internal-sub-only-nl

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Threat to Democracy? Start With Corruption, Many Voters Say

      by

      In a Times/Siena survey, respondents’ concerns about democracy often diverged from typical expert analysis.A rally called Save America last week in Mesa, Ariz. People have very different ideas of what that term means. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesWhen we started our national poll on democracy last week, David Leonhardt’s recent New York Times front-page story on threats to democracy was at the top of my mind. His article focused on two major issues: the election denial movement in the Republican Party, and undemocratic elements of American elected government like the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the Senate.But when we got the results of our Times/Siena poll late last week, it quickly became clear these were not the threats on the minds of voters.While 71 percent of registered voters agreed that democracy was “under threat,” only about 17 percent of voters described the threat in a way that squares with discussion in mainstream media and among experts — with a focus on Republicans, Donald J. Trump, political violence, election denial, authoritarianism, and so on.Instead, most people described the threat to democracy in terms that would be very unfamiliar to someone concerned about election subversion or the Jan. 6 insurrection — and I’m not just talking about stop-the-steal adherents who think the last election already brought American democracy to an end.The poll results help make sense of how so many voters can say democracy is under threat, and yet rank “threats to democracy” low on the list of challenges facing the country.When respondents were asked to volunteer one or two words to summarize the current threat to democracy, government corruption was brought up most often — more than Mr. Trump and Republicans combined.For some of these voters, the threat to democracy doesn’t seem to be about the risk of a total collapse of democratic institutions or a failed transition of power. Or they may not view the threat as an emergency or a crisis yet, like being on the brink of sustained political violence or authoritarianism.Instead, they point most frequently to a longstanding concern about the basic functioning of a democratic system: whether government works on behalf of the people.Many respondents volunteered exactly that kind of language. One said, “I don’t think they are honestly thinking about the people.” Another said politicians “forget about normal people.” Corruption, greed, power and money were familiar themes.Overall, 68 percent of registered voters said the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites” rather than “ordinary people.”Another 8 percent of voters cited polarization as the major threat to democracy. Like corruption, polarization poses a threat to democracy but might not necessarily count as an imminent crisis.And perhaps most surprising, many voters offered an answer that wasn’t easily categorized as a threat to democracy at all. Inflation, for instance, was cited by 3 percent of respondents — about the same as the share citing political extremists and violence. For perhaps as many as one-fifth of voters, the “threat to democracy” was little more than a repackaging of persistent issues like “open borders” and “race relations” or “capitalism” and “godlessness.”The 17 percent of voters who cited something related to Mr. Trump and election denial seemed to elevate the issue of democracy the most: Overall, 19 percent of those respondents volunteered that the state of democracy was the most important problem facing the country — more than any other issue.Among everyone else: Just 4 percent stated that concern as the No. 1 issue.My colleagues have more on this story here. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Behind Oz’s Crime Attacks Is a Play for the Philly Suburbs

