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      Will U.S. Democracy Survive the Threats?

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      More from our inbox:Women, ‘Stay Loud’A Childhood HomeGet a Living WillIllustration of the American flag.Illustration by Matt ChaseTo the Editor:Re “Democracy Challenged,” by David Leonhardt (front page, Sept. 18):Your excellent, and frightening, article suggests that our democracy is facing two simultaneous crises: Republicans who refuse to accept defeat in an election, and a growing disconnect between political power and public opinion. But there is a third, equally serious danger.While it is critical to get rid of dark money (reversing Citizens United) and gerrymandering, and to set term limits on the Supreme Court, an equally significant element of the current nightmare is coming from social media.Indeed, the degree to which social media has not only ginned up but actually created some or much of the current social-cultural-political zeitgeist is not well understood or acknowledged. For all the positives it provides, social media has become a cancer on society — one that has metastasized and continues to do so, often with the full knowledge (and even complicity) of social media companies.If we are going to begin arresting, and then (hopefully) reversing, the crisis described in the article, we need to address the social media issue as urgently as we need to address the overtly political ones. Addressing the latter without the former simply will not do the job.Ian AltermanNew YorkTo the Editor:Our democracy and our constitutional republic are not only challenged, but are on the verge of collapse. Should the Republicans capture the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, I believe that it will be a long time before we have another free and fair election in this country.The G.O.P. has stacked state houses with MAGA Republicans who, if given the chance, will do what Donald Trump wanted done in 2020: refuse to certify the will of the voters. In other areas we are rapidly losing our freedoms. We are in danger of losing the right to choose whether or not to bring a child into the world, the right to read or watch whatever we choose, and in many cases, the right to vote.The Republican Party has developed into a race-baiting, hateful group of people, inspired and directed by Mr. Trump, and Americans need to beware the consequences of electing more of their ilk at the local, state and federal level.Henry A. LowensteinNew YorkTo the Editor:“Democracy Challenged” is a chilling portrait of the bitter ideological civil war raging in America today. While not a conflict exacting physical wounds for the most part, it is for many of us emotionally exhausting, compounded by the realization that no obvious relief or solution is evident. It is almost impossible to watch cable news or read the daily papers without feeling despondent about the widening philosophical gulf separating the two parties.It is ironic that Democratic-leaning states contribute more to the federal government than they receive, in effect subsidizing Republican state policies that Democrats strongly oppose.I look forward to future articles in which I can hopefully discover a nugget of hope.Howard QuinnBronxTo the Editor:Thank you for all of your efforts to highlight the challenges to democracy and fair elections, but what I believe you are failing to do is sell democracy. You assume that democracy will sell itself. It won’t. There was a time when it would, but not today.Not only do you need to sell democracy — that is, emphasize its benefits — but you also need to highlight the cons of the alternative.We must sell democracy as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.Dan BuchanCheyenne, Wyo.To the Editor:While David Leonhardt is correct, of course, that the Republican Party’s increasing inclination to refuse to accept defeat in an election constitutes an existential threat to our democracy, so, too, does the likelihood that some of the large number of election deniers now running for statewide or local positions of electoral authority will prevail in November.Such a calamitous result would mean that if the outcome of a subsequent election is called into question by a defeated, victimized Democrat with legitimate cries of foul, it will be met with derision and scorn by the faux patriot MAGA crowd, and upheld by judges and justices whose allegiance to one man outweighs any sense of loyalty to the Constitution they might once have held sacrosanct.Edward PellSanta Monica, Calif.Women, ‘Stay Loud’ Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Trolls in Russia Schemed to Divide Women’s March,” by Ellen Barry (front page, Sept. 19), is a thorough, well-researched piece about how Russian trolls deliberately created discord within the Women’s March and across the women’s rights movement more broadly.While the details may be shocking to many, it’s old news that women are in the sightlines. Whether the actors are foreign or domestic, we’ve long been the targets of disinformation, harassment and violence, against our bodies and our freedoms.We’ve had to create programs like Digital Divas and Digital Defenders to combat disinformation, because it is still happening and only going to get worse as we fight back. In addition to digital spaces, we’re leaning on proven analog tactics, including get-out-the-vote training, phone banking and postcard mailing.Thousands of women, including many who have never volunteered before, are active ahead of the critical midterm elections to get people registered to vote and educated on the issues. We saw in the abortion referendum in Kansas last month how our efforts can succeed.Silence us, they will not. Women more than ever need to stay loud in the battle for equality. Neither a Russian bot nor a domestic terrorist will silence us into submission.Emiliana GuerecaLos AngelesThe writer is the founder and president of Women’s March Foundation and Action.A Childhood Home Marine BuffardTo the Editor:Re “Your Childhood Home Is in Front of You. Do You Go In?,” by Mark Vanhoenacker (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 12):I enjoyed this article, which described the pull toward one’s childhood home. As a psychiatrist, I begin my journey with patients by asking about their earliest years.“Who lived with you during your childhood?”“Were there any disruptive moves or departures?”By exploring these distant memories, I begin to understand their path to my office, and how I can help them shape a healthier future.If looking back is a positive experience, I may encourage those struggling with insomnia to imagine a virtual tour of their earliest home, focusing on even the most minute details. “What do you see as you look around your bedroom?”As a busy working mom, I find that this technique has helped me return to sleep despite my anxious mind, a soothing recall of a childhood filled with safety and love.Jennifer ReidMoorestown, N.J.Get a Living Will Emiliano PonziTo the Editor:Re “The Space Between Brain Death and Organ Donation,” by Daniela J. Lamas (Sunday Opinion, Sept. 18):It behooves everyone to make their wishes clear regarding organ donation (like on a driver’s license). Just as important, if not more so, is that each of us make our wishes clear regarding life support and other artificial means: respirator, feeding tube, etc.Making our wishes known in a living will not only has cost-saving implications but also assures our dignity.Pankaj GuptaEdison, N.J.The writer is a geriatrician. More

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      Want to Understand the 2022 Midterms? Meet Joe and Marie.

