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      Is It the Gas Prices, Stupid?

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      A simpler explanation for a Democratic turnaround.Democratic fortunes have improved markedly over the last few months, with the party overtaking Republicans on the generic congressional ballot in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.But there’s another, simpler explanation for a Democratic turnaround, one that lines up nearly as well as abortion: gas prices.The price of gas fell for 98 straight days beginning June 14 — 10 days before the court’s Dobbs decision on Roe. At the time, the average price of gas nationally was over $5 per gallon. Prices were at $3.67 by the end of the streak.While few would dispute that the Dobbs decision helped energize Democratic voters, it seems clear that falling gas prices have helped as well. After all, voters say that the economy and inflation — not abortion — are the most important issues facing the country. There’s a longstanding relationship between economic performance and the president’s standing. As James Carville once said: It’s the economy, stupid.So is it the gas prices, stupid? It’s hard not to wonder after looking at this chart by my colleague Francesca Paris.Tracking Biden’s approval and gas prices More

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      Lost Hope of Lasting Democratic Majority

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      Revisiting an influential book and the notion that demographics are destiny.Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, when a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority” seemed prophetic.Damon Winter/The New York TimesToday we wish a belated and maybe not-so-Happy 20th Birthday to “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” the book that famously argued Democrats would gain an enduring advantage in a multiracial, postindustrial America.There are countless explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and the growing dysfunction of American political life. This book does not necessarily rank at the top of that list. But when historians look back on this era, the book’s effect on American politics might be worth a mention.The thesis that Democrats were on the cusp of a lasting advantage in national politics helped shape the hopes, fears and, ultimately, the conduct of the two major parties — especially once the Obama presidency appeared to confirm the book’s prophecy.It transformed modest Democratic wins into harbingers of perpetual liberal rule. It fueled conservative anxiety about America’s growing racial diversity, even as it encouraged the Republican establishment to reach out to Hispanic voters and pursue immigration reform. The increasingly popular notion that “demographics are destiny” made it easier for the progressive base to argue against moderation and in favor of mobilizing a new coalition of young and nonwhite voters. All of this helped set the stage for the rise of Mr. Trump.This is a lot to attribute to a single book, especially since the book does not really resemble the Obama-era caricature advanced by its supporters. The book does not put forward what became a commonly held view that racial demographic shifts would allow Democrats to win through mobilization, a more leftist politics or without the support of white working-class voters.Instead, the book argued — not persuasively, as we’ll see — that Democrats could build a majority with a (still ill-defined) “centrist” politics of the Clinton-Gore variety, so long as they got “close to an even split” of white working-class voters.“We were clearly overly optimistic about that prospect, to say the least,” said John Judis, one of the authors of the book, of the prospect of such high levels of Democratic support.One easy way to see the divergence between reality and the expectations promoted by the book is to look at its projections for the Electoral College, compared with how the nation actually voted over the next 20 years: More

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      In a First, Biden Gets Involved in State Legislative Races

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      The president’s involvement is a sign that Democratic leaders are taking down-ballot contests more seriously than in past elections.President Biden became involved in state legislative races for the first time, with an email Friday asking Democrats to each donate the modest sum of $7 to his party’s campaign arm for statehouse elections.And, following his Sept. 1 speech lashing “MAGA Republicans,” Biden is framing the stakes as a battle for American democracy, coupled with a bread-and-butter message about inflation, an issue that has bedeviled his presidency and given Republicans hopes of a red wave in races all the way down the ballot.“State legislatures are the key to stopping Republican abortion bans, attacks on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, bills that undercut our democracy by making it harder for people to vote,” Biden wrote in the email, which was sent to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s mailing list. “Not just that, state legislatures are essential — I mean it, essential — to lowering prices for American families and building an economy that works for everyone.”Biden’s email, which the White House had been working on for weeks, comes as Republicans warn that they are being outspent in state legislative races. It’s a noteworthy shift in messaging for the traditionally chest-thumping G.O.P., and therefore revealing regardless of what the numbers actually tell us.As my colleague Nick Corasaniti reported on Friday, one outside group working on winning statehouses for Democrats, the States Project, plans to spend $60 million across just five states. That would be a humdrum sum for a hot Senate race, but it’s an astronomical amount in races where spending is often in the range of thousands of dollars, not even tens of thousands and far from millions.Nick’s reporting included a memo sent this week by the Republican State Leadership Committee, the D.L.C.C.’s counterpart on the right. It warns conservative donors that Democrats are vastly outspending them in key states.