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      This Minnesota Race Will Show the Potency of Crime vs. Abortion

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      Keith Ellison, the state’s progressive attorney general, faces a Republican challenger who is looking to harness public unease since George Floyd’s murder.WAYZATA, Minn. — Here in light-blue Minnesota, where I’m traveling this week, there’s a race that offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.Keith Ellison, the incumbent attorney general and a Democrat, insists that his bid for re-election will hinge on abortion, which remains legal in Minnesota.But his Republican challenger, Jim Schultz, says the contest is about public safety and what he argues are “extreme” policies that Ellison endorsed after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the aftermath of which Minnesota is still wrestling with.Schultz, a lawyer and first-time candidate, said in an interview that watching Floyd’s death under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a police officer who was later convicted of murder, had made him “physically ill.” He added that Ellison’s prosecution of Chauvin was “appropriate” and that he supported banning the use of chokeholds and what he called “warrior-style police training.”But Schultz, a 36-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School who has worked most recently as the in-house counsel for an investment firm, was scathing in his assessment of Ellison, presenting himself as the common-sense opponent of what he characterized as a “crazy anti-police ideology.”He decided to run against Ellison, he said, because he thought it was “immoral to embrace policies that led to an increase in crime in at-risk communities.”Ellison fired right back, accusing Schultz of misrepresenting the job of attorney general, which has traditionally focused on protecting consumers. County prosecutors, he said in an interview, were the ones primarily responsible for crime under Minnesota law — but he noted that his office had prosecuted nearly 50 people of violent crimes and had always helped counties when asked.“He’s trying to demagogue crime, Willie Horton-style,” Ellison said, referring to a Black man who was used in a notorious attack ad in the 1988 presidential election that was widely seen as racist fearmongering. Schultz’s plans, he warned, would “demolish” the attorney general’s office and undermine its work on “corporate accountability.”“He’s never tried a case or stepped in a courtroom in his life,” Ellison added.An upset victory by Schultz would reverberate: He would be the first Republican to win statewide office since Tim Pawlenty was re-elected as governor in 2006.Ellison, 59, served six terms in Congress and rose to become a deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. Before leaving Washington and winning his current office in 2018 — by only four percentage points — he was a rising star of the party’s progressive wing.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.Debates Dwindle: Direct political engagement with voters is waning as candidates surround themselves with their supporters. Nowhere is the trend clearer than on the shrinking debate stage.As one of the most prominent Democratic attorneys general of the Trump era, he has sued oil companies for what he called a “a campaign of deception” on climate change and has gone after pharmaceutical companies for promoting opioids.But the politics of crime and criminal justice have shifted since Floyd’s killing, and not necessarily to Ellison’s advantage. In a recent poll of Minnesota voters, 20 percent listed crime as the most important issue facing the state, above even inflation.Maneuvering on abortion rightsDemocrats would prefer to talk about Schultz’s view on abortion. They point to his former position on the board of the Human Life Alliance, a conservative group that opposes abortion rights and falsely suggests that abortion can increase the risk of breast cancer, as evidence that his real agenda is “an attempt to chip away at abortion access until it can be banned outright,” as Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic Party, put it. Democratic operatives told me that in their door-knocking forays, abortion was the topic most on voters’ minds — even among independents and moderate voters.So Ellison has been talking up his plans to defend abortion rights and warning that Schultz would do the opposite.“We will fight extradition if they come from another state, and we’ll go to court to fight for people’s right to travel and to do what is legal to do in the state of Minnesota,” Ellison said at a recent campaign stop. Schultz, he argued, “will use the office to interfere and undermine people’s right to make their own choices about reproductive health.”Schultz denies having an aggressive anti-abortion agenda. Although he said he was “pro-life” and described himself as a “person of faith” — he is a practicing Catholic — he told me he “hadn’t gotten into this to drive abortion policy.” Abortion, he said, was a “peripheral issue” to the attorney general’s office he hopes to lead, and he pointed out that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the practice legal in 1995.Historically, the attorney general’s office in Minnesota has focused on protecting consumers, leaving most criminal cases to local or federal prosecutors.But none of that, Schultz insisted, is “written in stone.” The uptick in crime in Minneapolis, he said, was a “man-made disaster” that could be reversed with the right policies.Ellison countered that Schultz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and cited four statutes that would have to be changed to shift the focus of the attorney general’s office from consumer protection to crime.Schultz acknowledged his lack of courtroom experience but said he would hire aggressive criminal prosecutors if he won. He is promising to beef up the attorney general’s criminal division from its current staff of three lawyers to as many as three dozen and to use organized crime statutes to pursue “carjacking gangs.”He’s been endorsed by sheriffs and police unions from across the state, many of whom are critical of Ellison’s embrace of a proposed overhaul of the Minneapolis Police Department, which fell apart in acrimony. Had it passed, the city would have renamed the police the Department of Public Safety and reallocated some of its budget to other uses.Ellison, who lives in Minneapolis and whose son is a progressive member of the City Council, seems to recognize his political danger. But what he called Schultz’s “obsessive” focus on crime clearly frustrates him.“He doesn’t really care about crime,” Ellison said at one point.He also defended his support for the police overhaul in Minneapolis as necessary to create some space for meaningful change and challenged me to find an example of his having called to “defund the police” — “there isn’t one,” he said. And he noted that he had supported the governor’s budget, which included additional money for police departments.In George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which shows lingering signs of the anger that followed Floyd’s murder.Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesWhere it all beganDemocrats in Minnesota insist that the crime issue is overblown — and murders, robberies, sex offenses and gun violence are down since last year. But according to the City of Minneapolis’s official numbers, other crimes are up: assault, burglaries, vandalism, car thefts and carjacking.And it’s hard, traveling around the area where Floyd’s murder took place, to avoid the impression that Minneapolis is still reeling from the 2020 unrest. But there’s little agreement on who is to blame.Boarded-up storefronts dot Uptown, a retail area where shopkeepers told me that the combination of the pandemic and the 2020 riots, which reached the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare of Hennepin Avenue, had driven customers away.A couple of miles away, on a frigid Tuesday morning, I visited George Floyd Square, as the corner where he was killed is known. Iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which is covered in street art and shows lingering signs of the eruption of anger that followed Floyd’s murder.A burned-out and graffitied former Speedway gas station now hosts a lengthy list of community demands, including the end of qualified immunity for police officers, which Schultz opposes. In an independent coffee shop on the adjoining corner, the proprietor showed me a photograph he had taken with Ellison — the lone Democratic politician, he said, to visit in recent months.I was intercepted at the square by Marquise Bowie, a former felon and community activist who has become its self-appointed tour guide. Bowie runs a group called the George Floyd Global Memorial, and he invited me on a solemn “pilgrimage” of the site — stopping by murals depicting civil rights heroes of the past, the hallowed spot of asphalt where Floyd took his last breath and a nearby field of mock gravestones bearing the names of victims of police violence.Bowie, who said he didn’t support defunding the police, complained that law enforcement agencies had abandoned the community. Little had changed since Floyd’s death, he said. And he confessed to wondering, as he intercepted two women who were visiting from Chicago, why so many people wanted to see the site but offer little in return.“What good does taking a selfie at a place where a man died do?” he asked me. “This community is struggling with addiction, homelessness, poverty. They need help.”What to read tonightHerschel Walker, the embattled Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, often says he has overcome mental illness in his past. But experts say that assertion is simplistic at best, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.As we wrote yesterday, swing voters appear to be tilting increasingly toward Republicans. On The Daily, our chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, breaks down why.Oil and gas industry lobbyists are already preparing for a Republican-controlled House, Eric Lipton writes from Washington.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Election Firm Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say