      by

      An impeachment vote against Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, points to the potency of an issue that works against Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.There’s an oft-repeated maxim about the political geography of Pennsylvania: It’s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on each end with Alabama (or Kentucky) in between.In broad strokes, it’s not wrong. Although Pennsylvania was one of the original 13 colonies, it is mountainous and overwhelmingly rural. In today’s political climate, that means a map of the state’s election results looks like a sea of red with a few blue islands.But maps and clichés can be misleading. The southeastern corner of the state, with Philadelphia and its surrounding “collar counties,” is far more populous than Pittsburgh or any of the other blue spots. It’s where statewide elections are won and lost.That geography explains why Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate, and allied groups are spending millions of dollars in the Philadelphia media market to attack Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate.And it helps explain why, in mid-September, Republicans — to the puzzlement of some Democrats — largely stopped running ads hammering Fetterman on inflation and increasingly accused him of being soft on crime.One ad sponsored by the Senate Leadership Fund, a group close to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, raps Fetterman as “dangerously liberal on crime” for his votes in favor of clemency while he served on a statewide parole board. Another accuses him of “releasing felony murderers.” In perhaps the most over-the-top ad, underwritten by the Trump-linked group MAGA Inc., a narrator says, “John Fetterman wants ruthless killers, muggers and rapists back on our streets, and he wants them back now.”Altogether, since Labor Day, Republicans have spent at least $5 million on television ads portraying Fetterman as a far-left radical who wants to let criminals out of jail, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking company.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With elections next month, a Times/Siena poll shows that independents, especially women, are swinging toward the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights as voters worry about the economy.Questioning 2020: Hundreds of Republicans on the ballot this November have cast doubt on the 2020 election, a Times analysis found. Many of these candidates are favored to win their races.Georgia Senate Race: The contest, which could determine whether Democrats keep control of the Senate, has become increasingly focused on the private life and alleged hypocrisy of Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee.Jill Biden: The first lady, who has become a lifeline for Democratic candidates trying to draw attention and money in the midterms, is the most popular surrogate in the Biden administration.Fetterman angrily disputes those accusations. But the amount of money pouring in and the ads’ focus on Philadelphia voters suggest that the G.O.P. groups behind them believe they’re working.Why the Philly suburbs matterConsider the difference between Hillary Clinton’s performance in Pennsylvania in 2016, when she lost the state to Donald Trump by more than 44,000 votes, and Joe Biden’s showing there four years later, when he beat Trump by more than 81,000 votes.The main reason Biden did so much better: He ran up huge margins in Philadelphia and its inner-ring suburbs in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties, where Trump’s political brand was toxic. Even when you include Berks County, a Republican exurban stronghold, Biden gained nearly 131,000 votes over Clinton’s 2016 results. That number is not far off the total ground — 124,000 votes — that he made up against Trump across the state.But that was a presidential election, with record-shattering turnout and Trump on the ballot. Consider instead the 2016 Senate race, in which Patrick J. Toomey, the Republican, defeated Katie McGinty, the Democrat, by about 87,000 votes. Toomey won Bucks and Chester Counties and kept Delaware and Montgomery Counties relatively close.“Absolutely, crime is hurting Fetterman,” said Josh Novotney, a former Toomey chief of staff who is now a partner at SBL Strategies, a lobbying firm based in Philadelphia.The big question in this year’s Senate race, then, is this: Can Fetterman, a tattooed and hoodie-wearing Bernie Sanders supporter from southwestern Pennsylvania, run up the score in and around Philadelphia as Biden did? And to do that, can he defuse the G.O.P.’s attacks over his crime record?The crime connectionIf there’s one thing we know about suburban voters, it’s that crime is important to them. Along with schools and taxes, it’s often an important reason they don’t live within city boundaries. And if you’ve ever watched the local television news, which millions of older voters still do, you know that crime often leads the broadcast.Polls are one way to measure whether Oz’s attacks are landing. But another is to watch the behavior of suburban politicians on the crime issue. And here, the signs are worrying for Fetterman.In mid-September, the Pennsylvania Statehouse voted to hold Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney of Philadelphia, in contempt of the legislative body during an impeachment inquiry that has riveted the state’s political class. Republicans blame Krasner for the rise in violent crime in the city, and, fairly or unfairly, many Democrats seem to agree.Last month, the Pennsylvania Statehouse voted to hold Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney of Philadelphia, in contempt. Republicans blame Krasner for a rise in violent crime.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesOf the 58 lawmakers who represent state districts in the collar counties, 37 voted to impeach Krasner on Sept. 13. Twenty-seven of those were Democrats. Even in Philadelphia, where Krasner was re-elected by roughly 40 percentage points last year, nine representatives voted for impeachment.Austin Davis, who is running on Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s ticket to replace Fetterman as lieutenant governor, voted for contempt, too. In 2018, Davis was elected to represent McKeesport in the Statehouse with nearly three-quarters of the vote.The contempt vote was a telling sign that these politicians — who we must assume are focused on their own political survival — view the crime issue as a dangerous one for them politically.After the vote, Krasner held a news conference at which he criticized the Democrats who voted against him as “uninformed.” Others, he said in a revealing comment, were driven by “what they perceive to be the short-term political consequences.”“Certainly, Krasner is the poster child that the G.O.P. uses,” said Larry Ceisler, a Democratic media consultant based in Philadelphia. But he expressed some uncertainty that crime was the main factor driving the poll numbers closer together, as opposed to Fetterman’s inability to campaign as vigorously as he ordinarily might and the natural contours of a marquee Senate race.“Is crime an issue? Yeah,” Ceisler said. But he noted that Fetterman had never been subject to a barrage of negative ads in previous races and that the question for him over the last few weeks of the campaign was: “Does he have a glass jaw or not?”What to readThe Times is offering live coverage of two debates tonight at 7. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who is seeking a second term, is facing off against Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent. In Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, a Republican, are holding a forum for the state’s marquee Senate race.Right-wing activists, driven by conspiracy theories about voter fraud, are inserting themselves in the election process, which has put officials on alert for disruptions and a wave of misinformation, Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti report.In Oregon’s wild governor’s race, an independent candidate is siphoning Democratic votes and Phil Knight, the billionaire Nike co-founder, is pouring in money. Mike Baker and Reid J. Epstein tell us how this may give an anti-abortion Republican a path to victory.A new breed of veterans is running for the House on the far right. Jonathan Weisman writes about the trend, which challenges assumptions that adding veterans to Congress fosters bipartisanship and cooperation.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      NYT/Siena Poll Is Latest to Show Republican Gains