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      VANCOUVER, Wash. — In March, five months before he became the Republican nominee in a Washington State congressional race, Joe Kent appeared on a webcast hosted by a Gen-Z white nationalist group called the American Populist Union. Kent, who would soon be endorsed by Donald Trump, was there to explain his disavowal of Nick Fuentes, a smirking 24-year-old far-right influencer whom The New York Times has described as “a prominent white supremacist.”On one side of the split screen was David Carlson, the American Populist Union’s baby-faced chief content officer. On the other was Kent, a movie-star-handsome former Green Beret in a plaid flannel shirt, with an American flag hanging behind him. What followed was a 45-minute conversation in which Kent attempted a dance that’s become common in today’s G.O.P.: remaining in the good graces of the far right while putting some distance between himself and its most abhorrent avatars.Joe Kent at a campaign event in Amboy, Wash. “Our agenda for the first two years is simple,” he said. “Impeachment, obstruction and oversight. The Biden agenda dies off in the crib.”Kent had spoken on the phone to Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and Vladimir Putin admirer who believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, earlier in his campaign to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who’d voted to impeach Trump. (They apparently discussed social media strategy.) Their association had become a problem in Kent’s primary, and eventually Kent tweeted that he didn’t want Fuentes’s endorsement because of “his focus on race/religion.” But this rejection infuriated some of Kent’s most reactionary supporters; Fuentes himself went after Kent in a three-and-a-half hour livestream. So Kent appeared on the American Populist Union’s webcast (the group has since changed its name to American Virtue) to explain himself.There, he spoke about how white people are discriminated against in America, called for an immigration moratorium, and said the United States is the only country that “recognizes that our rights are inherent and they come from God, not from government.” Carlson pressed him: Why, given Kent’s own religious and nationalist convictions, did he consider Fuentes “divisive”?“It’s more of a tactics thing,” Kent said. He noted that he has “moral qualms” about Fuentes’s giggling praise for Hitler, but said that where they really differ is on strategy. “Running out there and saying, ‘This movement is for white people and Christians only,’” said Kent, “that is not how you win elections at all.”The question of how you win an election in Washington’s Third Congressional District — a stretch along the southeastern border with Oregon that’s been reliably Republican, voting for Trump by four points in 2020 but still considered fairly moderate — is not just a political debate for right-wing YouTube. The race, pitting Kent, a burgeoning MAGA-world star, against Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a 34-year-old rural working-class Democrat who is emphasizing abortion rights, has national implications.Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Camas. She is counting on anger over the overturning of Roe to help her win.It’s one that will show us whether Republicans overreached in nominating candidates who speak almost exclusively to their base, or whether politicians like Kent really are the party’s future. It will show us just how potent the backlash to the overturning of Roe v. Wade is. And it will show us what kind of House we’re going to have come 2023: one that is capable of legislating, or one that makes the Tea Party look tame.In other words, the race in Washington’s Third is an almost perfect microcosm of the broader political forces at work in the fall midterm elections.You’ve heard it before: Until recently, it seemed inevitable that a red wave would crash over America in November. The Democrats’ congressional majority is paper-thin, the party in power typically loses midterm seats, and Joe Biden’s poll numbers were abysmal. But lately the forecast has turned cloudier, and districts like Washington’s Third have become surprisingly competitive.Across the country, Republicans have nominated politically inexperienced MAGA fanatics who could lose otherwise winnable races — people like the Ohio House candidate J.R. Majewski, a QAnon promoter who performs pro-Trump rap songs and reportedly misrepresented his military service.Kent is one of the more polished of the MAGA candidates. His military service — 11 tours, mostly in Iraq — is very real, and he has an immensely sympathetic personal story. In 2019, his wife, a Navy cryptologic technician named Shannon Kent, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in northeastern Syria, leaving Joe as the single father to a baby and a toddler. This horrific loss, he’s said, helped propel him into politics. Kent holds what he calls the “administrative state” responsible for his wife’s death, arguing that unelected bureaucrats subverted Trump’s attempts to pull American troops out of Syria.“They were supposed to be out Christmas Eve of 2018,” he told me, accusing people close to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who resigned over the Syria pullout, of slow-rolling the process. “I 100 percent blame the administrative state.”Kent’s anger is understandable, as is his deep disillusionment with the war on terror, which he now sees as a scheme, built on an edifice of lies, to enrich the military-industrial complex. America’s foreign wars, he said, were “a great way for the ruling class to extract wealth and give themselves more power.”It’s hard to entirely disagree with that. But Kent’s fury at the establishment has led him to what was, at least before Trump, the right-wing fringe. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group,” he said on Carlson’s webcast.Kent said that the Jan. 6 insurrection “reeks of an intelligence operation” and he wants all the “political prisoners” arrested for invading the Capitol released. His campaign, The Associated Press’s Brian Slodysko reported, paid a member of the Proud Boys, one of the groups that led the Jan. 6 attack, $11,375 for “consulting” services. He’s appeared at several rallies with Joey Gibson, the founder of a Vancouver-based Christian Nationalist group called Patriot Prayer that has often worked in concert with the Proud Boys.When I asked Kent why he went on Carlson’s webcast, he claimed he didn’t really know who he was. “Honestly, it seemed like a venue where a lot of younger guys listened to, so why not try and get in front of that audience,” he said. He described the Proud Boys, who’ve engaged in especially violent brawls in Portland, Ore., as “a drinking group” that acted in self-defense against the lawlessness of antifa and Black Lives Matter.Despite his hard-right associations, the Republican edge in the midterms probably would have made Kent a shoo-in in his district before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has mobilized pro-choice voters nationwide.Last month Pat Ryan, a Democrat running on abortion rights, won a special election in a closely divided district in upstate New York. A week later, a Democrat, Mary Peltola, beat Sarah Palin in a special election for Alaska’s lone House seat. “Democrats are punching above their weight in special elections since Dobbs,” said an analysis in FiveThirtyEight. While the November elections can be different from special elections, the challenge for Democrats remains the same: Can they punch above their weight in Washington’s Third?If Kent is one likely face of the future Republican Party, Gluesenkamp Perez, an auto shop owner, offers an intriguing path forward for the Democrats, who need to become competitive in Republican-leaning districts without sacrificing their ideals. She’s counting on a Dobbs backlash, especially since Kent favors a nationwide abortion ban. “It doesn’t matter what a woman’s political party is,” she said of women she meets on the trail. “If they’re old enough to remember what illegal abortions looked like, they do not want to go back.”Gluesenkamp Perez has spoken about how, during the height of the pandemic, she had a miscarriage and needed medical attention. One of the few places that could see her right away was Planned Parenthood, but to get inside, she had to make her way through a wall of protesters. It brought home to her the outrageous presumption of those who’d dictate to women what they can do with their bodies.