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      What Really Saved the Democrats This Year?

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      In the Democratic Party, despite its better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, internecine combat has been playing out in disputes over the party’s nominees and the policies they propose. At the nuts-and-bolts level of candidate selection, the debate has become intensely emotional and increasingly hostile.Strategists in the progressive wing of the party call centrists “corporate sellouts.” Centrists, in turn, accuse progressives of alienating voters by promoting an extremist cultural and law enforcement agenda.I asked Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist Welcome PAC, for his views on state of the intraparty debate. He emailed back:Far-left political science deniers refuse to accept the fact that moderate candidates still outperform those at the extremes. While there may be fewer swing voters now, the closeness of elections maximizes their importance. All the data points to moderate outperformance — from political science research to election results to common sense.Take the Dec. 16 analysis of the 2022 election by another centrist group, Third Way, “Comparing the Performance of Mainstream v. Far-Left Democrats in the House”: “Far-left groups like Sanders-style Our Revolution and AOC’s Justice Democrats constantly argue that the more left the candidate, the better chance of winning, saying their candidates will energize base voters and deliver victory,” Lanae Erickson, Lucas Holtz and Maya Jones of Third Way wrote.In an effort to test the claim of progressive groups, they note, “We conducted case studies analyzing districts with comparable partisan leans and demographically similar makeups to discern how Democratic congressional candidates endorsed by the center-left New Democrat Action Fund (NewDems) performed in the 2022 midterm elections versus those endorsed by far-left organizations.”Their results:In total, NewDems flipped seven seats from red to blue, picked up two critical wins in new seats, and helped elect 18 new members to Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. The NewDems Fund has now flipped 42 seats from red to blue since 2018, while Our Revolution and Justice Democrats have not managed to flip a single Republican-held seat over the last three cycles.I asked Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, if the organization had flipped any House seats from red to blue. He replied by email:This was not the goal of Our Revolution. Our Revolution’s goal in the 2022 elections was to push the Democratic Caucus in a progressive direction, and we succeeded with nine new members joining the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.In part because of Our Revolution’s support, he continued:The Congressional Progressive Caucus is growing by nine newly elected members, all of whom were endorsed by Our Revolution. That includes: Summer Lee, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez, Maxwell Frost, Becca Balint, Andrea Salinas, Jasmine Crockett, Jonathan Jackson, and Val Hoyle. Our Revolution’s success didn’t include just those running for Congress. Our Revolution’s success expanded to local races including St. Louis Board of Alderman President-elect Megan Green, whose victory creates a blue island in a state that is a sea of red.Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, emailed in response to a similar inquiry of mine that his group does not focus on shifting seats from red to blue: “We haven’t run really races in those areas. We’ve been focused on blue seats where the incumbent is corporate-backed and out of touch with their district.”Instead, Shahid wrote: “After the 2022 election cycle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus stated the incoming membership is the largest in its history at 103 members. The top three leaders are also all Justice Democrats: Rep. Pramila Jayapal as chair; Rep. Ilhan Omar as deputy chair; and Rep.-elect Greg Casar as whip.”In addition, Shahid argued, “Progressives have a lot to do with Democrats’ ambitious agenda under President Biden. Our work at Justice Democrats engaging in competitive primaries, win or lose, has been a big part of it — moving Democratic incumbents on key issues.”If, Shahid contended, “you think of politicians as balloons tied to the rock of public opinion, then progressives have substantially moved the rock,” adding thatmoderates have shifted in turn. John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock are not the same kind of Third Way moderates that might have run in purple states in the pre-Trump era. They embrace reproductive rights, bold climate action, a $15 minimum wage, eliminating the filibuster, student debt cancellation, and immigrant rights — things many moderates ran away from in the Obama era. The center of the party has shifted closer to the base and away from the consensus among Washington and Wall Street donors.While this debate may appear arcane, the dispute involves two different visions of the Democratic Party, one of a governing party guided by the principles of consensus and restraint, the other of a party that represents insurgent, marginalized constituencies and consistently challenges the establishment.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, was adamant in his criticism of Third Way, declaring in an email: “Every cycle, Third Way cooks the books with a false accounting of how races were run and won.”Green continued:The truth is: In swing seat after swing seat, Democrats won by running on economic populist positions that have long been supported by progressives and opposed by corporate Democrats — such as protecting and expanding Social Security benefits and fighting the pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street banks that fund Third Way. If there was one thing that caused Democrats to unnecessarily lose races this year, it was corporate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer blocking the president’s economic agenda for a year so that the impact of things like lower-price prescriptions were not felt by voters in time for the election.Green objected to Third Way’s comparison of the results of the New Democrat Coalition PAC, which has official standing with the House, with the result of such outside groups as Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.If, however, the endorsees of the New Democrat Coalition are compared with the endorsees of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition PAC candidates flipped a total of 42 seats from red to blue, 32 in 2018, three in 2020 and seven in 2022, while the candidates endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus flipped a total of eight over the three cycles, all in 2018, according to officials of both groups. The Progressive Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition have roughly equal numbers of members.Joe Dinkin, of the Working Families Party, dismissed the Third Way study as the “conclusions of the corporate flank of the Democratic Party” that have been subject to “very little scrutiny.”In the newly elected Congress, Dinkin wrote:This will be the most progressive Democratic caucus in memory, if not ever. 16 of the new 34 Democratic members of Congress were backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. The Congressional Progressive Caucus will have 103 members, or roughly 48 percent of the entirety of the Democratic caucus — a roughly 50 percent increase over the last decade.Dinkin continued:Centrist incumbents saw some significant losses. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney, a leading moderate, decided after redistricting to run in the bluer NY-17 over his former NY-18, a tougher district which included most of his former constituents, even though it meant leaving the incumbent Democrat in NY-17 without a district. Maloney lost that bluer seat. The Democrat who ran in NY-18, the redder seat SPM abandoned, was Pat Ryan — he won, and won with crucial support from the Working Families Party. Several other incumbent moderates lost their seats too, like former Republican and Blue Dog Tom O’Halleran.The intraparty debate boils down to a choice between two goals.If the objective is strengthening the left in the Democratic House Caucus, the way to achieve that goal is to nominate the most progressive candidate running in the primary. On that score, the size of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has grown, since its founding in 1991, to 103 members (as noted above). Overall, the composition of the Democratic electorate continues to shift to the left as have the votes of House Democrats, albeit slightly.If winning more seats is the top priority, the preponderance of evidence suggests that nominating moderate, centrist candidates in districts where Republicans have a chance of winning is the more effective strategy, with the caveat that a contemporary moderate is substantially more liberal than the moderate of two decades ago.Most — though by no means all — scholarly work supports the view that moderate candidates in competitive districts are more likely to win.Zachary F. Peskowitz, a political scientist at Emory, argued in an email:Candidates who are ideologically aligned with their constituencies will win more votes, on average, than relatively extreme candidates. If your goal is to win majorities in the House and the Senate, nominating moderate candidates in the most competitive districts and states — where the majority will be determined — is the best way to do it. If, instead, your goal is to push elite discourse in a liberal direction and are less concerned about immediately winning a governing majority, then nominating extremist candidates is a reasonable approach.Contrary to the argument that a more progressive candidate can mobilize base voters, Peskowitz argued that “nominating extremist candidates might increase turnout, but not enough to compensate for ceding moderates’ votes to your opponent. Moreover, there is a risk that an extremist will also mobilize the opposition to turn out to vote.”In sum, Peskowitz wrote:Progressive-aligned candidates who won the primaries in competitive districts or states did not fare well in the general election. Mandela Barnes lost the Wisconsin Senate contest to incumbent Ron Johnson and ran behind Wisconsin’s other statewide Democratic nominees. Josh Riley lost New York’s 19th Congressional District and Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the only progressive Democrat who successfully dethroned a Democratic incumbent in this cycle’s primaries, lost Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. Summer Lee in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District was the one example of a progressive endorsed non-incumbent who won a seat that wasn’t a Democratic lock. Moderate Democratic candidates, such as Abigail Spanberger and Haley Stevens, performed strongly, holding on to seats in challenging districts.Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, has examined the debate over moderate-versus-progressive candidates extensively, including in a 2018 paper with Daniel M. Thompson, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in U.S. Elections.”Hall and Thompson write: “We find that extremist nominees — as measured by the mix of campaign contributions they receive — suffer electorally, largely because they decrease their party’s share of turnout in the general election, skewing the electorate towards their opponent’s party.”“Turnout,” they add, “appears to be the dominant force in determining election outcomes, but it advantages ideologically moderate candidates because extremists appear to activate the opposing party’s base more than their own.”Hall and Thompson compared general election results from 2006 to 2014 in House races that involved close primary contests between a moderate and a more extreme candidate. They found that instead of lifting turnout, there were “strong, negative effects of extremist nominees on their party’s share of turnout in the general election.” Extremist nominees, they observed, “depress their party’s share of turnout in the general election, on average.”Hall and Thompson conclude that it is moderates who have a turnout advantage in general elections. They make two points.First, “We have found consistent evidence that extremist nominees do poorly in general elections in large part because they skew turnout in the general election away from their own party and in favor of the opposing party.”And second, “Much of moderate candidates’ success may actually be due to the turnout of partisan voters, rather than to swing voters who switch sides. In fact, our regression discontinuity estimates are consistent with the possibility that the bulk of the vote-share penalty to extremist nominees is the result of changes in partisan turnout.”An earlier study, from 2010, “Securing the Base: Electoral Competition Under Variable Turnout,” by Michael Peress, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, produced similar results: “My results indicate that the candidates can best compete by adopting centrist positions. While a candidate can increase turnout among his supporters by moving away from the center, many moderate voters will defect to his opponent.