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      The executive of a small Michigan elections software company was charged with grand theft by embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime.Before the arrest of its founder and chief executive, Eugene Yu, Konnech repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in statements to The New York Times.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesWhen Eugene Yu’s small election software company signed a contract to help Los Angeles County organize poll workers for the 2020 election, he agreed to keep the workers’ personal data in the United States.But the company, Konnech, transferred personal data on thousands of the election workers to developers in China who were writing and troubleshooting software, according to a court filing that Los Angeles County prosecutors made on Thursday.The filing adds new details about the arrest last week of Mr. Yu, whose company has been the focus of groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election. Some of those groups have accused the company of storing information about poll workers on servers in China. Before the arrest, the company repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in statements to The New York Times.Los Angeles prosecutors initially accused Mr. Yu of embezzling public money by knowingly violating the terms of the company’s contract. Since searching Konnech’s offices and Mr. Yu’s home, the prosecutors have also accused him of conspiring with others to commit a crime, according to the new legal filing. It is rare for an executive to face criminal charges for potentially mishandling data. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday.In the filing, prosecutors said a project manager at Konnech had sent an internal email early this month saying the company would no longer send personal data to Chinese contractors. “We need to ensure the security privacy and confidentially,” the email said.In a separate message, sent in August, the project manager noted that the contractors had high-level access to all of the poll worker software used by its customers. He called it a “huge security issue.”The documents did not specify whether others were being investigated or would be charged, and the district attorney’s office declined to comment.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.Los Angeles prosecutors said last week that none of Mr. Yu’s or Konnech’s actions had altered election results and that they had seen no evidence of identity theft. They have not indicated any motive in their public statements.The prosecutors said that the charges focused on the handling of personal information about poll workers, such as their names and phone numbers, and that the data did not relate to ballots or the voting process. Still, with the midterm elections just weeks away, several counties that use Konnech software said they were rushing to reassure voters that their elections were secure.Mr. Yu’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Konnech, which is based in Michigan, has about 20 employees in the United States and about 20 customers. It plays no role in the tabulation or counting of votes in American elections.Nevertheless, some election deniers have targeted the company, saying they discovered the company’s data in China and suggesting that Konnech gave the Chinese government a back door to manipulate America’s election process. The New York Times published an article about those claims early last week, as a part of its coverage of misinformation and elections.Los Angeles prosecutors arrested Mr. Yu the day after the article was published, raising questions about the truthfulness of statements that Mr. Yu made to The Times just days earlier, when he denied the accusations and said poll worker data had never been stored in China.If convicted, Mr. Yu faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison for the charges of grand theft by embezzlement of public funds and conspiracy to commit a crime. He also faces an additional five years because the contract was valued at more than $500,000.A ballot-tallying center in Los Angeles County. Officials have said the county will continue to use Konnech’s software to manage data on about 12,000 to 14,000 poll workers for the midterm elections.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesThe district attorney’s office said it was sifting through a trove of documents seized in its search of Konnech’s offices and Mr. Yu’s home last week. If those files reveal similar crimes in other counties, prosecutors could hand off the case to federal investigators.More than 20 attorneys general, district attorneys and election officials have contacted the district attorney’s office over the past week, they said.Mark Kriger, one of Mr. Yu’s lawyers, said in a bond hearing last week that Mr. Yu had participated in two voluntary interviews several weeks ago with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Yu told the agency that he was not aware of any data from Konnech being stored in China, the lawyer said at the hearing.The F.B.I. agents were surprised to learn about Mr. Yu’s arrest, Mr. Kriger said at the hearing. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. said she “wouldn’t be in the position to confirm or deny comments made by the attorney.”Mr. Yu, 64 and a Chinese-born American citizen, co-founded Konnech in 2002 as a phone technology company. He turned it into an elections software company in the late 2000s.In statements made to The New York Times before his arrest, Mr. Yu said that he had shuttered Konnech’s Chinese subsidiary in 2021 and that he no longer had employees there. Two people with knowledge of the company, who would speak only anonymously because of the legal proceedings, said it was known within Konnech that employees should avoid bringing up the use of Chinese contractors when talking to customers.Attention on the company surged in August and September after a conference hosted by Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, a nonprofit that claims to be searching for evidence of voter fraud, and Gregg Phillips, an election denier and longtime associate of the group.The group claimed that their team had discovered and downloaded Konnech’s data from servers located in China.Mr. Yu later sued the group for defamation, hacking and other charges, and hired a crisis management company. That case, based in Texas, is continuing.The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said its investigation began after Mr. Phillips had sent a tip to its public integrity division. When it announced the charges last week, the district attorney’s office told The New York Times in a statement that the group’s investigation had no input on the county’s investigation.After Mr. Yu’s arrest, Konnech sent an identical letter to several customers claiming that they had “never hosted your data or system in servers outside of the United States.”Fairfax County, Va., the City of Detroit, and Prince William County, Va., terminated their contracts with Konnech after Mr. Yu’s arrest.Los Angeles County said it would continue using Konnech software to manage data on about 12,000 to 14,000 poll workers for the midterm elections.Dekalb County in Georgia voted to keep its contract with Konnech, adding an amendment that the data would be stored on servers owned by Dekalb County instead of by Konnech.“We’re one week out from early voting starting in Georgia and run the risk of our election operations going awry from a company that is going down in flames,” Marci McCarthy, the chairwoman for the county’s Republican Party, said in an interview after the vote.“It’s not over,” she added. 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      For Zeldin, a Shooting Hits Close to Home and to His Campaign Theme