“Who is going to write a bill that can encompass all the complexity of giving birth and being pregnant?” she said. “That will not happen. There is no role for government in making these decisions.” The Pacific Northwest has a strong libertarian streak, and Gluesenkamp Perez said she meets people who were outraged by mask mandates and are now similarly angry about anti-abortion restrictions on bodily autonomy.Though fund-raising has recently picked up, Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign is still running on a shoestring. It currently consists of four paid staff members, including a young political director living in a camper in Gluesenkamp Perez’s driveway. Kent, whose appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show and Steve Bannon’s podcast have contributed to his national profile, has a staff of eight.At the Gluesenkamp Pérez event in Camas. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling had Kent leading by three percentage points, 47 percent to 44 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Nine percent were undecided. The Gluesenkamp Perez campaign’s internal polling shows her with a slight lead, and though internal polling should always be taken with a grain of salt, The Cook Political Report has changed the district’s rating from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican.”Because of the Trumpist candidates Republicans have nominated — people like Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania — some forecasts favor Democrats to maintain control of the Senate. The House, where gerrymandered districts give Republicans a strong advantage, is a different story.“For Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to pull the equivalent of an inside straight, holding virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold,” reported The Times.Democrats need to do a few things simultaneously. They need to turn out pro-choice women, shore up their edge with Latinos and stop hemorrhaging rural voters. Gluesenkamp Perez is unusually well positioned to try to do all three.Her father, a Mexican immigrant, was an evangelical preacher; she told me she learned public speaking in his Texas church. She and her husband live, with their 13-month-old son, off an unpaved road in a house they built themselves “nail by nail,” as she likes to say on the stump. Like Kent, she is good-looking, resembling a taller, lankier Winona Ryder, which shouldn’t matter but probably does.The auto shop owned by Gluesenkamp Perez and her husband.Gluesenkamp Perez and her son, Ciro.The shop Gluesenkamp Perez runs with her husband, Dean’s Car Care, employs eight people, and Gluesenkamp Perez speaks passionately about the struggles of both small-business owners and working parents. She often talks about putting infant noise-protecting headphones on her baby registry; because she couldn’t find a day care spot, her son spent a lot of time with her at the auto shop.“If you think you can spend 15K a year on day care, per kid, and save for retirement, and save up for a mortgage, you’re living in a really different economy than me and most of the people that I know,” she said at one rally.In high school, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she was so obsessed with civics that she was active in both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats. It was only when she was a freshman in college and her brother came out as gay that she decided the Republican Party wasn’t for her.Though she looks nothing like Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate candidate, John Fetterman, something about her reminds me of him. Both are part of working-class communities, and use cultural fluency as much as political rhetoric to try to connect with voters who might feel alienated by the national Democratic Party.Gluesenkamp Perez doesn’t always mention her immigrant heritage when she’s campaigning, at least in front of white, English-speaking audiences. (Her district is about 11 percent Latino.) “I’d say a lot of moderates feel like it’s somehow identity politics,” she said. She leans harder on her rural credentials: “We get our water from a well. I get my internet from a radio tower. And that means a lot to people in rural communities,” she said.Gluesenkamp Perez ’s first political campaign was in 2016, when she ran for county commission in Skamania County, the heavily forested area along the Columbia River Gorge where she lives. The county is very conservative, and she lost, but she outperformed Hillary Clinton by almost seven points.“I really learned how to listen more deeply about what the actual concerns are,” she said. “Because there’s sort of a top level of Fox News talking points, and then if you keep listening, and you go a little deeper, you can start to hear, what are the ways that that’s manifesting for you — what’s really influencing your quality of life.”A packed house, and then some, at a Gluesenkamp Perez event in Vancouver.It was Kent who inspired her to jump into the congressional race. Gluesenkamp Perez recalled the run-up to the 2016 election, when she was surrounded by evidence of enthusiasm for Trump and worried that national Democrats were ignoring it. She saw similar signs, she said, with Kent. “It was basically Joe Kent wallpaper in Skamania County,” she said. People she would have expected to have Herrera Beutler signs just didn’t.“I was not in this race to take Jaime Herrera Beutler out,” she told me. “Did I love her? No, but I wasn’t going to upset my life to run against her. But Joe Kent is dangerous, and I really felt like the same brand of Democrat with a pedigree and a graduate degree was not the solution right now.”Last Saturday afternoon, I watched Gluesenkamp Perez speak at a brewery here in downtown Vancouver. She was introduced by Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who boasted of winning 53 lawsuits against the Trump administration. Gluesenkamp Perez thanked him for his work, which she said “derailed Trump’s march towards fascism. And let’s be very clear. Joe Kent is picking up that same banner of fascism. Of white nationalism. Of the Proud Boys. And he has got to be stopped before it is too late!”Gluesenkamp Perez knows talking about fascism, like identity, can be inflammatory; witness the freakout in some quarters when Biden called the MAGA movement “semi-fascist.” But she also thinks that authoritarianism is something a good chunk of people in the district worry about. In an internal poll, her campaign asked voters which issues will determine their choice for Congress. “Protecting democracy,” came in first, closely followed by the cost of living. Abortion was third.After Gluesenkamp Perez, a man who doesn’t often speak at Democratic rallies took the mic. David Nierenberg, a hedge fund manager who calls Mitt Romney his “best friend,” was probably Jaime Herrera Beutler’s biggest fund-raiser in the district. Now he’s backing Gluesenkamp Perez.Nierenberg told me he’s been doing political fund-raising in the community since 1999. “I have never been involved with such a joyous and ecstatic and enthusiastic fund-raising effort as I’m seeing here,” he said. “And I think that is the combination of the huge differences between these two candidates, where Marie is