the idea that the ultimate remedy for Trump is to beat him at the ballot box a second time, as if the same supporters who rejected the last election will change course in the face of another defeat. It also makes clear the other weight-bearing problem with the argument against holding Trump accountable, which is that it treats inaction as an apolitical and stability-enhancing move — something that preserves the status quo as opposed to action, which upends it.But that’s not true. Inaction is as much a political choice as action is, and far from preserving the status quo — or securing some level of social peace — it sets in stone a new world of total impunity for any sufficiently popular politician or member of the political elite.Now, it is true that political elites in this country are already immune to most meaningful consequences for corruption and lawbreaking. But showing forbearance and magnanimity toward Trump and his allies would take a difficult problem and make it irreparable. If a president can get away with an attempted coup (as well as abscond with classified documents), then there’s nothing he can’t do. He is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.Among skeptics of prosecution, there appears to be a belief that restraint would create a stable equilibrium between the two parties; that if Democrats decline to pursue Trump, then Republicans will return the favor when they win office again. But this is foolish to the point of delusion. We don’t even have to look to the recent history of Republican politicians using the tools of office to investigate their political opponents. We only have to look to the consequences of giving Trump (or any of his would-be successors) a grant of nearly unaccountable power. Why would he restrain himself in 2025 or beyond? Why wouldn’t he and his allies use the tools of state to target the opposition?The arguments against prosecuting Trump don’t just ignore or discount the current state of the Republican Party and the actually existing status quo in the United States, they also ignore the crucial fact that this country has experience with exactly this kind of surrender in the face of political criminality.National politics in the 1870s was consumed with the question of how much to respond to vigilante lawlessness, discrimination and political violence in the postwar South. Northern opponents of federal and congressional intervention made familiar arguments.If Republicans, The New York Times argued in 1874, “set aside the necessity of direct authority from the Constitution” to pursue their aims in the South and elsewhere, could they then “expect the Democrats, if they should gain the power, to let the Constitution prevent them from helping their ancient and present friends?”The better approach, The Times said in an earlier editorial, was to let time do its work. “The law has clothed the colored man with all the attributes of citizenship. It has secured him equality before the law, and invested him with the ballot.” But here, wrote the editors, “the province of law will end. All else must be left to the operation of causes more potent than law, and wholly beyond its reach.” His old oppressors in the South, they added, “rest their only hope of party success upon their ability to obtain his goodwill.”To act affirmatively would create unrest. Instead, the country should let politics and time do their work. The problems would resolve themselves, and Americans would enjoy a measure of social peace as a result.Of course, that is not what happened. In the face of lawlessness, inaction led to impunity, and impunity led to a successful movement to turn back the clock on progress as far as possible, by any means possible.Our experience, as Americans, tells us that there is a clear point at which we must act in the face of corruption, lawlessness and contempt for the very foundations of democratic society. The only way out is through. Fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic.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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      An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives

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      WASHINGTON — A new conservative nonprofit group scored a $1.6 billion windfall last year via a little-known donor — an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms, and for years to come.The source of the money was Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul, and the donation is among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit. The beneficiary is a new political group controlled by Leonard A. Leo, an activist who has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help engineer the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and to finance battles over abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy.This windfall will help cement Mr. Leo’s status as a kingmaker in conservative big money politics. It could also give conservatives an advantage in a type of difficult-to-trace spending that shapes elections and political fights.The cash infusion was arranged through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities. It originated with Mr. Seid, a longtime conservative donor who made a fortune as the chairman and chief executive of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite.Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion, according to tax records provided to The New York Times, corporate filings and a person with knowledge of the matter.The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds.For perspective, the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats, according to an analysis by The Times. That spending, which Democrats embraced to aid the campaigns of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his allies in Congress, dwarfed the roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the Republican Party.The Marble Freedom Trust could help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — in such nonprofit spending, which is commonly referred to as dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited sums on politics while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.In a statement, Mr. Leo cited some of the left’s biggest donors and an advisory firm that helps manage the nonprofit groups they fund.