      by

      Is four points the real margin nationally? That’s a good question.The path to keeping the House and the Senate appears to be getting tougher for Democrats, according to the most recent polling. Campaign signs for the Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan in Columbus on Friday.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesWe have the result of our third New York Times/Siena College national survey of the midterm cycle to go with your coffee this morning: 49 percent of voters say they back the Republican congressional candidate in their district, compared with 45 percent backing the Democratic one.It’s a modest but notable swing from last month, when Democrats led by one percentage point among likely voters. Since then, the warning signs for Democrats have begun to add up, including Republican polling gains in key Senate races like those in Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and surprising Republican strength in districts in Rhode Island and Oregon where Democrats would normally be safe.Up to this point, Democrats have maintained a narrow lead in polls asking whether voters prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress, but there have been warning signs for the party here as well. Republicans have led in several high-quality polls, like ABC/Washington Post, CBS/YouGov and Monmouth University. Today, the Times/Siena survey adds a fourth such poll to the pile.The evidence for a shift toward Republicans appears to be underpinned by a change in the national political environment. Gas prices went up again. The stock market is down. A variety of data suggests that the electorate’s attention is shifting back to issues where Republicans are on stronger ground in public opinion, like the economy, inflation, crime and immigration, and away from the summer’s focus on democracy, gun violence and abortion, where Democrats have an edge.In other words, the conditions that helped Democrats gain over the summer no longer seem to be in place.Is four points the real margin? (Wonkiness 4/10)Our poll may show Republicans ahead, 49-45, and yet it may not be accurate to say they lead by four points. In fact, they actually lead by three points.How is this possible? Rounding. By convention, pollsters round the results to the nearest whole number. In this poll, the exact unrounded figures are 48.51 (rounding to 49) to 45.47 (rounding to 45). That’s a three-point lead.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.This is not at all uncommon. In 2020 polling, about one-third of our reported margins, based on the difference between two rounded vote shares of the candidates, were different from what our reported margin would have been if we had rounded once on the difference between exact figures.It’s not even the only example in today’s poll. Our result among registered voters is reported as a 46-46 percent tie, but Republicans lead, 46.2 to 45.6. If we reported it as a rounded margin, this might count as a one-point Republican lead.The two rounding errors add up to an even larger disparity between the reported and actual result when it comes to the difference between likely and registered voters. The rounded result makes it seem to be a four-point gap. In reality, the difference is a 2.5-point gap.This is a polling custom that has always left me a little cold. The case for rounding is straightforward: Reporting results to the decimal point conveys a false sense of precision. After a decade of high-profile polling misfires, “precision” is most certainly not the sense pollsters want to try to convey right now. And in this case, reporting to the one-thousandth of a point would obviously be ridiculous. We didn’t even contact a thousand people; how could we offer a result to the one-thousandth?But there’s a trade-off. Characterizing this poll as a four-point Republican lead doesn’t merely offer a false sense of precision — it’s just false. That’s not something I can gloss over.Sometimes, the difference is enough to affect the way people interpret the poll. We’ve reported one party in the “lead” by one percentage point when, in fact, the figures are essentially even. These differences don’t actually mean much, of course, but no one — not even those of us well versed in statistics and survey methodology — can escape perceiving a difference between R+1 and Even.Hopefully, the differences between the rounded and exact results can be another reminder that polling is inexact. The results are fuzzy, and the margin of error understates the actual degree of uncertainty anyway. If we had called another 100 people, or did another round of callbacks, the results would almost certainly have been at least somewhat different, and the same if we had called another 100 more. There isn’t a great way out of this problem. We can refrain from characterizing a 49-45 lead as a four-point lead, as the main Times article on this poll does today. But even this requires us to notice when the rounded and actual margins differ, which is not easy when our crosstabs and other products use rounded numbers. When we do notice a difference worth your attention, we’ll try to flag it here and elsewhere.What’s different about our polls this year?A few weeks ago, I noted that most pollsters this cycle weren’t making big methodological changes. Instead, they’re doing something more like tightening the screws on an old boat after a rough storm in 2020, rather than going out and buying a new boat.But I didn’t actually mention what screws we’ve tightened this cycle. Here’s a quick summary:We’re weighting on method of voting in 2020 — whether people voted by mail, early or absentee. It’s an important predictor of vote choice, even after considering the partisanship of a registrant. Registered Republicans who voted on Election Day, for instance, were more likely to back Donald J. Trump than those who voted by mail. Weighting on this in 2020 wouldn’t have made a major difference, but it would have brought some of our polls about half a point or so closer to the final result.We now use additional information about the attitudes of respondents in determining whether they’re likely to vote, including whether respondents are undecided; whether their views about the president align with their party; whether they like the candidate they intend to vote for; whether they back the party out of power in a midterm; and so on, all based on previous Times/Siena polls. At the same time, we now give even more weight to a respondent’s track record of voting than we did in the past.We’re changing how we characterize people who attended trade or vocational school but did not receive a college degree (Wonkiness rating: 6.5/10). The effect is a slight increase in the weight given to Republican-leaning voters without any post-high-school training, and a decrease in the weight given to the somewhat fewer Republican voters who attended some college or received an associate degree.This is a little complicated. Basically, pollsters need to decide whether people who went to technical or vocational school count as “high school graduates” or “some college” when they’re adjusting their surveys to make sure they have the right number of voters by educational group. They have to choose, because the Census Bureau doesn’t count a trade or vocational school as a level of educational attainment. In the view of the Census Bureau, that puts them in the category of high school graduates. The Times/Siena poll (and many other pollsters) previously counted them the same way.But this choice isn’t necessarily straightforward. Whether it’s the right choice in practice depends on whether census interviewers and respondents handle this question the way the census would like. If you completed a professional technical program at, say, Renton Technical College, there’s a chance you selected one of the various “some college” options on the census American Community Survey or the Current Population Survey.I’d like to run an experiment on this at some point, but for the moment we’re moving respondents like these into the “some college” category. By doing so, we modestly increase the weight we give to those categorized as high school graduates (who are pretty Republican), and decrease the weight on the other group (who still lean Republican but somewhat less so). Unfortunately, had we done this, it would have improved our result by only about a quarter of a point in 2020 — despite the number of words I just dedicated to the topic.On a totally different topic, we now consider the source of cellphones in determining whom we’ll call (Wonkiness rating: 8/10). This is the last point in this newsletter, so you can go on with the rest of your day if your eyes are glazing over, but I think it might be the most interesting to a subset of you, especially those who conduct polls.As I’ve mentioned before, we get the telephone numbers for our poll off a list of registered voters called a voter file. The telephone numbers on the voter file can have two different sources: those provided by the registrant on their voter registration form (which then wind up on the file), and those matched by L2 (our voter file vendor) from an outside source.The voter-provided cellphone numbers are the likeliest to yield a completed interview. They almost always lead to the person we’re looking for (we complete interviews only with the people named on the file). And the people contacted are a little more likely to cooperate, too. But the voter-provided cellphone numbers are almost exclusively from people who registered over the last 10 years (after all, if you registered 20 years ago, you probably didn’t have a cellphone number). As a result, they’re relatively, young, liberal, less likely to be married, less likely to own a home, and so on.The externally matched cellphone numbers are less likely to yield a completed interview. They’re less likely to belong to the people we try to reach; these people may also be less likely to take the survey, even when we’re reaching the right ones. They’re somewhat more representative of the population as a whole because anyone, regardless of when they registered, could plausibly have one of these numbers.Why does this matter? When we treated all cellphone numbers the same, we were systematically reaching fewer people who were older or married or homeowners — people more likely to have registered long ago. We called these groups in the right proportion, but we would wind up with fewer completed interviews from groups like this with more externally matched numbers.Now, we’re accounting for whether different demographic groups — like new or previously registered voters — have more self-reported phone numbers or externally matched phone numbers. As a result, we’ll dial more people from the groups with relatively high numbers of externally matched numbers.It’s hard to know how our 2020 polls would have been different if we had used this year’s approach. After all, we would have reached a different set of respondents. Most of the analyses I’ve conducted suggest that the respondents with self-reported or externally matched numbers aren’t very different politically, controlling for the characteristics we’re using in weighting. I’d note, though, that this would have been a real problem if we hadn’t been weighting on homeownership or marital status. Most pollsters using voter file data aren’t doing so; it might be worth looking at. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Politicians Have Always Paid Lip Service to Families. This Year Was Just a New Low.