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      The shooting of two teenagers directly outside his Long Island home has given Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to push his tough-on-crime message within a personal frame.After two teenage boys were shot outside his home on Long Island last weekend, Representative Lee Zeldin wasted little time to amplify the tough-on-crime message he has relentlessly pressed in his bid for governor of New York.He quickly assembled a news conference in front of his moonlit house on Sunday night, followed up the next day with a Fox News interview, and used an appearance at the Columbus Day Parade to imbue his political messaging with a new personal, if frightening, outlook.“It doesn’t hit any closer to home than this,” Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, said while marching at the parade in Manhattan on Monday, describing the incident as “traumatic” for his twin 16-year-old daughters, who were doing their homework in the kitchen when the shooting happened. “This could be anyone across this entire state.”“Last night the girls wanted to sleep with us,” Mr. Zeldin also said during the parade. “I didn’t think that the next time I’d be standing in front of a crime scene, it would be crime scene tape in front of my own house.”The shooting unfolded on Sunday afternoon when the police said multiple gunshots were fired from a dark-colored vehicle at three teenage boys walking near Mr. Zeldin’s home in Suffolk County on Long Island. Two 17-year-old boys were forced to take cover by Mr. Zeldin’s porch, suffering injuries that were not life threatening, while a 15-year-old boy fled the shots unharmed.That the shooting unfolded near the home of a conservative congressman who has anchored his campaign for governor on the state of crime in New York, attracting outsize media attention, appears to have been pure happenstance.The police had not made any arrests as of Tuesday, but they were investigating whether the incident was connected to gang violence, according to a law enforcement official who asked to remain anonymous to discuss an ongoing investigation.But with less than four weeks until Election Day, the shooting offered Mr. Zeldin an opportunity to elevate the issue of public safety in the governor’s race, as the congressman seeks a breakout in his efforts to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who has so far enjoyed a comfortable lead in most public polls.Mr. Zeldin faces a steep climb to overcome Ms. Hochul’s significant fund-raising edge in a state where Democrats overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans. He has been quick to talk about the impact of the shooting in starkly personal terms, appealing to New Yorkers who have also been affected by gun violence. Mr. Zeldin was at a campaign event in the Bronx with his wife during the shooting.Mr. Zeldin, a staunch Trump supporter who has represented Suffolk County in Congress since 2015, has said he would make law and order his top priority if elected. He has consistently sought to blame the rise in violence on criminal justice policies enacted by progressive lawmakers as well as on left-leaning prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan. He has promised to fire Mr. Bragg “on Day 1.”At the same time, he has opposed Democratic-led efforts to tighten gun control measures, cheering the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down New York’s concealed carry law as “a historic, proper, and necessary victory.”Ms. Hochul, who is seeking her first full term, has trumpeted her efforts to tighten the state’s bail laws and has emphasized initiatives to crack down on illegal gun trafficking, as well as a law she signed raising the age for the purchase of semiautomatic rifles, after a massacre at a Buffalo supermarket earlier this year.“We’re not running away from those issues,” Ms. Hochul said on Monday. “We’re leaning hard into them because we have a real record of accomplishment.”The shooting outside Mr. Zeldin’s home is the second time his safety has been threatened this election cycle.Three months ago, a man tried to physically attack Mr. Zeldin with a sharp key chain during a campaign event near Rochester. The attacker, a veteran of the Iraq War who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, was quickly subdued and initially released without bail before being arrested on federal assault charges.Mr. Zeldin, who was not injured, used the confrontation to attack Democrats for the reforms they enacted to the state’s bail laws two years ago, even if the episode did little to shake up the state of the race.“It’s an extraordinary coincidence of events that gives Zeldin’s crime message added credibility, urgency, and national attention,” said William F. B. O’Reilly, a Republican political consultant who is not working on the Zeldin campaign. “This will almost certainly help him in the final weeks of the campaign.”Mr. Zeldin could certainly use a boost, having lagged behind Ms. Hochul in nearly every public poll commissioned this cycle. He has also found himself chasing her haul of campaign contributions — a tribute to a voracious fund-raising apparatus that raised $11.1 million from July to October of this year. The cash has allowed her to blanket airwaves and smartphones with campaign ads attacking Mr. Zeldin’s support of Mr. Trump and his opposition to abortion rights.Mr. Zeldins financial outlook is not exactly bleak, however. He brought in $6.4 million during the same period, thanks in part to fund-raisers with former president Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. He has also seen support from conservative super PACs which have spent nearly $4 million in the past weeks on ads calling Ms. Hochul soft on crime and criticizing her handling of the economy.On Tuesday, a police car was still stationed outside Mr. Zeldin’s home in Shirley, a working-class hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island, where residents on the typically sleepy street were still rattled by the burst of violence.Dan Haug was in his home when he heard the shots and ran to the window, spotting one of the boys lying in Mr. Zeldin’s bushes, screaming and bleeding from the gunshot wounds.“You know, there’s little isolated incidents in this neighborhood with like, fireworks and like dogs getting loose,” said Mr. Haug, who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years. “But nothing like that.”Mary Smith, the mother of the teenager who escaped unharmed, blamed the shooting on the proliferation of guns among young people, while stressing that she did not believe her son was in a gang, saying: “He’s just a normal kid.”While expressing sympathy for the Zeldin family ordeal, Ms. Smith lamented that she had heard nothing from the congressman himself, despite his many public comments.“I’m around the corner from you,” Ms. Smith said in an interview. “They took the story away from the victims and made it about running for government.”Chelsia Rose Marcius More

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      2 Shot Outside Home of Lee Zeldin, Candidate for New York Governor

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      The conditions of the two people and the circumstances of what happened were unclear but officials said there was no connection between the shooting and the residents of the home.Two people were wounded in a shooting on Sunday outside the home of Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, the candidate said on Twitter.The Suffolk County Police Department said that detectives were investigating the shooting, outside a home in Shirley on Long Island at 2:20 p.m. The conditions of the two people were not immediately clear.In a statement, Mr. Zeldin said that the two men who were shot were under his front porch and that he did not know them. The authorities also said there was no connection between the injured and the residents of the home.Mr. Zeldin said that he and his wife, Diana, were not home at the time of the shooting and had just left the Bronx Columbus Day Parade in the Morris Park neighborhood. He said his 16-year-old daughters, Mikayla and Arianna, were in the house doing homework at the kitchen table when they heard gunshots and screaming.“They ran upstairs, locked themselves in the bathroom and immediately called 911,” he said. “They acted very swiftly and smartly every step of the way and Diana and I are extremely proud of them.”Mr. Zeldin, a conservative congressman, has made public safety the centerpiece of his campaign, traveling the state to highlight violent crimes while promising to tighten the state’s bail laws and crack down on crime, if elected.He is considered an underdog against Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who had a comfortable lead in recent polls. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one in New York, and the governor’s campaign has sought to highlight Mr. Zeldin’s opposition to abortion rights and his support for former President Donald J. Trump.The shooting is the second time that violence has intersected with Mr. Zeldin’s campaign in recent months. In July, a man from Western New York was charged with assaulting a member of Congress after he physically confronted Mr. Zeldin onstage during a political event.The man, who was identified as an Army veteran, was pointing a sharp keychain toward the congressman. He later said he had been drinking and did not know who Mr. Zeldin was. Mr. Zeldin placed the attack in the context of his anti-crime message.“I’m as resolute as ever to do my part to make New York safe again,” he said at the time.The campaign increased security around Mr. Zeldin after the July incident. He hit the same note on Sunday, saying that his daughters were shaken by the shooting but otherwise unhurt.“Like so many New Yorkers, crime has literally made its way to our front door,” he said.Governor Hochul said on Twitter that she had been briefed on the shooting and was “relieved to hear the Zeldin family is safe and grateful for law enforcement’s quick response.”Grace Ashford More

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      Some Democrats Embrace the Police as the G.O.P.’s Crime Attacks Bite

