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      Suddenly, a New Jersey Congressional Race Looks Like a Bellwether

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      SCOTCH PLAINS, N.J. — When New Jersey’s congressional map was redrawn last year, Representative Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat, was widely considered a political goner.President Biden’s popularity had plummeted, gas prices were soaring and Mr. Malinowski’s Seventh Congressional District — in which he barely eked out a re-election victory in 2020 — had been redrawn to include nearly 27,000 more registered Republicans. When Mr. Malinowski announced he would run for a third term, he did so in a terse statement, quoting an ominous Shakespearean battle cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”But 10 months later, as voters have absorbed the impact of the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that Democrats believe the national political momentum has shifted to a degree that even this race, written off by some as a strategic sacrifice, is narrowing.Any path by which Democrats are able to stave off a midterm rout or retain a slim House majority cuts straight through districts like Mr. Malinowski’s, where moderate, well-educated voters helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018 and are seen as crucial to holding it.“I do see it as a bit of a bellwether — an indicator of how things are going to go nationally,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who was a key architect of former Gov. Chris Christie’s victories in 2009 and 2013.Mr. Malinowski is running for a second time against Tom Kean Jr., the namesake of a beloved former New Jersey governor making his fourth run for Congress. Mr. Kean came within about 5,000 votes of winning in 2020 and remains a formidable opponent this year.Still, a national political action committee dedicated to preserving the Democratic majority in the House has suddenly begun buying up its first television time for Malinowski ads. And Democratic loyalists who have been knocking on doors for Mr. Malinowski say concern over abortion rights has grown palpable within the suburban swing district, which stretches from one side of northern New Jersey to the other.“I don’t know a woman who isn’t really angry and really scared,” Jennifer Robinson of Tewksbury, N.J., who supports Mr. Malinowski, said on Sunday night after a forum with both candidates sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey.“Republicans targeted this race thinking Tom Kean Jr. was going to ride a red wave,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Instead, with five weeks to go, this race remains neck and neck.”None of the major independent polling operations in New Jersey have released surveys about the race. A poll conducted in late July, paid for by a group that supports term limits, showed Mr. Kean leading by eight percentage points; 11 percent of the 400 people surveyed said they were undecided.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.On Sunday, an internal poll memo released by Mr. Malinowski’s campaign suggested that the race had narrowed, and that he and Mr. Kean were statistically tied, 48 percent to 48 percent.Mr. Kean’s campaign spokesman dismissed the poll and called its release a “desperate cry for help.”Mr. Malinowski and three other New Jersey Democrats rode a wave of anti-Trump fervor to Congress during the 2018 midterm cycle, temporarily leaving the state with just one Republican in its 12-person congressional delegation. But many of these newly blue swing districts remained highly competitive.Last year, the new congressional map, redrawn to reflect the 2020 census, eased some of the pressure on Democrats. As it added Republican-leaning towns to Mr. Malinowski’s district, it shored up the districts of several other vulnerable incumbents at a time when Democrats were bracing for a midterm shellacking.The districts of Democratic Representatives Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim and Mikie Sherrill all shed Republican-leaning towns — territory that in southern and central New Jersey the state’s two Republican congressmen, Christopher Smith and Jeff Van Drew, mainly absorbed, making their seats safer, too. Only Mr. Malinowski’s race, on paper, got harder.Yet until last month, the Democrats’ House Majority PAC had not made ad buys for Mr. Malinowski’s race, even as Republican special interest groups prepared to pump millions of dollars into Mr. Kean’s.But in late September the political action committee began booking television airtime, and it has now reserved between $100,000 and $185,000 in ads each week until Election Day, according to data maintained by Ad Impact, a company that tracks political advertising.Tom Kean Jr. speaking to voters in Scotch Plains, N.J., on Sunday. He came close to winning in 2020.