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FTX’s Near-Collapse Batters the Crypto Industry
Prices of digital currencies have tumbled even after the exchange FTX announced a provisional lifeline by a top rival, Binance. A humbling downfall for Sam Bankman-Fried.Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York TimesA crypto giant’s fate is in doubtDevastation in the crypto market continued on Wednesday, after the giant crypto exchange Binance announced a bombshell deal to buy its embattled rival, FTX. (The deal excludes FTX’s American operations.) The entire market’s capitalization now stands at $900 billion, down from $3 trillion just one year ago, while major cryptocurrencies were down by double-digit percentages. The damage is largely contained within crypto; both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed up yesterday.But investors fear that Binance won’t go through with the rescue plan, and that more pain awaits after their industry’s biggest Lehman-esque moment to date.What happened? Binance, an early investor in FTX turned rival, said over the weekend that it planned to sell its holdings in FTT, a token used for trading on FTX’s platform — a stunning move that cast doubt on the financial health of FTX and its trading arm, Alameda Research. The token’s value has plunged by roughly 80 percent in the past 36 hours to just under $5.Traders withdrew over $1.2 billion from FTX on Monday alone, according to the research firm Nansen. By Tuesday, FTX had stopped processing withdrawals; its chief executive, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was reportedly casting about for a financial lifeline from billionaires, finally turned to Binance for salvation.Binance has cemented its dominance over crypto. It was already the largest exchange worldwide for digital currencies and derivatives; FTX’s trading volumes in September were just a fraction of Binance’s. Its founder, Changpeng Zhao — widely known as CZ — showed off his power by effectively kneecapping FTX and then swooping in with a rescue. “This elevates Zhao as the most powerful player in crypto,” Ilan Solot of the derivatives trader Marex Solutions told The Financial Times.It’s a humbling downfall for Bankman-Fried, who in just three years rocketed from obscurity to become one of the best-known moguls in crypto, earning comparisons to Warren Buffett and J.P. Morgan. Months ago, Bankman-Fried sought to live up to the Morgan comparison, swooping in to bail out troubled crypto companies like Celsius and Voyager Digital (deals whose status is now unclear); he also became a frequent presence in Washington, calling for more regulation of the crypto industry, to the ire of CZ and other executives.At the beginning of the year, FTX was valued at $32 billion, backed by heavyweight investors like BlackRock, SoftBank and Tiger Global. (Investors said yesterday they were blindsided by the deal.) The 30-year-old Bankman-Fried — known in the crypto world as S.B.F. — was said to have a net worth of over $16 billion. But a document leaked to CoinDesk purportedly showed that FTX and Alameda, whose finances had long been murky, were highly illiquid and financially vulnerable.The crypto world fears other shoes will drop. Investors worry that CZ may yet pull out of his rescue deal: He noted on Tuesday that the transaction was nonbinding and subject to due diligence. Meanwhile, tokens associated with FTX, including Solana, have continued to plunge in value.Other crypto players sought to distance themselves from the FTX meltdown. Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, the biggest U.S.-focused exchange, said FTX’s troubles appeared to arise from “risky business practices” that his company doesn’t engage in. Still, Coinbase shares fell nearly 11 percent yesterday.And regulators say the news justifies more scrutiny of crypto companies. “This is a major market event for the digital asset sector,” said Joe Rotunda of the Texas State Securities Board Enforcement Division, which had already been investigating FTX.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Elon Musk sells billions more in Tesla stock to pay for his Twitter deal. He sold nearly $4 billion worth of shares in recent days, according to regulatory filings, bringing his total sales for the year to $36 billion. The electric carmaker’s shares were up slightly in premarket trading.The United Nations seeks to end “sham” corporate net-zero pledges. Companies that claim to be trying to cut carbon emissions but invest in fossil fuels should be shamed, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said at COP27. Meanwhile, more rich countries pledged to pay poorer ones compensation for damage from climate change.Disney reports a jump in streaming losses. The media giant said its direct-to-consumer unit — including Disney+ — doubled its third-quarter losses from a year ago, to $1.5 billion. But Disney said the quarter was the “peak” for losses, and noted it had added 12 million new subscribers.TikTok lowers its worldwide revenue targets amid a spending slump. The video platform cut its sales goals by 20 percent after its advertising and e-commerce operations struggled, The Financial Times reports. TikTok also revamped its leadership in the United States.Adidas cuts its profit forecast after breaking from Kanye West. The warning from the sportswear giant came weeks after it ended its highly profitable collaboration with the rapper now known as Ye. Separately, Adidas named Bjorn Gulden, the former head of Puma, as its next C.E.O.The red wave that wasn’t Republicans haven’t quite had the night they expected. As of 7 a.m. Eastern, Republicans were 21 seats shy of retaking control of the House. But leadership of the Senate remains up in the air after the Democrats flipped a seat in Pennsylvania. Here are the big highlights so far:Pennsylvania: John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, beat Mehmet Oz in the closely watched Senate race. Political analysts now say Democrats need to win two of three hotly contested Senate races — in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all currently held by Democrats — to maintain power in the chamber.Georgia: The Senate contest looks like it’s headed for a runoff on Dec. 6, pitting the incumbent, Raphael Warnock, against his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.Governor races: Voters backed high-profile incumbents, including Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York; Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas; and Tony Evers, Democrat of Wisconsin.Ballot initiatives: Voters in Michigan approved making abortion access a right protected under the State Constitution. Those in Maryland and Missouri voted to legalize marijuana, though similar measures were rejected in Arkansas and North Dakota.A rough night for Donald Trump: Several candidates that he endorsed, including in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, lost or were behind. And a potential rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, handily won re-election.Meta slices through its work forceFacebook’s owner Meta will lay off 11,000 employees, equivalent to 13 percent of its work force, the company announced on Wednesday morning, in the biggest restructuring in the social media giant’s history. A slump in digital advertising and ballooning losses from its pivot to the metaverse have pushed the company to make a series of wide-ranging cuts.In a note to