likable, approachable, moderate, well spoken, and then we have a flame-throwing extremist on the other side.”But one of Kent’s key advantages is that he doesn’t have the affect of a flame-throwing extremist. He’s smooth and affable, without Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s coiled, wild-eyed intensity or Representative Matt Gaetz’s smarm. “He’s got a very clean-cut, square-jawed sort of marketing, and if you’re not really paying attention, you’re going to get distracted by the hair,” said Gluesenkamp Perez. He has a talent for saying outrageous things as if they were banal common sense.I met Kent last Sunday, at a Republican picnic held in a wooded grove in Skamania County, and then saw him speak again the next day at an outdoor town hall in a rural area called Amboy. He made it quite clear what he intends to do in Congress. “Our agenda for the first two years is simple,” he said at the town hall. “Impeachment, obstruction and oversight. The Biden agenda dies off in the crib.”After the Kent event in Amboy, where the candidate expressed his view on shutting down the government if need be. “I used to work in the federal government,” he said. “It can shut down. It’s really not a big deal.”Of course, any Republican majority will obstruct and investigate Biden, but the size and composition of a potential Republican caucus still matters. It will determine, among other things, just how many impeachments and government shutdowns we’re in for, and how often the House uses its power to protect Trump and reify MAGA conspiracy theories. The more candidates like Kent get elected, the less reason Republicans will have to make any concession to a reality that exists outside the Trumpist bubble.In his speeches, Kent promised to impeach Biden on Day One, and then Vice President Kamala Harris (“one of the lead fund-raisers for antifa and B.L.M. during the summer of 2020”), Attorney General Merrick Garland and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. At the town hall, he emphasized his willingness to shut down the government: “I used to work in the federal government,” he said. “It can shut down. It’s really not a big deal.”In this environment, a Gluesenkamp Perez win wouldn’t just give Democrats an extra seat, or provide a shining example for how to run in purplish regions: It would be a cautionary tale warning Republicans that there’s a price for marching into the fever swamps.As for Kent, his attempt to distance himself from Fuentes shows that he’s capable of modulating his political strategy. Most of the time, it seems, he doesn’t think he has to. A Kent victory would signal to other Republicans that even outside of ultra-red districts, there’s no need to appeal to moderates, and little price to be paid for courting the hard right.On the stump, in addition to listing all of those people he would impeach, Kent promised to hold Anthony Fauci “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” I asked him what holding Fauci accountable means. “Criminal charges,” said Kent. But what charges, I asked? “Murder,” he replied, as it were the most obvious answer in the world.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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      Lost Hope of Lasting Democratic Majority

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      Revisiting an influential book and the notion that demographics are destiny.Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, when a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority” seemed prophetic.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday we wish a belated and maybe not-so-Happy 20th Birthday to “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the book that famously argued Democrats would gain an enduring advantage in a multiracial, postindustrial America.There are countless explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and the growing dysfunction of American political life. This book does not necessarily rank at the top of that list. But when historians look back on this era, the book’s effect on American politics might be worth a mention.The thesis that Democrats were on the cusp of a lasting advantage in national politics helped shape the hopes, fears and, ultimately, the conduct of the two major parties — especially once the Obama presidency appeared to confirm the book’s prophecy.It transformed modest Democratic wins into harbingers of perpetual liberal rule. It fueled conservative anxiety about America’s growing racial diversity, even as it encouraged the Republican establishment to reach out to Hispanic voters and pursue immigration reform. The increasingly popular notion that “demographics are destiny” made it easier for the progressive base to argue against moderation and in favor of mobilizing a new coalition of young and nonwhite voters. All of this helped set the stage for the rise of Mr. Trump.This is a lot to attribute to a single book, especially since the book does not really resemble the Obama-era caricature advanced by its supporters. The book does not put forward what became a commonly held view that racial demographic shifts would allow Democrats to win through mobilization, a more leftist politics or without the support of white working-class voters.Instead, the book argued — not persuasively, as we’ll see — that Democrats could build a majority with a (still ill-defined) “centrist” politics of the Clinton-Gore variety, so long as they got “close to an even split” of white working-class voters.“We were clearly overly optimistic about that prospect, to say the least,” said John Judis, one of the authors of the book, of the prospect of such high levels of Democratic support.One easy way to see the divergence between reality and the expectations promoted by the book is to look at its projections for the Electoral College, compared with how the nation actually voted over the next 20 years: More

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      As Cable News Focused on Queen, Democratic Political Donations Slipped

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      When the Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced a bill this month to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks, Democratic fund-raisers expected it to dominate news outlets like MSNBC, bringing small-dollar donations for candidates.But they did not anticipate that cable news networks, overtaken by the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, would relegate politics to an afterthought for more than a week in favor of ancient rituals, Grenadier Guards and the monarch’s corgis.Suddenly, the traditional September influx of campaign cash slipped, which Democrats attributed in significant part to the round-the-clock coverage of the 10-day period of mourning for the queen that culminated in her funeral on Monday.Democrats said that they relied on grass-roots donations — those under $250 — to compete with spending by Republican-aligned super PACs on television ads, particularly in battleground states.Nat Binns, a principal for MissionWired, a digital fund-raising company that supports Democrats, said in an interview on Friday that he had never experienced such a vacuum of political news stories at this stage of the campaigns.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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      In a First, Biden Gets Involved in State Legislative Races

