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      Maryland Seventh Congressional District Primary Election Results 2022

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      Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Alana Celii and Jonathan Weisman; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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      Pelosi Backs Rep. Mondaire Jones in Crowded Open-Seat Race in New York

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      House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will on Monday endorse Representative Mondaire Jones, a first-term upstate congressman who is facing a stiff battle in his bid to capture an open seat in New York City.Following an unusually messy redistricting process, Mr. Jones opted not to run again in his current district, which encompasses Rockland County and parts of Westchester County, or in a neighboring one to the south. Either would have required him to compete against incumbents, one of whom is the powerful chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.When that chair, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, announced he would run in Mr. Jones’s reconstituted 17th District — drawing outcries from Mr. Jones and his allies — Ms. Pelosi supported Mr. Maloney.With her endorsement on Monday, Ms. Pelosi will be making some amends, hoping that her backing may help Mr. Jones get more traction in a district where he only recently moved.“Mondaire Jones has gotten real results for New Yorkers,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement provided to The New York Times. The speaker credited Mr. Jones for playing a “vital role in passing life-changing legislation that has lifted up working families, helped deliver expanded access to health care and invested in affordable housing.”New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: This year, for the first time in over 75 years, the state ballot appears destined to offer only two choices: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican. Here is why.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.New York’s messy redistricting process created new maps that jumbled primary contests across the state, but had a particularly chaotic effect in New York City.Representative Jerrold Nadler represents the existing 10th District through the end of the year. But after reapportionment drastically altered the district contours, he opted to instead compete against Representative Carolyn Maloney for the 12th District, which now envelops his Upper West Side political base.His decision created a rare open seat in the 10th District, a safely Democratic stronghold that now encompasses Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, including Sunset Park and Park Slope. That has sparked a political gold rush, with roughly a dozen candidates on the ballot for the Aug. 23 primary.Late-summer turnout is likely to be low, as many voters are expected to be on vacation or unaware of the unusually timed contest. Its outcome is likely to turn heavily on voter outreach and absentee ballot operations; endorsements may also play a small factor.Mr. Jones’s first term in Congress has been active. His eagerness to sponsor and co-sponsor bills put him at the top of Axios’s 2021 list of “the most legislatively active freshmen in Congress.” More recently, he co-sponsored legislation to enshrine marriage equality into federal law and another bill that would provide monthly payments to families with children.“Whether it was passing monumental voting rights protections or securing billions of dollars in new investments in New York City’s housing, health care and schools, I’ve worked closely with Speaker Pelosi to deliver real results for New York’s working families, and I’m proud to have her support,” Mr. Jones said in a statement. Mr. Jones has secured the support of several other House colleagues, including Representative Pramila Jayapal, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But recent polls suggest Mr. Jones’s campaign is struggling to stay in the top tier, and Nydia Velázquez, the congresswoman who represents much of the existing district, has endorsed one of Mr. Jones’s rivals, Carlina Rivera, a New York City councilwoman.It is unclear how much influence Ms. Pelosi’s endorsement will yield, or if will come with any financial support from the House Majority PAC or the Democratic funding arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But it may help in other ways.“Obviously it will be helpful, in that it will bring more attention to what has been arguably a struggling campaign out of the box,” said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist who worked on former mayor Bill de Blasio’s abortive run for the same seat.But Mr. Kwatra cautioned that the voters who do turn out to vote out will be unusually well-informed about the election, and will have strong opinions about the candidates that are not likely to be swayed by a political endorsement.“The ones that do end up voting in this election, they’re going to be very sophisticated and very clear about why they’re voting and who they’re voting for,” he said. More

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      A New Yorker’s Opposition to Abortion Clouds Her House Re-Election Bid