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Malinowski’s district includes affluent commuter towns close to New York City, communities filled with horse-country estates (and a former president’s golf course) and rural, Republican bastions. Voters in the district backed Mr. Biden by less than four percentage points, even though he beat former President Donald J. Trump by nearly 16 percentage points in New Jersey, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by just over one million voters.Even if it has narrowed, the race remains a decidedly uphill battle for Mr. Malinowski.Inflation has been stubborn, and consumers are still feeling an economic pinch — an issue that a Monmouth University poll released on Monday found is likely to overshadow abortion access as a motivator heading into the midterms. Only 42 percent of voters across the country support Mr. Biden, according to last month’s New York Times/Siena College poll, a threshold that is just as bad or worse than any president whose party went on to lose control of Congress in midterm elections, going back to 1978.And Mr. Malinowski remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations he failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock trades, an error he has taken responsibility for and said resulted from carelessness.“It’s better for Democrats than six months ago,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But it’s still a better political environment for Republicans than it was two years ago — and certainly four years ago.”At the forum on Sunday, questions from an audience filled almost entirely with Malinowski supporters centered largely on Mr. Kean’s position on abortion.Mr. Malinowski supports access to abortion at any point in a pregnancy, and he said on Sunday that he would vote to enshrine a right to abortion into federal law.Mr. Kean, a former state senator and assemblyman, has said he supported a “woman’s right to choose.” But he opposes abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy absent extenuating circumstances, according to his campaign.“I think there are meaningful exceptions that should be rape, incest, life and the health of the mother,” he said Sunday. “Those are exceptions for a reasonable amount of time.”In the Senate, he voted against a bill affirming abortion as a right in New Jersey. He said he opposed the legislation, which was later signed into law, because it permitted abortion at any point in a pregnancy, including what he called late-term abortion. Abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy are rare, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.A Kean campaign website is less nuanced.“Tom is a fierce defender of the sanctity of life, fighting every step of the way to protect the unborn from egregious abortion laws proposed in New Jersey, and will continue to do so in Congress,” it reads.“When I’m talking about the egregious piece of legislation, the ability to choose to terminate, for not valid reasons, when a baby can stay alive, be alive, outside of the womb, is wrong,” he said at the forum.Of the 616,000 registered voters in the district, about a third are not enrolled in either major party. It is these moderate voters who tend to sway elections in New Jersey.Motivating supporters to turn in mail ballots or to show up at polling places during an election year with no statewide races is crucial for any candidate, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.“Elections are about turnout,” Ms. Walsh said. “The people who turn out are the people who feel they have the most at stake.”Ms. Walsh, whose organization studies voting trends among women, said she believed the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended nearly 50 years of abortion rights in the United States would be an “energizer.”“I think it all feels very real to people,” she said.Tracy Keegan, a founder of Summit Marches On, a left-leaning group in Mr. Malinowski’s district that formed after the 2017 Women’s March and includes mainly women with children, said she believed the growing energy among voters extended beyond concern over reproductive rights.“It’s not just about abortion,” she said. “It’s about a government’s willingness to remove freedoms.”A gun control rally in Summit, N.J., after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, drew hundreds of people, said Ms. Keegan. a 51-year-old mother of three.“It wasn’t just Democrats,” she said. More

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      Online Fund-Raising Was Supposed to Save Politics. Instead, It’s Dragging Us to Hell.