      by

      Politicians and political organizations offering empty, hand-waving support for family values while doing relatively little to actually deliver tangible support to families is a political cliché. But just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by this sort of hypocrisy, I saw that FRC Action PAC (an affiliate of FRC Action, itself an affiliate of the Family Research Council) — an organization that says it “gives our members the ability to support deserving, pro-family statesmen” — endorsed Herschel Walker for Senate.If you missed it somehow, earlier this month, a woman reported to be the mother of one of Walker’s children said he’s hardly been a part of the child’s life, paid for her to have one abortion and urged her to get a second. In June, it was reported that Walker fathered two children he had not previously spoken about publicly. Walker’s adult son Christian recently tweeted, “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”On his campaign website, Walker says he’s pro-family but doesn’t specifically cite any parent-friendly policies, like paid family leave, that he might champion. His family-friendly bona fides, apparently, are simply his professed “personal faith” and “pro-life” convictions.Yet he claims to “put Georgia families first.”This kind of contradiction can be jarring. It can make the 1992 contretemps between Vice President Dan Quayle and the character Murphy Brown seem almost quaint. Bottom line: This sort of thing isn’t new in American political history. For example, I was spelunking through The Times archives and found this short article from 1915: “KEEP ON BEING A MOTHER”: This Is Roosevelt’s Advice to Parent of 7 Little Ones, Facing Hunger.” And while I wouldn’t equate Walker with Theodore Roosevelt (win or lose in November, Walker’s image won’t be added to Mount Rushmore anytime soon), a thread of hollow family values talk connects them.According to that article, a Mrs. McHonney, whose husband had lost his job and had no means to support their large brood, wrote to Roosevelt, asking:Do you advocate raising children for country charges, the poor house, or what? I am a mother of seven children and feel that I have a right to ask. Perhaps you have never had the experience of raising seven children on $80 a month and then suddenly losing the position and have your house threatened with foreclosure.Roosevelt answered:We are, any of us, liable to run into hard luck, but that does not by any manner of means lessen our duties to ourselves and to society. I am sorry for Mrs. McHonney, who seems to be having a hard time through no fault of her own, or of her husband. It seems to me that the only answer to her question is to tell her to keep right on being a mother, the best, highest, most worthwhile job on earth, no matter what the temporary conditions that surround it may be.Unfortunately, you can’t feed a family with the sanctity of motherhood, which was a hobby horse of Roosevelt’s — specifically, the sanctity of white motherhood. In his 1905 remarks to the Mothers’ Congress, Roosevelt described the desire to have only two children as “race suicide” and said that if any man or woman chose not to have children, “such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle.”If there’s doubt about what “race” meant in that context, the author Christopher Klein notes that more generally, “Roosevelt believed fundamentally that American greatness came from its rule by racially superior white men of European descent.” According to the historian Thomas Dyer, when Roosevelt left office, he counted a low fertility rate among this group as one of the “very big problems” the incoming president William Howard Taft would need to recognize. According to Dyer in his 1980 book, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race”:The fervor with which Roosevelt hawked the virtues of increased fertility for the better classes increased after he left the presidency. To the familiar calls for large families and the ceaseless invocations of women’s racial duties he now added diatribes against birth control, family planning and the “science” of eugenics.So Roosevelt discouraged family planning, but even in his post-presidential fervor he seemingly had no practical solutions for Mrs. McHonney — though perhaps she didn’t fit his definition of the type of person he hoped would go forth and multiply.As with the incongruities of today’s politics, more than one person called out Roosevelt’s thinking — including his own children. His daughter Alice, who would have only one child, through an affair with Senator William Borah of Idaho, “rebelled against the humiliation of her father’s attitude toward, as she put it, ‘large families, the purity of womanhood and the sanctity of marriage,’” according to the biography “Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker” by Stacy Cordery. Alice and three friends secretly founded a tongue-in-cheek “race suicide club,” Cordery writes, “so named because of T.R.’s speech condemning white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women who were derelict in their primary duty of producing sufficient numbers of children to keep America strong.”One woman gave a scathing riposte to Roosevelt’s callous advice to Mrs. McHonney, writing in an open letter: “Mr. Roosevelt’s teachings are rather horrible. Let us increase and multiply blindly until the country is overrun with a half-nourished, ignorant population, and then joyously take the slightest excuse to turn some of our surplus citizens into cannon’s meat.”While the historical details are fascinating — if revolting — I wish we didn’t have to keep repeating this tiresome cycle. In general, I try to remain hopeful about forward progress for America’s families, and no doubt things have improved since Teddy’s day. But sometimes the dissonance between “family values” and valuing families is so extreme — as many on the political right line up behind Walker despite report after report of abhorrent behavior toward his own family — that it’s hard to remain optimistic.There’s a line from Ann Crittenden’s book “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued” that I quote in my forthcoming book, and which applies here: “All of the lip service to motherhood still floats in the air, as insubstantial as clouds of angel dust.”Mrs. McHonney, they’re still blowing smoke in your face.Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.My 4-year-old’s bedtime involved lots of cajoling and repeating myself: “Lay down, please” when she would rather be doing anything else. I eventually started voicing her round doughnut pillow to talk to her. “Waaaah! I’m so saaaad! I need a nice fuzzy head to lay on me!” Interested, she scooted right over and laid down. “Aaaah! A nice heavy head with lots of brains!” And the bonus is I only need to say it once.— Eric Schares, Ames, IowaIf you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page. Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Boys and Girls Off the Bus. Way Off.