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      Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the city’s lone Republican House member, has tried to maintain some distance from the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.As the lone Republican in the New York City congressional delegation, Representative Nicole Malliotakis has adopted certain stances that would make her an understandable outlier in a deeply Democratic city.Just days after taking office in early 2021, she voted to discard the legitimate 2020 election results, voting for a debunked conspiracy theory that claimed President Donald J. Trump actually won the election. She followed up by voting against Mr. Trump’s second impeachment as a result of the deadly Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.But as she seeks re-election in November, Ms. Malliotakis has tried to tread a finer line around guns and abortion, two polarizing social issues that have taken on added prominence in light of recent Supreme Court decisions. (In June, the court overturned the federal right to abortion, as well as a New York law governing concealed weapons.)On guns, for example, Ms. Malliotakis has voiced some support for new regulations, even voting for several Democratic gun control bills proffered in the wake of the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. She later, however, voted against the omnibus bill package, contending that it was “constitutionally suspect” and “represented a partisan overreach.”Ms. Malliotakis opposes abortion rights, favoring restrictions on using taxpayer funding for the procedure and on late-term abortions. But she has said that she believes that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, such as when the life of the mother is at risk.But Ms. Malliotakis has also tried to maintain some distance from the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, saying in a recent interview that she “didn’t weigh in on it.” Yet earlier this month, the congresswoman voted against a pair of bills that would have banned states from restricting abortions and prohibited them from blocking access to out-of-state abortion services.Republicans, who are expected to fare well in November’s midterm elections, have long fought to overturn Roe. Yet some of the party’s candidates have not rushed to embrace the Dobbs ruling, wary of alienating voters who, according to polls, may be swayed by social issues in ways that help Democrats.Ms. Malliotakis is a prime example. Her district encompasses Staten Island and a swath of southwest Brooklyn, some of the city’s most conservative areas. Yet New York remains an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and the recent Supreme Court rulings were profoundly unpopular here.So, like many of her Republican colleagues, Ms. Malliotakis, a first-term congresswoman, is instead trying to steer the conversation toward bottom-line issues like inflation and high gas prices.“People are struggling putting gas in their tanks, putting food on their tables, paying their bills,” Ms. Malliotakis said in a recent interview.New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: This year, for the first time in over 75 years, the state ballot appears destined to offer only two choices: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican. Here is why.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.“For some people who are single-issue individuals, it could potentially have an impact,” she added, of her statements on guns and abortion. “But I know that crime and pocketbook issues are the most important issues to the people I represent.”Ms. Malliotakis is expected to easily win her Republican primary next month against John Matland, a badly underfunded rival, setting her up for a likely rematch against Max Rose, the former Democratic congressman whom she unseated in 2020.Mr. Rose, a combat veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan and awarded the Bronze Star, has sought to tie Ms. Malliotakis to the extreme elements of the Republican Party, including Mr. Trump, and to the Capitol riot by the president’s supporters, saying he is running to protect “the soul of America.”“Everything that our country was built upon wasn’t just spit at: They tried to destroy it,” he said during a campaign walkabout on July 11 in Bay Ridge. “And even after — even after — Nicole, and everyone else in Congress who were almost killed, they still voted to decertify.”He is also openly derisive of Ms. Malliotakis’s seeming duality on some hot-button issues, mocking her limited embrace of gun control, for example, as nothing more than “a few ceremonial votes.”“When it came time for the package to be voted on, as she always does, she played both sides,” he said, referring to the omnibus bill. “Voted for it before she voted against it. Who knows what’s going on here?”Max Rose, right, has tried to highlight Ms. Malliotakis’s position on abortion, portraying her as being on “the wrong side of history.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMr. Rose has also held a handful of public events after the Supreme Court ruling on abortion — including one at Ms. Malliotakis’s Brooklyn district office in Bay Ridge — to portray her as out of touch with her district, even on Staten Island, saying the congresswoman is “on the wrong side of history.”