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      In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our Yahoo browsers. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Amid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter.Mr. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. “McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days.Mr. McCain and Mr. Dean both lost — but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time.The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “the victory lab.”The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.A warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. Obama for the outburst.But after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign.This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer.The story was similar for Amy McGrath, who ran against Senator Mitch McConnell, and Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who got shaved clean by Bryan Steil. The lesson remains unlearned: This year Marcus Flowers has raised $10 million in his assuredly hopeless race against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — double the receipts of more competitive races. Added together, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates. At a minimum, that money could be used more efficiently by the Democratic Party. But that entire way of thinking might be a reflection of broken politics brain. Aren’t there myriad better uses for all that altruism than pumping out hokey attack ads?As the social media outrage fund-raising model began to come into form, the political parties began to professionalize their grass-roots outreach using email and then text messages. Gone was the decentralized model Mr. Dean had road-tested, whereby supporters organized among themselves, recruiting neighbors and message board friends toward a common cause. By the 2010s, that was displaced by centralized, beta-tested boiler rooms that used powerful digital tools to prey on people’s emotions. The result is very little message variation within the party coalitions. We’ve seen a few exceptions, most notably Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. But overall, it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.To get a sense of just how noxious and stupid the material is that reaches America’s inboxes, I like to peruse The Archive of Political Emails’ The Firehose from time to time. A colleague of mine engineered the site for archival purposes, signing up for various lists and funneling them to the same place. You won’t be surprised to find out that The Firehose is largely devoid of that community-minded hopey-changey stuff that we were promised in the aughts. Instead it’s peppered with conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time. (We all have our weaknesses.)Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?This part is a deep, bipartisan problem. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee might be the longest-running offender when it comes to sending apocalyptic, wheels-off messages demanding voters’ money. It has even been chastised from within its own ranks — to little effect.There is also the more direct grift. Last year I wrote about how the National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation form used a prechecked box scheme, which automatically doubled the dollar amount and made it recurring. A warning aggressively threatened donors if they unchecked the box. Similar tactics resulted in the Trump campaign’s having to return $122 million to supporters who had been duped and, in some cases, financially devastated. If the old fund-raising system was transactional, this new one is dominated by the eternal and emotionally toxic hunt for the small donor.As gross and unethical as those tactics are, the greatest threat resulting from all of this is how the very politicians who are refusing to abide by the results of democratic elections are often being funded: by the once vaunted online donor, even if this one just wants to watch the whole system burn.Senator Josh Hawley raised around $3 million in the first quarter of 2021, mostly after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol. He’s even merchandising this asininity. Most of the Republican leadership has fund-raised on Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-addled social media site. Rank-and-file voters who preferred candidates who promised to decertify the last election or who might certify the next one only if they get their preferred winner (or both) helped fund those candidates in Republican primaries this year.Many of these candidates have struggled to raise what is required for the general elections, in part because Mr. Trump is sucking up nine figures for his PACs, at least one of which spent copiously on legal fees this summer while spending little on supporting Republican candidates. But some wild-eyed insurrectionists might get swept into office during an election cycle in which Republicans perform well, and that is dangerous enough.Maybe, then, given the results of our two-decade experiment in people-powered politics, we might temper rhetoric that glorifies the mighty grass-roots dollar. And reflect on how we might reform our financing system to disincentivize the crazy-making. Empowering the little guy and draining the swamp sounds nice and all, but as it turns out, there is something to be said for a little gatekeeping.And if you don’t believe me, the O.G. disrupter basically admitted as much.Last week I called Mr. Dean to ask him to reflect on the devolution of the netroots model that seemed to offer so much hope for doe-eyed reformers two decades ago.“At the time, it was a way that a young generation could start pushing their way up by using technology,” he said, “and it was incredible.”“But now that technology has been abused,” he continued. “The right-wingers are using it in service of fascism.” He added, “And I just send all my fund-raising emails to junk.”Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The ‘Core Four’ Senate Races, and Beyond