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      The president’s involvement is a sign that Democratic leaders are taking down-ballot contests more seriously than in past elections.President Biden became involved in state legislative races for the first time, with an email Friday asking Democrats to each donate the modest sum of $7 to his party’s campaign arm for statehouse elections.And, following his Sept. 1 speech lashing “MAGA Republicans,” Biden is framing the stakes as a battle for American democracy, coupled with a bread-and-butter message about inflation, an issue that has bedeviled his presidency and given Republicans hopes of a red wave in races all the way down the ballot.“State legislatures are the key to stopping Republican abortion bans, attacks on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, bills that undercut our democracy by making it harder for people to vote,” Biden wrote in the email, which was sent to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s mailing list. “Not just that, state legislatures are essential — I mean it, essential — to lowering prices for American families and building an economy that works for everyone.”Biden’s email, which the White House had been working on for weeks, comes as Republicans warn that they are being outspent in state legislative races. It’s a noteworthy shift in messaging for the traditionally chest-thumping G.O.P., and therefore revealing regardless of what the numbers actually tell us.As my colleague Nick Corasaniti reported on Friday, one outside group working on winning statehouses for Democrats, the States Project, plans to spend $60 million across just five states. That would be a humdrum sum for a hot Senate race, but it’s an astronomical amount in races where spending is often in the range of thousands of dollars, not even tens of thousands and far from millions.Nick’s reporting included a memo sent this week by the Republican State Leadership Committee, the D.L.C.C.’s counterpart on the right. It warns conservative donors that Democrats are vastly outspending them in key states.“While Democrats cry out for more resources,” it reads, “they are dominating the television spending at this point in the campaign.”That is only partially true.Citing publicly available advertising data, which The New York Times verified, the memo notes that in Michigan, Democrats have spent nearly six times as much as Republicans in state legislative races since the primaries. In Colorado, another hotly contested state, the R.S.L.C. memo notes, “Democrats have spent and booked nearly four times more than Republicans since the June 28 primary.”Michigan followed a nonpartisan redistricting process this year that threw out a heavily gerrymandered map that favored Republicans. A flood of spending has come to the state: Democrats have spent and booked more than $20 million in TV ads, while Republicans have spent and booked just under $3.7 million.Nick found, however, that “on the television airwaves, Republican candidates and outside groups have spent roughly $39 million, while Democrats have spent roughly $35 million,” citing data from AdImpact, a media-tracking company.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.In Pennsylvania and Arizona, Nick reported, “Republicans have spent nearly $1 million more than Democrats on ads since July.”Just one Democratic state senator, Mallory McMorrow, had already raised nearly $2 million as of Friday, according to her campaign.The presidential factorPresidents have typically focused on winning races for the Senate, the House and governorships. But over the last decade, as Democrats have worked to reverse the nationwide gains Republicans made after redistricting in 2010, many in the lower ranks of the party have been pushing Democratic leaders to pay more attention to the bottom of the ballot.Three factors have changed the game this year.The first is Donald Trump, who started getting involved in state legislative races as he embraced candidates who endorsed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In addition, some candidates for secretary of state would be in charge of running elections even though they falsely claim that Trump won in 2020, On Politics wrote on Thursday.The second is abortion. Republicans have spent decades amassing power and support in state legislatures while national Democrats largely ignored state politics in favor of higher-profile contests. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June shined a spotlight on the gains Republicans had made at the state level as so-called trigger laws went into effect in many states, restricting abortion after the ruling.In Michigan, for instance, where Republicans control both houses of the State Legislature, Democrats are investing great hopes in a ballot measure that seeks to overturn a 1931 law that the Roe reversal triggered, although a judicial ruling has kept abortion legal in the state for now.And the third is the long tail of the 2010 redistricting, which Republicans used to redraw maps in their favor after midterm elections that President Obama famously described as a “shellacking.”President Biden remains fairly unpopular, despite making some gains over the last few months. His approval rating was 42.7 percent as of Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of public opinion polls.That said, Trump is even less popular, and Democrats have spent months researching ways to anchor Republican candidates to him even though he won’t be on the ballot this year.Abortion-rights advocates in the Michigan Legislature in June. Republicans are expected to hold the Legislature, but forecasting races is difficult with little polling.Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal, via APWhat the forecasts sayWhether this strategy will help Democrats keep the statehouses they picked up in 2018, and held in most cases in 2020, is another matter.According to forecasts by CNAnalysis, one of the few publicly available prognosticators that focuses on state legislative races, it’s looking like it will be a very Republican year across the country.As of Friday, CNAnalysis was predicting that Republicans would hang on to legislatures in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, with Maine and Minnesota as tossups. Democrats, the firm expects, will retain Colorado and New Mexico.But such forecasts are inherently difficult in races where polling is scant, and much depends on which way undecided voters break in the fall.Will they side with Republicans and their complaints about the prices of gas and groceries, or will they hear out Democrats’ messages about abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and democracy?That’s the $1 million question of this election — whether it’s in a high-profile Senate race in Pennsylvania or a humble statehouse contest in Arizona.The wider stakesNick’s article also mentions a once-obscure legal doctrine called the “independent state legislature theory.” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor, called it the “800-pound gorilla brooding in the background of election law cases working their way up from state courts” in June.The doctrine is an unorthodox interpretation of the Constitution. It holds that the framers of the Constitution intended for state legislatures to reign supreme over secretaries of state and even state constitutions. Most law professors view it as far out of the mainstream, but some conservative legal scholars, including at least two current Supreme Court justices, see it as legitimate.Quietly, lawyers linked to the Republican National Committee and to congressional leaders have been angling for the Supreme Court to rule on the doctrine. Conservative lawyers under the banner of a group called the Honest Elections Project invoked a version of the theory in Pennsylvania in 2020, citing it in a petition for writ of certiorari to the state Supreme Court.The lawyers, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman of the Republican-linked firm Baker and Hostetler, argued that the secretary of the commonwealth at the time, Kathy Boockvar, had overstepped her constitutional boundaries by altering the date by which the state would accept late-arriving mail-in ballots.If the Supreme Court does embrace the doctrine, it could fundamentally alter how elections are conducted in the United States, from the rules governing the mechanics of voting to who makes the final decisions on what is and is not legal.In some cases, senior Democrats have privately warned candidates against filing lawsuits that could trigger the court’s conservative majority to take up the concept in the so-called shadow docket, in which the court does not hold a full oral argument session but issues a ruling with little explanation.That is not likely to happen before the midterms, court watchers say. Democratic legal experts also think they will have a better shot during one of the court’s regular sessions, during which they can present their counterarguments in full.In March, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, responding to a case in North Carolina, appeared to signal that the court was eager to rule on the independent state legislature theory in what my colleague Adam Liptak described as “an orderly fashion.”