“I generally do believe that when it comes down to it, people are on the side of women having the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves,” he said. In recent weeks, Mr. Rose continued that line of attack, saying the congresswoman had “tweeted over 180 times and issued 13 press releases” since the Dobbs decision, but “has said nothing about millions of women losing control over their bodies.”When asked specifically about the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Ms. Malliotakis demurred.“My constituents, they know that nothing is going to change in New York,” she said. “The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, so we have to accept the Supreme Court’s decision regardless.”Ms. Malliotakis’s comments have also given fodder to her opponents on the right, including Mr. Matland, a health care worker who lost his job for refusing to be vaccinated, and who is seeking to oust Ms. Malliotakis in the Aug. 23 primary with a low-budget, anti-establishment campaign.Mr. Matland, who is making his first run for public office, said that Ms. Malliotakis has “often alienated the Republican base,” and that she has only been voted into office because of her name recognition — she served five terms in the State Assembly and ran unsuccessfully in 2017 for mayor of New York City — and her district’s aversion to Democratic candidates.“People say ‘I only voted for her’ — and I’m guilty of this myself — ‘because I thought she was a much better option than Max Rose,’” Mr. Matland said, adding, “And that’s the exact reason we have primaries: so we can get a better option.”John Matland is challenging Ms. Malliotakis in the Republican primary on Aug. 23.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesConsidering the likelihood of a tough year for Democrats nationally, most observers think that Mr. Rose will have an uphill battle in November, assuming he wins his primary in August against two challengers: Brittany Ramos DeBarros, a progressive community activist, and Komi Agoda-Koussema, an educator.Mr. Rose’s campaign was also dealt a setback earlier this year when a state judge threw out new Democrat-drawn congressional lines that could have tilted the district heavily in his favor. The refashioned lines, drawn by a redistricting expert in May, left the district looking largely the same, though its section of Brooklyn — about half as populous as the Staten Island portion — did favor President Biden over Mr. Trump by about 12 points in the 2020 election.Ms. Malliotakis accused Mr. Rose of entering the race only “because he thought they were going to change the lines in his favor.” “The good news about reruns is we know how they end,” Ms. Malliotakis said of her rematch against Mr. Rose.Vito Fossella, the Republican who serves as the Staten Island borough president, echoed that sentiment, saying he didn’t “see how the dynamics” of the race have changed much since 2020, and suggesting that abortion and guns would not be major issues for Staten Island voters.“On balance, what people care about is ‘Are we safe? Are we comfortable economically? Do we have a brighter future?’” said Mr. Fossella, who is a supporter of Ms. Malliotakis.A path to re-election for Ms. Malliotakis, 41, will likely include a big win on the island’s South Shore, a Republican stronghold, to offset the more liberal neighborhoods in the north. And for South Shore residents like Edward Carey, a retired banking executive who winters in Florida but has a house in the Eltingville neighborhood, Ms. Malliotakis is already a sure thing. He noted the backing of Mr. Fossella, as well as other factors.“She’s a Republican, she’s a woman, she’s young,” said Mr. Carey, 83, a registered Republican who said the last Democrat he voted for was John F. Kennedy. “That’s good enough for me.”Ms. Malliotakis may be headed for a November rematch with Mr. Rose, whom she unseated in 2020.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesStill, State Senator Diane J. Savino, a moderate Democrat who has represented the north part of Staten Island for nearly two decades, said “you cannot pinpoint Staten Island voters.”“It’s not that they’re Republican or Democrat, left-leaning or right-leaning: It’s whether or not that candidate speaks to what touches Staten Islanders,” she said, noting the island’s recent history of vacillating between parties. “Anybody who thinks that they can put their finger on the pulse of Staten Island voters doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”She also criticized Ms. Malliotakis for being wishy-washy on critical issues, but noted that voters don’t seem to care.“Up until now, Nicole has skirted on this,” Ms. Savino said, referring to Ms. Malliotakis’s anti-abortion votes in Washington and Albany. “No one ever holds her accountable. So I don’t think that’s going to drive voters here. What’s going to drive voters is whether or not they think they’re going to have someone who is going to fight for them in Washington.”Vin DeRosa, a patron at Jody’s Club Forest, a popular bar near the North Shore where Mr. Rose has been known to drink, is a registered Democrat but said he considers himself an independent who “votes for the person” rather than the party line.Mr. DeRosa, a retired telecommunications professional, said that he had voted for Mr. Rose in 2020, and that he likely would again, if only because of Ms. Malliotakis’s association with Mr. Trump.“I’m not sure I want a congressperson who has to call Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. DeRosa said, “to find out what to do.” More