“It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” Mr. Leo said. Mr. Seid and an associate did not respond to messages seeking comment.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsChallenging DeSantis: Florida Democrats would love to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis in November. But first they must nominate a candidate who can win in a state where they seem to perpetually fall short.Uniting Around Mastriano: Doug Mastriano, the far-right G.O.P. nominee for Pennsylvania governor, has managed to win over party officials who feared he would squander a winnable race.O’Rourke’s Widening Campaign: Locked in an unexpectedly close race against Gov. Greg Abbott, Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate, has ventured into deeply conservative corners of rural Texas in search of votes.The ‘Impeachment 10’: After Liz Cheney’s primary defeat in Wyoming, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.The Marble Freedom Trust’s formation in May 2020, the donation of Tripp Lite shares by Mr. Seid, and Mr. Leo’s role have not been previously reported.The funds are difficult to trace through public records. Tripp Lite is a private company that is not subject to corporate disclosure rules for public companies. On its tax filing, Marble indicated that the $1.6 billion came from the “sale of gifted company and subsidiaries,” but indicated that it withheld identifying information “to protect donor confidentiality.”And Eaton, the publicly traded Irish company that bought Tripp Lite, does not refer to Marble in statements related to the sale.The person with knowledge of the matter said that the Tripp Lite shares were donated to Marble months before the deal with Eaton was announced in January 2021. The sale was completed in March 2021.Katy Brasser, a spokeswoman for Eaton, said in a statement, “We have no additional information to share regarding the acquisition that was announced last year.”Ray D. Madoff, a professor of tax law at Boston College who is the director of the school’s Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, said the structure of the transaction was most likely legal but did appear to allow a donor to avoid federal tax obligations from the sale of the company.Here is how it works: Marble Freedom Trust is registered under a section of the tax code — 501(c)4 — for organizations that focus primarily on what the Internal Revenue Service calls “social welfare” and as a result are exempt from paying taxes. Such groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy, but their supporters are not entitled to deduct donations from their income taxes. Supporters can, however, donate assets that a nonprofit can sell and avoid capital gains taxes on the sale. More

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      Group Seeks to Block Abortion Vote in Michigan, Citing Typography

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      Conservative groups in Michigan filed challenges this week to efforts to put two constitutional amendments on the ballot in November, one that would guarantee abortion rights and the other that would expand voting access.The challenge to the abortion amendment was based on a lack of spacing between words, which gave some words the appearance of running together. They characterized the typographical errors as “gibberish,” and “incomprehensible argle-bargle.”One group argued that the Michigan Board of State Canvassers should reject the petition to put that amendment to voters, while a second group took issue with the voting petition, saying it failed to identify every current constitutional provision the amendment would override.The board of canvassers will meet on Aug. 31 to decide whether to certify the petitions.The challenge to the abortion measure comes less than three weeks after voters in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have let state legislators ban or severely restrict abortion. That vote underscored abortion rights as a salient issue capable of driving voters to the polls after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and it raised advocates’ hopes that Michiganders would vote similarly.Supporters of the petition for the Michigan abortion amendment said they had submitted more than 730,000 signatures, surpassing the roughly 425,000 required, though the board of canvassers needs to verify them.Read More on Abortion Issues in AmericaAn Uneasy Champion: President Biden, a practicing Catholic, is being called to lead a fight for abortion rights that he has sidestepped for decades. Advocates wonder if he’s up to the task.Safe Havens: After Roe, conservatives are seeking to expand ways that allow women to give up newborns, such as baby drop boxes. But for many experts in adoption and women’s health, they are hardly a solution.In Mississippi: The state that spurred the overturning of abortion rights, is among 17 that have rejected an option to extend new mothers’ Medicaid coverage.A Rare Prosecution: A teenager used pills to terminate her pregnancy at home with the aid of her mother. Their Facebook messages are now key evidence in a rare prosecution over abortion.Darci McConnell, a spokeswoman for Reproductive Freedom for All, the group promoting the abortion amendment, said that the organization was “confident that we’re in compliance with all legal requirements for ballot proposals” and that hundreds of thousands of voters had “read, understood and signed the petition in support of reproductive freedom for all.”The petition includes the text of the proposed amendment, which would ensure abortion rights broadly until fetal viability and in cases where “the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” was in danger after viability. On some lines, the text is squeezed tightly. In a 152-page challenge, Citizens to Support MI Women and Children, a group that opposes the amendment, argued that