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, agreed that “moderate candidates perform better in general elections,” but, he added, “that advantage is declining as baseline partisanship drives most results regardless of candidates. Because we have national partisan parity, small candidate advantages can still be important.”The moderation factor, Grossman wrote by email, “was more pronounced on the Republican side because Republicans ran more extreme candidates and those candidates had less experience. There continues to be no evidence in either party that extreme candidates mobilize their side more than they mobilize the other side or turn off swing voters.”The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime critic of the Democrats’ progressive wing, contends in a recent essay, “Ten Reasons Why Democrats Should Become More Moderate,” that adoption of an extreme progressive stance is not only “dead wrong,” but also that “Democrats need to fully and finally reject it if they hope to break the current electoral stalemate in their favor.”In the 2022 election, Teixeira writes,the reason why Democrats did relatively well was support from independents and Republican leaning or supporting crossover voters — not base voters mobilized by progressivism. These independents and crossover voters were motivated to support Democrats where they did because many Democrats in key races were perceived as being more moderate than their extremist Republican opponents.According to Teixeira:As the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the last four years, they have actually done worse among their base voters. They’ve lost a good chunk of their support among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanics, and among young voters. Since 2018, Democratic support is down 18 margin points among young (18-29 year old) voters, 20 points among nonwhites and 23 points among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in orientation and they’re just not buying what the Democrats are selling.Teixeira’s final point:Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to embrace patriotism and dissociate themselves from those who insist America is a benighted, racist nation and always has been. Large majorities of Americans, while they have no objection to looking at both the bad and good of American history, reject such a one-sided, negative characterization. That includes many voters whose support Democrats desperately need but who are now drifting away from them.A postelection analysis conducted by officials of Impact Research, the firm that polls for President Biden, provides further support for a moderate strategy by emphasizing the crucial importance in the 2022 contest of winning support from independent voters.In their Dec. 7 study, “How Democrats Prevented a Red Wave,” John Anzalone, founder of Impact, and Matt Hogan, a partner, wrote:That Democrats’ win over independents was critical since Republicans appear to have bested them in turnout based on both finalized geographic data and exit polls. The latter found that Republicans had a 3- to 4-point advantage in party ID and that each party won about 95 percent of their own partisans. It was therefore Democrats’ performance with independents, not turnout, that helped prevent a red wave.A key factor in Democrats’ ability to win over independents, according to Anzalone and Hogan,was that these voters wanted more bipartisanship and felt Democratic candidates were more likely to deliver it. By an 11-point margin (53 percent to 42 percent), voters preferred a candidate who would “work in a bipartisan manner and compromise” over one who would “stay true to their beliefs.” Among independents, the preference for bipartisanship more than doubled to 24 points. Democrats benefited from this desire by winning the voters who preferred a bipartisan approach by a 30-point margin.As a practical matter, the debate between proponents of moderation and proponents of progressivism may be less of a dilemma for the Democratic Party than an ongoing process in which the party, its voters and its elected officials move leftward, often turbulently. At the same time, the Democratic Party has a storied history of cannibalizing its own — and Republicans are catching up quickly. It is getting harder to see a peaceable and productive resolution between the two parties or inside them.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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      Schumer Can Take the Insults, if It Helps Keep Democrats in Power

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      For an hour on Sunday night, Senator Chuck Schumer endured insult after insult. He was called a liar and a failure. He was blamed for inflation, the decline of the shipbuilding industry, and death threats to Supreme Court justices. He was referred to as a modern-day Goliath, a “blind biblical giant,” a surprising description of a senator famed for both his spectacles and his slouch.Mr. Schumer took it all, seemingly treating the excoriation from his Republican opponent, Joseph Pinion, as an extended opportunity to remind voters of a series of Democratic accomplishments over the last two years during his tenure as Senate majority leader, a role he is clinging to even as his party faces serious headwinds in midterm elections next week.Democrats across New York and the nation are playing defense in the closing week of the campaign cycle as they try to protect their party’s control of the Senate and especially the House of Representatives, where Republicans are feeling bullish. That includes in New York, where the map includes competitive congressional races from Long Island to central New York, and where Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying fend off a challenge from Representative Lee Zeldin, a conservative Republican with deep ties to former president Donald J. Trump.Mr. Schumer does not seem in any danger: He is heavily favored to win a fifth term in the Senate, with a recent Quinnipiac poll showing him holding a 12-point lead. But it is a measure of where things stand for Democrats that Mr. Schumer was willing to trade time on Sunday night to trumpet his party in exchange for absorbing Mr. Pinion’s brickbats, which included a near-constant assertion that the senator has been in office too long.“Chuck Schumer has spent 42 years making promises about what he will do tomorrow,” said Mr. Pinion, 39, a former host and conservative commentator on the Newsmax network. “It’s always a day away. And you never trust a man who promises to do tomorrow what he had power to do yesterday.”For Mr. Pinion, the debate at Union College in Schenectady, hosted by Spectrum News, was perhaps his best chance at introducing himself to voters, a challenge considering the Quinnipiac poll found nearly 60 percent of those polled didn’t know enough about Mr. Pinion to form an opinion. (That cohort seemingly included Mr. Schumer himself, who opened the debate by saying, “Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you.”)Mr. Schumer has long prided himself on an aggressive media strategy — reporters can set their watches by his 11:30 a.m. news conferences — and his frequent trips around the state, including visiting all of the state’s 62 counties every year, a pace he has continued even as Democrats seek to shore up support for Ms. Hochul and other candidates.That included a visit last week to Onondaga County, alongside President Biden, to bring attention to a $100 billion plan by Micron to build new computer chip manufacturing facilities near Syracuse.“This guy gets things done,” the president said of Mr. Schumer, during the event.Such was the argument the senator himself made on Sunday night, returning again and again to legislation passed by Democrats while he has served as majority leader, including measures to reduce the price of prescription drugs, tighten gun control laws, and pour money into manufacturing like that in Onondaga County.