Subterms
Emily Elconin for The New York TimesIn Michigan, which has an open seat, Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who comfortably won re-election in November, is also taking steps toward a possible Senate run in 2024. Her moves include forming a national campaign team and meeting with leaders across the state, a person close to the congresswoman confirmed last week. More
Mr. Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump and later served on the House panel investigating the Capitol riot, will seek the seat held by Senator Dianne Feinstein.WASHINGTON — Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who emerged as one of President Donald J. Trump’s chief congressional tormentors from his perch atop the House Intelligence Committee, announced on Thursday that he would seek the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein.Mr. Schiff, 62, is the second member of California’s Democratic congressional delegation to join the 2024 race, after Representative Katie Porter. He enters the campaign with the largest national profile, built from his position as the manager of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. He later served on the House committee responsible for investigating the origins of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Ms. Feinstein, 89, has not said whether she will run again in 2024 but is widely expected not to do so as she faces Democratic worries about her age and ability to serve. Last year, she declined to serve as president pro tem of the Senate, and in 2020 she ceded her post as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee after coming under pressure from her party during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.More on CaliforniaA Wake of Tragedy: California is reeling after back-to-back mass shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.Storms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised people in the state with an unrelenting period of extreme weather that has caused extensive damage across the state.New Laws: A new year doesn’t always usher in sweeping change, but in California, at least, it usually means a slate of new laws going into effect.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Schiff served in California’s State Senate before being elected to a Los Angeles-area House seat in 2000.In Congress, he became a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who tapped him to play a leading role in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial and then on the Jan. 6 committee. Last fall, Mr. Schiff passed on a chance for a slot on the post-Pelosi House leadership team to focus on a planned run for the Senate.During and after the Trump years, Mr. Schiff became one of the most prodigious fund-raisers in Congress. During the 2018 election cycle, he raised $6.3 million, and then his fund-raising surged to $19.6 million in 2020 and $24.5 million in 2022 — without a competitive election of his own to wage. He has not faced a serious challenge since arriving in Congress, winning each of his general elections by at least 29 percentage points.According to the latest Federal Election Commission reports, Mr. Schiff had $20.6 million in campaign money at the end of November, compared with $7.7 million for Ms. Porter and $54,940 for Ms. Lee.Other California Democrats considering running include Representative Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley. Because of California’s all-party primary system, the election is not likely to feature a competitive Republican candidate; in 2016 and 2018, two Democrats advanced to the Senate general election. Last year, a Republican won 39 percent of the vote against Senator Alex Padilla, who had been appointed to finish Vice President Kamala Harris’s term.California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents, has not hosted a highly competitive contest for an open Senate seat since 1992, when Ms. Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, a fellow Democrat, were both elected for the first time.Ms. Feinstein, who is in her sixth term, has been trailed by questions about her fitness to serve. Problems with her short-term memory have become an open secret on Capitol Hill, though few Democrats have been willing to discuss the subject publicly.She has made no moves to suggest she will seek re-election in 2024. She has not hired a campaign staff and, in the latest campaign finance report for the period ending in September, had less than $10,000 in cash on hand, a paltry sum for a sitting senator. More
Representative Ruben Gallego of Phoenix is set to challenge Ms. Sinema from the left, after she resigned from the Democratic Party.Representative Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat from Phoenix, announced on Monday that he would run for the Senate in 2024, setting up a potential face-off with Senator Kyrsten Sinema over her seat that could carry high stakes for Democrats’ control of the upper chamber.Mr. Gallego, a 43-year-old former state lawmaker and U.S. Marine veteran, began his campaign with a video in which he declares his run to a group of fellow veterans at American Legion Post 124 in Guadalupe, Ariz., near Phoenix. In it, he highlights his humble Chicago origins and his combat experience in Iraq, and he pledges to fight to extend the American dream to more families.“It’s the one thing that we give every American, no matter where they’re born in life,” he says, crediting belief in the dream for his own climb into the halls of Congress. Ms. Sinema, whose opposition to key elements of her party’s agenda had angered Democrats, left the party in December and registered as an independent. Democrats in Arizona quickly turned their attention to her seat. It is expected that Ms. Sinema will seek re-election, but she has not yet announced her intentions.In his campaign ad, Mr. Gallego sought to draw sharp contrasts between himself and Ms. Sinema, taking subtle swipes at the first-term senator over her leadership and ties to corporate interests.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.2024 Presidential Race: As the 2024 primary approaches, the wavering support of evangelical leaders for Donald J. Trump could have far-reaching implications for Republicans.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.