employees, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and C.E.O., admitted that the company had hired too aggressively during the pandemic as homebound consumers spent more time socializing and shopping online. Meta mistakenly assumed this trend would continue: “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he wrote.The company has begun cutting costs across its operations, “scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint,” Zuckerberg wrote. The stock was up 3.7 percent in premarket trading, outperforming the Nasdaq.The economic downturn is forcing companies across industries to shrink. Citigroup and Barclays are expected to lay off hundreds in their investment banking units, Bloomberg reports. And, according to Protocol, Salesforce could cut as many as 2,500 positions in the coming weeks as the activist investor Starboard Value seeks big changes in corporate strategy.Exclusive: Keurig Dr Pepper buys stake in Athletic Brewing Keurig Dr Pepper has invested $50 million in Athletic Brewing, the nonalcoholic beer company, as part of a $75 million fund-raise by Athletic, DealBook is first to report. It’s the beverage giant’s second foray into the nonalcoholic booze category — it announced a deal to acquire a nonalcoholic cocktail brand called Atypique this summer — and another sign of interest in this fast-growing category.Athletic Brewing was founded in 2017 by Bill Shufelt, a former trader at the hedge fund Point72, and John Walker, a former craft brewer. It now sells its products — including lager, light beer and sparkling water — at retailers like Trader Joe’s. With its new backer, Athletic is looking to expand in Australia, France and Spain.Sales of nonalcoholic beer are skyrocketing, growing almost 70 percent between 2016 and 2021 in the U.S., to about $670 million, according to Euromonitor. While that is still a tiny portion of the overall beer market, its popularity stands in stark contrast to overall sluggishness in beer sales, as the younger generation drinks less and cares more about its waistline. Beer giants like Heineken, Budweiser and Sam Adams have released nonalcoholic alternatives in the last five years.It’s not just for recovering alcoholics or nondrinkers. Shufelt said 80 percent of his customers drink alcohol, and three-fourths are between the ages of 21 and 44. About half are women, he added.THE SPEED READ DealsThe E.U.’s antitrust watchdog will deepen its scrutiny of Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. (WSJ)Goldman Sachs has reportedly weighed buying payment-technology companies to expand its credit-card business. (WSJ)The electric carmaker Lucid said it planned to raise up to $1.5 billion in fresh capital. (NYT)PolicyThe private equity giants Apollo, Carlyle and KKR disclosed inquiries by regulators over their dealmakers’ use of messaging apps like WhatsApp for business. (Bloomberg)Supreme Court justices are weighing a Pennsylvania law that requires companies to consent to being sued in its courts for conduct done anywhere. (NYT)Kenya published some details of a 2014 loan it took out from China, potentially straining relations with the country’s biggest source of infrastructure financing. (NYT)Best of the restVirginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, now says she may have misidentified the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz as an abuser. (NYT)Twitter may now offer two kinds of check marks to verify users. (The Verge)Levi’s named Michelle Gass, Kohl’s chief executive, as its next C.E.O. (NYT)Would you take a Zoom meeting in a movie theater? AMC hopes so. (Insider)UBS’s chief risk officer, Christian Bluhm, is quitting to become … a professional photographer. (FT)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More
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John Fetterman and the Fight for White Working-Class Voters
Nina Feldman and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the Democrats to hold on to power in Washington, they have to do what President Biden did in Pennsylvania two years ago: Break the Republican Party’s grip on the white working-class vote, once the core of the Democratic base. In tomorrow’s midterm election, no race better encapsulates that challenge than the Pennsylvania Senate candidacy of John Fetterman.Is the plan working or is this crucial group of voters now a lost cause for the Democrats?On today’s episodeShane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The New York Times.John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, embodies the party’s hope of winning back white working-class voters.Christopher Dolan/The Times-Tribune, via Associated PressBackground readingAmong white working-class voters in places like northeast Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has both the furthest to fall and the most to gain.In the final days of the Pennsylvania Senate race, Mr. Fetterman has acknowledged that his recovery from a stroke remains a work in progress, leaning into the issue with a mix of humor, sarcasm and notes of empathy. There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Shane Goldmacher More
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Confidence, Anxiety and a Scramble for Votes Two Days Before the Midterms
As candidates made their closing arguments on Sunday, Democrats braced for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country while Republicans predicted a red wave.DELAWARE COUNTY, Pa. — The turbulent midterm campaign rolled through its final weekend on Sunday as voters — buffeted by record inflation, worries about their personal safety and fears about the fundamental stability of American democracy — showed clear signs of preparing to reject Democratic control of Washington and embrace divided government.As candidates sprinted across the country to make their closing arguments to voters, Republicans entered the final stretch of the race confident they would win control of the House and possibly the Senate. Democrats steeled themselves for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country.On Sunday, President Biden campaigned for Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York in a Yonkers precinct where he won 80 percent of the vote in 2020, signaling the deep challenges facing his party two years after he claimed a mandate to enact a sweeping domestic agenda. Former President Donald J. Trump addressed supporters in Miami, another sign of Republican optimism that the party could flip Florida’s most populous urban county for the first time in two decades.In the rally at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Mr. Biden characterized Election Day and the coming 2024 campaign as “inflection points” for the next 20 years. Voters, he said, had a clear choice between two “fundamentally different visions of America.”Mr. Trump, meanwhile, took the stage for about 90 minutes to blast Democrats as being soft on crime, re-litigate grievances about his presidency and the 2020 election, and boast that he has motivated Hispanic voters, especially in Florida, to shift toward the Republican Party.