“Under my leadership, the Senate has had the most productive session in decades,” he said.Mr. Pinion has also stumped for months, roaming from motorcycle-and-morning coffee events in Western New York to rooftop fund-raisers in Manhattan to help fuel an underfunded campaign: Mr. Pinion’s latest filing, for example, with the Federal Election Commission shows his campaign committee with a little less than $12,000 cash on hand..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-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Pinion has seemingly tried to augment that lack of resources with a surfeit of fiery rhetoric and CGI-heavy broadsides: One of Mr. Pinion’s online ads shows him in an apocalyptic landscape, amid the burning ruins of skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty.“America is burning,” Mr. Pinion says, criticizing the federal outlay of dollars to Ukraine, high inflation and the baby-formula crisis. “And the politicians that started the fire want to blame someone else.”In another ad, he likened Mr. Schumer to a dinosaur presiding over “the Jurassic States of America,” a visual conceit complete with Mr. Pinion flanked by a pair of raptors. “Like my friends here, the American dream is about to go extinct,” he says, before turning to his prehistoric friends. “Sorry, guys, it’s true. You’re dead!”But his most recurring campaign theme has been that Mr. Schumer has been in Washington too long — nearly 42 years, between nearly two decades in the House of Representatives and his four terms in the U.S. Senate — with too little to show for it. A recent email blast noted that Mr. Schumer “has been in office longer than I have been alive.”“He says the job’s not done,” Mr. Pinion told a crowd in Amsterdam, N.Y., in September, alongside Representative Elise Stefanik and Michael Henry, the party’s candidate for attorney general. “If you haven’t got the job done in 42 years, perhaps its time to step aside and let some one else take a crack at it.”Mr. Schumer’s ads have showcased working-class supporters, as well as mailers linking Mr. Pinion to anti-abortion efforts by Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader.Like Mr. Pinion and his dinosaurs, Mr. Schumer has also shown a sense of humor, with an ad billed as “Yiddish Lessons with the Majority Leader.” In it, Mr. Schumer, who is Jewish, identifies Mr. McConnell, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Mr. Trump as “schmos”; the riots of Jan. 6, 2021 as a “shande,” or shame; and mentions the words “kvell” and “naches” for his pride and joy at his legislative accomplishments.“Because fighting for New York is no schtick for me,” he concludes.On Sunday, Mr. Pinion was on the attack from the very beginning, calling out “the legend of Charles Ellis Schumer” before saying he wanted to do “some myth busting.”“He is, in fact, an exceptional politician, one of the best that has ever lived,” Mr. Pinion said. “But he’s a failed senator. He has failed the people of this state on multiple occasions.”Mr. Schumer rarely returned fire, sticking to promoting the raft of accomplishments that he hopes voters remember next week. But toward the end of the debate, he scolded Mr. Pinion, saying the race wasn’t about how long he had served, but whether he had delivered for New York.“I produce results, I am productive,” he said. “I’m not just shooting verbiage, and calling names.” More

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      4 Takeaways From the Last Kemp-Abrams Debate Before Election Day

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      Gov. Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, who would like to replace him, met Sunday night for one of the last major televised debates of the 2022 midterm election cycle, and the Georgia showdown delivered an hour heavy on substance and light on political fireworks and viral moments.Mr. Kemp, a Republican who narrowly defeated Ms. Abrams, a Democrat, in 2018, holds a durable lead of 5 to 10 percentage points in public and private polling, a status that was evident throughout their discussion.Mr. Kemp took few chances, stuck to his talking points about how Ms. Abrams has spent the years since their last contest and tried to sell Georgia voters on how good they have things now.Ms. Abrams, as she has done throughout her campaign, pressed a message that prosperity in Mr. Kemp’s Georgia has not been shared equally. Under an Abrams administration, she said, Black people and women would have more input into their relationship with the government — or in the case of abortion rights, pushing the government away from any relationship at all.Here are four takeaways from Sunday’s debate:Abrams tried to catch up.With just about all of Ms. Abrams’s arguments against Mr. Kemp well worn by now — she has been making parts of them fairly consistently since their 2018 race — she sought a new approach to chip away at Mr. Kemp’s advantage in the race and remind her supporters that the election isn’t over.So she turned to Herschel Walker, seeking to tie Mr. Kemp to Georgia’s Republican Senate nominee. Mr. Walker’s campaign has been plagued by a host of revelations about his past: that despite opposing abortion rights, he pushed women with whom he’d had relationships to undergo abortions and that he had physically attacked women and family members — accusations Georgians are seeing nonstop in television advertising.A watch event in Atlanta for the governor’s debate on Sunday evening.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesDuring a segment discussing new restrictions on abortion that Mr. Kemp signed into law, Ms. Abrams accused him of refusing to defend women.“And yet he defended Herschel Walker, saying that he didn’t want to be involved” in Mr. Walker’s personal life, she said. She added, “But he doesn’t mind being involved in the personal lives and the personal medical choices of the women in Georgia. What’s the difference? Well, I would say the equipment.”Kemp: Check my record.Ms. Abrams criticized Mr. Kemp for a majority of the policy decisions during his term as governor, like ignoring public health guidance to keep businesses open at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting a law that allows the purchase of firearms without a permit. But Mr. Kemp dismissed her arguments with an I’m-rubber-and-you’re-glue argument.