the lack of spacing was unacceptable.For instance, in a section that reads, “Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy,” the challengers said the formatting created “nonexistent words” such as “decisionsaboutallmattersrelatingtopregnancy.”They described this and other examples as “nonsensical groupings of letters that are found in no dictionary and are incapable of having any meaning.”The text at issue in a Reproductive Freedom for All petition.State of Michigan“Because the petition fails to use actual words in the full text in its proposed amendment, how can the people know what they are voting for or against?” it said, adding that even if the board of canvassers concluded that these were merely typos, Michigan law did not allow supporters of the amendment to fix such errors at this point in the process. Citizens to Support MI Women and Children directed a request for comment to Genevieve Marnon, the legislative director for Right to Life of Michigan, an anti-abortion group. Ms. Marnon, who filed an affidavit in support of the challenge, said that petitions were “routinely disqualified for technical errors,” saying that state officials had rejected signatures on a 2019 anti-abortion proposal “for small tears in the petition and for return address stickers’ covering a few words of the ‘essential elements’ of the petition.” (Signatures for that campaign, which extended into 2020, were also challenged on substantive grounds, including claims that some were duplicates.)Ms. Marnon attached to her email a mocking word-search puzzle whose answer list consisted of words from the petition — all of them separated in the correct places.Reproductive Freedom for All will file a formal rebuttal by Tuesday, according to Mark Brewer, a lawyer working with the group, who called the complaint a “frivolous Hail Mary challenge.” After that, he said, nonpartisan staff in the Michigan secretary of state’s office will make a recommendation to the board of canvassers on whether the challenge should be upheld.If the board of canvassers — two Democrats and two Republicans — deadlocks at its meeting on Aug. 31, the next step will be the courts. Under the Michigan Constitution, amendments for the November ballot must be finalized by Sept. 9.The challenge to the voting rights amendment was filed on behalf of a group called Defend Your Vote. The proposal it objected to would amend the Michigan Constitution to, among other things, require nine days of early in-person voting and expand access to absentee ballots. It would also bar any law or conduct that “has the intent or effect of denying, abridging, interfering with or unreasonably burdening the fundamental right to vote.”Supporters said they had submitted about 670,000 signatures.In their challenge, lawyers for Defend Your Vote argued that the amendment petition did not specify all of the current constitutional provisions it would modify.One provision they said was improperly omitted designates the “first Tuesday after the first Monday of November” as Election Day. By mandating an early-voting period, the challengers argued, the amendment would render that provision “inoperative.”Micheal Davis Jr., the executive director of Promote the Vote, the group supporting the voting amendment, called the complaint “bogus, baseless and meritless.”The challenge to the voting amendment will be adjudicated through the same process as the challenge to the abortion amendment. A spokeswoman for Promote the Vote said the group had not filed its formal rebuttal yet. More

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      What Liz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss Says About the State of the G.O.P.

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      Representative Liz Cheney’s martyr-like quest to stop Donald J. Trump has ensured her place in Republican Party history. But her lopsided defeat in Wyoming on Tuesday also exposed the remarkable degree to which the former president still controls the party’s present — and its near future.Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Mr. Trump in early 2021 for his role inciting the mob that stormed the Capitol. Only two have survived the 2022 Republican primaries, a breathtaking run of losses and forced retirements in a chamber where incumbents typically prevail with ease.No single defeat was as freighted with significance as Ms. Cheney’s, or as revealing of the party’s realignment.The sheer scope of her loss — the daughter of a former vice president was defeated in a landslide — may have only strengthened Mr. Trump’s hand as he asserts his grip over the Republican Party, by revealing the futility among Republican voters of even the most vigorous prosecution of the case against him.Casting her mission of combating election denialism as a moral imperative and her work as just beginning, Ms. Cheney pledged to “do whatever it takes” to prevent a second Trump presidency. “Freedom must not, cannot and will not die here,” she declared in her concession speech on Tuesday night in Jackson.Not long ago, Ms. Cheney had been seen as a rising Republican star, even a potential House speaker-in-waiting. Now, after becoming her party’s most dogged Trump detractor — turning the Jan. 6 committee hearings into a bullhorn with which to warn of the dangers Mr. Trump and his enablers posed to the party, the country and even democracy itself — she is soon to be out of her job.Ms. Cheney had hoped the Jan. 6 riot would be a turning point for Republicans. It did prove to be a dividing line. But it was those who crossed Mr. Trump who have suffered the electoral consequences.“She may have been fighting for principles,” said Taylor Budowich, a spokesman and adviser to Mr. Trump. “But they are not the principles of the Republican Party.”Ms. Cheney made clear she was more than willing to lose her House seat, and she hinted broadly at a 2024 presidential campaign of her own, invoking Abraham Lincoln’s failed bids for lesser offices before he sought and won the presidency. On Wednesday, she formed a new political action committee, the Great Task, whose name nods to Lincoln and which will be filled with leftover campaign cash, and said she was “thinking” of running for president.But the outcome in Wyoming showed that while anti-Trump Republicans can count on ample money and media attention, the actual Republican constituency for them is far more limited. Indeed, one of Ms. Cheney’s last gasps was an effort to get Democrats to switch parties to vote in the G.O.P. primary.While anti-Trump Republicans may garner media attention, Mr. Trump is tightening his grip on the party.