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      Violent crime in cities has become a central talking point of Republican campaigns. It’s hurting many Democratic candidates, but not all.In one of the more unusual television advertisements of this year’s midterm election campaigns, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, accuses Democrats of wanting to defund police departments.“Violent crime is surging in Louisiana,” he says in the ad. “Woke leaders blame the police.”That wasn’t the unusual part. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states, Republicans have painted Democrats as hostile to the police and as cheerleaders for rioting and mayhem. And even though the data on crime is mixed, the tactic seems to be working for the G.O.P. in many races.What was unusual was that Kennedy was bothering to advertise at all in his deep-red state, and the line that came next:“Look,” the Louisiana senator continues, “if you hate cops just because they’re cops, the next time you get in trouble, call a crackhead.”Kennedy’s re-election bid is far from competitive. His Democratic opponent, a community activist from Baton Rouge named Gary Chambers, is polling in the teens. And, in this instance, the Democrat in question really has endorsed the idea of cutting police budgets.“People hate the phrase defund the police,” Chambers wrote on Twitter in December 2020. “Yet we defund education and healthcare almost every year. I live in a parish with 11 different police agencies, in the 2nd most incarcerated place in THE WORLD. It hasn’t solved crime. Move the money. It’s not making us safer.”Chambers made national headlines during the primary for smoking a blunt in an ad that called for the legalization of marijuana. In an interview at the time, Chambers said he decided to show himself smoking pot because it was important to be “very direct about the issues that we’re facing.” If it’s fair for people to make millions of dollars for selling cannabis, he asked, “why are people going to jail for this?”Given Kennedy’s comfortable lead over Chambers in the polls, the “crackhead” line appears meant to drive headlines about Democrats in general, rather than slam his specific opponent. And the ad is just a cruder version of attacks Republicans have leveled against Democrats across the country, regardless of their actual positions. Often — but not always — the candidates being targeted are Black, as Chambers is. But either way, the racial subtext of the criticism is impossible to ignore.Robbing ads of contextIn Florida, for instance, Senator Marco Rubio has portrayed his Democratic opponent, Representative Val Demings, a 65-year-old former police chief of Orlando, as a dangerous “radical” who is soft on crime.Like Chambers, Demings is Black — but, unlike him, she hails from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. She was one of 207 House Democrats who recently voted for the Invest to Protect Act, a bipartisan bill to increase funding for local police departments.One Rubio ad, titled “Blame America,” takes remarks by Demings out of context to claim that she “praised defunding the police.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.She made the comments on “CBS This Morning” in June 2020, soon after the police killing of George Floyd, giving a measured reaction to a pledge by the Minneapolis City Council to “end policing as we know it,” in the words of one councilwoman, and to rebuild the department with a focus on public health.“The council is being very thoughtful in terms of looking at all of the services that police provide,” Demings said. She went on to elaborate, “The council, along with law enforcement authorities and other community leaders, will sit down and look at everything and come out with a plan that allows them to keep Minneapolis safe, but also bring the community and the police together in a much-needed and long-overdue way.”In the end, the effort to cut the city’s police budget collapsed in acrimony as the political winds shifted.Demings is trying to push back against Rubio’s attacks, though her chances of unseating him appear slim in a state where Republicans have become dominant in recent elections. She has spent almost $8 million airing ads highlighting her experience in law enforcement, according to data provided by AdImpact. Five separate TV ads feature images of Demings in uniform and feature a claim that violent crime fell by 40 percent during her tenure as police chief.In one spot that aired this summer, Demings explicitly says she’d never vote to defund the police.“That’s just crazy,” she says into the camera.Where the crime attacks seem to be workingAs my colleague Reid Epstein wrote today, the Republicans’ crime offensive is hurting Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin.“Republicans have seized in particular on Mr. Barnes’s past progressive stances, including his suggestion in a 2020 television interview that funding be diverted from ‘over-bloated budgets in police departments’ to social services — a key element of the movement to defund the police,” Reid wrote. “Since then, Mr. Barnes has disavowed defunding the police and has called for an increase in funding.”At times, the campaign against Barnes, who is Black, has taken on explicit racial elements. “Mail advertising from Republicans has darkened Mr. Barnes’s skin, while some TV ads from a Republican super PAC have superimposed his name next to images of crime scenes,” Reid added.The soft-on-crime ads are also making an appearance in Pennsylvania, where the race has likewise moved in Republicans’ direction since Labor Day. The Democratic nominee for Senate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is white, faces an onslaught of ads accusing him of being too lenient on incarceration while in office. (Fetterman oversaw a parole board that successfully recommended clemency for about 50 inmates who had been sentenced to life in prison.)Kennedy, coincidentally, recently made an appearance for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, at a rally in Newtown, a blue-collar suburb of Philadelphia. The so-called collar counties around the state’s largest city are where statewide elections are typically won or lost — among the mainly white, non-college-educated voters who tend to swing between the two parties.And they’re hearing a lot about crime on the nightly news: A Pew Research survey from January found that 70 percent of Philadelphia residents thought crime, drugs and public safety was the most important issue facing the city.At the Newtown rally, Kennedy repeated the “crackhead” line and said, “Fetterman thinks cops are a bigger problem than criminals.” He added, “A free tip, folks: Most cops will leave you alone unless you do illegal stuff.”Fetterman appears to take the criticism personally, no surprise given that his engagement with the criminal justice system is written on his body.When I spoke with the lieutenant governor recently for an article about his health, he grew agitated after I asked him about the G.O.P.’s attacks on his record on crime.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has faced a barrage of Republican ads calling him soft on crime.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesAs he responded, Fetterman unrolled the sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt, revealing tattoos of the dates of murders in Braddock, the former steel town south of Pittsburgh where he served as mayor for over a decade.“It’s a smear and a lie, and they know that,” he said, adding that he had first been motivated to run for office by Braddock’s chronic problems with gun violence.“I talked about funding the police,” he said.How some Democrats are respondingTattoos aside, Pennsylvania law enforcement is coalescing against Fetterman. Most major police organizations in the state have endorsed Oz.But that hasn’t been every Democrat’s fate this year. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee for governor, is depicting himself as the law-and-order alternative to Doug Mastriano, his Republican opponent, who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Shapiro’s efforts are not going unnoticed. He’s earned endorsements from several policing organizations, including the Philadelphia lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, which offered a concurrent endorsement of Oz. Its president, John McNesby, used the announcement to denounce Fetterman, whom he accused of having “a long history of anti-police rhetoric and advocacy for polices that make communities less safe.”Shapiro’s ties to the F.O.P., the nation’s largest police organization, worried some in the Democratic primary this year. But what was once a liability is now a strength, and he leads Mastriano by double digits.If that lead holds, credit Shapiro’s deft moves to defuse Republican talking points on crime as one factor. He highlights his F.O.P. endorsement in a number of TV ads, two of which feature retired Philadelphia police officers offering their personal endorsements. In a city where the rate of violent crime is on track to surpass last year’s record high, that’s a potent message.The pro-police ads from Demings and Shapiro aren’t unique, either. In general election races this year, Democrats have spent almost $29 million on 175 individual ads praising the police or promoting police endorsements, according to a New York Times analysis of AdImpact data.What to readTonight, Senator Mark Kelly faces Blake Masters in the only debate of the Arizona Senate race. Jennifer Medina offers this preview.At a campaign stop in Georgia, Herschel Walker, the anti-abortion Republican nominee for Senate, sidestepped a claim that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, Maya King and Jonathan Weisman report.Clyde McGrady and Kellen Browning profiled Walker’s son Christian Walker, a social media star who has in recent days loudly criticized his father’s actions.Representative Tom Malinowski’s struggle to win his re-election bid in New Jersey looks like a national bellwether, Tracey Tully writes.A federal judge blocked New York’s new restrictions on the carrying of guns in public, finding much of the law unconstitutional. Jonah Bromwich has more.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Will Abortion Turn Tide for Democrats in House Fight for NY Suburbs?