      by

      Campaign reporting has changed enormously since the days of Theodore White, Timothy Crouse and Richard Ben Cramer. Today, a chat with two Times reporters who live in the brave new world of American politics.Campaign reporting used to be pretty straightforward: You hopped on the bus and followed candidates around as they spoke at rubber-chicken dinners, Rotary Clubs and union halls, or wormed your way into posh homes to eavesdrop on the pitches they made behind closed doors.That was the old days.Now, the most influential player in a Senate or House race might not be the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, but a MAGA influencer or a TikTok cooking star who dabbles in politics.For better or worse, the smoke-filled rooms where party bosses once decided who won and lost no longer rule. A chat on a platform like Telegram or a sit-down on a seemingly obscure podcast can move more votes than an interview with a local Walter Cronkite on the 11 o’clock news.So, with Election Day now less than a month away, I chatted with two reporters at The New York Times who are steeped in this brave new world of political power — tracking fringe movements and conspiracy theorists, meeting with election deniers and hearing from new breeds of political activists who don’t play by the old rules.Alexandra Berzon focuses on efforts to undermine the security and integrity of the American election system; Ken Bensinger covers the right-wing media outlets and social-media stars that have become central to U.S. politics in the digital age.Here is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Ali, you worked with former colleagues last year on groundbreaking reporting that showed how Steve Bannon and his calls for a “precinct strategy” are shaping the midterms. What are you seeing and hearing now?Alexandra: The false idea that our election system is fundamentally broken — spurred by debunked conspiracy theories from Donald Trump and his allies about the 2020 election — has proved incredibly sticky. You see it in polling of the Republican base, of course, but also in the scores of groups that operate under the moniker of “election integrity,” which have proliferated since 2020 all over the country and have helped keep this notion alive and energized a base of activists who are not just active online but are holding frequent gatherings.It’s really an extension or morphing of the Tea Party movement, but now focused on the actual administration of elections as a core issue — in fact the precinct strategy that you mentioned was an effort for these activists to take over local county Republican groups, which gives them some amount of involvement in the elections process. Nick Corasaniti and I wrote a brief summary yesterday of some of what has happened on this front since Jan. 6, 2021.And Ken, your story on chatter about “civil war” was pretty eye-opening. What did you find the most disturbing as you delved into why the notion that the U.S. could be headed for political violence is gaining so much traction?Ken: Academics and others who track extremism have written extensively over the past couple of years about how a growing slice of the public may be receptive to, or even welcome, political violence. What was once really a fringe sentiment among only the most radicalized of Americans has moved closer to the political mainstream.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Research done out of the University of Chicago now indicates that as many as 20 million Americans approve of violence for political ends. While nobody thinks there are millions of folks with assault rifles locked, loaded and ready for battle, it still is a very troubling finding. And it helps explain why politicians seem so much more comfortable with rhetoric about a civil war, or what some politicians call a “national divorce” in which red and blue states are somehow violently separated.Just a few weeks ago, Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser for Trump, claimed in a speech that governors had the power to declare war and “probably will” in the near future. In fact, they cannot do that. The more salient point is this: Flynn was making this speech at a fund-raising event for Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, and the audience — people who paid a minimum of $300 a plate to be there — was eating it up.What are election officials worrying about most right now?Alexandra: The concern I hear about most from election officials (aside from the day-to-day concerns of election administration such as finding venues for polling places and recruiting enough poll workers) is about the impact of misinformation and disinformation. There’s long been a sense that if you bring skeptical people into the process and have them working elections or monitoring them, a lot of their concerns and anxieties will be alleviated.Elections officials and experts are hoping this will be the case now with people who are steeped in election conspiracy theories getting involved in being poll workers and poll watchers. And the officials are certainly expressing confidence that they can run safe and secure elections. But there is also serious anxiety now about these people serving as vigilantes and injecting more uncertainty into the process.Ken, I remember you saying once that you keep your messages open on Twitter as a kind of listening post. What does your direct-message inbox look like on an average week, and are you seeing any trends lately?Ken: I love my fans! As a rule, I like to keep my DMs open because I think it’s important to hear what people have to say, even if it’s not exactly polite. Plus, there are often great story tips buried there between the cryptocurrency spam and scams.Lately, however, I’ve noticed a marked increase in conspiracy-minded messages. A number of people routinely reach out to show me more “proof” that President Biden is dead, or that he has been secretly replaced by a Chinese operative, or that — and I swear I’m not making this up — he’s actually a “lizard person” wearing a cutting-edge silicone mask designed by the C.I.A. You can tell, they say, by the little rubberized tabs visible around the president’s ears.Among a steady stream of Jeffrey Epstein theories and memes plucked straight from 4Chan, I’ve also noticed lately a lot of stuff claiming the Democratic Party is this extremely hawkish institution that wants to trigger global thermonuclear war and is using the conflict in Ukraine as a pathway to do that. It’s an interesting reversal, since for decades it was the Republican Party that was accused of being full of warmongers. I suppose all political trends eventually go full circle.What is happening in American politics that you think deserves more attention?Ken: With each passing day, there seems to be more and more misinformation and disinformation being served up to a public that seems increasingly receptive to it.I’m seeing lots of politicians amplifying this trend in two ways.One is by repeating untruths spread on the internet without attempting to verify them, and becoming some of the primary spreaders of bad info by virtue of their huge followings and reach.The other way is by relentlessly attacking and, lately, ignoring what they call the mainstream media and by telling their followers to do their own research. And while we’ve seen politicians displaying hostility to the press for some time, a new trend seems to be completely ignoring most journalists in favor of communicating directly with voters through social media or a select group of reporters judged to be sympathetic.Candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida rarely, if ever, talk to most reporters, while others, such as Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, appear to have no communications apparatus at all, leaving phone calls, emails and text messages perpetually unanswered.Some candidates don’t campaign in traditional ways anymore, shunning public appearances for carefully controlled interviews on narrowly targeted podcasts and radio shows, and using messages sent via influential surrogates on Twitter, Facebook and, in particular, Telegram.The result, it appears, is that an expanding portion of the public never hears anything remotely close to a diversity of information, while misinformation served up in bad faith morphs into accepted and undeniable fact for untold numbers of people. As a journalist, confronting that is difficult: It feels as if even the most thorough fact-checking efforts are never so much as seen by half the country.Republican candidates who questioned the 2020 election.The New York TimesWhat to read about democracyMore than 370 Republicans on the November ballot have cast doubt on the 2020 election, a Times investigation led by Karen Yourish found. Most are still doing it. Many will win.A memo from Georgia’s elections director gave the false impression that third parties or partisan actors could challenge voters’ eligibility on the spot, much to the concern of the Black community. On Thursday, he clarified that is not the law.Colorado’s secretary of state owned up to a clerical error that led to postcards being sent to noncitizens with instructions on how to register to vote. But the manipulation of quotation marks around the word “accidentally” by election deniers has fueled conspiracy theories.A Republican congressional candidate in Maine is backtracking from claims he made that litter boxes were being placed in school bathrooms for students dressing up as cats, a widely debunked myth. The candidate, Ed Thelander, has also peddled election falsehoods. NBC News has more on the origins of the litter-box myth.viewfinderA supporter saluting Donald Trump last Sunday at a rally in Mesa, Ariz.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA rally saluteAfter baking in the unrelenting Arizona sun for at least 10 hours, a rally official gestured to us weary and sunburned pool photographers. We peered over the red, white and blue banner separating us from the audience as the sun set behind Donald Trump’s at his rally last Sunday in Mesa, Ariz., to see a lone, elderly veteran saluting the former president.To me, the salute embodies the fierce dedication of Trump’s supporters. To attend a Trump rally, especially to arrive early enough to get a good seat, requires a serious amount of perseverance through hours of standing in line and waiting for his eventual arrival.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats Worry Katie Hobbs Is Stumbling in Arizona’s Governor Race