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesHer loss was also the latest sign that the central organizing principles of today’s Republican Party are tethered less to specific policies — she was a reliable vote for much of the Trump agenda — than to whatever Mr. Trump wants at any given time.Most recently, that has meant lashing out at federal law enforcement authorities over the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home for missing materials with classified markings. More broadly, it has meant embracing his obsession with denying his 2020 defeat and amplifying his false claims of election fraud, regardless of the bloody fallout nearly 20 months ago or its destabilizing effect on the nation.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid, a prospect that would test the national viability of a conservative, anti-Trump platform.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.“You could write the history of the modern Republican Party over the last two years, and what does Jan. 6 look like? A hiccup,” said William Kristol, the neoconservative writer who co-founded Republican Voters Against Trump, a group spending millions of dollars to oppose Trump-backed election deniers. “The price of admission to today’s Republican Party is turning a blind eye to Jan. 6.”That was the experience of Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment weeks after taking office and lost his re-election primary this month. He said his constituents asked him about his impeachment vote 10 times as much as about anything else.“Policy is not policy toward improving government,” Mr. Meijer explained. “It’s policy as a signifier of whether you’re part of the in group or the out group.”Refusing to repeat the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, he said, put Mr. Meijer squarely in the “out group.”In Michigan, Representative Peter Meijer, who voted for impeachment, lost his primary to a Trump-backed rival. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“I can’t tell you the number of times somebody said, ‘You don’t have to believe the election is stolen, the important thing isn’t believing it, it’s saying it,’” Mr. Meijer recalled in an interview. “That is what a Republican is supposed to do right now.”If a series of primary setbacks this spring had showed that Mr. Trump was not invincible, then races in August have showcased his enduring influence.Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State, another Republican vote for impeachment, was ousted by a Trump supporter. A Trump-backed candidate, Tim Michels, who has entertained trying to overturn the 2020 election, won the Republican nomination for governor of Wisconsin. And Mr. Trump’s preferred candidates swept the nominations in Arizona for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state. All embraced his election denialism. More

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      What Liz Cheney’s Loss in Wyoming Means

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      If Liz Cheney’s loss to Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s primary election on Tuesday seems like a bad dream to many of Ms. Cheney’s Democratic admirers, that’s because it is: For a generation, progressives have imagined the moment when the white working class would finally turn against an insular and privileged Republican establishment. That day has arrived. But it isn’t what Democrats dreamed.Apparently uninterested in everyday governing, the new insurgents who elected Ms. Hageman are consumed with demonstrating that they are authentic conservative Republicans. And in that sense, they are succumbing to the same impulses they associate with their liberal opponents: a shrill hostility to different viewpoints, an obsession with virtue signaling and a willingness to purge their own ranks. The older tradition of Republican politics — the one that cradled Ms. Cheney from girlhood and shaped her in office — is still alive, though embattled, even in Wyoming. Progressives who realize that this privileged Republican establishment was a linchpin of our democracy all along may start rooting for a counterrevolution from above rather than a revolution from below.In the not very distant past, Wyoming’s G.O.P. was focused on governing the state by addressing everyday challenges, like distributing a limited number of liquor licenses and funding its public schools. Politics was “frankly boring,” recalled Tim Stubson, a partisan of the old school.The Cheneys exemplified Wyoming’s establishment: They are quiet and diligent legislators, even a little bland. They are also highly educated and wealthy, splitting their time between Washington and Wyoming’s Teton County, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.Wyoming politics began to change beneath their feet, slowly at first, as the Tea Party rose to power, and then rapidly during the Trump years, as a new guard waged war with the establishment, making politics less about ordinary governance than about identity.We’ve spent the last year traveling Wyoming, from Cheyenne in the south to Sheridan in the north, from Evanston in the west to Wheatland in the east, talking to local political activists and leaders. This obsession with identity left a mark everywhere, but nowhere more obviously than at the recent Republican state conventions. Just a decade ago, few delegates would have attended party meetings with guns strapped to their hips. Now many do. That wasn’t enough for one delegate at the last convention: He reportedly strutted about with a gun fully cocked. In another departure from old norms, many