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      ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — A year ago, Republicans staged an uprising in the Long Island suburbs, winning a slew of races by zeroing in on public safety and suggesting that Democrats had allowed violent crime to fester.Now, with the midterms approaching, Democratic leaders are hoping that their own singular message, focused on abortion, might have a similar effect.“Young ladies, your rights are on the line,” Laura Gillen, a Democrat running for Congress in Nassau County, said to two young women commuting toward the city on a recent weekday morning. “Please vote!”Long Island has emerged as an unlikely battleground in the bitter fight for control of the House of Representatives, with both Democrats and Republicans gearing up to pour large sums of money into the contests here.Nassau and Suffolk Counties, where nearly three million New Yorkers live, have become a powerful testing ground for the main campaign themes of each party, with Democrats hoping that their renewed focus on abortion rights — following the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — will help them retain control of the House.The New York City suburbs are at a rare political crossroads: Three of the four House seats that encompass most of Long Island are open this year after their incumbents retired or stepped aside to seek higher political office, offering both parties a unique, regionally concentrated opportunity to send new faces to Congress.The two districts that are mostly situated in Nassau County, just east of Queens, are held by Democrats, while the two districts concentrated on the eastern stretch of the island in Suffolk County are held by Republicans. Both parties are vying to gain one, if not, two seats.That prospect has injected a sense of urgency and uncertainty into the races on Long Island, once a Republican stronghold that has turned more Democratic and diverse in recent decades, becoming the type of suburban swing area that could determine control of the House in November.Republicans have almost exclusively focused on blaming Democrats for rising prices as well as on public safety: They have amplified concerns about the state’s contentious bail laws and crime in nearby New York City, where many Long Islanders commute for work.“Many Democrats feel like that they don’t have a party anymore because it’s gone so far to the left,” said Anthony D’Esposito, a former New York City police detective and local councilman running against Ms. Gillen, the former Town of Hempstead supervisor who lost her seat in 2019. He suggested that police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers who live in Nassau County but work in the five boroughs are alarmed by crime in the city.Anthony D’Esposito, a former New York City police detective, is trying to flip a Democratic seat being vacated by Kathleen Rice.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMr. D’Esposito and Ms. Gillen are running in a tight race to replace Representative Kathleen Rice, a Democrat who announced in February that she would not run for re-election in the Fourth District in central and southern Nassau, which she has represented since 2015.“The Dobbs decision was a wake-up call that elections have consequences,” Ms. Rice said in an interview. “But for people on Long Island, they don’t want to just hear about that. They want to hear about how we’re going to get inflation under control and public safety,” she said, adding both were politically thorny issues for Democrats in New York.Republicans are looking to replicate their success from 2021, when the party used visceral ads of assaults and break-ins to help capture a slew of races across Long Island. They ousted Laura Curran, the Democratic Nassau County executive, in November, and won control of the Nassau district attorney’s office despite running a first-time candidate against a well-known Democratic state senator.Democratic operatives are quick to caution that 2021 was an off-year election, when Republicans typically are more successful in getting voters to the polls. Indeed, there are more Democrats than Republicans registered to vote in the district, and political analysts have forecast it as more favorable for Democrats.Still, almost a quarter of voters are unaffiliated with either party. Some high-ranking Democrats have privately raised concerns that the contest is being overlooked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which did not include it in its national “Red to Blue” slate of competitive races, a designation that provides field work and helps attract financial support from national donors.Interviews this month with more than a dozen voters in Nassau County showed that public safety, inflation and immigration remained animating issues among Republicans and swing voters who typically play an outsize role in elections here..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Joe O’Connor, a 75-year-old Vietnam veteran from Freeport on Long Island’s South Shore, is not registered with either party. He voted against Mr. Trump in 2020 but said he was still unsure how he would vote in November, noting that chief among his concerns were education, homelessness and safety in New York City.“New York has come back great, and I’m really happy with that,” said Mr. O’Connor, a former teacher who frequently visits museums and Broadway shows in the city. “But it’s got to be cleaned up, and it’s got to be safe for people.”Democrats, for their part, have homed in on abortion rights and the threat to democracy as central campaign themes, hopeful that the recent legal setbacks that have thrust former President Donald J. Trump back into the news will also boost their chances in a state where Mr. Trump remains deeply unpopular.Delis Ortiz, 20, who said she would vote for her first time in November, said that while her top concern was keeping up with rising grocery prices, she would most likely vote Democratic in part because of the party’s stance on abortion rights.“I believe that every person has a right to their own body,” said Ms. Ortiz, a barista at an upscale coffee shop in Garden City. “Nobody should have that power over anyone else, ever.”Those themes are playing out visibly in the competitive race to replace Representative Thomas R. Suozzi, a centrist Democrat who has represented the Third District, in northern parts of Nassau County and parts of eastern Queens, since 2017 but decided not to run for re-election to pursue an unsuccessful run for governor this year.Robert Zimmerman, a small-business owner and well-known Democratic activist, has repeatedly sought to cast his Republican opponent, George Santos, as too extreme to represent the district, highlighting Mr. Santos’s apparent support of abortion bans and his attendance at the pro-Trump rally in Washington on Jan. 6.Robert Zimmerman, a Democrat, is facing George Santos, a Republican, in a contest to fill an open seat vacated by Representative Thomas Suozzi.Johnny Milano for The New York Times“Long Island can very well determine who has the majority in Congress,” Mr. Zimmerman said over coffee at a diner in Great Neck this month. “And frankly, George Santos represents the greatest threat to our democracy of any candidate running for Congress in New York State. I really can’t underscore that enough.”In a statement, Charley Lovett, Mr. Santos’s campaign manager, accused Mr. Zimmerman of trying to “distract voters from the disasters that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s policies have caused with Robert Zimmerman’s full support.”Their matchup also has history-making potential: The race appears to be the first time that two openly gay candidates for Congress have faced off in a general election.The governor’s election could also play a role in some House races on Long Island, which has emerged as a key battleground in the race between Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent, Representative Lee Zeldin, who has represented most of Suffolk County in Congress since 2015.Ms. Hochul has held a significant lead in most public polls, and she held a narrow five-point lead in the New York City suburbs in a Siena College poll released on Wednesday. Even so, Republicans are hoping Mr. Zeldin’s support on Long Island could help drive its voters to the polls, buoying the party’s House candidates, though Democrats are betting that their barrage of attack ads portraying Mr. Zeldin as a right-wing extremist will help the party animate Democrats and swing more moderate voters in their favor.Mr. Zeldin’s entry into the governor’s race paved the way for Democrats to try and flip his now-open congressional seat in the First District on the eastern end of the island, one of the few Republican-held seats in the country that is open and considered competitive. But Democrats face an uphill battle: The seat is projected to slightly favor Republicans, who have held the district since Mr. Zeldin wrestled it from Democratic control in 2014.The Democrat in the race, Bridget Fleming, a former assistant district attorney and current county legislator, has nonetheless outpaced her opponent in fund-raising and recently received the endorsement from the union that represents police officers in Suffolk County. She was also added to the Democrats’ Red to Blue program in June.A moderate, she has centered her campaign in the district, a mix of working-class and wealthy residents, on affordability and conserving the environment — a top issue for fishermen and farmers, as well as the tourism industry, on the island’s East End — but also on protecting women’s right to choose.