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      Why Andrew Yang’s New Third Party Is Bound to Fail

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      Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.Why am I so confident that the Forward Party will amount to nothing? Because there is a recipe for third-party success in the United States, but neither Yang nor his allies have the right ingredients.First, let’s talk about the program of the Forward Party. Writing for The Washington Post, Yang, Whitman and Jolly say that their party is a response to “divisiveness” and “extremism.”“In a system torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes,” they write, “you must reintroduce choice and competition.”The Forward Party, they say, will “reflect the moderate, common-sense majority.” If, they argue, most third parties in U.S. history failed to take off because they were “ideologically too narrow,” then theirs is primed to reach deep into the disgruntled masses, especially since, they say, “voters are calling for a new party now more than ever.”It is not clear that we can make a conclusion about the public’s appetite for a specific third party on the basis of its general appetite for a third party. But that’s a minor issue. The bigger problem for Yang, Whitman and Jolly is their assessment of the history of American third parties. It’s wrong.The most successful third parties in American history have been precisely those that galvanized a narrow slice of the public over a specific set of issues. They further polarized the electorate, changed the political landscape and forced the established parties to reckon with their influence.This also gets to the meaning of success in the American system. The two-party system in the United States is a natural result of the rules of the game. The combination of single-member districts and single-ballot, “first past the post” elections means that in any election with more than two candidates, there’s a chance the winner won’t have a majority. There might be four or five or six (or even nine) distinct factions in an electorate, but the drive to prevent a plurality winner will very likely lead to the creation of two parties that take the shape of loose coalitions, each capable of winning that majority outright.To this dynamic add the fact of the presidency, which cannot be won without a majority of electoral votes. It’s this requirement of the Electoral College that puts additional pressure on political actors to form coalitions with each other in pursuit of the highest prize of American politics. In fact, for most of American history after the Civil War, the two parties were less coherent national organizations than clearinghouses for information and influence trading among state parties and urban machines.This is all to say that in the United States, a successful third party isn’t necessarily one that wins national office. Instead, a successful third party is one that integrates itself or its program into one of the two major parties, either by forcing key issues onto the agenda or revealing the existence of a potent new electorate.Take the Free Soil Party.During the presidential election of 1848, following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of antislavery politicians from the Democratic, Liberty and Whig Parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!”The Free Soil Party, notes the historian Frederick J. Blue in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” “endorsed the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to extend slavery and must in fact prohibit its extension, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, declared its platform, “to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government possesses constitutional power to legislate on that subject and is thus responsible for its existence.”This was controversial, to put it mildly. The entire “second” party system (the first being the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) had been built to sidestep the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party — which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, for president in the 1848 election — fought to put that conflict at the center of American politics.It succeeded. In many respects, the emergence of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of mass antislavery politics in the United States. They elected several members to Congress, helped fracture the Whig Party along sectional lines and pushed antislavery “Free” Democrats to abandon their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few short years they transformed American party politics. And when the Whig Party finally collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, after General Winfield Scott’s defeat in the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil Party would become, in 1854, the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which brought an even larger coalition of former Whigs and ex-Democrats together with Free Soil radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, antislavery party.There are a few other examples of third-party success. The Populist Party failed to win high office after endorsing the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, for president in 1896, but went on to shape the next two decades of American political life. “In the wake of the defeat of the People’s party, a wave of reform soon swept the country,” the historian Charles Postel writes in “The Populist Vision”: “Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”“By turn of fate,” Postel continues, “Populism proved far more successful dead than alive.”On a more sinister note, the segregationist George Wallace won five states and nearly 10 million ballots in his 1968 campaign for president under the banner of the American Independent Party. His run was proof of concept for Richard Nixon’s effort to fracture the Democratic Party coalition along racial and regional lines. Wallace pioneered a style of politics that Republicans would deploy to their own ends for decades, eventually culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.This is all to say that there’s nothing about the Forward Party that, as announced, would have this kind of impact on American politics. It doesn’t speak to anything that matters other than a vague sense that the system should have more choices and that there’s a center out there that rejects the extremes, a problem the Democratic Party addressed by nominating Joe Biden for president and shaping most of its agenda to satisfy its most conservative members in Congress.The Forward Party doesn’t even appear to advocate the kinds of changes that would enable more choices across the political system: approval voting where voters can choose multiple candidates for office, multimember districts for Congress and fundamental reform to the Electoral College. Even something as simple as fusion voting — where two or more parties on the ballot share the same candidate — doesn’t appear to be on the radar of the Forward Party.The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. “On every issue facing this nation,” they write, “we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”No, we can’t. When an issue becomes live — when it becomes salient, as political scientists put it — people disagree. The question is how to handle and structure that disagreement within the political system. Will it fuel the process of government or will it paralyze it? Something tells me that neither Yang nor his allies have the answer.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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      Democrats Aid Far-Right Candidate Against Republican Who Backed Impeachment