“We need a landslide so big that the radical left cannot rig or steal it,” he said, minutes before a rainstorm soaked the crowd. “We are going to take back America.”The appearances represented an unusual capstone to an extraordinary campaign — the first post-pandemic, post-Roe, post-Jan. 6 national election in a fiercely divided country shaken by growing political violence and lies about the last major election.While a majority of voters name the economy as their top concern, nearly three-quarters of Americans believe democracy is in peril, with most identifying the opposing party as the major threat. Should Republicans sweep the House contests, their control could empower the party’s right wing, giving an even bigger bullhorn to lawmakers who traffic in conspiracy theories and falsehoods like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.A gas station in Mineral County, Nev., had gas prices well above $5 a gallon last week. A majority of voters say the economy is their top concern.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesA central question for Democrats is whether such a distinctive moment overrides fierce historical headwinds. Since 1934, nearly every president has lost seats in his first midterm election. And typically, voters punish the party in power for poor economic conditions — dynamics that point toward Republican gains.After days of campaigning across rural Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the Republican challenging Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, rallied supporters in and around Las Vegas this weekend, predicting a “red wave” that is “deep and wide.” Mr. Laxalt noted that Mr. Biden did not campaign in Nevada this year and blamed him for the state’s 15 percent inflation.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“He’s going to call you anti-democratic for using the democratic system to give us a change,” he told supporters on Saturday in Clark County, the state’s largest county. “But that change is coming.”The midterm’s final landscape hinted that voters were prioritizing fiscal worries over more existential fears about democracy or preserving abortion rights. From liberal northeastern suburbs to Western states, Republican strategists, lawmakers and officials now say they could flip major parts of the country and expand their margins in Southern and Rust Belt states that have been fertile ground for their party for much of the last decade.There were also some early signs that key parts of the coalition that boosted Democrats to victory in 2018 and 2020 — moderate suburban white women and Latino voters — were swinging toward Republican candidates. Top Democratic officials made 11th-hour efforts to shore up their base. Vice President Kamala Harris made stops in Chicago to help Illinois Democrats. The first lady, Jill Biden, traveled to Houston on Sunday, trying to lift party turnout in Harris County, a stronghold for Democrats in Texas.In the House, where Republicans need to flip five seats to control the chamber, the party vied for districts in Democratic bastions, including in Rhode Island, exurban New York, Oregon and California. Republican strategists touted their surprisingly close standing in governor’s races in longer-shot blue states like New York, New Mexico and Oregon.At the same time, the Senate remains a tossup, with candidates locked in near dead-even races in three states — Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania — and tight races in at least another four. Republicans need just one additional seat to win control.“Everyone on the Republican side should be optimistic,” said Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican and the head of the Republican Senate campaign arm. Mr. Scott predicted his party would flip the chamber, going beyond the 51 seats needed for control. “If you look at the polls now, we have every reason to think we’ll be over 52.”Lt. Gov. John Fetterman with supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh on Saturday.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTwo supporters of Senator Raphael Warnock greeted each other at one of his events in Monroe, Ga., on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesFor months, Democratic candidates in key races have outpaced Mr. Biden’s low approval ratings, aided by flawed Republican opponents who had been boosted to primary victories by Mr. Trump. Continuing to outrun the leader of their party grew more difficult as perceptions of the economy worsened and as Republican groups unleashed a fall ad blitz accusing their opponents of being weak on crime.“It’s a close race — it’s a jump ball for sure,” Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democrat running for Senate in Pennsylvania against Mehmet Oz, the television personality, told a group of supporters in suburban Philadelphia.Dr. Oz and Mr. Fetterman both spent time in the Philadelphia area on Sunday, battling, in particular, in the crucial swing suburbs. A day after joining Mr. Trump at a rally in the Pittsburgh exurbs, Dr. Oz campaigned with Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, two more moderate Republicans.In Georgia, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley told supporters not to feed into national headlines about Republicans’ strength, as she campaigned with Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee, in the conservative northwest Atlanta exurbs.“Don’t listen to this red wave stuff they’re talking to you about. The win that will happen in Georgia will simply be based on turnout,” she said. “Do more of us show up than they do?”And in the Las Vegas suburbs, former President Bill Clinton appeared with Ms. Cortez Masto to urge a crowd of labor union members to warn their family and friends not to cast a protest vote for Republicans, who he said would be “terrible” for working-class people.“They’re gambling that they have this magic moment where we’ll all be so mad, we’ll stop thinking,” he said. “Between now and Tuesday, people here could change the outcome of this election.”Cheri Beasley, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina in a tight race against Representative Ted Budd, spoke to voters in Charlotte, N.C., in September.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIn the House, the question is how large next year’s Republican majority will be. Some strategists have increased their estimates of how many seats the G.O.P. will gain from a handful to more than 25, which is well over the threshold for control of the chamber. Some of the Democratic challenges are structural: Republicans could pick up three seats just from redistricting according to some estimates, and a wave of Democratic retirements means more than a dozen seats in competitive districts lack incumbents to defend them. Paired with the number of seats leaning Republican or considered tossups, those obstacles are the makings of a landslide if undecided voters break decisively for the party out of power.“It’s not a surprise that this is a tough cycle,” said Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the Democratic House campaign arm, who is in danger of losing his seat in New York’s Hudson Valley, which Mr. Biden won by 10 percentage points. “We’re very much aware of what we’re up against.”In governor’s races, Republican candidates modeled after Mr. Trump face decidedly mixed prospects, reflecting their party’s struggles with his continued influence. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised for re-election, while Kari Lake, the Republican nominee in Arizona, faces a tough battle. Doug Mastriano, the far-right nominee in Pennsylvania, was expected to lose, but Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both of whom clashed with Mr. Trump, appear to have solidified their hold.Kari Lake addressed reporters at a campaign event on Friday, alongside other Republican candidates at the U.S.