“There’s no question that fundamental freedoms are under assault in our country,” said Ms. Fleming. “The exploitation of the extremes that we’ve seen recently is electrifying people who are standing up to fight for themselves.”In an interview, her opponent, Nicholas LaLota, brushed off Democrats’ almost singular focus on reproductive rights, saying that New York already had some of the strictest protections in the country.“Here in New York, nobody’s abortion rights are under attack or assault,” said Mr. LaLota, a former Navy lieutenant who works in the Suffolk County Legislature. “So those folks who want to campaign on abortion, they should run for state office, not federal office.”He added that voters in the district “who live paycheck to paycheck were more concerned about rising interests rates and prices.”Democrats are facing an even steeper climb to unseat Representative Andrew Garbarino, a well-funded Republican who represents the Second District on the South Shore that is among the most affluent in the country. Opposing Mr. Garbarino is Jackie Gordon, an Army veteran, who lost to Mr. Garbarino in 2020. More

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      Fetterman-vs.-Oz Campaign Turns to a Focus on Criminal Justice

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      Lee and Dennis Horton maintained their innocence through 27 years behind bars. The brothers were convicted in a 1993 robbery and fatal shooting in Philadelphia that they say they did not commit.“We were forgotten men,” Lee Horton said. “Nobody was paying us any mind. John Fetterman reached out and pulled us up. He saved our lives because there’s no doubt we would have died in prison.”Mr. Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 in large part to rejuvenate the Board of Pardons as a last stop for justice. One of the lieutenant governor’s few duties is to be the chair of the board, which had grown moribund.Under his leadership, the number of inmates serving life sentences who were recommended for clemency and release, including the Hortons, has greatly increased.Now that record has become a top issue for Mr. Fetterman’s opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, with Republicans training intense fire on the Democrat on social media, in email blasts and in $4.6 million in TV ads accusing him of “trying to get as many criminals out of prison as he can.”After the Horton brothers were released in 2021, Mr. Fetterman gave them jobs as field organizers for his campaign.“If John Fetterman cared about Pennsylvania’s crime problem, he’d prove it by firing the convicted murderers he employs on his campaign,” Brittany Yanick, a spokeswoman for Dr. Oz, said this month.Mr. Fetterman, in an interview, accused Dr. Oz of fear-mongering and twisting the facts of the Hortons’ case and those of others he championed. “Of course, these ghouls are going to do that kind of thing and distort and lie about the truth,” he said.Across the country, Republicans have taken up the issue of crime to rally midterm voters, confronting a rise in violence in most major cities that began during the coronavirus pandemic. Among them is Philadelphia, which is on pace to equal last year’s record 562 homicides.While attacking Democrats as soft on crime may be standard for Republicans in most election years, Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed contrast because Mr. Fetterman has turned the pardons board into a cause célèbre over four years.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.Rather than soft-pedaling his record, Mr. Fetterman expressed satisfaction in winning the release of inmates who served decades in prison, generally with model records.“There were some wrongs that needed to be put right, and there were a lot of people caught up in this system that were innocent or deserving” of release, he said.If Republicans “weaponize” his record and “destroy” his career over his advocacy for second chances, Mr. Fetterman added, including for the Hortons and other men he said were wrongly convicted, “then so be it.”Mr. Fetterman with the Horton brothers on Saturday at a rally in Philadelphia. Hannah Beier/ReutersIn a poll of Pennsylvania voters by The Morning Call/Muhlenberg College last week, only 3 percent named crime as the most important issue in the midterms, well behind the economy (22 percent) and abortion (20 percent). But the pollster, Chris Borick, suggested Mr. Fetterman’s 41 percent disapproval was driven by Republican portrayals of him as “too left-leaning,” which have included attacks on his pardons record. The lieutenant governor led Dr. Oz, a former heart surgeon and celebrity TV host, by 49 percent to 44 percent, within the margin of error.Barney Keller, a spokesman for Dr. Oz, said his campaign would continue to attack Mr. Fetterman on crime. “Dr. Oz has surged in the polls because John Fetterman is the most pro-murderer candidate in America,” Mr. Keller said.While individual pardon cases are complex, requiring voters to absorb details and nuance, the G.O.P. attacks on Mr. Fetterman are meant to deliver the opposite: a blunt, visceral punch.The Oz campaign created a website called Inmates for Fetterman, highlighting the crimes of convicted murderers whose release Mr. Fetterman sought, and asking for donations to Dr. Oz.The Oz campaign has singled out the Horton brothers, whose release Mr. Fetterman calls one of the pinnacles of his career in public office. The brothers share a name but are not related to the most infamous released inmate in a political attack ad, Willie Horton, whose crime spree while on a furlough program hurt the presidential candidacy of Michael Dukakis in 1988.Invoking that episode explicitly, Mr. Fetterman said he had anticipated that opponents would “Horton us” over his championing the brothers’ release.Like more than 1,100 lifers in Pennsylvania’s prisons, 70 percent of them Black, the Horton brothers were convicted of second-degree murder, a charge filed against suspects who participate in a felony — such as robbery, arson or rape — that leads to a death. It also includes accomplices not directly responsible for a fatality who drove a getaway car or acted as a lookout..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Pennsylvania is an outlier in mandating life without parole for second-degree murder, and reformers argue that it violates constitutional protections against unduly cruel punishments.With no possibility of release through the normal parole process, these inmates have been encouraged by Mr. Fetterman to seek commutations before the pardons board. The board can recommend either pardons (for inmates already released) or commutations (for those still behind bars). The five-member board, which includes Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, must unanimously approve commutations, and the governor must sign off. Mr. Fetterman said that in each commutation case he supported, he asked the prisoner’s warden if he would want that individual as a neighbor. “And they’re like, ‘Absolutely,’” he said.Commutations — typically, a reduction of a life sentence to time served — were once common, but in the tough-on-crime era beginning in the 1990s they all but ended. Mr. Fetterman argued that “those who didn’t take a life” and had clean records over decades in prison should be “living out their lives at home.”Under his chairmanship, the board has recommended 50 commutations of life sentences, compared with just 10 in the preceding two decades.In addition to commutations, Mr. Fetterman is under fire from Republicans for opposing certain life sentences for murder and for a statement he once made that he “agreed” with a corrections official that prison populations could be cut by a third with no harm to the public.