      by

      Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, has often been overshadowed by her Republican opponent, Kari Lake, in one of the country’s closest and most important contests.It’s angst season on the left — and perhaps nowhere more so than in Arizona, which appears determined to retain its crown as the most politically volatile state in America.Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races of the 2022 campaign.Lake, a telegenic former television anchor who rose to prominence as she pantomimed Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, has taken a hard line against abortion and routinely uses strident language on the stump. The Atlantic recently called her “Trumpism’s leading lady.” She has largely overshadowed Hobbs, whose more subdued personality has driven far fewer headlines.The immediate object of Democratic hand-wringing this week is a decision by Hobbs, who has served as Arizona’s secretary of state since 2019, to decline to debate Lake. Instead, Hobbs arranged a one-on-one interview with a local PBS affiliate, a move that prompted the Citizens Clean Elections Commission, a group established by a ballot initiative in 1998, to cancel its planned Q. and A. with Lake.Thomas Collins, executive director of the commission, said in an interview that the Hobbs campaign had never seriously negotiated over the format of a debate — and that, in any case, the organization was neither willing nor able to accommodate what officials there viewed as an “ultimatum” from the secretary of state’s team about policing the “content” of the event.He shared an exchange of letters and emails between the commission and Nicole DeMont, Hobbs’s campaign manager, who wrote in an email that Hobbs was “willing and eager to participate in a town-hall-style event” but would not join a debate that would “would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions and childish name-calling.”On Wednesday, Lake repeated her challenge to debate Hobbs and accused Arizona PBS, which did not respond to a request for comment, of cutting “a back-room deal with that coward to give her airtime that she does not deserve.”Days earlier, Lake tried to ambush Hobbs during a town hall event at which the candidates made separate appearances onstage — a stunt that was clearly intended to embarrass the Democrat.Hobbs has said she was simply reacting to the way Lake conducted herself during a Republican primary debate in June, in which she dodged questions and repeated falsehoods about what happened in 2020. “I have no desire to be a part of the spectacle that she’s looking to create, because that doesn’t do any service to the voters,” Hobbs said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”Among those second-guessing Hobbs’s decision this week was Sandra Kennedy, a co-chairwoman of President Biden’s 2020 campaign in Arizona. “If I were the candidate for governor, I would debate, and I would want the people of Arizona to know what my platform is,” Kennedy told NBC News.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.Laurie Roberts, a liberal columnist for The Arizona Republic, published a scathing column on Hobbs this week in which she wrote that the Democratic nominee’s refusal to debate Lake “represents a new level of political malpractice.”And David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, criticized Hobbs on his podcast for what he said was a “mistake” in avoiding debates with Lake. He added, “I think it’s a recognition that Kari Lake is a formidable media personality.”Democrats have also noted that when Hobbs appeared on “Face the Nation” — directly after Lake gave an interview to Major Garrett of CBS News — she spent much of the eight-minute interview on the defensive rather than prosecuting a political argument against her opponent. Democrats called it a missed opportunity to highlight’s Lake’s slippery answers about the 2020 election.One reason for the fraying nerves among Democrats is their widely shared view that the stakes of the governor’s race in Arizona are existential for the party. Democrats fear that Lake, if elected, would conspire to tilt the state back into the Republican column during the 2024 presidential election and help usher Trump back into power. Her charisma and on-camera skills make her uniquely dangerous, they say.Hobbs allies push backPrivately, while Democrats acknowledge that anxiety about the governor’s race is running high, they insist that Hobbs is running about as well as any Democrat could.They note that the contest is essentially tied in polls even though Arizona is a purple state with a deep reservoir of conservative voting habits. The current Republican governor, Doug Ducey, won re-election by more than 14 percentage points in 2018. (Ducey is stepping down because of term limits.) And they say that Hobbs, unlike Lake, is aiming her pitch primarily at swing voters rather than at her party’s base.Lake has pressured Hobbs to participate in a debate.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesAccording to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index, which measures the past performance of states and congressional districts across the country, Republicans have a built-in advantage in Arizona of two percentage points.Some Democrats say Hobbs has failed to campaign vigorously enough, in contrast to the seemingly omnipresent Lake. Allies of Hobbs defend her by noting that she has been bopping around the state, but in something of an acknowledgment that she could do more, they say she is planning a third statewide tour as Arizona’s scorching heat dissipates this fall.“Katie Hobbs has been running an incredibly strong campaign, and the fact that this race is so competitive speaks to that,” said Christina Amestoy, a communications aide at the Democratic Governors Association, who dismissed the concerns as “angst from the chattering class.”Amestoy noted that Hobbs was drawing support from independents and Republicans as well as from partisan Democrats — a recognition, she said, that voters want “substance” over “conspiracy theories.”With the help of the governors group, which has transferred $7 million to the Arizona Democratic Party, Hobbs has spent more than $10 million on television ads since Labor Day. She has leaned heavily on two themes: her support for law enforcement, and a portrayal of Lake as an extremist on abortion.Several Hobbs ads show Chris Nanos, the grizzled sheriff of Pima County, in uniform. Nanos warns in one spot that Arizona law enforcement officers could be required to arrest doctors and nurses who perform abortions if Lake becomes governor. He says such a move would divert resources from fighting crime and illegal immigration.Other ads introducing Hobbs to voters have depicted her as a down-to-earth former social worker who drove for Uber as a state lawmaker to help make ends meet, an implied contrast to Lake, whose career as a newscaster made her moderately wealthy.The state of playDemocrats are counting on appealing to crossover voters in the suburbs, as they did when Biden won the state in 2020. They have highlighted Lake’s comments ripping Republicans who have criticized her as “a cavalcade of losers” and depicted her attempts to distance herself from previous hard-line remarks on abortion as duplicitous.Hobbs might benefit, too, from the strength of Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat who is polling comfortably ahead of Blake Masters, the Republican challenger in Arizona’s Senate race.Democrats in Arizona are running a coordinated statewide campaign that allows them, in theory, to reap economies of scale, target their spending and avoid duplicative efforts on traditional campaign activities like door-knocking and turnout operations.In contrast, Republicans in the state are in the midst of a power struggle between the fading establishment wing of the G.O.P., led by Ducey, and the emerging Trump-backed wing, spearheaded by Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominee for secretary of state.In one small illustration of the infighting on the right, the Republican Governors Association has begun funneling its advertising money through the Yuma County Republican Party rather than the official state party, an unusual arrangement that speaks to the level of mutual mistrust between national Republican leaders and Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the state Republican Party.That has given Democrats slightly more bang for their advertising dollar, because Republicans were paying higher rates before they made the shift to the Yuma County Republican Party.Republicans, projecting increased confidence in Lake’s eventual victory, reveled in the Democratic shirt-rending over Hobbs — a welcome diversion, perhaps, from their own internal squabbles.“In a state where problems with illegal immigration and the economy are top of mind, Democrats were always going to be at a disadvantage because voters don’t believe their party can adequately fix the issues,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the R.G.A. “What Democrats couldn’t plan for was Katie Hobbs’s self-immolation in front of a national audience.”What to readThe House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol voted on Thursday to issue a subpoena to former President Trump, a move that will set off a fierce legal battle. Catch up with our live coverage of the day’s dramatic proceedings here.In state after state, Republicans are paying double, triple, quadruple and sometimes even 10 times more than Democrats are for television ads on the exact same programs, Shane Goldmacher reports.Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump loyalist, has long antagonized Mitt Romney, the state’s other Republican senator. But now, as Lee finds himself in a surprisingly close race for re-election against Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, he’s pleading for Romney’s support. Jonathan Weisman explains.Michael Bender examines a peculiar phenomenon: how Republican candidates talk far more glowingly about Trump on rally stages than they do in televised debates.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      In the House, These National Security Democrats Face Political Peril