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      The House Democrats’ official campaign arm is stepping into a Western Michigan Republican primary to elevate a candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump against one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him.The $425,000 advertising run is the latest in a slew of Democratic efforts to draw attention to far-right candidates, hoping that they will be easier to beat in November than more mainstream Republicans. But in this case, it could also be seen as a slap to Representative Peter Meijer, the incumbent in the Grand Rapids-area district who braved blowback from his own party over his vote to impeach Mr. Trump and is now fighting skulduggery from the right and the left.The ad, which will begin airing on Tuesday and was openly cut and funded by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, proclaims that John Gibbs, who is challenging Mr. Meijer, is “too conservative” for West Michigan. But in tone and content, it is clearly meant to appeal to pro-Trump voters in the Aug. 2 Republican primary, hailing Mr. Gibbs as “handpicked by Trump to run for Congress,” buffing his bona fides as an aide in the Trump administration and promising that he would push “that same conservative agenda in Congress,” including a hard line against illegal immigration and a stand for “patriotic education.”It is similar to an advertisement run by the House Democratic super PAC that unsuccessfully tried to bolster a pro-Trump candidate against Representative David Valadao in California, another of the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment. That ad infuriated even some Democrats.By law, elected Democrats must stay at arm’s length from the super PAC, known as the House Majority PAC, that was responsible for the ad in Mr. Valadao’s race. But with the Gibbs ad, the campaign committee responsible for it is run by a member of Democratic leadership, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, and the group is far more integrated into official actions.The Democratic campaign committee refused to comment on the advertisement. But the intent was clear. Mr. Meijer’s redrawn district has shifted from one that narrowly voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 to one that President Biden would have carried by nine percentage points.The tone of the current ad is bright, but if Mr. Gibbs were to win the primary, the next effort from Democrats is likely to be considerably darker. Mr. Gibbs, who was an aide to former Housing Secretary Ben Carson, could not win confirmation in 2020 to direct Mr. Trump’s Office of Personnel Management over comments he made accusing Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, of taking part in a “Satanic ritual,” and calling Democrats the party of “‘Islam, gender-bending, anti-police, ‘u racist!’”More recently, Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Meijer clashed over the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory, which Mr. Gibbs baselessly called “simply mathematically impossible.”In Pennsylvania, the state’s Democratic Party singled out State Senator Doug Mastriano during his successful quest for the Republican nomination for governor, despite his propagation of false claims about the 2020 election and his presence in Washington during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Polling last month showed that Mr. Mastriano’s race against Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, appeared to be a dead heat.Democrats believe that Michigan’s Third District, with its new boundaries, is one of the few in the country that they can take from a Republican, and they are willing to risk electing a Trump-backed election denier with a history of inflammatory remarks to make it easier on their favored candidate, Hillary Scholten.After Mr. Meijer’s impeachment vote, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, praised Mr. Meijer for what he called “a very impressive display of courage and integrity.”“Guess that doesn’t count for much when a marginally increased chance of flipping a House seat is on the table,” Mr. Meijer quipped in a text message on Monday. More

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      A Trump-Backed Veteran Ran Hard to the Right, Only to Be Outflanked

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      Joe Kent, a square-jawed Trump devotee running for a House seat in Washington State, is in a bit of a pickle.Kent has campaigned as a “Stop the Steal”-style candidate on Donald Trump’s “America First” platform, positions that apparently caught the eye of the former president, who has endorsed him.Kent insists the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents provocateurs. In September, he spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., in support of people accused of storming the Capitol, urging the release of what he called “political prisoners.”But in recent weeks, far-right figures led by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, have started an online drumbeat claiming that Kent, a retired Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer who has a fistful of Bronze Stars, is actually a deep-state denizen himself.Kent’s wife, Shannon, was a targeting specialist for the National Security Agency who was killed by a suicide bomber in northeast Syria in 2019 while fighting the Islamic State.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More