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      While Democrats are optimistic about holding the Senate, and Republican campaigns have faced a huge financial disadvantage, races are tightening across the country as the November election approaches.Nearly a month out from Election Day, Democrats are growing more confident about holding the Senate — but are sweating a coming flood of advertising spending from Republican groups aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the would-be majority leader.The picture looks dire for the G.O.P. across what Democrats call their “Core Four” races. McConnell’s public fretting during the primaries about “candidate quality” appears apt in a year that otherwise might be Republicans’ to lose.The G.O.P. candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, is facing a new allegation that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion despite his opposition to the procedure. Public polls since mid-September have shown Senator Raphael Warnock inching away from Walker as Democratic groups ramp up their negative advertising. Warnock is raking in money; his campaign raised $26 million over the last three months. But if neither candidate can reach 50 percent, Georgia will be headed for another runoff election.In New Hampshire, McConnell’s allies spent heavily to stop Don Bolduc, a retired Army general who limped into the Republican primary with just $84,000 in his campaign account and had raised less than $600,000 since the start of 2021. Gov. Chris Sununu, the big dog in New Hampshire politics, warned in August that Bolduc could not defeat Senator Maggie Hassan, who has bet heavily that Republicans’ support for banning abortion will be the decisive factor in a blue-tinged state whose motto is “Live Free or Die.”Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat in Arizona, has raised such an astronomical sum — $54 million since the start of the cycle, according to his latest report to the Federal Election Commission — that Republican outside groups have all but written off his opponent, the venture capital executive Blake Masters.A major bright spot for Republicans is Nevada, where Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, unique among the Core Four, is polling behind Adam Laxalt, the attorney general. As my colleagues Jennifer Medina and Jonathan Weisman wrote this week, “Democrats in Nevada are facing potential losses up and down the ballot in November and bracing for a seismic shift that could help Republicans win control of both houses of Congress.”Republicans also argue that national trends — and the laws of midterm political gravity — are working in their favor.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.As Election Day approaches and as voters begin to concentrate on the choices in front of them, Republican operatives expect the races to center more on inflation, the slowing economy, crime and President Biden’s unpopularity than they have thus far. To focus on anything else, the Republican consultant Jeff Roe said recently, would amount to “political malpractice.” Roe’s firm, Axiom Strategies, represents Laxalt in Nevada.“You only need to look at the past 24 hours to see why candidate quality matters and why Republicans have been so concerned about the flaws that their roster of recruits bring to these Senate races,” said David Bergstein, the communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.A CBS News poll published on Wednesday, which showed Kelly up just three percentage points over Masters in Arizona among likely voters, seemed to underscore Republicans’ argument about where the midterms might be headed: When the network pushed undecided voters to make a choice, the result was a closer race than other polls. The CBS survey also found that while Kelly is popular, 61 percent of likely voters disapproved of the job Biden is doing as president — a pretty gnarly number for Democrats to overcome.The money pictureAcross all of the big races, Democratic candidates enjoy a significant edge in campaign cash.According to a New York Times analysis of campaign finance reports, Republican candidates in the seven big battleground Senate races had raised less than a third of what their opponents had brought in by the end of June, the most recent federal deadline for campaigns to report their fund-raising totals.It’s fallen to McConnell and groups such as the Senate Leadership Fund, run by a top former deputy, to close the gap. In New Hampshire, for instance, the super PAC announced $23 million in TV ads aimed at defeating Hassan. And in Pennsylvania, the leadership fund has already spent nearly $34 million, primarily on TV ads.Money is only one part of the picture. Political operatives closely track “gross ratings points,” a measure of the reach of an advertising campaign. Democrats say they have been able to match or exceed Republicans on the airwaves in most weeks since the general election began, thanks in large part to their candidates’ cash advantages. A dollar spent by a candidate on TV ads typically goes further than a dollar spent by a super PAC because stations are required by law to sell them time at discounted rates.And while TV isn’t everything — digital ads and old-fashioned retail campaigns still matter — it’s one factor that campaigns and outside groups monitor obsessively, and it’s where they typically devote a bulk of their money. For that reason, it’s probably the best single measure we have of the relative balance of power between the two parties.AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, reckons that 2022 is on pace to smash previous records. The firm estimates that campaigns will spend $9.7 billion on political ads this year, which it calls “a historic sum.”The wild cardsHere’s the thing: Republicans need to pick up only one seat to regain control of the Senate.But in this year’s other competitive Senate races — North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Democrats have opportunities to cancel out any gains Republicans make elsewhere.In that second group of contests, the polls have tightened in recent weeks. It’s hard to know exactly why, but operatives in both parties noted that Republicans have been dogging their Democratic rivals by linking them to rising incidents of violent crime. Others said they always expected wayward Republicans to come home after Labor Day, which is when ad spending ramped up and most voters began tuning in.Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a progressive who knocked off two more centrist rivals in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, has struggled to parry those attacks. Wisconsin Democrats have gone after Senator Ron Johnson not by highlighting his penchant for foot-in-mouth comments on the coronavirus and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, but by accusing him of doing little to help the people of his state.They have linked him tightly to a plan by Senator Rick Scott of Florida that they say would cut Social Security and Medicare. But Johnson has opened up a narrow lead in the polls, aided by heavy spending from a super PAC bankrolled by Richard Uihlein, a Republican construction magnate.To the surprise of some Democrats, Cheri Beasley, a retired state Supreme Court judge running in North Carolina, has fared better than Barnes. Polls show her staying close to even with Representative Ted Budd, the Republican nominee. Beasley has relied heavily on “air cover” from groups like Emily’s List, an abortion-rights group that almost exclusively backs Democrats, and Senate Majority PAC, an outside group close to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader.Polls show Cheri Beasley staying close to even with Representative Ted Budd in North Carolina.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesAnd in Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz has been closing the gap with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, thanks in part to a $7 million loan from his personal bank account. Fetterman had a serious stroke on the eve of the Democratic primary and has slowly been ramping up his campaign activities as he recovers.Fetterman remains ahead, for now, but mainstream Republicans like Tom Ridge and Senator Pat Toomey have endorsed Oz — a signal that, despite concerns about his high negative ratings from voters and accusations about his medical practices, they see him as very much in the game.The hunt for a Red OctoberThere could be surprises, though — especially if the election turns out to be a red wave.Several Democratic incumbents look wobbly. An Emerson College poll out Wednesday found that Senator Patty Murray of Washington State was up by nine percentage points over her Republican challenger, Tiffany Smiley. But the poll, Republicans said, may have overestimated the percentage of Democrats likely to turn out in the fall. And in Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet raised just over $5 million in the most recent fund-raising quarter — hardly a juggernaut.In both states, the G.O.P. candidates have sought to defuse the abortion issue. Joe O’Dea, a blue-collar businessman running in Colorado as a political outsider, favors abortion rights and has been critical of Donald Trump, while Smiley has aired ads distancing herself from other Republicans on the abortion issue. George W. Bush, the former president, recently endorsed O’Dea and agreed to raise money on his behalf, while McConnell called him “the perfect candidate” for Colorado.If Republicans start throwing real money at long-shot candidates like O’Dea and Smiley, pay attention. It would suggest that despite many of McConnell’s nightmares about poor-quality candidates, this could be the G.O.P.’s year after all.What to readMore than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, references to a new “civil war” are flaring up in right-wing online circles, Ken Bensinger and Sheera Frenkel report.Elon Musk might be buying Twitter after all. It would be a wild ride, according to our tech columnist, Kevin Roose.When Biden met DeSantis. Katie Rogers was on the scene as the Florida governor met the president to tour hurricane-ravaged areas of the state, with the specter of 2024 hanging over their encounter.J. David Goodman writes about Patriot Mobile, a Christian cellphone company that has become a rising force in Texas politics.Annie Karni explores the toxic relationship between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, her chief antagonist and a possible successor.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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      There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

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      The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and –0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”There are, Graham argues,long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021, that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”In addition, the authors write:Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.For the past two decades, white working-class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point whereEducation divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.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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      For Pelosi and McCarthy, a Toxic Relationship Worsens as Elections Approach

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      WASHINGTON — She has called him a “moron.”He has mused publicly — purely in jest, his aides later insisted — about wanting to hit her with the oversized wooden gavel used to keep order in the House.The relationship between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the man who is most likely to succeed her should Republicans win control of the House in next month’s elections is barely civil. And as the moment of the possible succession draws closer, she has become less and less interested in masking her contempt for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican.At a news conference last week, when asked to respond to Mr. McCarthy’s claim that she was not allowing Democrats to speak out about what he described as a crisis at the border, Ms. Pelosi said of the minority leader, “I don’t even know what he’s talking about — and I don’t know if he does.”The same week, her spokesman, Drew Hammill, savaged Mr. McCarthy for a news conference he had held on the steps of the Capitol to discuss “firing Nancy Pelosi.” It was, Mr. Hammill said, “about par for the course for an uninspiring and incoherent politician like the minority leader, whose only real