      by

      A group of lawmakers who have pushed centrist foreign policy goals, many of them elected in the blue wave of 2018, are confronting troublesome re-election bids.They played a decisive role in kicking off Donald Trump’s first impeachment. They’ve pushed hard for centrist foreign policy goals, working with Republicans whenever the stars aligned. And they’ve been persistent critics of their own team, taking calculated potshots at President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they try to cast themselves as pillars of political independence.Now, with the midterm elections less than a month away, as many as half a dozen of the moderate national security Democrats in the House are in peril, and maybe more.Many of them were elected amid the anti-Trump blue wave of 2018, in districts that Democrats might otherwise have struggled to win.Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former C.I.A. analyst who is fluent in Arabic and Swahili, has established herself as one of the top intelligence experts on Capitol Hill. Republicans have identified Slotkin as a top target this year.Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia still speaks in the argot of a former Navy commander and decorates her House office with photographs of the submarines and cruisers that populate the country’s largest naval base, in nearby Norfolk. During last year’s race for governor of Virginia, the winner, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, would have won Luria’s district by double digits. Her opponent, State Senator Jen Kiggans, is another Navy veteran and could easily unseat her.Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a retired Marine, is clinging to the most pro-Trump district held by a Democrat anywhere in the country. Golden squeaked into office in part because his Republican opponent, Bruce Poliquin, misplayed the state’s ranked-choice voting system, a mistake Poliquin seems to be rectifying during this year’s rematch.Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia is a former C.I.A. officer who has supplied some of the most memorable lines criticizing her party’s perceived leftward lurch. Although Spanberger’s seat in suburban Northern Virginia is now considered safer after Virginia’s redistricting cycle, her team says it is taking no chances.And Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, a puckish former State Department official and human rights expert, has nudged the Biden administration to welcome more Afghan refugees, provide more help to Ukraine and seize the yachts of Russian oligarchs. Malinowski, whose Trump-leaning district grew slightly redder after New Jersey redid its maps, faces a stiff challenge from Thomas Kean Jr., who nearly defeated him in 2020.Together, they represent a fading tradition: the quaint notion that politics stops at the water’s edge. And all of them are vulnerable to being washed out in a red tide this fall. Their potential ousters, as well as a number of key retirements, threaten to hollow out decades of national experience in Congress at a time of great turmoil abroad.“They bring a lot of expertise to the table, which is really useful to have in-house on oversight committees rather than having to rely on the agencies all the time,” said Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona who fought in the Iraq war.Gallego, a member of the Armed Services Committee, added that experience working for the military or the C.I.A. exposed Democratic politicians to Americans from an array of working-class and rural backgrounds — which, he said, gave them valuable insights into the politics of those types of communities.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.These Democrats have also balanced out what some like-minded experts said was a risk that, in reaction to Trump’s foreign policy, the party might have drifted toward politically self-destructive isolationism at a time when voters were worried by the president’s seeming solicitousness toward authoritarian leaders in China, Russia and North Korea.“What they did is they served as ballast within the Democratic Party when there were some pretty loud voices that were trying to pull the Democrats off the cliff and into oblivion,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.Katulis pointed to a failed attempt by progressives last year to strip funding for Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system, a move that the national security Democrats and pro-Israel groups quashed.Win or lose, change is on the horizon for DemocratsThree senior Democrats on the Armed Services Committee are also retiring: Jim Cooper of Tennessee, Jim Langevin of Rhode Island and Jackie Speier of California. So no matter what happens in November, decades of experience and interest in foreign policy on the left will be leaving Congress.And though other national security-minded Democrats, like Representatives Andy Kim and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, have been drawn into safer districts, a wave election for Republicans could threaten some of those seats, too.A Republican takeover of the House, moreover, would put the party in charge of important oversight committees, such as the intelligence panel, a platform Democrats used under Representative Adam Schiff of California to carry out investigations of the Trump administration. Those inquiries made news, damaged the president politically and ultimately helped lead to his first impeachment.If Republicans gain control of the House, even Democrats who survive the election will find themselves relatively powerless to help steer the country’s foreign policy, forced to play defense as their opponents control the agenda on the House floor and within each committee.