-Mexico border in Sierra Vista, Ariz.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesSupporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida gathered at a campaign event in Coconut Creek, Fla., on Friday. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn some ways, the congressional elections are less consequential than some of the state elections, given that Mr. Biden will still be in the White House to block Republican legislation. In Wisconsin and North Carolina, the party is on the verge of breakthroughs in state legislatures that would give it almost total control of their governments.If Republicans gain just a handful of House and Senate seats in North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, faces the prospect of a Republican supermajority, rendering his veto pen obsolete to stop policies like a state abortion ban. If Republicans flip only one of the two State Supreme Court seats up for re-election Tuesday, a Republican-controlled high court could ratify even more gerrymandered state legislative maps that would lock in Republican control for the foreseeable future.“Yes, we’re concerned about it because the Republicans got to draw their own districts,” Mr. Cooper said. “We know this is a very purple, 50-50 state, yet we have a situation with unfair maps of maybe a supermajority.”But the chaotic events of the post-Trump era along with questions about the very mechanics of elections have injected a heavy dose of uncertainty into the outcome of the 2022 midterms.Democratic strategists have been enthusiastic about early voting, saying that it matched or was higher than the turnout two years ago when the party swept the House. More than 30 million ballots have been cast already, exceeding the 2018 total, and the Democratic advantage is 11 percentage points nationwide, even better than in 2018, according to Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a firm that analyzes political data.But Republican candidates have followed Mr. Trump’s lead in denouncing mail voting and encouraging their voters to cast their ballots on Election Day. So those early Democratic numbers could be swamped by Republican votes on Tuesday.New Yorkers cast their ballots during early voting at a polling station at John Jay High School in Brooklyn on Saturday. More than 30 million ballots have been cast already.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesRepublicans, meanwhile, point to polling averages that crept toward the G.O.P. in the final week. But a number of the polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms, which could influence the outcome of those surveys. And after several cycles of polling underestimating Trump voters, it’s unclear whether pollsters have correctly captured the electorate. “I’ve never been one who has put my bets on any poll, because I think particularly at this time people are not sharing where they are,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, who is facing a tough re-election battle in her blue state.Hispanic voters are likely to play a crucial role in Tuesday’s election, though both sides remain uncertain how much the landscape has shifted. In two of the states that are likely to determine control of the Senate — Nevada and Arizona — they make up roughly 20 percent of the electorate. Latinos also account for more than 20 percent of registered voters in more than a dozen hotly contested House races, including in California, Colorado, Florida and New Mexico.“The data itself right now is a picture of uncertainty,” said Carlos Odio, who runs Equis, a Democratic-leaning research firm that focuses on Latino voters. “We’re not seeing further decline for Democratic support, but the party has relied on very high margins in the past.”The audience watched former President Barack Obama at a Democratic rally in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesKatie Glueck More
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For Fetterman, Campaign Trail Doubles as Road to Recovery
After a stroke and an uneven debate against his rival, Mehmet Oz, John Fetterman is leaning into his health challenges, to cheering crowds, as he campaigns for Senate in Pennsylvania.COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — John Fetterman was getting fired up at a campaign rally on Thursday evening, vigorously bashing his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, as a “fraud,” when the lingering effects of the stroke he had in May abruptly surfaced.“This is a guy that’s, that’s made millions, with scam, ah — you know, scam …” Mr. Fetterman trailed off, trying twice more for the word he would eventually land on: “artist.”“Eh — that’s another one, somebody can film that,” he continued, laughing a little and flinging his arms out to his sides, as if daring his critics to mock him. “Stroke thing. He sold miracles that I just couldn’t even pronounce even before I had a stroke.”In the final days of the extraordinary Pennsylvania Senate race, in which a stroke survivor is running against a celebrity television physician, Mr. Fetterman is proactively acknowledging that his recovery remains a work in progress, leaning into the issue with a mix of humor, sarcasm and notes of empathy for others struggling with health challenges, as he competes in one of the most consequential contests in the nation.Over the course of four events — the Thursday gathering, a Friday discussion with a Philadelphia-area congresswoman and two major Saturday rallies — Mr. Fetterman came across as high-energy and forceful at times, but uneven in crispness and fluency. He sometimes stumbled over a word, corrected himself midsentence or tacked on extraneous words. Abortion decisions belong “only between a woman and their doctor,” he said on Thursday. “Always has — should — been, and always should — will.”But all of those appearances were a far cry from Mr. Fetterman’s debate performance last month, where his strikingly halting answers alarmed Democrats in Pennsylvania and nationally as they worried about a seat that could determine control of the U.S. Senate.Mr. Fetterman in Philadelphia on Saturday night. Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMr. Fetterman reaching out to a supporter after appearing with President Biden.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAt his events, it was evident that Mr. Fetterman has fiercely devoted fans who know his biography, revel in his social media swipes at Dr. Oz and are eager to shout encouragement at any mention of the stroke. The gatherings sometimes had the feel of a movement campaign, but the question is how big that movement is, in a sharply divided state and at a challenging time for Democrats across the country.Mr. Fetterman often sounded clear and relaxed during a Friday conversation with Representative Mary Gay Scanlon at a senior center in Delaware County, the day after he received a prized endorsement from Oprah Winfrey, who was instrumental in Dr. Oz’s rise to fame. He engaged in exchanges over issues like the infrastructure package as he used a closed captioning system, which was barely detectable to the audience.