accomplishment to date is typing up a radical right-wing wish list that sends a clear message to the American people that House Republicans have gone off the deep end.”And that was the edited version.Ms. Pelosi, who at 82 is in her eighth year as the first female speaker of the House, specializes in emasculating takedowns of male counterparts she finds lacking. She perfected the art during the Trump presidency (see: ripping up the text of the president’s State of the Union address on camera moments after he finished delivering it).Last year, she referred to Mr. McCarthy as “such a moron” for claiming that a mask mandate in the House was “not a decision based on science.”Mr. McCarthy, 57, who made his gavel quip in front of a group of donors last year, has given Ms. Pelosi plenty of fodder for ridicule and ill will. After she barred Trump loyalists from joining the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Mr. McCarthy said she had “broken this institution.” He has routinely labeled her a “lame duck speaker.”But where Mr. McCarthy has accused her of partisanship and abuse of power, Ms. Pelosi, who colleagues say abhors spinelessness and stupidity, has accused him of acting like a buffoon.After Mr. McCarthy delayed the House passage of Democrats’ marquee domestic policy bill last year with an eight-and-a-half-hour floor speech that at times veered into the nonsensical, Ms. Pelosi’s office called it a “meandering rant” and said: “As he hopefully approaches the end, we’re all left wondering: Does Kevin McCarthy know where he is right now?”Ms. Pelosi prides herself on her ability to steer complex and high-stakes legislation through the often raucous House.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesHer allies in Congress often point out that he appears to struggle with the basics of the English language. (Mr. McCarthy once said that Ms. Pelosi “will go at no elms to break the rules.”)The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with him could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Partisan feuds and name-calling on Capitol Hill are nothing new. Former Speaker Tip O’Neill, Democrat of Massachusetts, used to refer to three of his Republican antagonists — Representatives Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Bob Walker of Pennsylvania and Vin Weber of Minnesota — as the “Three Stooges.” But, according to Mr. Gingrich, the nickname was bestowed “in a sense of fun.”And in recent history, speakers — who are partisan leaders but also are elected by the entire House, as dictated by the Constitution — have shown at least a modicum of respect to their counterparts in the opposing party, in a nod to their institutional responsibilities.That is less and less the case for Ms. Pelosi and Mr. McCarthy. People close to her said she viewed the Republican leader not simply as an unserious legislator, but as no kind of legislator at all.In many ways, the two are polar opposites.Ms. Pelosi prides herself on her virtuosic command of her fractious caucus and her ability to steer complex and high-stakes legislation through the often raucous House. Mr. McCarthy, who famously separated former President Donald J. Trump’s favored red and pink Starburst candies from the rest of the pack and presented them to him to curry favor, has focused more on politics than policy during his career in Congress. In recent years, he has often catered to his conference’s most extreme members, or to Mr. Trump..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It’s hard for any serious person to respect someone better at counting Starbursts than votes,” Mr. Hammill said when asked for comment about their relationship.While she did not have a close bond with the two Republican speakers who succeeded her in the past, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, their offices routinely worked together and Ms. Pelosi never held them in such low regard. Ms. Pelosi has virtually nothing to do with Mr. McCarthy’s office, even behind the scenes. House Republicans did not participate this year in negotiations to keep the government funded.Some Democrats said Ms. Pelosi’s public aversion to the minority leader is simply a symptom of the post-Trump political reality.“This disdain is really part and parcel of where we are in the country between the parties and between people,” said Richard Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri and a former majority leader. “Congress is a reflection of the people. If the people are polarized and divided and hateful, then Congress is going to be the same.”Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Pelosi were never close. But it was not always this bad.Mr. McCarthy arrived in Congress in 2007 from the Central Valley in California, the same year Ms. Pelosi made history as the first woman to be elected speaker. It was not until 2014 that he rose to a leadership position, and Ms. Pelosi was gracious at the time about working opposite someone from a conservative swath of her home state.“I certainly know him as a Californian,” she said at the time. “I wish him well.”She added, “We can all work together, because that’s what the American people expect and deserve.”That same year, Mr. McCarthy had written a column for a new political website, Breitbart California, which he said would help fill a “void of conservative activism” in his blue state. But after the site ran a boorish photoshopped image of Ms. Pelosi in a bikini, on all fours, Mr. McCarthy called the picture inappropriate and asked that his column be removed from the site.In the intervening years, politics changed. Mr. McCarthy, playing the pleaser, earned the nickname “my Kevin” from Mr. Trump when he was in office. He helped to politically resuscitate Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 attack, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, enlisting his help in the midterm elections and fighting the creation of an inquiry into the Capitol riot.Ms. Pelosi no longer pretends that they can work together.“He literally ran away from the press when he was asked about his position,” she said at a news conference this year, referring to Mr. McCarthy’s refusal to condemn a Republican National Committee resolution that referred to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack as “legitimate political discourse.”