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has already vowed to begin investigations of the Biden administration in retaliation for what Democrats did during the Trump years.That’s no idle threat.Under President Barack Obama, Republicans seized on the administration’s handling of the 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, to damage the future political prospects of two senior Democratic leaders: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who went on to run for president in 2016, and Susan Rice, who served as United Nations ambassador and national security adviser. Rice’s appearances on Sunday talk shows to discuss the Benghazi attack hobbled her chances of succeeding Clinton and may have helped scuttle her opportunity to become Biden’s running mate in 2020.Highly politicized oversight of foreign policy has been known to jump-start political careers, too.One of the ringleaders of the Benghazi oversight push, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, issued a report that went beyond the criticisms of his fellow Republicans toward the Obama administration. His prominence on the issue caught the eye of Trump, who named him C.I.A. director and later secretary of state. Pompeo, a vocal critic of Biden’s foreign policy, is now widely understood to be considering a presidential bid in 2024.What to readIn races across the nation, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck write, Republican candidates are “waffling on their abortion positions, denying past behavior or simply trying to avoid a topic that has long been a bedrock principle of American conservatism.”Los Angeles has been rocked by the leak of a secretly recorded private discussion in which three members of the City Council used racist insults and slurs. One of the council members resigned on Wednesday, Jill Cowan and Shawn Hubler report.The conservative activist Leonard Leo, who has led efforts to appoint conservatives to federal courts, has quietly built a sprawling network and raised huge sums of money to challenge liberal values. Read Kenneth Vogel’s investigation.Online misinformation about the midterm elections is swirling in immigrant communities, researchers say, in even more languages, on more topics and across more digital platforms than it did in 2020. Tiffany Hsu explains.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Who in the World Is Still Answering Pollsters’ Phone Calls?

      by

      Response rates suggest the “death of telephone polling” is getting closer.Ryan CarlWe’re already in the field with our next New York Times/Siena College national survey, so it’s a good time to go through some of the poll-related reader mail we’ve received recently.Here’s a version of a question we get a lot:Given that pollsters are relying on calling people on the phone (per your methodology description at the bottom of the poll), how do you know where they are, and how do you account for the fact that so few people answer their phones at all anymore? I for one have moved twice since I got my current phone number, most recently to a different state, so my phone number has nothing to do with my actual location. Meanwhile, most of my calls are spam, so I almost never answer my phone unless I recognize the phone number — and I am someone who is old enough to have grown up with what is now called a landline. My teenage kids almost never answer their phones at all. The only people I know who still ever use a landline at all are my parents. — Doug Berman, West Jordan, UtahThere are a lot of good points here, so let’s take it bit by bit.How do we know where they are? Some pollsters (like us) call voters from a list of telephone numbers on a voter registration file, a big data set containing the names and addresses of every registered voter in most states. The addresses tell us “where they are” with a great deal of precision.How do we deal with people who have moved? The voter file offers a solution to this problem as well. Once you’ve registered to vote in your new state, pollsters can call your phone number if it’s on the voter file — and call it regardless of whether it’s an in-state or out-of-state area code.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.How do you account for the fact that few people answer? Before I respond, I want to dwell on just how few people are answering. In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.No, it wasn’t nearly this bad six, four or even two years ago. You can see for yourself that around 1.6 percent of dials yielded a completed interview in our 2018 polling.The Times has more resources than most organizations, but this is getting pretty close to “death of telephone polling” numbers. You start wondering how much more expensive it would be to try even ridiculous options like old-fashioned door-to-door, face-to-face, in-person interviews.Call screening is definitely part of the problem, but if you screen your calls almost 100 percent of the time, it might be a little less of one than you might think. About one-fifth of our dials still contact a human. But once we do reach a person, we’ve got a number of challenges. Is this the right human? (We talk only to people named on the file, so that we can use their information.) If it is the right person, will he or she participate? Probably not, unfortunately.OK, back to the question: What do we do to account for this? The main thing is we make sure that the sample of people we do reach is demographically and politically representative, and if not, we adjust it to match the known characteristics of the population. If we poll a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by two percentage points, and our respondents wind up being registered Democrats by a four-point margin, we give a little less weight to the Democratic respondents.We make similar adjustments for race; age; education; how often people have voted; where they live; marital status; homeownership; and more. As I explained last month, we believe our polls provide valuable election information. Is all of this enough? After 2020, it’s hard not to wonder whether the people who answer the phone might be more likely to back Democrats than those who don’t answer the phone. We’re conducting some expensive multi-method research this fall to help answer this question, to the extent we can. We’ll tell you more at a later time.What about cellphones? Finally, an easy one: We call cellphones and landlines! About three-quarters of our calls go to cellphones nowadays — including nearly every call to young people. More