“The issue is almost certain to keep arising until the court definitively resolves it,” Kavanaugh wrote, adding that the court should grant a petition seeking review on the merits “in an appropriate case — either in this case from North Carolina or in a similar case from another state.”What to read about democracyBallot mules. Poll watch parties. Groomers. Cecilia Kang lays out the most dominant false narratives circulating about November’s midterm elections.A whistle-blower who worked for Twitter and testified before the Jan. 6 committee told The Washington Post that extremism and political disinformation on social media pose an “imminent threat not just to American democracy, but to the societal fabric of our planet.”A law in Georgia that lets people and groups submit an unlimited number of challenges to voters’ eligibility is causing headaches for election workers as they try to prepare for ballots to be cast in the state’s crucial races, according to The 19th.Voting rights groups and Democrats are bristling at the inclusion of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, on the cover of Time magazine’s issue highlighting election defenders. They pointed out that Raffensperger is a defendant in 20 voter suppression lawsuits.A new report by Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that “American democracy is at a dangerous inflection point” and lays out five strategies to address what she calls “a democratic setback potentially as serious as the ones already occurring in India and Hungary.”viewfinderShuran Huang for The New York TimesA tough questionOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Shuran Huang told us about taking the image above:Capturing nuanced moments is one of my favorite tasks when I am covering news events in Congress.Amid hours of grueling testimony, witnesses usually manage to keep up a steely disposition during hearings on Capitol Hill.But not always.Here, William Demchak, chief executive officer of PNC Financial Services, took a deep breath with his eyes closed after answering a tough question from a lawmaker.The light hit Demchak’s face in just the right way to highlight his frustration — and created a contrast to the smiling face on the painting behind him.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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      Democratic-Allied Group Pours $60 Million Into State Legislative Races

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      A Democratic-aligned group is investing nearly $60 million in state legislative races in five states, a significant sum in an often overlooked political arena where Democrats have struggled for decades.The group, the States Project, said it was focusing on flipping a single seat in the Arizona State Senate that could swing it to Democratic control, and on winning back both chambers of the Michigan and Pennsylvania legislatures. The group also aims to defend Democratic majorities in Maine and Nevada.The large infusion of cash from the States Project amounts to a recognition of the critical role that state legislatures play in American politics, orchestrating policy on abortion access, what can be taught in schools and other issues that animate voters. In every state except Minnesota, Virginia and Alaska, a single party controls both chambers.Next year, the Supreme Court could give the legislative bodies yet more power if it endorses a theory, often called independent state legislature doctrine, that would give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over elections. Left-leaning groups like the States Project argue that state legislative contests this year in several key battlegrounds could have an outsize impact on future elections.“The alarm bells are ringing in our state legislatures,” said Adam Pritzker, a founder of the States Project and a Democratic donor. “With the rise of the Tea Party and the balance of power dramatically shifting toward the right, the rest of us have been asleep at the wheel for too long at the state level. And now, this threat is truly off the charts.”Daniel Squadron, left, and Adam Pritzker founded the States Project, a Democratic-aligned group focused on state legislatures.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesThe $60 million investment represents all of the States Project’s spending for the 2022 election cycle. The group estimates that it has already contributed about half of the money to candidates and legislative caucuses.While Democrats have historically been outgunned by Republicans at the state legislative level, in part because of gerrymandered districts created after the Tea Party wave of 2010, they have ramped up their spending over the past few years and are coming closer to parity this year.On the television airwaves, Republican candidates and outside groups have spent roughly $39 million, while Democrats have spent roughly $35 million, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. In Pennsylvania and Arizona, Republicans have spent nearly $1 million more than Democrats on ads since July.Nonetheless, the Republican State Leadership Committee has sounded the alarm about falling behind Democrats financially in state legislative races.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.“The truth is, we have been outspent in every recent election cycle, and we know full well that we will be again this year,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican committee, said in a memo to donors on Wednesday.Though the group has not released its third-quarter fund-raising numbers, it announced a record second-quarter haul of more than $53 million in July. But the Republican committee also supports candidates for secretary of state and lieutenant governor, in addition to state legislative contenders.Frustration has sometimes boiled over from outside groups like the States Project that want more out of the Democratic National Committee.The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the arm of the Democratic National Committee that focuses on state legislative races, announced in July that it had raised $6.75 million, a record for the group, but still below what the States Project has been able to raise. A spokeswoman for the Democratic committee said that the group planned to spend roughly $50 million this cycle, but that it had not announced its third-quarter fund-raising.Mr. Pritzker, the States Project co-founder, said that “the national party in D.C. has always overlooked and underfunded legislatures,” adding: “If you need an example, the D.N.C. hasn’t given the D.L.C.C. a single dollar to this cycle. And that needs to change.”