“We could argue different ways about how to do it, but at the core, if you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly,” he says in the video, which was released in English and Spanish. “I’m sorry that politicians have let you down, but I’m going to change that.”A head-to-head matchup between Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema in the general election is likely to split the coalition of Democrats and independents who have powered Democratic victories in Arizona in recent elections. The divide could provide an opening for a Republican to retake a seat that has helped Democrats retain their narrow majority in the Senate.Democrats in Arizona previously made motions that they intended to rally behind Ms. Sinema’s Democratic challenger. Mr. Gallego’s campaign team includes veterans from Senator Mark Kelly’s re-election bid in Arizona, as well as Democratic consultants who served on the successful 2022 Senate campaigns for Raphael Warnock in Georgia and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Mr. Gallego’s campaign also has taken on Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist focused on mobilizing Latino voters.Representative Greg Stanton, a Democrat who had also shown interest in running for the seat, said this month that now was “not the right time,” clearing the path for Mr. Gallego in the primary.Among the Republicans weighing Senate runs are Kari Lake, the Trump-endorsed news anchor who last year lost her race for governor, and Blake Masters, who was defeated in a Senate race by Mr. Kelly.For both Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema, the greatest factor will be the Republican nominee, said Mike Noble, a longtime nonpartisan pollster based in Phoenix.A center-right candidate could consolidate Republican and right-leaning independent voters, most likely narrowing the chances for both Ms. Sinema and Mr. Gallego. A hard-right candidate like Ms. Lake or Mr. Masters, on the other hand, would most likely intensify the contest between Mr. Gallego and Ms. Sinema for moderates and the state’s large independent electorate, about one-third of voters.“Heading into next year’s election, Kyrsten Sinema would like nothing else for Christmas than to have Kari Lake as the Republican nominee come 2024,” Mr. Noble said. “They both would love it.”Ms. Sinema was elected to the Senate in a groundbreaking victory in 2018, in the first Democratic triumph since 1976 in a contest for an open Senate seat in Arizona. Her victory pointed to broader political shifts in the state. Once a longtime conservative bastion, Arizona has become a national battleground as the state’s Republican Party has veered further right, while growing numbers of Latino and independent voters have pushed the state to the center.Ms. Sinema embraced solidly centrist positions in defeating her Republican opponent. Voter drives to register more Latinos, who generally vote Democratic in Arizona, also paid off for Ms. Sinema. But distaste for the senator has been growing among Latino activists and other parts of her Democratic base as she has positioned herself as a bulwark against major parts of her former party’s agenda, mainly attempts to increase taxes on corporate America and Wall Street.National Democrats have been tight-lipped about their approach to the 2024 race, as some worry that a full-on offensive against Ms. Sinema in the general election might inadvertently help elect a Republican.Mr. Gallego, who has been among Ms. Sinema’s fiercest critics, had been fielding input from his family over the holidays over whether he would run. He would be the first Latino senator from Arizona should he prevail.In his campaign video released Monday, he describes his hard upbringing as one of four children raised by a single mother in Chicago. He made it to Harvard and worked to pay his way through school before enlisting in the Marine Corps. His combat experience on the front lines in Iraq, where he came under heavy fire and lost some of his closest friends, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder but also inspired him to go into public service, he said.The ad positions Mr. Gallego as an advocate of strong government and a fighter for working-class families who he said “feel they are one or two paychecks away from going under.”“The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates,” he said. “It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.” More
Mr. Dolan, a state senator whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, will compete for the Republican nomination against one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators.State Senator Matt Dolan of Ohio, a Republican, announced on Tuesday that he would run for the United States Senate against Sherrod Brown, one of the most vulnerable Democrats in 2024.It will be Mr. Dolan’s second Senate campaign, after he finished third in the Republican primary for an open seat in Ohio last year. The winner of that primary, J.D. Vance, went on to win the general election.Mr. Dolan’s family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, and he used millions of dollars of his own money to fund his first campaign, in which he won about 23 percent of the primary vote — finishing significantly behind Mr. Vance and narrowly behind the second-place finisher, Josh Mandel.In his campaign announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Dolan, the chairman of the Ohio Senate’s finance committee, emphasized border security, fighting inflation and his support for the police. He accused Mr. Brown of “blind loyalty to his party.”“Ohioans want a problem solver who has successfully faced big challenges impacting our quality of life, not the political blame game that lacks commonsense solutions,” he said. “I have a proven conservative record of success that has yielded results for Ohio families, workers and businesses.”A tough line on immigration was also a hallmark of Mr. Dolan’s 2022 campaign, though he broke from his opponents’ hard-right line on at least one specific policy: He supported the preservation of H-1B visas that allow immigrants to work temporarily in certain industries.Mr. Dolan is a former chief assistant prosecutor in Geauga County, east of Cleveland, and a former assistant state attorney general.Ohio, a former swing state that has moved toward Republicans in recent years, represents one of several opportunities for the G.O.P. to pick up a Senate seat in 2024, with Democratic incumbents in the red states of Montana and West Virginia also up for re-election.Mr. Brown, a three-term senator and former representative, has won difficult races before, though, including in 2018, when he won re-election by more than six percentage points just two years after Donald J. Trump won in Ohio by eight.Mr. Brown has shown strong — and enduring, even in the past few years — appeal among the blue-collar voters who are essential in Ohio elections. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he has pushed for more oversight of Wall Street and more consumer protections. He has also been a vocal proponent of expanding the child tax credit and other elements of the social safety net, including the Supplemental Security Income program for disabled and older Americans.A spokesman for Mr. Brown did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Dolan’s announcement, but Mr. Brown’s campaign quickly sent a fund-raising email to supporters calling Mr. Dolan “the first of what we expect to be many challengers jumping into the race.”Among others, Republicans are watching Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state, who has not announced whether he will run but is widely expected to do so. More
The seat will be open as Senator Mike Braun runs for governor instead.Representative Jim Banks, a staunch conservative with the backing of a deep-pocketed political action committee, opened his bid for an Indiana Senate seat on Tuesday with an ad highlighting his deployment to Afghanistan and issuing a broadside against “radical socialist Democrats.”Mike Braun, who currently holds the seat and is one of the state’s two Republican senators, will run for governor next year, creating an opening that could lead to a crowded primary fight in the reliably Republican state. Mr. Banks, who recently led the House’s Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that is broader and less confrontational than the House’s Freedom Caucus, turned to the Senate after he lost his bid to be whip, the No. 3 Republican position in the G.O.P.’s new House majority.He enters the contest with the backing of the Club for Growth, a moneyed conservative political action committee that spent millions of dollars to get its preferred House and Senate candidates across the line in the November midterms. The group and its super PAC “are prepared to spend whatever it takes to help Banks secure the nomination and victory,” its president, David McIntosh, said Tuesday.The Club for Growth is already spending money against another possible candidate, the former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, whom it considers too conciliatory. Mr. Banks signaled that he too would focus on Mr. Daniels, who was also president of Purdue University and a White House budget director under President George W. Bush. Mr. Daniels a decade ago called for a truce on cultural issues, a stance Mr. Banks appeared to call out in an interview with Politico, saying that issues like abortion and gender “matter more than at any point in my lifetime.”“I’ll never be calling for a truce on social issues or cultural issues,” he told Politico.Mr. Banks also has the endorsement of Representative Larry Bucshon, another Indiana Republican, and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas.But Indiana’s current governor, Eric Holcomb, who is facing a term limit, is considering a run for the Senate, as is Representative Victoria Spartz, whose Ukrainian birth has elevated her voice in Congress.In his announcement, Mr. Banks called himself “a small-town kid from a working-class home” with deep roots in Indiana and a record fighting overseas and in Congress for “conservative Hoosier values.” He threw in a nod to former President Donald J. Trump, calling him “the strongest president in my lifetime.”Mr. Braun, a businessman who had little political experience when he ran against Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, in 2018, beat him by six percentage points. His victory came two years after Representative Todd Young breezed past Evan Bayh, a Democrat and former senator who had come out of retirement to try a comeback. Those defeats signaled just how difficult a Democratic comeback in the state would be.In November, Mr. Young won re-election with nearly 59 percent of the vote. More
Ms. Porter is the first announced challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein, 89, who has yet to declare her 2024 plans but is widely expected to not seek re-election.WASHINGTON — Representative Katie Porter, a third-term California Democrat who studied under Elizabeth Warren at Harvard University and became a social media darling of liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that she would run in 2024 for the Senate seat held by Dianne Feinstein.Ms. Porter, 49, is the first announced challenger to Ms. Feinstein, 89, who has not declared her intentions about 2024 but is widely expected to not seek re-election amid Democratic worries about her age and ability to serve. Last year, Ms. Feinstein declined to serve as president pro tem of the Senate and earlier relinquished her post as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee under immense pressure after the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.“It’s time for new leadership in the U.S. Senate,” Ms. Porter said in a video announcing her campaign. Ms. Feinstein, in a statement released by her office, said she would “make an announcement concerning my plans for 2024 at the appropriate time.” She said she was focused on addressing the deadly storms battering California. Ms. Porter’s early campaign announcement — which carries echoes of Ms. Warren’s entrance to the 2020 presidential contest, when she was the first major Democrat to embark on a bid — jump-starts a race that is certain to be among the most expensive intraparty contests in the country. A vaunted fund-raiser, Ms. Porter became widely known for her combative treatment of witnesses from the financial sector and Trump administration officials who appeared before her on the House Oversight Committee.More on CaliforniaStorms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised residents across Central and Northern California with an unrelenting period of extreme weather stretching over weeks.Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant planned to restore a century-old railroad to help people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up.U.C. Employee Strike: Academic employees at the University of California voted to return to work, ending a historically large strike that had disrupted research and classes for nearly six weeks.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.The Iowa-born Ms. Porter was a leading surrogate for Ms. Warren’s 2020 campaign and often hosted small events promoting her mentor. She worked as a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and in 2012 was appointed by Kamala Harris, then the California attorney general, to oversee a $9 billion settlement after the mortgage crisis. She was elected to Congress in 2018.Ms. Porter won re-election in November by 3.4 percentage points in a district made much more Republican in California’s redistricting process, after prevailing in 2020 by seven points. Her seat may be tougher for Democrats to hold in 2024 without a candidate on the ballot who has Ms. Porter’s fund-raising acumen. Other California Democrats who have not announced campaigns for Ms. Feinstein’s Senate seat but are believed to be considering bids include Representative Adam Schiff, who has already hired staff members in preparation for a statewide campaign; Representative Barbara Lee, who has told donors of her plans to run; and Representative Ro Khanna, an aide for whom said Mr. Khanna would decide on the Senate race “in the next few months.” “It’s going to be a very exciting race with fabulous people — several have already talked to me,” said former Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who served for four terms alongside Ms. Feinstein before retiring in 2016. “The fact that Katie Porter has announced, I think, is going to open the door for a lot of early announcements.” California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents, has not hosted a highly competitive contest for an open Senate seat since 1992, when Ms. Feinstein and Ms. Boxer were both elected for the first time.Ms. Feinstein, in her sixth term, has been dogged by questions about her fitness to serve. Issues with her short-term memory have become an open secret on Capitol Hill, though few Democrats have been willing to discuss the subject publicly.She has made no moves to suggest she will seek re-election in 2024. She has not hired a campaign staff and, in the latest campaign finance report for the period ending in September, had less than $10,000 in cash on hand, a paltry sum for a sitting senator. More
Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More
A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.Not long ago, Joe Mohler would have seemed an unlikely person to help bury the political legacy of Donald J. Trump.Mr. Mohler, a 24-year-old Republican committeeman and law student in Lancaster Township, Pa., voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. He voted for him again in 2020 — but this time with some misgivings. And when Mr. Trump began spouting lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, Mr. Mohler, who grew up in a solidly conservative area of southeastern Pennsylvania, was troubled to hear many people he knew repeat them.Last January, after county Republican leaders aligned with a group known for spreading misinformation about the 2020 election and Covid-19 vaccines, Mr. Mohler spoke out against them — a move that he said cost him his post as chairman of the township G.O.P. committee.“I just realized how much of a sham the whole movement was,” he said. “The moment the veil is pulled from your face, you realize how ugly the face is that you are looking at.”Mr. Mohler was part of a precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate that went against its own voting history this year in order to reject Republican candidates who sought control over elections, at least in part out of concern for the health of the political system and the future of democracy.After deciding that preserving the integrity of elections was his single most important issue in 2022, he voted last month for the party’s nominee for Senate, Mehmet Oz, who hedged carefully on the question of who won the 2020 election but eventually said he would have voted to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory had he been in office. But in the governor’s race, Mr. Mohler decided he could not vote for Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate, who as a state senator was central to efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results. Mr. Mastriano had pledged to decertify voting machines in counties where he suspected the results were fraudulent and to appoint as secretary of the commonwealth, the office overseeing elections in Pennsylvania, someone who shared his views.“It was just so reprehensible,” Mr. Mohler said. “I didn’t want anybody like that in the governor’s office.”Doug Mastriano, a leader in the movement to investigate and overturn the 2020 election, was defeated in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.Mark Makela for The New York TimesThe decisions of voters like Mr. Mohler, discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump. But they did suggest a possible ceiling on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that prevented, in this cycle, the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized. Mr. Mastriano lost by nearly 15 percentage points to the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro — part of a midterm election that saw voters reject every election denier running to oversee elections in a battleground state. In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system. In all three, those candidates lost. The rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems.The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020, suggesting that the defection of ticket-splitters like Mr. Mohler likely played a role.In a survey of voters in five battleground states conducted by the research firm Citizen Data for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, a third who cast ballots for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in November cited a concern that G.O.P. candidates held views or promoted policies “that are dangerous to democracy.” The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More