“This debate’s going to be a lot like the last one,” he said early on, before delivering a line he’d repeat throughout the hour. “Ms. Abrams is going to attack my record because she doesn’t want to talk about her own record.”The refrain is a common one from Mr. Kemp and one he used against his Republican primary opponent, David Perdue. It also underlines a key feature of Mr. Kemp’s re-election campaign, which has focused largely on his first term. And while Ms. Abrams has a policy record dating back to her years as State House minority leader, hers did not include policymaking from the governor’s mansion.She recognized that fact in her rebuttal before reading off a laundry list of his policies she disagreed with: “I have not been in office for the last four years.”Mr. Kemp stuck to his talking points on Sunday in the debate in Atlanta.Ben Gray/Associated PressLong answers led to fewer fireworks.Hosted by the Atlanta TV station WSB, the debate was meant to be heavy on policy and light on drama — and policy heavy it was. The format gave each candidate 90 seconds — as opposed to 60 or even 45 in some other debates — to answer each question, with rebuttals that often lasted just as long.It was also a performance in which both candidates kept within the rules. There were no interruptions or interjections and at no point in the hourlong debate did the moderators have to remind either candidate of the agreed-upon time limits.That gave the candidates ample time to articulate their views and gave Georgia’s voters one of the clearest opportunities to judge for themselves the candidates’ policy and stylistic differences.The moderators also left the job of policing fact from fiction to the candidates themselves — a responsibility both Mr. Kemp and Ms. Abrams did not hesitate to accept. The questions posed were open-ended, allowing a robust discussion but not one in which the moderators challenged the candidates on their own past positions and statements.Two candidates who disagree on everything.There is virtually no overlap in Ms. Abrams’s and Mr. Kemp’s views on the issues most animating the race. Those stark differences came into full view during their back-and-forth on firearms, abortion, the state’s election laws and use of the state’s budget.Mr. Kemp argued that universal access to guns would allow more people in Georgia to protect themselves. Ms. Abrams said that logic would put more people in danger and increase the likelihood of mass shootings.Ms. Abrams has loudly criticized the state’s newly instituted law outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — Mr. Kemp signed and defended the law. And on the state’s more than $6 billion state budget surplus, Mr. Kemp said he supported allocating the funds for tax relief while Ms. Abrams has proposed using it to fund an array of state programs.The differences highlighted the candidates’ contrasting partisan instincts and put a clear choice between the two on display for an electorate that is very closely divided. More

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      Kemp and Abrams Face Off Sunday for Final Debate in Georgia’s Governor Race

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      ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, and Stacey Abrams, his Democratic challenger, will meet again onstage on Sunday for their second and final debate in a campaign rematch for governor.The one-hour debate will be hosted by WSB-TV in Atlanta and begin at 7 p.m. Eastern time. It will be broadcast live on local Atlanta television and carried on WSB-TV’s streaming service. Reporters from The New York Times will provide live analysis and updates.To participate in this debate, candidates had to meet a 10 percent polling threshold, which disqualified the Libertarian candidate, Shane Hazel.Early voting is already in full swing in Georgia as the last full week of campaigning before Election Day begins. Several high-profile surrogates from both parties have visited the state to bolster Mr. Kemp’s and Ms. Abrams’s campaigns, including former President Barack Obama, who held a rally in Atlanta for the Democratic ticket on Friday. Former Vice President Mike Pence will campaign with Mr. Kemp around the Atlanta area on Tuesday.Sunday’s debate will provide both candidates with a platform to deliver their closing messages to voters in a race for governor that has largely been defined by national trends. Ms. Abrams has made health care and abortion access a cornerstone of her campaign in light of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, while Mr. Kemp has hammered her and Democrats in Washington over rising prices and the volatile economy.As of Friday, polls showed Mr. Kemp ahead of Ms. Abrams by an average of seven percentage points. More

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      Bennet and O’Dea Meet Up for Final Senate Debate in Colorado on Friday

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      Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, and his Republican rival, Joe O’Dea, will square off in a final debate on Friday night as they both try to win over remaining undecided voters with Election Day just over a week away.The debate, which is taking place at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, follows one on Tuesday night in which the two had a fairly reserved exchange that did not even touch on abortion rights — one of the chief points of contention in the campaign so far. Friday’s showdown is expected to be more aggressive, with a much larger audience. It will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time and be streamed live.“This is one of our best and last opportunities to show undecided voters who we are and what we stand for: like freedom of choice, protecting public lands, and an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” Mr. Bennet said in a fund-raising email sent Friday.Mr. O’Dea, a construction company owner making his first run for public office, has stepped up his criticism of Mr. Bennet, who is seeking a third full term, and the Biden administration, blaming them for rising crime and lax security at the border with Mexico. “There’s a humanitarian crisis at the border,” he said recently on a Fox News radio program, pointing to migrant deaths as well as the smuggling of fentanyl, which he said has killed 1,900 Coloradans, along with other drugs. “We’ve got to put an end to it. Bennet and Biden, they will not treat it like a crisis. I will.”Mr. O’Dea has sought to present himself as a more moderate Republican, and broke with former President Donald J. Trump, a move which brought him a rebuke. Mr. Bennet has emphasized his record on Colorado issues, including obtaining funding for river and conservation projects.The race is not in the top tier of Republican pickup opportunities. But national Republicans say they believe Mr. O’Dea could still have a chance as the party’s candidates have gained momentum in recent weeks, though polls have kept Mr. Bennet in the front throughout the campaign. More

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      No, That Democrat Didn’t Vote ‘100% of the Time’ With Nancy Pelosi