“This is definitely not a mission-accomplished message,” Mr. Pritzker said of his group’s new investment. “We’re pretty late to the game.”Brooke Goren, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said it had been “giving money directly to state parties and coordinated campaigns,” which “supports candidates up and down the ticket, including in every one of the D.L.C.C.’s targeted chambers.”Daniel Squadron, a former Democratic state senator from New York and another founder of the States Project, said that while some of the money would be spent on television and digital ads, the vast majority would be sent directly to candidates and Democratic legislative caucuses. They could then coordinate their spending based on their state’s campaign finance laws.“The top issue in state legislative races is a local issue in each district,” Mr. Squadron said. “So we started giving directly to the candidates and caucuses working in districts themselves. One thing that does is that gets them off the phones, out of the darkened rooms and into the districts to go meet their constituents.”Joanna E. McClinton, the Democratic leader in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, said the States Project had helped many of the party’s candidates in the state with training on messaging, and with an incentive program that unlocks more funding per candidate based on doors knocked.But the biggest accomplishment, Ms. McClinton said, was simply pulling even with Republicans who have controlled the state’s legislature for over a decade.“Because they have been in power for so long, they’re able to outpace us in so many ways, particularly around fund-raising,” she said.In Michigan, where Republicans control both chambers, the State Senate is considered a tossup for the first time in decades after an independent commission drew new legislative districts that reduced Republicans’ advantage. Since July, Democrats have spent more than $17 million on state legislative races in the state, far more than the roughly $3 million Republicans have spent, according to AdImpact.For the States Project, the central goal and biggest challenge is breaking through to voters on the issues of democracy and independent state legislature theory.“That state legislatures would be handed this power in presidential elections seems fantastical because it’s absurd,” Mr. Squadron said. “The fact that it may be what the Supreme Court says does strain credibility. It unfortunately happens to be true.” More

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      Democrats Pour Millions Into Key Secretary of State Races

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      Democrats are outspending Republicans in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada, where they see their opponents as threats to democracy.In a normal election year, races for secretary of state are sleepy affairs, and their campaigns struggle for media coverage amid the hurly-burly of more prominent Senate, governor and House contests.This year, however, is anything but normal.Democrats are pouring millions of dollars into races for secretary of state, buoyed by the nature of their Republican opponents and the stakes for American democracy.According to an analysis by my colleague Alyce McFadden, Democrats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have outraised their Republican opponents as of the most recent campaign finance reports. And overall, Democratic-aligned groups working on secretary of state races in those four states have outspent Republicans by nearly $18 million in this election cycle, according to the ad analytics firm AdImpact, with more spending on the way.The role of a secretary of state varies, but in those four states, as well as Arizona and Pennsylvania (where the governor appoints the secretary), they play a critical role in overseeing the mechanics of elections. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, for example, they often had to make judgment calls about how to ensure that voters had access to the polls when vaccines were not yet available, making elderly and immunocompromised Americans concerned about showing up in person.The ‘Stop the Steal’ slateMany of the Republicans running in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have earned national notoriety.Take Mark Finchem, a cowboy-hat-and-bolo-tie-wearing Arizona lawmaker running for secretary of state. He crushed his G.O.P. rivals in the primary by whipping up fears about a stolen election in 2020.In a recent interview with Time magazine, Finchem said it was a “fantasy” that President Biden won in 2020 — even though he was elected by more than seven million votes nationwide.“It strains credibility,” Finchem said. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?”Or Jim Marchant, the G.O.P. nominee in Nevada. Marchant has been a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement and has linked up with a slate of “America First” candidates in other states to raise money from national donors. As my colleague Alexandra Berzon has reported, those candidates, including Finchem, have been “injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud” into their campaigns.Others, such as Kristina Karamo in Michigan, have espoused fringe views on a variety of social issues. On her personal podcast, she called yoga a “satanic ritual” that was originally intended by its creators to “summon a demon.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.The Republican exceptionDemocrats are frustrated with the accolades that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican incumbent in Georgia, has received from political commentators. His refusal to overturn the 2020 presidential election results despite heavy pressure from Donald Trump, they say, was merely the minimum requirement of the job.“It’s good when Republicans are not openly treasonous,” Jena Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, said in an interview.But she accused Raffensperger of supporting what she characterized as the “worst voter-suppression package in the country” — the Republican-led law Georgia passed in 2021 overhauling voter access.The Democratic nominee in Georgia is Bee Nguyen, a state lawmaker and policy adviser at New American Leaders, a nonprofit that encourages immigrants and refugees to run for office. Nguyen, who took the seat Stacey Abrams vacated during her first run for governor in 2017, is Vietnamese American and the first Democratic woman of Asian descent to hold a state office in Georgia.Outside groups focused on bolstering Republicans who stood up to Trump in 2020 spent heavily on Raffensperger’s behalf in his primary against Representative Jody Hice, another Stop-the-Stealer. With the help of several million dollars in last-minute donations, along with the full backing of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular governor, Raffensperger defeated Hice by nearly 20 percentage points, avoiding a runoff.A New York Times analysis of that law, Senate Bill 202, found that the state’s Republican Legislature and governor “have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.”The law alone could change turnout in Georgia, which reached record levels during two Senate elections in January 2021. Democrats say Republicans changed the law to suppress votes from people of color; in a speech in Atlanta on Jan. 11, 2022, President Biden called it “Jim Crow 2.0.”Privately, Democrats worry, too, about complacency within their own ranks — particularly among centrists who may like the fact that Raffensperger bucked Trump’s will in 2020 but are less animated by the new voting law. Republicans have defended it as a common-sense effort to pull back what they characterized as emergency measures to accommodate voters during the pandemic. But they have struggled to explain why some measures, such as a restriction on handing out water to voters waiting in long lines, are necessary.Griswold, a lawyer who worked on voter access for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, also leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. She has used her national platform to reposition the organization as a bulwark of democracy against Trump and his Stop the Steal movement.Voters in Lost Mountain, Ga., during the primary in May. Democrats are furious about the state’s new voting rules.