“Republicans seem to be having a limbo contest with themselves to see how low they can go,” she said then.Mr. McCarthy has accused Ms. Pelosi of partisanship and abuse of power.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Gingrich, who served as the speaker in the early 1990s, said there was visceral hatred between members of the two parties in his time; he helped orchestrate an investigation that toppled Speaker Jim Wright, Democrat of Texas. But more often, there was respectful disagreement.Mr. Gingrich called Mr. Wright’s successor, Representative Tom Foley, Democrat of Washington, “just a wonderful human being” and “fabulous to work with.”Mr. Gephardt was hardly thrilled about having to hand the gavel to Mr. Gingrich after Democrats lost 54 seats in the 1994 midterm elections, ending 40 years in the majority.“I dreaded having to do that,” Mr. Gephardt said in an interview. “I worked really hard on what I said.” But he mustered a respectful handoff, using the moment to celebrate democracy.“We may not all agree with today’s changing of the guard,” Mr. Gephardt said then. “We enact the people’s will with dignity and honor and pride.”In 2011, the last time Republicans won control of the House, Ms. Pelosi handed the gavel to a teary-eyed Mr. Boehner, conveying good wishes for her successor.“I now pass this gavel and the sacred trust that goes with it to the new speaker,” Ms. Pelosi said. “God bless you, Speaker Boehner.”Such a moment is difficult to imagine between her and Mr. McCarthy. Many in California have speculated that Ms. Pelosi would resign if Republicans were to prevail in the midterm elections, bringing her 35-year career to a close.In that case, when it came time for Mr. McCarthy’s big moment, she might not be there at all. More

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      LePage Stumbles on Abortion Questioning in Maine Governor’s Debate

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      Republicans’ struggles to find an effective abortion message this campaign season manifested itself on Tuesday on a debate stage in the Maine governor’s race, as former Gov. Paul LePage repeatedly stumbled over a question about how he would handle the issue if voters returned him to office.The issue has been an advantage for Democrats, whose base has been energized after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade while Republicans face a dilemma over how to reassure swing voters without alienating their conservative base. Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat seeking a second four-year term, seemed to sense her opportunity while seated a few feet from Mr. LePage, a Republican who left office in 2019 because of Maine’s prohibition on serving a third consecutive term.Asked whether she would remove state restrictions on abortion, Ms. Mills said she supported the current law. Maine permits abortions until viability, generally until 24 to 28 weeks, when a fetus could survive outside a mother’s uterus.“My veto power,” Ms. Mills said, “will stand in the way of efforts to roll back, undermine or outright eliminate the right to safe and legal abortion in Maine.”Mr. LePage was then asked whether he would sign a bill that placed additional restrictions on abortions in the state. While Democrats hold majorities in both chambers of Maine’s Legislature, Republicans are making a play to flip both in November.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with him could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.“I support the current law,” Mr. LePage said.“And if they brought those bills to you, you would not sign them?” asked one of the moderators, Penelope Overton, a staff writer for The Portland Press Herald.“That is correct,” he answered.Ms. Mills then jumped in and pointed out that in Maine, a bill can become law without the governor’s signature.“Would you let it go into law without your signature?” Ms. Mills asked.“I don’t know. I would look — that’s a hypothetical,” Mr. LePage said.“You were governor,” Ms. Mills continued. “You know what the options are.”“Wait a second,” Mr. LePage said, throwing his hands in the air.“Would you let it go into law without your signature?” Ms. Mills asked, turning to her left to face her predecessor and repeatedly point at him.Mr. LePage dropped a pen he had been holding, and bent over to pick it up off the ground.“Would you allow a baby to take a breath?” he asked, twisting the pen in his hands. “Would you allow the baby to take a breath, then —”Mr. LePage broke off his question. It was unclear what he was asking, and a campaign spokesman didn’t immediately respond to requests to clarify or comment for this article.Ms. Mills, now sitting back in her chair with her legs crossed and her hands folded flatly on the table in front of her, continued to press.“Would you allow a restrictive law to go into effect without your signature?” she asked, staring at Mr. LePage. “Would you block a restriction on abortion?”“Would I block?” Mr. LePage said. “This is what I would do,” he added, chopping both hands in the air in front of him. “The law that is in place right now, I have the same exact place you have. I would honor the law as it is. You’re talking about a hypothetical.”“No,” Ms. Mills said with a smile. “We’re not.”Ms. Overton reminded Mr. LePage that she had asked about whether or not he would veto additional abortion restrictions.“I’m not sure I understand the question,” Mr. LePage said.“I do understand the question,” Ms. Mills interjected. “My veto pen would stand in the way.”“When you say restrictions, I am trying to understand,” Mr. LePage said.Another moderator, Jennifer Rooks, who hosts a radio show on Maine Public, stepped in and asked Mr. LePage what he would do if lawmakers passed a bill to ban abortions after 15 weeks.“Would you veto that?” Ms. Rooks asked.“Yes,” Mr. LePage said, nodding his head.Earlier in the week, Mr. LePage had boasted that he wasn’t planning to prepare for the debate against Ms. Mills, according to The Bangor Daily News.“I’ll eat her lunch,” he said. More

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      Are You ‘Third-Party-Curious’? Andrew Yang and David Jolly Would Like a Word.