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      G.O.P. operatives, like a classic rock station playing “Stairway to Heaven,” believe that the hits work, and so they eagerly link vulnerable Democrats to the “radical San Francisco liberal.”It’s a phrase you’re hearing a lot in debates and Republican attack ads: that Democrat X voted “100 percent of the time” with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Whenever you hear a claim like that, be skeptical. It’s probably false.Some of these ads go even further. An ad for J.D. Vance in Ohio, for instance, claims his Senate opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “votes with Biden, Pelosi 100 percent.” He repeated that statistic in a news release today.Ryan actually ran against Pelosi for House speaker in 2016, winning 63 votes. In 2018, he signed a letter calling for her ouster. He’s probably been her most vocal critic among elected Democrats, at some risk to his career in the House.Republicans have tried the same tactic against other Democratic rebels — notably Representative Abigail Spanberger, a lawmaker from Northern Virginia who is another of Pelosi’s in-house critics. “Abigail Spanberger votes 100 percent with Pelosi,” one G.O.P. ad says. “It is like having our very own Pelosi mini-me.”Pelosi has been a boogeywoman in Republican campaigns for more than a decade. Remember “Fire Pelosi” in 2010? The haircut thing during the pandemic? The ice cream freezer drawer? For G.O.P. operatives, linking vulnerable Democrats to Pelosi, or the “radical San Francisco liberal” in their words, is akin to a classic rock station that always plays “Stairway to Heaven” or “Free Bird” — they do it because they think it works.And has Ryan voted with Pelosi and Biden 100 percent of the time? Has Spanberger? Not really. Republicans have leveled the same cookie-cutter accusation at Cindy Axne, Angie Craig, Elaine Luria, Chris Pappas, Dean Phillips and Susan Wild — all of them known to be among the least partisan Democrats in the House.Let’s unpack where those statistics come from, and why they’re so misleading.There are two main sources that track congressional voting records: FiveThirtyEight, which rates lawmakers on how often they align with Biden, and ProPublica, which built an online tool that allows you to compare head-to-head voting records of any two members of Congress.ProPublica’s tool lists only “votes designated as major by ProPublica.” In the current Congress, there have been 123 such votes. And when you do a comparison between Pelosi and Ryan, it does return a result of 100 percent, along with the text: “They have disagreed on 0 votes out of 123 votes in the 117th Congress.”But that’s “really misleading,” according to John Lawrence, a former chief of staff to Pelosi and the author of a new book on her first tenure as speaker, “Arc of Power.”Not only, he said, does the tool cherry-pick votes, but it doesn’t capture how often Pelosi has had to deliver what Lawrence called “bad news” to the left wing of her caucus when the Senate balks. During the negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, for instance, Senator Joe Lieberman refused to support a public insurance option — so Pelosi had to twist the arms of disappointed progressives in the House to get them to support final passage.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Here are six more reasons that the 100 percent thing is bunk:First: Because she’s speaker, by House tradition, Pelosi usually doesn’t vote. So on a purely factual basis, it’s flat wrong.“We could estimate with some confidence, but it’s not a great metric,” said Sarah Binder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University who studies Congress. But that’s a minor point.Second: Centrists like Ryan will sponsor or co-sign reams of legislation that never gets a vote because it doesn’t match the priorities of their more liberal Democratic colleagues. Along with Spanberger, for instance, he’s a co-sponsor of the Trust in Congress Act, a bill to bar lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks. Pelosi initially opposed it. Ryan also broke with Pelosi by opposing the USA Freedom Act of 2014, which would have cut off the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone records.Third: The “100 percent” sound bites also don’t capture all the times Ryan, for one, voted with the man who hopes to replace Pelosi as speaker: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. ProPublica’s tool finds that, in the 116th Congress, Ryan and McCarthy voted together 256 times out of 744 total votes, including 11 “major votes.”Drew Hammill, a deputy chief of staff in Pelosi’s office, also noted that legislation on gun safety, infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing had passed with Republican votes.Fourth: Like a duck paddling beneath the surface of the water, there’s a lot that goes on in Congress that is not easy to see and is impossible to quantify: Lawmakers shape legislation through committee meetings, private exchanges or random hallway encounters with colleagues, public statements and amendments.As Lawrence pointed out, lawmakers will often withhold their vote in exchange for concessions that make a bill more palatable for their districts. Ryan, for instance, insisted on beefing up pro-union provisions in the CHIPS Act, the bipartisan semiconductor bill, and he got his way before voting yes.If you’re a Capitol Hill reporter or a whiz at using Congress.gov, the government’s extremely clunky vote-tracking tool, or the even more arcane Congressional Record, you can trace some of that. But a lot of the give-and-take is hard to capture with data.Fifth: Lawmakers on the left are just as likely to break with leadership as centrists are, if not more so. By ProPublica’s measure, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York voted with Pelosi 94 percent of the time — but nobody would describe her as more moderate than Ryan or Spanberger. Binder noted that, on paper, Ocasio-Cortez often votes with Republicans when she opposes the Democrats’ party line. So she shows up as a “moderate” in some indexes, as do Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.Sixth: The House and the Senate are different institutions, with different structures and traditions. The House, for instance, has a much more powerful Rules Committee, which enforces more party-line voting. As Binder pointed out, most votes are “procedural votes” that don’t tell us much about a lawmaker’s ideological predilections.In the Senate, where any senator can hold up a bill for pretty much any reason, there’s also the filibuster — which, for better or worse, promotes more collaboration across the aisle.So if you run two senators against one another in ProPublica’s app, you’ll find far more Democrats voting with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at rates in the 80s. But that doesn’t tell you all that much about whether, say, Senator Jon Tester of Montana is to the left of Representative Jared Golden of Maine. And the Senate tends to vote on lots of nominations, which clogs up the data.Representative Tim Ryan, campaigning at Ohio State University, lands in the middle of the pack among Democratic members of Congress in terms of voting against the majority.Gaelen Morse/Getty ImagesSo which metrics are more accurate?Political scientists prefer more sophisticated measures of ideology, but they don’t tend to be easy to use. There are two main ones: VoteView, which I wrote about earlier, and Congressional Quarterly’s “Party Unity” score.Party Unity scores are proprietary, but C.Q. occasionally releases rankings to the public. The publication’s list of the Democrats who voted most often against their own party’s majority makes intuitive sense. The top 10 of these “opposition Democrats” in 2020 all represented swing districts: They include Golden, Spanberger, Luria of Virginia, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Max Rose of New York, Joe Cunningham of North Carolina, Anthony Brindisi of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida.By VoteView’s more complex measure, Ryan scores a -0.402, which puts him around the middle of the Democratic pack. Spanberger scores a -0.176, implying that she is more conservative.For comparison’s sake, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, scores a -0.681, while Golden, the most conservative Democrat, is at -0.114. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who voted with Pelosi 99 percent of the time according to ProPublica’s online tool, is right up there with Golden at -0.15.But that’s not exactly the stuff attack ads are made of, let alone rebuttals. You probably won’t see Ryan out there promoting his VoteView rating of -0.402 on the hustings — it’s far easier for him to say, as he often does, “Well, I ran against Nancy Pelosi.”What to readMany American entrepreneurs have mixed politics and business. No one has fused the two quite like the election-denying chief executive of MyPillow, report Alexandra Berzon, Charles Homans and Ken Bensinger.As was the case in 2020, Republican votes are more likely to be counted and reported first in several battleground states, giving the party’s candidates deceptively large early leads. Nick Corasaniti reports on the “red mirage.”As Cheri Beasley and Val Demings run competitive Senate campaigns in North Carolina and Florida, some Black female Democrats say party leaders are leaving them to fend for themselves, writes Jonathan Weisman.A Tennessee man was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for dragging a police officer protecting the Capitol into an angry pro-Trump crowd that brutally assaulted the officer on Jan. 6, 2021. Alan Feuer has sentencing details.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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      Fetterman vs. Oz Is Not Really Fetterman vs. Oz

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      So, how many of you watched the Pennsylvania Senate debate because you want to back the most articulate candidate?The whole country was wondering how well John Fetterman was doing, given his auditory processing issues. He can get his thoughts across, but there aren’t going to be any oratory prizes in the immediate future.If one of those had been given out on Tuesday night, Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate, would have won. Big shock, right? The former television talk-show star was more articulate than the guy who had a stroke.But deep down, nothing made much difference. Most viewers knew who they were going to support before the debate began. Hundreds of thousands of them had already voted. Makes total sense. The most important thing about this election, by far, is that it could decide who will control the Senate.There, the big votes are almost always divided by party. Be honest — were you really surprised that Fetterman was the one who wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $15? Or that Oz is the one who would protect the filibuster?At this point, party is all that matters. Still, there we were, trying to judge how the guys performed. On occasion, it was a little hard to tell whether Fetterman’s answers constituted normal political evasion or stroke-induced confusion. For instance, he’d once said he’d never support the very lucrative fracking industry, which many Pennsylvania workers love and virtually all Pennsylvania environmentalists hate. Then he changed his mind. On Tuesday, he said: “I do support fracking. And I don’t, I don’t. I support fracking, and I stand, and I do, support fracking.”That was it, and a very good example of how the repercussions from a stroke can make it much more difficult for a politician to achieve classic dodge-and-switcheroo.Unfortunately, given Fetterman’s trouble with quick repartee, he didn’t throw in a reminder of his opponent’s very recent metamorphosis into a Pennsylvania resident, or more than a quick jab about how Oz, who doesn’t seem worried about the minimum wage, is the guy with “10 gigantic mansions.”True enough. Would have loved to pursue that a little bit — I wonder whether Oz couldn’t be lending one of his Manhattan condos to the homeless. Or displaced Venezuelan refugees?Issue-wise, the big faux pas of the evening actually came from Oz, who flubbed his answer to an abortion question. The good doctor has, um, evolved since he was dispensing medical advice on TV. He was slightly vague but apparently pro-choice back then. Once he became an ambitious Republican politician, he discovered he was “100 percent pro-life.” Now that he’s running in a general election, he’s trying to jump back to the old between-a-woman-and-her-doctor territory.Sort of. On stage this week, he called for a decision made by “women, doctors, local political leaders …”Hmm, how many of you want to bring the local political leaders into this? May I see a show of hands?Oz seemed unthrilled about being asked if he’d back Donald Trump for the 2024 nomination. Which was a little ungrateful, given that he was probably on stage only because Trump had endorsed him in the Republican primary.Bringing up the former president was yet another reminder that our main concern right now is about which party wins control. If you want a Senate that’s going to reject anything that comes out of a Biden White House, feel free to consider the Republican candidates. Otherwise, come on …I know, it’s tough. Voters have less than two weeks to make a choice, and in a fair world they’d be able to think about more than that One Big Thing. What about Fetterman’s long-term prognosis? After the debate, his spokesman said he did “great tonight for a man who was in a hospital bed just several months ago.” That’s true, but it’s not a qualification voters would want to hear for the next six years.You certainly hope he’ll at least be able to get up and go to work. But whatever his condition, don’t express your concern by helping turn the Senate over to Mitch McConnell.If you’ve got a local election for governor or mayor, feel free to mull the character details. They’re the ones whose personality, self-discipline and charisma really matter. For instance, watching the gubernatorial candidates in New York, Kathy Hochul and challenger Lee Zeldin, go at it this week, you got to hear people talk about stuff they could actually do on their own, and not in a pack with 49 or 50 of their colleagues.True, it wasn’t the most stirring debate in state history and objective viewers might have found Zeldin a tad off-putting. (He opened with a rant about how wretched everything was, to which Hochul mildly replied, “Well, nice to see you too …”)Yeah, if you’ve got to vote for an executive, you do need to pay close attention. Take some of the time you were going to devote to those Senate races. On that front, you should have been homing in at primary time, when they picked the candidates. Now, the Republican and Democratic nominees are who they are.And the oratory certainly doesn’t matter. When was the last time a friend told you she’d changed her mind about a big issue after a rousing speech by Senator X? Well, it did sort of work for Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” But that was 30 years before John Fetterman was born.And it was a movie.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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      Pennsylvania Voters Absorb an Unusual Debate: ‘I Felt Sorry for Fetterman’