delegates have taken to wearing their cowboy hats inside the convention center. “That’s not a Wyoming thing,” noted JoAnn True, a patron of the old party. This is mostly because there is no need to wear a cowboy hat indoors — unless your goal is to sport a costume that signals a conservative social identity.Virtue signaling is also on the rise. One convention delegate argued that Wyoming schoolchildren should not be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance, since the word “indivisible” suggests that states can’t secede from the union. Another Republican Party figure was criticized for allegedly failing to adopt an appropriately respectful posture during the pledge.Acting the part of a true Wyoming conservative is a delicate art. It’s not only about signaling that you belong to a rugged, rural working class, but also about highlighting your conservative bona fides, which often means exiling anyone who doesn’t toe the line. Now a conservative cancel culture as unforgiving as its progressive rival is sweeping over the Wyoming G.O.P.Ms. Cheney, of course, is the most prominent victim of that cancel culture: She has been censured twice by the party, and now has been voted out of office. But she is just the tip of an iceberg that mostly lies beneath the media’s radar. Other members of the old type have been censured as well. Their crimes are varied, ranging from supporting Medicaid expansion to founding a nonpartisan PAC to fund female candidates.Websites have emerged that help the new censors identify politically incorrect Republicans. WyoRINO, for example, exposes legislators “who falsely claim to be Republicans” by scrutinizing their voting records for the slightest signs of apostasy. According to the site’s index, nearly a two-thirds majority of Wyoming’s Republican legislators are faking it.Those who are formally censured, though, usually have something else in common: They are from the upper class. In recent years the party has censured a wealthy activist, a state senator with a doctorate and a physician. Joe McGinley, the physician — a prominent party leader of the old style — was censured for reasons that are still a bit mysterious. But as a Stanford-trained doctor, he was a perfect symbol of an inauthentic conservative. Joey Correnti IV, a pistol-packing delegate, mocks his supposed haughtiness, claiming that he introduces himself as “Doctor Joe McGinley.”Plenty of the new insurgents are themselves comfortable members of the professional class pretending to be “one of the people.” Some, like Ms. Hageman, simply seem opportunistic, while others sincerely share cultural affinities with Wyoming’s working class. But to its credit, the new identity politics has also done something rare in this gilded age of American politics: It has elevated genuinely working-class citizens into positions of power. For example, Tom James, elected to the State Senate in 2018, grew up in a foster home and campaigned for office as he delivered pizzas. Meanwhile, Frank Eathorne, the current chairman of the state party, previously worked as a Terminix pest exterminator. As Tim Stubson of the old establishment acknowledged, “It’s a much more blue-collar party.”These candidates are starting to reshape the G.O.P. beyond Wyoming as well. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado earned a G.E.D., having left high school after she got pregnant. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a truck driver won a State Senate seat on a shoestring budget. And in Arizona, Rusty Bowers — who resisted pressure from Donald Trump to overturn his state’s election results — was just badly defeated by David Farnsworth, a small businessman and former crane operator with an A.A. degree.For decades, progressives have hoped that the white working class would turn against the affluent bankers, doctors and oil magnates who control the Republican Party. Well, it did. Class warfare of a kind did finally break out. It’s just not the sort of war progressives imagined, much less hoped for.That’s true partly because progressive longings for class war rested on a falsehood. Influential books like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” insisted that the Republican elite was rapaciously consumed with padding its wealth and exploiting its working-class supporters. Like other myths, that critique contained a kernel of truth. Wyoming’s establishment was too insular at times — and it practiced self-dealing on occasion.But whatever its sins, it was also public spirited. It cared about the general welfare of the state and worked hard on its behalf, laboring away for a pittance in a legislature that begins its sessions in the dead of Wyoming’s punishing winter, when driving is treacherous. The new identitarians infiltrating the State Legislature seem less interested in seeking remedies to real problems than in signaling to their base.Thus, they perform small symbolic acts, like pushing a bill that requires local law enforcement officials to ignore federal law that violates the Second Amendment, or sponsoring a bill that prohibited the teaching of critical race theory in Wyoming public schools. It failed because enough traditional conservatives don’t believe it’s a real problem. Tom Walters, a state representative of the old school, observed, “They speak of it as though it’s there, and yet they know all their teachers and they know their teachers aren’t teaching it.”Addressing these phantoms swallows up time, leaving larger issues neglected. Cathy Connolly, the Democratic minority leader in the State House, told us: “We have one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. We now have the highest workplace fatality rate. We’ve got Covid issues. We’ve got hospitals closing. We’re not looking at these issues because we have these stupid bills,” she said, adding an expletive.The right’s new identity craze wasn’t engineered by Donald Trump. It simply created an opportunity that he exploited. But Mr. Trump has rendered identity politics more dangerous than its progressive rival by wedding it to a cult of personality and a campaign to steal an election. Those changes