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      For years, hopeful reformers have touted the promise of third parties as an antidote to our political polarization. But when so many of the issues that voters care about most — like abortion, or climate change, or guns — are also the most divisive, can any third party actually bring voters together under a big tent? Or will it just fracture the electorate further?[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Today’s guests say it’s worth it to try. Andrew Yang and David Jolly are two of the co-founders of the Forward Party, a new political party focused on advancing election reform measures, including open primaries, independent redistricting commissions in every state and the widespread adoption of ranked choice voting. Yang is a former Democratic candidate for president and a former Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. Jolly is a former Republican congressman and executive chairman of the Serve America Movement. Together, they joined Jane Coaston live onstage at the Texas Tribune Festival to discuss why they’ve built a party and not a nonprofit, what kinds of candidates they want to see run under their banner and what Democrats are getting wrong in their midterm strategy right now.This episode contains explicit language.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Todd Heisler/The New York Times and Michael S. Schwartz/Getty ImagesThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Vishakha Darbha and Derek Arthur. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Ahead of Midterms, Democrats Bet on Abortion Rights

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      EAGAN, Minn. — Before dozens of volunteers fanned out through the Twin Cities suburbs to knock on voters’ doors on a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, gathered them in a campaign office in a strip mall here to make sure they remembered a specific message.“As you go to each door, what I want you to have in your mind is that if Tyler Kistner is your member of Congress, he is someone who has said he is 100 percent pro-life,” Ms. Craig said, referring to her Republican opponent. “Today, the people of this district have never had a more distinct choice. We are the party — and I am the member of Congress — who will be the wall to protect your reproductive rights, to protect your privacy, to protect your freedoms.”In competitive districts across the country like Ms. Craig’s, Democrats in difficult re-election races are leaning heavily into preserving abortion rights as a closing argument for their uphill bids to hang onto their seats in a year when their party’s majority is at risk.Armed with polling data that shows that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion has moved independent voters in their direction, they have reoriented their campaigns around the issue in the crucial final weeks before the election.The strategy is built around the hope that in the handful of close races that will determine control of the House, the demise of federal abortion rights has energized independent voters and conservative-leaning women so intensely that it could allow otherwise vulnerable Democrats to eke out victories that previously seemed out of reach.Supporters of abortion rights protesting in Washington. Polling data shows that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters toward Democrats.Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesNearly every advertisement that House Democrats’ super PAC is funding is about reproductive rights, including one that dramatizes the consequences of a national abortion ban, featuring police officers handcuffing doctors, nurses and patients who sought or performed “health care services that have been legal for nearly 50 years.” Roundtables hosted by vulnerable incumbents flanked by OB/GYNs and elaborate events rolling out Planned Parenthood endorsements abound.It is a rare opportunity for Democrats to go on the offensive during a campaign cycle that was initially expected to deal their party steep losses, and in which their majority is still at risk amid rising inflation, concerns about crime and President Biden’s sagging approval ratings. In recent weeks, however, internal polling has shown that the threat of losing abortion access has energized some abortion rights supporters who might not ordinarily vote in a midterm election and swayed independents toward Democratic candidates, potentially affording the party a chance to stanch its losses. More