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      LEMOYNE, Pa. — Two professors walked separately out of a grocery store just outside Pennsylvania’s capital city on Wednesday. Each had different political leanings and different preferences in the state’s Senate race.But they agreed on one thing: The extraordinary debate the day before between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat and stroke survivor, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee and celebrity doctor, was a painful ordeal.“I felt sorry for Fetterman,” said Deb Donahue, 68, an adjunct professor and an Oz supporter from Camp Hill, Pa. “I think he really struggled a little bit.”Across the grocery-store parking lot, the other professor, now retired, Mary Boyer, said she could not bring herself to watch the debate. But Ms. Boyer, 72, a Fetterman supporter from Lewisberry, Pa., said she had read about his difficulties articulating his message at times onstage.“I didn’t want to have to watch him suffering,” she said, even as she emphasized that she saw Mr. Fetterman as a strong candidate and a good fit for the state.Mary Boyer, a Fetterman supporter, did not watch the debate. She still thinks he’s a strong candidate.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesIn more than a dozen interviews across Pennsylvania on Wednesday, voters’ reactions to the debate overwhelmingly centered on Mr. Fetterman’s often halting performance, prompting a range of responses from both Democrats and Republicans — alarm, protectiveness, empathy, disappointment, embarrassment, admiration, worry about the political implications.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.The biggest open question, though, was whether his clash with Dr. Oz — who set off his own backlash by suggesting that state laws on abortion should be decided by “women, doctors, local political leaders” — changed any minds in one of the most consequential Senate contests on the map.“I don’t think Fetterman won over any undecided votes — I think it’s going to leave a lot of people with a tough decision about perceived competency,” said Damian Brennan, 51, a Fetterman backer from Pittsburgh. “We’re kind of fans of his, and we were a bit concerned.”Dr. Oz convinced at least one: Tom Linus, 50, an engineer from Washington Crossing, Pa., said the debate had cemented his decision to vote for the Republican. But he suggested he was more swayed by Dr. Oz’s remarks than by Mr. Fetterman’s performance.“I was kind of borderline before, but I think Oz won me over,” Mr. Linus said. “He was really much more into the details than I was expecting him to be.”Mr. Fetterman, who had a stroke in May, is dealing with lingering auditory processing issues, his campaign says, a challenge that led him to use closed captions in a fast-moving debate against an opponent who has years of television experience. His answers were sometimes notably brief, and at times he trailed off or jumbled words.His team, which had sought to lower expectations before the event, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $2 million since the debate. This month, his campaign released a note from Mr. Fetterman’s primary care physician saying that he could “work full duty in public office.”Cheryl Smith, a pathologist from Philadelphia, said she was confident that Mr. Fetterman would make a full recovery from his stroke.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times“John is ready to fight for every vote these next two weeks and win this race,” said Joe Calvello, a spokesman for Mr. Fetterman. The campaign also turned Dr. Oz’s abortion comments into an ad.Mr. Fetterman, who has won statewide office, has a strong political persona in Pennsylvania as a shorts-wearing former mayor of Braddock, a struggling old steel town he worked to help revitalize. Some voters said they simply did not expect him to be a strong debater, health challenges aside.“This is a setting that I think he wouldn’t have presented himself well even before the stroke, because he’s not a natural debater,” said Amie Gillingham, 51, of Greensburg, Pa. “If you’re judging on the style of the debate, Oz was the clear winner because he’s a polished public speaker, and that is not Fetterman.”Ms. Gillingham said the debate format seemed to work against Mr. Fetterman, but she added that was not a reason to vote against him.“If he’s willing to put himself out there, warts and all, I have so much respect for that,” she said. “To say that he’s an idiot who isn’t capable of being a senator simply because he’s struggling under this specific debate format is disingenuous and ableist in the extreme.”Cheryl Smith, 75, a pathologist from Philadelphia, expressed confidence in Mr. Fetterman’s ability to do the job.“They are going against Fetterman because of his speech problems right now, but hopefully that will clear up,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. As long as your mind is working well, you know what’s going on.”For several Democrats, their reaction to the debate was rooted in how they believed other voters might perceive Mr. Fetterman’s performance. The debate came after weeks of polling showing a tight race, and while surveys differ, Dr. Oz has undeniably gained ground this fall.Larry Kirk, 81, of Berks County, Pa., is a Democrat and will be voting for Mr. Fetterman in November. But he thought Dr. Oz had outperformed Mr. Fetterman onstage.Tom Linus of Washington Crossing, Pa., said Mehmet Oz’s performance in the debate had won him over.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times“I think it will have a negative impact on Fetterman because he didn’t really answer the accusations very well,” Mr. Kirk said. “And for people who are merely going to listen and not really think it through for themselves or check the research, unfortunately, I think Fetterman might have lost a few independent votes.”Megan Crossman of South Philadelphia said she was mostly worried that other voters would conclude that Mr. Fetterman is not up to the job.“I’m a physician, so that doesn’t necessarily mean his cognitive skills are off, it’s just his ability to get the words out,” she said. “But it does make me concerned about what voters who are less familiar might think.”Russell Greer, 75, of Butler, Pa., said he was a Republican who intended to vote for Mr. Fetterman. He said he didn’t think Dr. Oz — whose longtime principal residence was in New Jersey — had lived in Pennsylvania long enough to understand the state or its people, and he has followed Mr. Fetterman’s career.But the debate, he said, was hard to watch.“I think he was forced into that debate to quell different opinions, and I think he didn’t,” Mr. Greer said. “I think it made it worse.”He said he watched Mr. Fetterman and Dr. Oz debate for about 15 minutes. Then he turned it off.Jon Hurdle More