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA complicated picture for DemocratsDeciding how to calibrate their message to voters about the security and fairness of the upcoming midterms has been tricky for Democrats.That is especially true in Georgia, where newly registered voters of color powered Biden’s victory as well as those of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Democrats are wary of inadvertently signaling that the new voting rules could mean that those communities’ votes will be wasted this year.Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, stressed in an interview that despite Republicans’ attacks on the integrity of American elections, “our system works.”She noted that American elections are subject to “bipartisan checks and balances at every level,” with Democrats and Republicans alike enlisted to certify disputed votes and official results — while arguing that preserving these checks and balances is exactly what’s on the ballot this year.As for the new laws in states like Georgia, she said, “voters of color have faced these suppression tactics for generations” and expressed confidence that voters would overcome those barriers just as they did in 2020.But that system is under severe strain. Republican county officials in New Mexico, upstate New York and rural Pennsylvania have said they will refuse to certify votes from digital machines, and election officials across the country have faced death threats.Many Democrats were highly critical of the Biden administration’s strategy for pushing an overhaul of voting rights through Congress. It failed in January while facing unified Republican opposition and skepticism from centrist Democrats, led by Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration’s point person for voting rights, has faced repeated questions about what she has done to find workarounds in lieu of federal legislation, beyond making the occasional speech.Democrats pushed to appropriate federal funds to protect election workers in legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, but Republicans have resisted. On Wednesday, the House passed its version of an overhaul bill, but the Senate will need to pass its own, different version, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported.His article contained a quote from Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is the leading Republican author on the Senate side but has provoked concerns among Democratic colleagues, including Tim Kaine, with whom I spoke in March. They say that she is merely maneuvering to run out the clock at the bidding of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.“We can work together to try to bridge the considerable differences,” Collins told Hulse. “But it would have been better if we had been consulted prior to the House sponsors’ deciding to drop their bill.”What to readThere is scant evidence that the charitable giving of Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, matches the promises his company made. David A. Fahrenthold and Shane Goldmacher contacted the charities to ask.J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate in northern Ohio, has promoted himself as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan. But Neil Vigdor looked at the U.S. Air Force records, and there is no sign that the candidate was deployed there.Maggie Astor has been tracking the ratings that the National Rifle Association gives to political candidates since 2008. She has found that the Democratic break from the group is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress received an A.A rash of retirements has complicated Democrats’ efforts to hold the House, Catie Edmondson writes. Instead of battle-tested incumbents, first-time candidates are defending the districts.The American public’s views of Donald Trump have remained stable across different measures in recent months even as he faces multiple investigations, Ruth Igielnik writes.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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      For First Time in at Least 25 Years, No Democrat Has Top Grade From N.R.A.

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      The Democratic break from the National Rifle Association is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress anywhere in the country received an A in the group’s candidate ratings, which were once a powerful influence in U.S. elections.A New York Times analysis of the N.R.A.’s letter grades for more than 900 general election candidates, the last of which were published this week, identified the milestone. It is the culmination of a yearslong trend of eroding support for the hard-line views of the organization, which retains strong allegiance from Republican candidates but has lost any semblance of bipartisan support.Of the more than 450 Democrats who will be on House or Senate ballots in November, only one, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, received even a B. Three received C’s, 23 received D’s and 370 — 81 percent of the total — received F’s. (The rest received a “?” rating, meaning they had no public record on gun policy or had made contradictory statements.)The numbers were even starker among the roughly 200 Democrats running for re-election, 98 percent of whom received F’s.There were more defections from the party line among Republicans, though they were still in the single digits: One, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, received an F, and seven, including four incumbents, received D’s. Notably, 24 percent of Republican candidates received a “?” rating, a mark the N.R.A. says “often indicates indifference, if not outright hostility,” to gun rights.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.That amount has increased sharply among Republicans; it was 11 percent a decade ago. By contrast, “?” grades among Democrats declined over the same period to 13 percent from 33 percent. Many Democrats used to avoid going on the record about guns out of fear of the N.R.A.’s well-funded backlash.All told, of 926 major-party candidates on House and Senate ballots this year, 36 percent received A’s and 40 percent received F’s, making 2022 the third election in a row in which the N.R.A. assigned more F’s than A’s.While Republicans have always supported the N.R.A. in larger numbers, it was not long ago that the group also had meaningful Democratic backing: In 2012, 70 Democrats running for the House or Senate received A’s. That is now unheard-of. The last Democratic incumbent with an A rating was Collin Peterson of Minnesota in 2020, when he lost re-election.Most incumbents received the same grade this year as the last time they ran, which is typical. Only 14 saw their grades change, seven in each direction.Almost all of those incumbents were Republican: the seven who were upgraded and six of the seven who were downgraded. (The one Democrat was Representative Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia, who went from a C to an F; as recently as 2018, he had received an A and an N.R.A. endorsement.) The downgraded Republicans — Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Marco Rubio of Florida and Todd Young of Indiana, and Representatives Steve Chabot of Ohio, Tony Gonzales of Texas and David Joyce of Ohio — all went from A’s to B’s.Mr. Rubio’s new grade reflected his decision to endorse limited gun restrictions after the Parkland, Fla., shooting in 2018. (Since senators receive ratings only when they run for re-election, this is the first year in which he has been graded since 2016.)The other Republicans who were downgraded voted for the bipartisan gun bill that passed in June. It was the first time in nearly three decades that Congress — long held in check by N.R.A. lobbying — passed any significant restriction on guns. More