have only widened the party’s class divide: While a substantial majority of white Republican primary voters without a college degree say they would prefer to vote for him in 2024, those with college degrees generally want someone else, according to a July New York Times/Siena College poll.Ms. Cheney’s fall highlights the cultish character of the right’s evolving politics of identity. During her first two terms, she supported Mr. Trump’s positions 93 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight (almost as often as Kevin McCarthy and more often than Elise Stefanik). Yet Ms. Cheney is not only considered to be a “Republican in Name Only” by many Wyoming Republicans — she is the face of the RINOs. At the state convention, one attendee sported a T-shirt that said “No More RINOs” with Ms. Cheney’s name circled and crossed out. To cross Mr. Trump is to become a fake conservative.Sadly, the G.O.P. establishment was not strong enough to save Ms. Cheney. Happily, though, it isn’t dead, even in Wyoming. In fact, it’s far more entrenched than Ms. Cheney’s defeat might suggest. The old guard still controls the State Legislature and Wyoming’s two most populous counties, both of which pushed back forcefully on efforts to censure Ms. Cheney. And in some places the new insurgents have been outmaneuvered and beaten back. For example, in Campbell County, where support for Mr. Trump surpasses that of most Wyoming counties, the establishment wrestled the party away from the new identitarians.Similar fights are playing out in state parties and legislatures from Colorado to Arizona, Idaho, Illinois and Texas, where the new identitarians are gaining momentum, chipping away at the old guard’s power. But even if they continue to advance, their style of politics may also contain the seeds of its destruction. Any party that elevates symbolism over governing risks stirring mass revolt down the road. Some practitioners of identity politics on the left have already discovered that lesson the hard way. When some members of the San Francisco Board of Education busied themselves renaming schools instead of prioritizing reopening them after lengthy closures during the pandemic, they were recalled. Results matter even in the age of identity politics.Though the outcome of the G.O.P.’s civil war is impossible to determine, one thing is clear: Both sides see the conflict in existential terms. As the traditionalist Dr. McGinley said of Ms. Cheney’s race: “The soul of the Republican Party is at stake.” Ms. Cheney fought valiantly for the party’s soul and was celebrated by traditional Republicans in Wyoming for doing so. They don’t believe her cause is lost — and neither should we.Stephanie Muravchik (@stephaniemurav1) and Jon A. Shields are professors of government at Claremont McKenna College and the authors of “Trump’s Democrats.” They are working on a new book about Liz Cheney’s Wyoming and the future of the American right.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Is It All About ‘Fealty to Trump’s Delusions’? Three Writers Talk About Where the G.O.P. Is Headed

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      Ross Douthat, a Times Opinion columnist, hosted an online conversation with Rachel Bovard, the policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Tim Miller, the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell,” about the recent primaries in Arizona, Michigan and beyond, and the strength of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.Ross Douthat: Rachel, Tim, thanks so much for joining me. I’m going to start where we always tend to start in these discussions — with the former president of the United States and his influence over the Republican Party. Donald Trump has had some bad primary nights this year, most notably in May in Georgia.But overall Tuesday seems like it was a good one for him: In Michigan, his favored candidate narrowly beat Peter Meijer, one of the House Republican votes for impeachment. In the Arizona Republican primary for governor, Kari Lake is narrowly ahead, which would give Trump a big victory in his battle of endorsements against Mike Pence, who endorsed Lake’s main rival.Do you agree, or is Trump’s influence just the wrong lens through which to be assessing some of these races?Rachel Bovard: It was a good night for Trump’s endorsements, which remain critical and decisive, particularly when he’s picking candidates who can change the ideological direction of the party. No other major figure in the G.O.P. has shown they can do the same.Tim Miller: An early agreement! The Republicans put up a slate of “Big Lie” candidates at the top of the ticket in an important swing state last night, which seems pretty important.Bovard: I would dispute the notion that Arizona represented “a slate of ‘Big Lie’ candidates.”Miller: Well, Lake has long brought up fraud claims about the 2020 election. Rare potential evidence of the party bucking Trump could come from the Third Congressional District in Washington, benefited by a “jungle” primary — candidates for an office, regardless of party, run on the same ballot, and the top two candidates square off in the general election. If the Trump-endorsed candidate loses, it seems a good endorsement for that set up.Bovard: But the Blake Masters campaign in particular represented a depth of issues that appealed to Arizona voters and could represent a new generation of Republicans.Douthat: Let’s get into that question a little bit. One of the questions hanging over the phenomenon of Trumper populism is whether it represents any kind of substantial issue-based change in what the G.O.P. stands for, or whether it’s just all about fealty to Trump.The Masters campaign and the Lake campaign seem to represent different answers to that question — Masters leveraging Trump’s support to try to push the party in a more nationalist or populist direction on trade, foreign policy, family policy, other issues, and Lake just promising to stop the next (alleged) steal. Or do we think that it’s all the same phenomenon underneath?Bovard: A very significant part of Trump’s appeal, what he perhaps