“John Fetterman wants to release one-third of prisoners and eliminate life sentences for murderers,” claimed Dr. Oz’s first TV ad of the general election. The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has run five ads leveling similar attacks, including its latest, which calls Mr. Fetterman “dangerously liberal on crime.”For purposes of soft-on-crime attacks, it little matters that murders rose during the pandemic in blue states and in red states alike, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas. Studies show low recidivism rates for lifers released after their sentences were commuted: about 1 percent for inmates over age 50, in a Pennsylvania study from 2005.Mr. Fetterman said he did not support releasing a third of all prisoners — about 12,000 of Pennsylvania’s 36,000 inmates. He said the official who remarked that cutting prison populations by a third would not threaten public safety was a former secretary of corrections appointed by a Republican governor. And the life sentences he seeks to end are for second-degree murder.Last week, in a visit to Philadelphia to promote safe streets, Dr. Oz criticized Mr. Fetterman’s record on the pardons board and proposed his own anticrime measures, including support for the First Step Act. That law, passed in 2018 with bipartisan support, includes sentence reductions for federal inmates with good behavior — a version of the second chances that Mr. Fetterman espouses.At a campaign event last week in Philadelphia, Dr. Mehmet Oz spoke with Sheila Armstrong, who lost her brother to gun violence.Ryan Collerd/Associated PressMalcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative from Philadelphia, said that if Dr. Oz and Senate Republicans cared about high crime rates, they would support investments in poor communities such as raising the minimum wage, and gun safety measures that go beyond the limited bipartisan bill signed by President Biden in June. That law expanded background checks for gun buyers under age 21 and funds red-flag laws that let authorities take guns from people deemed dangerous.“Dr. Oz and Senate Republicans do not give a damn about people in Philadelphia and about the crime that folks are enduring,” Mr. Kenyatta said.Mr. Keller, the Oz spokesman, did not answer directly when asked whether Dr. Oz would have voted for the bipartisan gun law. “Doctor Oz is interested in how the implementation of this law will occur, and was particularly interested in the new funding for mental health,” Mr. Keller said.Mr. Fetterman was so convinced that the Horton brothers were wrongfully convicted that after the pardons board rejected their first clemency petition in 2019 — Mr. Shapiro, the attorney general, voted against it — he suggested he would run for governor if that’s what it took to get them out.“The trajectory of my career in public service will be determined by their freedom or lack thereof,” he once told The Philadelphia Inquirer.The deputy superintendent of the state corrections department endorsed the Hortons’ release. A brother of the man killed in the 1993 shooting, for which the Hortons and a third man were convicted, was opposed. “They took a human life, and they don’t deserve to be out in society,” the victim’s brother, Reinaldo Alamo, told The Inquirer. The third man in the case, who police records said was the actual gunman, was released in 2008.The brothers finally won clemency in their second try, in 2020. Mr. Fetterman set his sights on the Senate, and Mr. Shapiro ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor.Since the brothers returned home to Philadelphia, the corrections department has invited them to speak monthly to cadets training to be prison guards, Lee Horton said.Their work for the Fetterman campaign includes attending ward meetings, telling their story at rallies and simply walking the streets.“On any given day we’re out talking to people about John Fetterman’s policies about minimum wage, how he would make average, everyday working people’s lives better,” Dennis Horton said.His brother added: “We’re not angry. We gave up the anger years ago but, you know, we want to be able to live our lives and to be able to feed our families. We want to be able to have jobs.”Lee Horton dropping campaign signs off at businesses in Philadelphia on Friday.Hannah Beier for The New York Times More

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      Republicans Intensify Attacks on Crime as Democrats Push Back

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      In Pennsylvania, Republicans are attacking John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate, as “dangerously liberal on crime.”Outside Portland, Ore., where years of clashes between left-wing protesters and the police have captured national attention, a Republican campaign ad juxtaposes video of Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a Democratic congressional candidate, protesting with footage of rioters and looters. Ms. McLeod-Skinner, an ominous-sounding narrator warns, is “one of them.”And in New Mexico, the wife of Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee for governor, tells in a campaign ad of how she had once hid in a closet with her two young daughters and her gun pointed at the door because she feared an intruder was breaking in. Though the incident happened a decade ago, the ad accuses Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Mr. Ronchetti’s Democratic opponent, of making it “easier to be a criminal than a cop.”In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are intensifying their focus on crime and public safety, hoping to shift the debate onto political terrain that many of the party’s strategists and candidates view as favorable. The strategy seeks to capitalize on some voters’ fears about safety — after a pandemic-fueled crime surge that in some cities has yet to fully recede. But it has swiftly drawn criticism as a return to sometimes deceptive or racially divisive messaging.Crime-heavy campaigns have been part of the Republican brand for decades, gaining new steam in 2020 when President Donald J. Trump tried to leverage a backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement to vilify Democrats. But two years later, left-wing calls to defund the police have given way to an effort to pump money back into departments in many Democratic-led cities, raising questions about whether Republicans’ tactics will be as effective as they were in 2020, when the party made gains in the House.Republicans are running the ads most aggressively in the suburbs of cities where worries about public safety are omnipresent, places that were upended by the 2020 protests over racial injustice or are near the country’s southwestern border. In some of the country’s most competitive Senate races — in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Republican candidates have pivoted to a message heavily aimed at crime.“This is something that crosses party lines and everyone says, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t this something that is dealt with?’” said Mr. Ronchetti, whose state has experienced an increase in violent crime this year. “You look at New Mexico: People used to always know someone with a crime story. Now, everyone has their own.”Polling shows that voters tend to see Republicans as stronger on public safety. By a margin of 10 percentage points, voters nationwide said they agreed more with Republicans on crime and policing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released this month.National Republican strategists say they always planned to use crime as a so-called kitchen-table issue, along with inflation and the economy. Now, after a summer when Democrats gained traction in races across the country, in part because of the upending of abortion rights, Republican campaigns are blanketing television and computer screens with violent imagery.Some of the advertising contains thinly disguised appeals to racist fears, like grainy footage of Black Lives Matter protesters, that sharply contrast with Republican efforts at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term to highlight the party’s work on criminal justice overhauls, sentencing reductions and the pardoning of some petty crimes.