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“Have people heard that I’ve had a stroke?” he asked wryly near the beginning of that appearance. “I thought I was always pretty empathetic before, but after that, it’s really deepened just how critical it is to make sure that there needs to be things like captioning, which I’m using now — right now.” He mentioned that such accommodations allowed more people to “fully participate.”And at rallies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on Saturday, he cracked self-deprecating jokes about the challenge of being a stroke survivor who had to speak before former President Barack Obama, widely regarded as the Democratic Party’s most powerful surrogate.At his Thursday rally in Collegeville, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, he had several noticeable verbal missteps, sounding choppy as he discussed abortion rights or dealings with China.But in tone and delivery, he often came across as vigorous and seemed to be enjoying himself during his roughly 18-minute performance that included riffs about sports — the Eagles and the Phillies were both playing that night. He was cheered on by a crowd that, by the end, was treating seemingly every other sentence as an applause line.The crowd in Collegeville, Pa., on Thursday listening to Mr. Fetterman’s speech.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesWhen he mentioned his time as mayor “of a community out in western Pennsylvania,” one attendee shouted out, “Braddock!” Mr. Fetterman previously served as mayor of Braddock, Pa., where he attracted attention for his efforts to revitalize a struggling steel town.And as he ridiculed Dr. Oz over his real estate, he was cheered on by calls of “Yes, sir!” and “Crudité!”Earlier this year, a video of Dr. Oz shopping for, as he put it, “crudité,” became a subject of significant mockery as Mr. Fetterman’s campaign tried to use it to illustrate that the Republican was out of touch.A Marist poll conducted after the debate found Mr. Fetterman with a lead of six percentage points over Dr. Oz among registered voters and among those who said they definitely planned to vote. But an Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey of Pennsylvania voters, also conducted after the debate, found Dr. Oz with a narrow lead, but within the poll’s margin of error. Many party strategists on both sides of the aisle regard the race as very close.While questions about Mr. Fetterman’s health have been a significant theme of the race, crime, the economy and Dr. Oz’s biography have been equally or, in some cases, more dominant. Mr. Fetterman has been pummeled with attacks on his criminal justice record as Republicans have zeroed in on his tenure as chair of the state’s Board of Pardons, and Democrats face a difficult national environment amid high inflation and President Biden’s weak approval numbers.But polls also show warning signs for Dr. Oz, whose time as a TV doctor and ties to the state have repeatedly come under scrutiny. A Monmouth University poll released Wednesday found that 55 percent of Pennsylvanians surveyed thought he had little understanding of the concerns of voters like them. A Fox News poll showed that 44 percent of voters worried that Dr. Oz, whose longtime principal residence was in New Jersey, was not familiar enough with Pennsylvania to carry out the job of senator.At this point in the race, with few undecided voters left, “it comes down to the intangibles, the character attributes of the candidates themselves,” said Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster.“What’s the more damning hit?” he said. “Is it Fetterman’s health and not being able to serve or ‘Oz is from Jersey’?”Mr. Fetterman with his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, in Pittsburgh on Saturday.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. Fetterman had a stroke on the Friday before the May primary election, though he waited until Sunday to disclose it. On Primary Day, he had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted, which his campaign described at the time as a standard procedure that would help address “the underlying cause of his stroke, atrial fibrillation.” The statement prompted questioning from doctors. His campaign offered few other details about his condition in the days that followed.In a statement in early June, his cardiologist said that he also had a serious heart condition called cardiomyopathy, but that “if he takes his medications, eats healthy, and exercises, he’ll be fine.”And last month, Mr. Fetterman released a letter from his primary care doctor saying that “he has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” and that he “spoke intelligently without cognitive deficits.”“His speech was normal, and he continues to exhibit symptoms of an auditory processing disorder, which can come across as hearing difficulty,” said the letter from Dr. Clifford Chen, the primary care physician. “Occasional words he will ‘miss,’ which seems like he doesn’t hear the word, but it is actually not processed properly.”Dr. Chen has donated to Mr. Fetterman’s campaign and to other Democrats, The Associated Press has noted.The issue of auditory processing was evident on Thursday night as Mr. Fetterman worked the rope line after his event in suburban Philadelphia, shaking hands and posing for pictures but not stopping for long conversations over blaring music. The campaign has acknowledged that auditory processing is especially challenging for Mr. Fetterman in that setting.One man, who declined to share his name on the record for fear of losing his job, came up to Mr. Fetterman in tears. The man, 42, showed Mr. Fetterman what he said was his pardon letter for a marijuana conviction. The candidate, who as lieutenant governor is the chairman of the Board of Pardons, glanced at the document briefly and appeared to thank the man, but they did not have an extended exchange.“I just told him,” the man said afterward, still crying, “thank you for my freedom.”In the final days of the campaign, both candidates are competing hard in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with dueling appearances in Bucks County on Sunday.Dr. Oz campaigned with Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, two lawmakers regarded as more moderate Republicans, and his final pre-election rally on Monday is in suburban Montgomery County. He is walking a difficult line, though: He also appeared with former President Donald J. Trump and State Senator Doug Mastriano, the far-right nominee for governor who is anathema to many centrist suburban voters, at a rally on Saturday.Mr. Fetterman with Representative Mary Gay Scanlon in Upper Darby, Pa., on Friday.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. Fetterman, for his part, appeared on “The View” on Friday, which may have reached suburban women in particular, his team said. He campaigned with state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, in Bucks County on Sunday afternoon.And his advisers and allies were elated by the endorsement from Ms. Winfrey, which was heavily covered on the local news.“This week was ‘Fetterman Strikes Back,’” said Joe Calvello, a spokesman for Mr. Fetterman. He also noted the letter the candidate released from his doctor, and that Mr. Fetterman was “doing a recovery in public, in the public eye.”On the campaign trail, Mr. Fetterman has a habit of narrating what that process entails.“Sometimes I miss words, sometimes I might mush two words together,” Mr. Fetterman said on Thursday, to shouts of “We don’t care!”“This,” he said at another point, “is what recovery looks like.” More
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Democrats, Don’t Despair. There Are Bright Spots for Our Party.