taught the G.O.P., was that he spoke for voters who stood outside of party orthodoxy on a number of issues. And that’s where Masters tried to distinguish himself. He had a provocative campaign message early in his campaign: American families should be able to survive on a single income. That presents all kinds of challenges to standard Republican economic policy, how we think about family policy and how the two fit together. He also seems to be fearless in the culture wars, something else that Republicans are anxious to see.So this constant distilling into the “Big Lie” overlooks something key: A sea change is slowly happening on the right as it relates to policy expectations.Miller: But you know who distilled the Masters campaign into the “Big Lie”? Blake Masters. One of his ads begins, “I think Trump won in 2020.” This is an insane view, and I assume none of us think Masters really believes it. So fealty to Trump’s delusions is the opening ante here. Had Masters run a campaign about his niche, Peter Thiel-influenced issue obsessions but said Trump lost and he was harming Republican voters by continuing to delude them about our democracy, he would’ve lost like Rusty Bowers did.I do think Masters has some differentiated policy ideas that are probably, not certainly, reflective of where the G.O.P. is headed, but that wasn’t the main thing here.Douthat: So Tim, speaking for the “it’s Trump fealty all the way down” camp, what separates the Arizona results from the very different recent results in Georgia, where Trump fealty was insufficient to defeat either Brian Kemp or even Brad Raffensperger?Miller: Two things: First, with Kemp, governing actually matters. With incumbents, primaries for governor can be somewhat different because of that. Kemp was Ron DeSantis-esque without the attention in his handling of Covid. (This does not extend all the way to full anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical governors like Larry Hogan of Maryland or Charlie Baker of Massachusetts — Kemp almost never said an ill word about Trump.)Second, the type of electorate matters. Republican voters actually bucked Trump in another state, my home state, Colorado. What do Georgia and Colorado have in common? Suburban sprawl around a major city that dominates the state and a young, college-educated population.Douthat: Does that sound right to you, Rachel? And is there anything we aren’t seeing about a candidate like Lake that makes her more than just a stalking horse for Trump’s own obsessions?Bovard: Tim is right in the sense that there is always nuance when it comes to state elections. That’s why I also don’t see the Washington State primary race as a definitive rejection of Trump, as Tim alluded to earlier. Lake is, as a candidate, bombastic on the election issue.Miller: “Bombastic” is quite the euphemism for completely insane. Deliberate lies. The same ones that led to the storming of the Capitol.Bovard: Well, I don’t see that as determining how she governs. She’s got an entire state to manage, if she wins, and there are major issues she’ll have to manage that Trump also spoke to: the border, primarily.By the way, I regularly meet with Democrats who still tell me the 2018 election was stolen, and Stacey Abrams is the rightful governor of Georgia, so I’m not as pearl clutchy about it, no.Miller: “Pearl clutchy” is quite a way to describe a lie that has infected tens of millions of people, resulted in multiple deaths and the imprisonment of some of Trump’s most loyal supporters. I thought the populists were supposed to care about these people, but I guess worrying about their lives being ruined is just a little “pearl clutching.”Bovard: I know we don’t want to relitigate the entirety of Jan. 6, so I’ll just say I do worry about people’s lives being ruined. And the Jan. 6 Select Committee has further entrenched the divide that exists over this.Douthat: I’m going to enforce a pivot here, while using my moderator’s power to stipulate that I think Trump’s stolen-election narrative has been more destructive than the left’s Abrams-won-Georgia narrative or the “Diebold stole Ohio” narrative in 2004.If Lake wins her primary, can she win the general-election race? Can Doug Mastriano win in Pennsylvania? To what extent are we watching a replay of certain Republican campaigns in 2010 — long before Trump, it’s worth noting — where the party threw away winnable seats by nominating perceived extremists?Bovard: A key for G.O.P. candidates going forward is to embrace both elements of the cultural and economic argument. For a long time in the party these were seen as mutually exclusive, and post-Trump, I don’t think they are anymore. Glenn Youngkin won in Virginia in part by embracing working-class economic issues — leaning into repeal of the grocery tax, for example — and then pushing hard against critical race theory. He didn’t surge on economics alone.Douthat: Right, but Youngkin also did not have to run a primary campaign so deeply entangled with Trump. There’s clearly a sweet spot for the G.O.P. to run as economic moderates or populists and anti-woke fighters right now, but can a figure like Lake manage that in a general election? We don’t even know yet if Masters or J.D. Vance, who both explicitly want to claim that space, can grab it after their efforts to earn Trump’s favor.Tim, can these candidates win?Miller: Of course they can win. Midterm elections have historically washed in candidates far more unlikely than nominees like Masters (and Lake, if she is the nominee) or Mastriano from tossup swing states. Lake in particular, with her history in local news, would probably have some appeal to voters who have a personal affinity for her outside the MAGA base. Mastriano might be a slightly tougher sell, given his brand, vibe and Oath Keeper energy.Bovard: It’s long been conventional wisdom that you tack to the right in primaries and then move more to the center in the general, so if Lake wins, she will have to find a message that appeals to as many voters as possible. She would have to present a broad spectrum of policy priorities. The G.O.P. as a voting bloc has changed. Its