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Focus on Crime: In the final phase of the midterm campaign, Republicans are stepping up their attacks about crime rates, but Democrats are pushing back.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Megastate G.O.P. Rivalry: Against the backdrop of their re-election bids, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship.Rushing to Raise Money: Senate Republican nominees are taking precious time from the campaign trail to gather cash from lobbyists in Washington — and close their fund-raising gap with Democratic rivals.The full picture on crime rates is nuanced. Homicides soared in 2020 and 2021 before decreasing slightly this year. An analysis of crime trends in the first half of 2022 by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan policy and research group, found that murders and gun assaults in major American cities fell slightly during the first half of 2022, but remained nearly 40 percent higher than before the pandemic. Robberies and some property offenses posted double-digit increases.Candidates on the right have tended to be vague on specific policy details: A new agenda released by House Republicans proposes offering recruiting bonuses to hire 200,000 more police officers, cracking down on district attorneys who “refuse to prosecute crimes” and opposing “all efforts to defund the police.”Still, Republicans see the issue as one that can motivate their conservative base as well as moderate, suburban independents who have shifted toward Democrats in recent weeks.Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee for governor of New Mexico, released an ad in which his wife recounted a possible break-in at their home years ago. Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesIn the past two weeks alone, Republican candidates and groups have spent more than $21 million on ads about crime — more than on any other policy issue — targeting areas from exurban Raleigh, N.C., to Grand Rapids, Mich., according to data collected by AdImpact, a media tracking firm.But those attacks are not going unanswered: Over the past two weeks, Democrats have spent a considerable amount — nearly $17 million — on ads on the issue, though the amount is less than half of what Democrats spent on ads about abortion rights over the same period.The political arm of the center-left think tank Third Way, Shield PAC, is starting to spend about $5 million targeting swing voters to defend at least seven Democrats who are vulnerable on the issue of crime..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In 2020, some Democrats feared alienating liberal activists who were pushing to drastically overhaul policing. A series of defeats by progressive candidates in New York and California since the 2020 election delivered evidence of the depths of voter frustration about quality-of-life issues, prompting more in the party to embrace a moderate message. Some in the party see an opening to flip the script — or at least neutralize some of the attacks.A private memo circulated by the House Democratic campaign arm over the summer urged candidates in competitive races to rebut Republican criticisms by promoting endorsements from law enforcement and clearly articulating to voters that “Democrats stand for funding police to keep communities safe.”Many candidates have adopted that approach. “Mandela Barnes doesn’t want to defund the police,” a retired officer identified as “Rick” says in a recent ad for the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, pushing back on a weekslong onslaught. “He’s very supportive of law enforcement.”After months of calls for legislative action from Democratic lawmakers facing difficult re-election races in conservative-leaning districts, House Democrats overcame divisions within their caucus to pass a package of legislation on Thursday awarding $60,000,000 annually for five years to local police departments. The centerpiece bill attracted support from a broad bipartisan majority but faces an uncertain future in the Senate. Still, Democrats say the House passage helps their case on crime and policing.“We proved pretty clearly that we are very strong supporters of law enforcement funding — investing, not defunding — which is key to protecting our families and our communities,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and the sponsor of the legislation.Many Republicans were critical of the F.B.I. after it searched former President Donald J. Trump’s home in Florida.Marco Bello/ReutersFor its part, the White House has tried to turn the tables on Republicans, joining Democratic campaign committees in wielding Republican denunciations of the police after the Capitol siege and of the F.B.I. after the Mar-a-Lago search to argue that the G.O.P. is anti-law enforcement.“You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection,” Mr. Biden said late last month in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “You can’t be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on Jan. 6 ‘patriots.’”And an ad from the House Majority PAC, which is aligned with House Democratic leadership, accuses the Republican candidate in Arizona’s Fourth Congressional District of favoring “defunding the F.B.I.” and disrespecting federal law enforcement.Republicans say that attacks based on a candidate’s record will resonate most. Greg Landsman, the Democrat running against Representative Steve Chabot, a Republican, in a Cincinnati district that was redrawn to lean Democratic, has faced criticism for writing legislation as a Cincinnati councilman to redirect $200,000 from the city’s Police Department to an independent board responsible for fielding complaints against police officers.Some of the advertising has racial overtones. An ad against Mr. Barnes from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which highlights the 2021 attack at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., ends with a picture of Mr. Barnes alongside three members of the progressive “Squad” — all women of color — and the words “different” and “dangerous.” His supporters called the ad racist.Other ads are slightly misleading: In New York, the first general-election ad from the Republican candidate for governor, Representative Lee Zeldin, is a compilation of grainy footage of shootings, looting and fistfights. “Vote like your life depends on it,” a narrator urges. “It just might.”Mr. Zeldin recently confirmed that half of the video in the ad was shot before Gov. Kathy Hochul took office, and that one clip was from Oakland, Calif.And a Republican ad campaign against Wiley Nickel, a Democratic defense lawyer running in an exurban House district near Raleigh, N.C., accuses him of representing rapists, “cop killers” and distributors of child pornography.Mr. Nickel’s campaign says he has never defended people accused of those kinds of charges; his campaign manager called the ad’s claims “patently false.” Mr. Nickel says his practice focuses on low-level offenses and misdemeanors. He has countered by proclaiming in his own ad that he would increase police funding.As for the ad in New Mexico describing a break-in at Mr. Ronchetti’s home, the incident took place in 2012 — seven years before his opponent took office.“Our point wasn’t that the governor was responsible for my particular home invasion,” Mr. Ronchetti said in an interview. “To me, this is purely an issue of, we are headed in the wrong direction.”At least a few voters say they relate to the sentiment — if not the specifics — of that Republican message.“I wouldn’t even let my kids play with guns,” said Alanna Gonzalez, a retiree in Issaquah, a Seattle suburb. “And now we’ve talked about getting one. We’ve had break-ins in our condo. There’s been shootings on the street. Never did we ever have anything like that before.”Ms. Gonzalez, a lifelong Democrat, said that crime had changed her political views, and that she and her husband, Robert, were considering voting for Republicans this year.Mr. Gonzalez said the Democratic Party had become “a hug-me, squeeze-me bunch, and we just don’t like it.”Alanna Gonzalez said that she and her husband, Robert Gonzalez, were considering voting for Republicans this year because of their worries about crime.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesKirk Johnson More