The Democratic Party and Senator Mitch McConnell rarely see eye to eye on anything. But if Democrats hold the line in the elections on Tuesday and keep control of the Senate — and we still have a shot — it will come down to candidate quality.That’s the phrase that Mr. McConnell used this past summer alluding to his Republican Senate nominees.Going into Tuesday’s vote, Democrats face fierce headwinds like inflation and the typical pattern of losses in midterm elections for the party in power. But unlike some Republican candidates — a real-life island of misfit toys — many Democratic Senate candidates have been a source of comfort: the likable, pragmatic, low-drama Mark Kelly in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, the heterodox populists John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Tim Ryan (Ohio). If the party can defy the odds and hold the Senate, there will be valuable lessons to take away.For many election analysts, the hopes of the summer — that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe could help Democrats buck historical trends — look increasingly like a blue mirage, and Republicans seem likely to surf their way to a majority in the House.Yet the battle for the Senate is still raging, and largely on the strength of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman. Their races also offer insights that can help Democrats mitigate losses in the future and even undo some of the reputational damage that has rendered the party’s candidates unelectable in far too many places across the country.In a normal midterm year, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kelly would be the low-hanging fruit of vulnerable Democrats, given that they eked out victories in 2020 and 2021 in purple states.But they bring to the table compelling biographies that resist caricature. Mr. Kelly is a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut whose parents were both cops. Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, quotes Scripture on the campaign trail and compares the act of voting to prayer.They’ve rejected the hair-on-fire, hyperpartisan campaign ads that endangered incumbents often rely on. Mr. Kelly’s ads highlight his bipartisanship and willingness to break with the Democratic Party on issues like border security — he supports, for example, filling in gaps in the wall on the border with Mexico.Mr. Warnock, too, has focused on local issues: His campaign has highlighted his efforts to secure funding for the Port of Savannah and his bipartisan work with Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to help Georgia’s peanut farmers. These ads will probably not go viral on Twitter, but they signal that Mr. Kelly and Mr. Warnock will fight harder for the folks at home than they will for the national Democratic agenda.In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman have showed up in every county, red or blue, in their states. Democrats can’t just depend on driving up the margins in Democratic strongholds — they also need to drive down Republicans’ margins in their strongholds.Mr. Fetterman is holding to a slim lead in polls. Most analysts doubt Mr. Ryan can prevail in what is a tougher electoral environment for a Democrat, but even if he loses, he helped his peers by keeping his race competitive, and he did it without a dollar of help from the national party. He forced national Republicans to spend about $30 million in Ohio that could otherwise have gone to Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.Anything could happen on Tuesday. Politics, like football, is a game of inches. It’s still possible that Democrats could pick up a seat or two. It’s also plausible that Republicans could take seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and even New Hampshire.But when the dust settles on the election, Democrats need to do some real soul-searching about the future of our party. We look likely to lose in some places where Joe Biden won in 2020. And what’s worse, we could lose to candidates who have embraced bans on abortion and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, views shared by a minority of the American people. This outcome tells us as much about the Democratic brand as it does the Republican Party.Fair or not, Democrats have been painted as the party of out-of-touch, coastal elites — the party that tells voters worried about crime that it’s all in their heads and that, by the way, crime was higher in the 1990s; the party that sneers at voters disillusioned with bad trade deals and globalization and that labels their “economic anxiety” a convenient excuse for racism; the party that discounts shifts of Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party as either outliers or a sign of internalized white supremacy.If Democrats are smart, they’ll take away an important lesson from this election: There is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat. To win or be competitive in tough years in places as varied as Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, we need to recruit and give support to the candidates who might not check the box of every national progressive litmus test but who do connect with the voters in their state.Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Ryan offer good examples. Both have been competitive in part because they broke with progressive orthodoxy on issues like fracking (in Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman was called the “enemy” by an environmentalist infuriated by his enthusiastic support for fracking and the jobs it creates) and trade deals (in Ohio, Mr. Ryan has bragged about how he “voted with Trump on trade”).It also means lifting up more candidates with nontraditional résumés who defy political stereotypes and can’t be ridiculed as down-the-line partisans: veterans, nurses, law enforcement officers and entrepreneurs and executives from the private sector.In some states, the best candidates will be economic populists who play down social issues. In others, it will be economic moderates who play up their progressive social views. And in a lot of swing states, it will be candidates who just play it down the middle all around.It might also mean engaging with unfriendly media outlets. Most Democrats have turned up their noses at Fox News even though it is the highest-rated cable news channel, but Mr. Ryan has made appearances and even put on air a highlight reel of conservative hosts like Tucker Carlson praising him as a voice of moderation and reason in the Democratic Party. In the frenzied final days of the campaign, Mr. Fetterman wrote an opinion essay for FoxNews.com.This year we still might avoid losing the Senate. And Democrats can avoid catastrophe in future elections. It all comes down to two words: “candidate quality.”Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”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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How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom
Molly Jong-Fast had just finished interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris for her podcast when she hopped in an Uber S.U.V. headed to the Century, the Manhattan literary club where she was throwing a book party for the media critic Margaret Sullivan, a friend. The editors of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair greeted her with hugs. The owner of The New Republic, Win McCormack, stopped to say hello.“I just interviewed the vice president!” Ms. Jong-Fast gushed.“The vice president?” Mr. McCormack replied, brow furrowing. “ … Of the United States?”For much of her life, Ms. Jong-Fast, 44, was known for being the daughter of her mother, Erica Jong, whose novel “Fear of Flying” is a feminist classic. Ms. Jong-Fast went to rehab at 19, married at 23, and wrote a couple of novels and a book of essays about her bohemia-by-way-of-Park-Avenue upbringing.Now, within a certain rarefied slice of American political life, she is a star. On Wednesday, she joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent. One million people follow her on Twitter. The first guest on her new podcast, distributed by the mega network iHeartMedia, was President Biden’s chief of staff. In the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, she has interviewed Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Fetterman and Ms. Harris — a lineup rivaling MSNBC.In Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo,” a moviegoer steps into the screen and enters the world of her favorite film. From her Upper East Side living room, Ms. Jong-Fast marshaled a weapons-grade Twitter habit and a penchant for sliding into journalists’ DMs to catapult herself into the beating heart of left-wing media: the MSNBC Mom who starts actually appearing on MSNBC.Her rise is a testament to the power of social media, the increasingly blurred lines between armchair pundits and professional commentators, and the opportunism of writers, on the right and the left, who used Donald Trump’s presidency to reinvent themselves. It’s about the flight to ideological comfort among news consumers in a partisan era. But it’s also about Ms. Jong-Fast and her ability to win friends, wear her privilege lightly and help anxious liberals cope with a chaotic moment.“She speaks and writes in a way that is incredibly relatable to a group of people that don’t ordinarily have a columnist that speaks to them,” said Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, who praised her “lack of harrumph.” One superfan, the artist Diana Weymar, stitched enough needlepoints of Ms. Jong-Fast’s aphoristic tweets (“What if killing your constituents is bad for your re-election?”) to fill an exhibit at a Chelsea gallery. Ms. Jong-Fast is not an adversarial interviewer — “Do you think, personally, that democracy can survive a second Trump term?” she asked Ms. Harris — but her progressive fans don’t seem to mind. “I think she’s found her sense of purpose,” Ms. Sullivan said at the book party, as Ms. Jong-Fast, in periwinkle glasses and a Thom Browne cardigan, darted among guests. “There are very few people that meet Molly that don’t wind up rooting for Molly.”‘I’m so grateful I got sober before social media.’ — @mollyjongfastMs. Jong-Fast with her mother, Erica Jong, in New York, in July.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesLast month, Ms. Jong-Fast sat barefoot in her spacious but homey Upper East Side co-op, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of uptown literary life: Fornasetti candles, her grandfather’s Emmy, a pillow needlepointed with the cover of The New York Post. As one dog was groomed in the dining room, another nestled in her lap. In her makeshift home podcast studio, Ms. Jong-Fast had just wrapped a Zoom interview with Gisele Barreto Fetterman, wife of the Pennsylvania Senate candidate. (“You look a-mazing,” Ms. Jong-Fast cooed, as Ms. Fetterman asked after her pets.)The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“I was a drug addict, I nearly died, I got sober; I’ve had this incredible run,” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “A lot of kids who grew up like I grew up are not high functioning. I feel very grateful.”Her parents split up when she was 3. Her mother, busy being a cultural icon, often left Ms. Jong-Fast with her grandparents, including Howard Fast, the “Spartacus” novelist and Communist activist who served prison time in the McCarthy era and introduced Molly to left-wing politics.Her mother, Ms. Jong-Fast notes, was an early adopter of oversharing. In 1985, Erica moved 6-year-old Molly from New York to the Beverly Hilton for a month because she was developing a sitcom based on her daughter’s experience with divorce. A pilot aired, but not before Ms. Jong-Fast’s father, Jonathan Fast, sued and demanded that his ex-wife change the character’s name from Molly to Megan. (A review in The New York Times praised the show’s “appealing breeziness.”)Ms. Jong-Fast is dyslexic and did poorly in school; her ejection from Dalton, she said, was a “seismic” shock for her ur-intellectual family. She got into alcohol and drugs. After spending time at Hazelden, the A-list rehab center, Ms. Jong-Fast, at 21, published a roman à clef about her struggles. “That was what my mother did,” she said, referring to the act of novelizing one’s life. “So I just thought that was what you’re supposed to do.” The reviews were vicious.She married her husband, an English professor turned venture capitalist, had three children, and wrote another book. But she felt at a loss. “I was like, ‘My life has no meaning,’” she recalled. “I was not put on this earth to write chick-lit novels.” Her writing on politics, at The Forward, drew little notice.Then Mr. Trump came down the escalator. “At some point I realized this guy was gonna win and I was like, ‘Why isn’t everyone hysterical?’” she recalled. “That’s when I really started tweeting.”She tweeted her angst five, 10, 15 times a day. (Sometimes she would merely reply to Mr. Trump’s tweets, scoring likes and retweets for her punchy responses.) She replied to journalists and posted links to their stories. The conservative commentator Bill Kristol hired her to write for his site The Bulwark. She traveled, on her own dime, to cover Trump rallies and conservative conferences, mingling with the network of reporters she was cultivating online.She turned her lack of reportorial expertise into an asset, forsaking complex political analysis for a “can you believe this?” astonishment. (When she started a newsletter at The Atlantic, she called it “Wait, What?”) For anguished liberals in the Trump era seeking a voice in the media, simply underlining the preposterousness of events was enough. “Sometimes everyone will say something and I’ll be like, ‘How’?” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “I just feel like a lot of times I’m like, this doesn’t smell right, and I think that has been really helpful in my life.”‘Democrats continue to bring a stuffed animal to a knife fight.’ — @mollyjongfastOne evening in 2019, I arrived at Ms. Jong-Fast’s building for a party she was throwing in honor of the actress Kathy Griffin. Inside the door was Resistance Twitter come to life.The writer E. Jean Carroll, who had recently accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault, was engrossed in conversation with George T. Conway III, husband of Kellyanne Conway, when Ms. Griffin, in an ecru Valentino dress, approached. “Who has Mrs. Mueller’s number?” she asked mischievously, laying out a “Lysistrata”-style scheme in which the wife of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would withhold physical relations from her husband until he divulged damning details about Mr. Trump.Her planning was interrupted by the arrival of the Momofuku catering. “This is the best party I’ve been to all year,” Ms. Carroll said as she glided toward the slow-roasted pork. (Later, when she sued Mr. Trump for defamation, she hired a lawyer that Mr. Conway recommended to her that evening.)Philippe Reines, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton, surveyed the room of liberal writers, comedians and cable news green room habitués, and compared the gathering to the TV show “Lost”: shellshocked survivors wandering a beach. “If we all went down on the plane, who would get the obit?” he asked. The consensus: Ms. Griffin.Washington has its famed political hostesses — Sally Quinn, Pamela Harriman — but latter-day New York has lacked for gatherers. Ms. Jong-Fast, with her ample personality (and ample apartment), filled the void. “I walked in and the first sight I see is Erica Jong talking with Joyce Carol Oates,” said Ms. Sullivan, a former public editor of The Times. “I felt like I was in literary heaven.”These gatherings — which extend to a semiregular Washington party at the home of the NBC reporter Jonathan Allen — have doubled as another prong of Ms. Jong-Fast’s path to media success. Many attendees are people Ms. Jong-Fast has met online. (“It’s just one of those friendships that develops through direct messages,” Mr. Conway recalled.) When she started a podcast in 2020 at The Daily Beast, “The New Abnormal,” Ms. Jong-Fast leaned on those connections to secure guests like Ben Stiller, Sharon Stone, and Mary Trump. The podcast, co-hosted with the former Republican consultant Rick Wilson, sailed toward the top of the charts.Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, with Ms. Jong-Fast at a book party for Margaret Sullivan, right, in New York, last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was sort of like, ‘Meh, OK, does the world really need another podcast?’” recalled Mr. Shachtman, the Rolling Stone editor who ran The Daily Beast at the time. “And it became hugely important to us — hugely.”Ms. Jong-Fast left for The Atlantic in late 2021, where she remained until joining Vanity Fair. In September, she moved her podcast to iHeartMedia, which advertises the show across its radio stations. So far, “Fast Politics” — a two-person operation consisting of Ms. Jong-Fast and a producer who previously recorded songs for The Misfits — is hovering around the Top 50 of Apple’s news category.The Trump era produced no shortage of wannabe pundits. Ms. Jong-Fast credits some of her success to a tenacity honed by years as a freelancer; to secure Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, for her podcast, she pestered his staff for months. “I’m used to so much rejection,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Do you have five minutes for me? You could do it in your car!’”A high-end Rolodex helps. Her first MSNBC appearance was with Lawrence O’Donnell, who, she admits, once went on a date with her mother. “There are people I am more connected to than others,” she said. When Ms. Jong-Fast, on Oct. 20, tweeted about the death of her dog, Cerberus, she received condolences from Aimee Mann, Padma Lakshmi, Daryl Hannah, and Megyn Kelly.She is particularly close with Ms. Griffin, who said in an interview that when she met Ms. Jong-Fast, “about 75 percent of my friends had dumped me permanently.” (Ms. Griffin had been widely castigated for posting a photo of herself with a facsimile of Mr. Trump’s decapitated head.) When Ms. Griffin had surgery in 2021 to remove a tumor in her lung, Ms. Jong-Fast stayed with her in Malibu, Calif.“We’d watch the news or she’d be online the whole time,” Ms. Griffin recalled.‘My life may not turn out how I want it but at least I won’t be buried on my second husband’s golf course.’ — @mollyjongfastPhilip Vukelich for The New York TimesMs. Jong-Fast says she wants to fill a perceived void in the political podcast space, arguing that conservative megastars like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino need more liberal rivals. (Mr. Shapiro is not exactly a fan, once tweeting that the fact Ms. Jong-Fast is paid “to say and write words” proves that “in a big, beautiful, capitalistic democracy like ours, literally anyone can make a living.”) Ms. Jong-Fast acknowledges a debt to “Pod Save America,” the lefty podcast started by Barack Obama alumni, and expressed some jealousy that they booked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has repeatedly turned her down.Her podcast is unlikely to move the needle with purple-state voters, so why do boldface politicians like Ms. Harris even bother? The audience, said one Democratic operative, is not voters so much as elite liberals with money; for Democrats, accessing the donor class is as much a part of the left-wing media game as swaying hearts and minds. Ms. Jong-Fast is a relatively friendly conduit.Ms. Jong-Fast, after years of struggling to break into top-tier magazines, marvels at Twitter’s ability to bypass media gatekeepers. But her million-strong Twitter account is a powerful megaphone in its own right: Several journalists confided to me they often text their stories to Ms. Jong-Fast as a surefire path to clicks.In recent days, she has been heckling Elon Musk on Twitter, although she is relatively sanguine about the medium’s future under its new owner. “We’re still gonna need a place to push content,” she said.There are downsides. Ms. Jong-Fast has received death threats. (“I told the doormen and they were like, ‘Again?’”) She shrugged them off. “One thing that was helpful — or made me pathological, depending on your viewpoint — is that my mother wrote about me my whole life, so I never had this assumption of privacy,” she said.Erica Jong is suffering from memory issues, but her daughter said she enjoys seeing her appearances on cable news. “It makes her feel good about her parenting choices,” Ms. Jong-Fast said, wryly.In the age of Trump, partisan punditry is a kind of modern therapy: How many liberals attribute their sanity to nightly sessions with Rachel Maddow? Some of Ms. Jong-Fast’s fans feel the same: “I get emails that are like, ‘I live in Montana, I’m 88 years old, you make me feel like it’s going to be OK.’”For Ms. Jong-Fast, who on Wednesday celebrated 25 years sober, the treatment might go both ways. “My husband is like, ‘Oh my god, democracy is dying in front of us,’” Ms. Jong-Fast said as a dog hopped off her lap. “And I’m like, ‘I’m just going to write another piece.’” More