voters are actively iterating on all of this, so previous assumptions about what appeals to voters don’t hold up as well. I tend to think there’s a lane for Trump-endorsed candidates who lean into the Trump-style economics and key culture fights.Miller: I just want to say here that I do get pissed about the notion that it’s us, the Never Trumpers, who are obsessed with litigating Jan. 6. Pennsylvania is a critical state that now has a nominee for governor who won because of his fealty to this lie, could win the general election and could put his finger on the scale in 2024. The same may be true in another key state, Arizona. This is a red-level threat for our democracy.A lot of Republicans in Washington, D.C., want to sort of brush it away just like they brushed away the threat before Jan. 6, because it’s inconvenient.Douthat: Let me frame that D.C. Republican objection a different way: If this is a red-level threat for our democracy, why aren’t Democrats acting like it? Why did Democratic Party money enter so many of these races on behalf of the more extreme, stop-the-steal Republican? For example, given the closeness of the race, that sort of tactic quite possibly helped defeat Meijer in Michigan.Miller: Give me a break. The ads from the left trying to tilt the races were stupid and frankly unpatriotic. I have spoken out about this before. But it’s not the Democrats who are electing these insane people. Were the Democrats responsible for Mark Finchem? Mehmet Oz? Herschel Walker? Mastriano won by over 20 points. This is what Republican voters want.Also, advertising is a two-way street. If all these self-righteous Republicans were so angry about the ads designed to promote John Gibbs, they could’ve run pro-Meijer ads! Where was Kevin McCarthy defending his member? He was in Florida shining Mr. Trump’s shoes.Douthat: Rachel, I watched that Masters ad that Tim mentioned and listened to his rhetoric around the 2020 election, and it seemed like he was trying to finesse things, make an argument that the 2020 election somehow wasn’t fair in the way it was administered and covered by the press without going the Sidney Powell route to pure conspiracism.But let’s take Masters’s spirit of generalized mistrust and reverse its direction: If you were an Arizona Democrat, why would you trust a Governor Lake or a Secretary of State Mark Finchem to fairly administer the 2024 election?Bovard: Honestly, the thing that concerns me most is that there is zero trust at all on elections at this moment. If I’m a Democrat, I don’t trust the Republicans, and vice versa. Part of that lack of trust is that we aren’t even allowed to question elections anymore — as Masters did, to your point, without going full conspiracy.We regain trust by actually allowing questions and full transparency. This is one of the things that worries me about our political system. Without any kind of institutional trust, or trust of one another, there’s a breakdown.Miller: This is preposterous. Arizona had several reviews of their election. The people lying about the election are the problem.Douthat: Last questions: What do you think are the implications of the big pro-life defeat in the Kansas abortion referendum, for either abortion policy or the November elections?Bovard: It shows two headwinds that the pro-life movement is up against. First is money. Reporting shows that pro-abortion advocates spent millions against the amendment, and Democrats in many key races across the country are outpacing Republicans in fund-raising. Second, it reflects the confusion that exists around this issue post-Roe. The question presented to Kansas voters was a microcosm of the general question in Roe: Should abortion be removed from the state Constitution and be put in the hands of democratically elected officials? Yet it was sometimes presented as a binary choice between a ban or no ban. (This early headline from Politico is an example: “Kansas voters block effort to ban abortion in state constitutional amendment vote.”)But I don’t think it moves the needle on the midterms.Miller: I view it slightly differently. I think most voters are in a big middle that Republicans could even use to their advantage if they didn’t run to the extremes. Voters do not want blanket abortion bans or anything that can be construed as such. Something that moved the status quo significantly to the pro-life right but still maintained exceptions and abortion up to a certain, reasonable point in pregnancy would be politically palatable.So this will only be an effective issue for Democrats in turnout and in places where Republicans let them make it an issue by going too far to the extreme.Douthat: Finally, a different short-answer question for you both. Rachel, say Masters and Vance are both in the Senate in 2023 as spokesmen for this new culturally conservative economic populism you favor. What’s the first bill they co-sponsor?Bovard: I’d say a large tax on university endowments.Douthat: Tim, adding the evidence of last night to the narrative, can Ron DeSantis (or anyone else, but let’s be honest, there isn’t anyone else) beat Trump in a Republican primary in 2024?Miller: Sad to end with a wishy-washy pundit answer but … maybe! Trump seems to have a plurality right now within the party on 2024, and many Republicans have an affinity for him. So if it were Mike Pence, Chris Christie or Liz Cheney, they would have no chance.Could DeSantis thread a needle and present himself as a more electable Trump? Some of the focus groups The Bulwark does makes it seem like that’s possible. But will he withstand the bright lights and be able to pull it off? Will Trump be indicted? A lot of known unknowns. I’d put DeSantis as an underdog, but it’s not impossible that he could pull it off.Douthat: There is absolutely no shame in the wishy-washy pundit game. Thanks so much to you both for joining me.Ross Douthat is a Times Opinion columnist. Rachel Bovard is the policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a tech columnist at The Federalist. Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”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