“While Democrats cry out for more resources,” it reads, “they are dominating the television spending at this point in the campaign.”That is only partially true.Citing publicly available advertising data, which The New York Times verified, the memo notes that in Michigan, Democrats have spent nearly six times as much as Republicans in state legislative races since the primaries. In Colorado, another hotly contested state, the R.S.L.C. memo notes, “Democrats have spent and booked nearly four times more than Republicans since the June 28 primary.”Michigan followed a nonpartisan redistricting process this year that threw out a heavily gerrymandered map that favored Republicans. A flood of spending has come to the state: Democrats have spent and booked more than $20 million in TV ads, while Republicans have spent and booked just under $3.7 million.Nick found, however, that “on the television airwaves, Republican candidates and outside groups have spent roughly $39 million, while Democrats have spent roughly $35 million,” citing data from 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.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.In Pennsylvania and Arizona, Nick reported, “Republicans have spent nearly $1 million more than Democrats on ads since July.”Just one Democratic state senator, Mallory McMorrow, had already raised nearly $2 million as of Friday, according to her campaign.The presidential factorPresidents have typically focused on winning races for the Senate, the House and governorships. But over the last decade, as Democrats have worked to reverse the nationwide gains Republicans made after redistricting in 2010, many in the lower ranks of the party have been pushing Democratic leaders to pay more attention to the bottom of the ballot.Three factors have changed the game this year.The first is Donald Trump, who started getting involved in state legislative races as he embraced candidates who endorsed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In addition, some candidates for secretary of state would be in charge of running elections even though they falsely claim that Trump won in 2020, On Politics wrote on Thursday.The second is abortion. Republicans have spent decades amassing power and support in state legislatures while national Democrats largely ignored state politics in favor of higher-profile contests. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June shined a spotlight on the gains Republicans had made at the state level as so-called trigger laws went into effect in many states, restricting abortion after the ruling.In Michigan, for instance, where Republicans control both houses of the State Legislature, Democrats are investing great hopes in a ballot measure that seeks to overturn a 1931 law that the Roe reversal triggered, although a judicial ruling has kept abortion legal in the state for now.And the third is the long tail of the 2010 redistricting, which Republicans used to redraw maps in their favor after midterm elections that President Obama famously described as a “shellacking.”President Biden remains fairly unpopular, despite making some gains over the last few months. His approval rating was 42.7 percent as of Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of public opinion polls.That said, Trump is even less popular, and Democrats have spent months researching ways to anchor Republican candidates to him even though he won’t be on the ballot this year.Abortion-rights advocates in the Michigan Legislature in June. Republicans are expected to hold the Legislature, but forecasting races is difficult with little polling.Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal, via APWhat the forecasts sayWhether this strategy will help Democrats keep the statehouses they picked up in 2018, and held in most cases in 2020, is another matter.According to forecasts by CNAnalysis, one of the few publicly available prognosticators that focuses on state legislative races, it’s looking like it will be a very Republican year across the country.As of Friday, CNAnalysis was predicting that Republicans would hang on to legislatures in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, with Maine and Minnesota as tossups. Democrats, the firm expects, will retain Colorado and New Mexico.But such forecasts are inherently difficult in races where polling is scant, and much depends on which way undecided voters break in the fall.Will they side with Republicans and their complaints about the prices of gas and groceries, or will they hear out Democrats’ messages about abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and democracy?That’s the $1 million question of this election — whether it’s in a high-profile Senate race in Pennsylvania or a humble statehouse contest in Arizona.The wider stakesNick’s article also mentions a once-obscure legal doctrine called the “independent state legislature theory.” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor, called it the “800-pound gorilla brooding in the background of election law cases working their way up from state courts” in June.The doctrine is an unorthodox interpretation of the Constitution. It holds that the framers of the Constitution intended for state legislatures to reign supreme over secretaries of state and even state constitutions. Most law professors view it as far out of the mainstream, but some conservative legal scholars, including at least two current Supreme Court justices, see it as legitimate.Quietly, lawyers linked to the Republican National Committee and to congressional leaders have been angling for the Supreme Court to rule on the doctrine. Conservative lawyers under the banner of a group called the Honest Elections Project invoked a version of the theory in Pennsylvania in 2020, citing it in a petition for writ of certiorari to the state Supreme Court.The lawyers, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman of the Republican-linked firm Baker and Hostetler, argued that the secretary of the commonwealth at the time, Kathy Boockvar, had overstepped her constitutional boundaries by altering the date by which the state would accept late-arriving mail-in ballots.If the Supreme Court does embrace the doctrine, it could fundamentally alter how elections are conducted in the United States, from the rules governing the mechanics of voting to who makes the final decisions on what is and is not legal.In some cases, senior Democrats have privately warned candidates against filing lawsuits that could trigger the court’s conservative majority to take up the concept in the so-called shadow docket, in which the court does not hold a full oral argument session but issues a ruling with little explanation.That is not likely to happen before the midterms, court watchers say. Democratic legal experts also think they will have a better shot during one of the court’s regular sessions, during which they can present their counterarguments in full.In March, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, responding to a case in North Carolina, appeared to signal that the court was eager to rule on the independent state legislature theory in what my colleague Adam Liptak described as “an orderly fashion.”“The issue is almost certain to keep arising until the court definitively resolves it,” Kavanaugh wrote, adding that the court should grant a petition seeking review on the merits “in an appropriate case — either in this case from North Carolina or in a similar case from another state.”What to read about democracyBallot mules. Poll watch parties. Groomers. Cecilia Kang lays out the most dominant false narratives circulating about November’s midterm elections.A whistle-blower who worked for Twitter and testified before the Jan. 6 committee told The Washington Post that extremism and political disinformation on social media pose an “imminent threat not just to American democracy, but to the societal fabric of our planet.”A law in Georgia that lets people and groups submit an unlimited number of challenges to voters’ eligibility is causing headaches for election workers as they try to prepare for ballots to be cast in the state’s crucial races, according to The 19th.Voting rights groups and Democrats are bristling at the inclusion of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, on the cover of Time magazine’s issue highlighting election defenders. They pointed out that Raffensperger is a defendant in 20 voter suppression lawsuits.A new report by Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that “American democracy is at a dangerous inflection point” and lays out five strategies to address what she calls “a democratic setback potentially as serious as the ones already occurring in India and Hungary.”viewfinderShuran Huang for The New York TimesA tough questionOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Shuran Huang told us about taking the image above:Capturing nuanced moments is one of my favorite tasks when I am covering news events in Congress.Amid hours of grueling testimony, witnesses usually manage to keep up a steely disposition during hearings on Capitol Hill.But not always.Here, William Demchak, chief executive officer of PNC Financial Services, took a deep breath with his eyes closed after answering a tough question from a lawmaker.The light hit Demchak’s face in just the right way to highlight his frustration — and created a contrast to the smiling face on the painting behind him.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Democrats Pour Millions Into Key Secretary of State Races

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      Democrats are outspending Republicans in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada, where they see their opponents as threats to democracy.In a normal election year, races for secretary of state are sleepy affairs, and their campaigns struggle for media coverage amid the hurly-burly of more prominent Senate, governor and House contests.This year, however, is anything but normal.Democrats are pouring millions of dollars into races for secretary of state, buoyed by the nature of their Republican opponents and the stakes for American democracy.According to an analysis by my colleague Alyce McFadden, Democrats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have outraised their Republican opponents as of the most recent campaign finance reports. And overall, Democratic-aligned groups working on secretary of state races in those four states have outspent Republicans by nearly $18 million in this election cycle, according to the ad analytics firm AdImpact, with more spending on the way.The role of a secretary of state varies, but in those four states, as well as Arizona and Pennsylvania (where the governor appoints the secretary), they play a critical role in overseeing the mechanics of elections. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, for example, they often had to make judgment calls about how to ensure that voters had access to the polls when vaccines were not yet available, making elderly and immunocompromised Americans concerned about showing up in person.The ‘Stop the Steal’ slateMany of the Republicans running in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada have earned national notoriety.Take Mark Finchem, a cowboy-hat-and-bolo-tie-wearing Arizona lawmaker running for secretary of state. He crushed his G.O.P. rivals in the primary by whipping up fears about a stolen election in 2020.In a recent interview with Time magazine, Finchem said it was a “fantasy” that President Biden won in 2020 — even though he was elected by more than seven million votes nationwide.“It strains credibility,” Finchem said. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?”Or Jim Marchant, the G.O.P. nominee in Nevada. Marchant has been a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement and has linked up with a slate of “America First” candidates in other states to raise money from national donors. As my colleague Alexandra Berzon has reported, those candidates, including Finchem, have been “injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud” into their campaigns.Others, such as Kristina Karamo in Michigan, have espoused fringe views on a variety of social issues. On her personal podcast, she called yoga a “satanic ritual” that was originally intended by its creators to “summon a demon.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Inflation Concerns Persist: In the six-month primary season that has just ended, several issues have risen and fallen, but nothing has dislodged inflation and the economy from the top of voters’ minds.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate candidate in Georgia claimed his business donated 15 percent of its profits to charities. Three of the four groups named as recipients say they didn’t receive money.North Carolina Senate Race: Are Democrats about to get their hearts broken again? The contest between Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, and her G.O.P. opponent, Representative Ted Budd, seems close enough to raise their hopes.Echoing Trump: Six G.O.P. nominees for governor and the Senate in critical midterm states, all backed by former President Donald J. Trump, would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.The Republican exceptionDemocrats are frustrated with the accolades that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican incumbent in Georgia, has received from political commentators. His refusal to overturn the 2020 presidential election results despite heavy pressure from Donald Trump, they say, was merely the minimum requirement of the job.“It’s good when Republicans are not openly treasonous,” Jena Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, said in an interview.But she accused Raffensperger of supporting what she characterized as the “worst voter-suppression package in the country” — the Republican-led law Georgia passed in 2021 overhauling voter access.The Democratic nominee in Georgia is Bee Nguyen, a state lawmaker and policy adviser at New American Leaders, a nonprofit that encourages immigrants and refugees to run for office. Nguyen, who took the seat Stacey Abrams vacated during her first run for governor in 2017, is Vietnamese American and the first Democratic woman of Asian descent to hold a state office in Georgia.Outside groups focused on bolstering Republicans who stood up to Trump in 2020 spent heavily on Raffensperger’s behalf in his primary against Representative Jody Hice, another Stop-the-Stealer. With the help of several million dollars in last-minute donations, along with the full backing of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular governor, Raffensperger defeated Hice by nearly 20 percentage points, avoiding a runoff.A New York Times analysis of that law, Senate Bill 202, found that the state’s Republican Legislature and governor “have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections, making absentee voting harder and creating restrictions and complications in the wake of narrow losses to Democrats.”The law alone could change turnout in Georgia, which reached record levels during two Senate elections in January 2021. Democrats say Republicans changed the law to suppress votes from people of color; in a speech in Atlanta on Jan. 11, 2022, President Biden called it “Jim Crow 2.0.”Privately, Democrats worry, too, about complacency within their own ranks — particularly among centrists who may like the fact that Raffensperger bucked Trump’s will in 2020 but are less animated by the new voting law. Republicans have defended it as a common-sense effort to pull back what they characterized as emergency measures to accommodate voters during the pandemic. But they have struggled to explain why some measures, such as a restriction on handing out water to voters waiting in long lines, are necessary.Griswold, a lawyer who worked on voter access for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, also leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. She has used her national platform to reposition the organization as a bulwark of democracy against Trump and his Stop the Steal movement.Voters in Lost Mountain, Ga., during the primary in May. Democrats are furious about the state’s new voting rules.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA complicated picture for DemocratsDeciding how to calibrate their message to voters about the security and fairness of the upcoming midterms has been tricky for Democrats.That is especially true in Georgia, where newly registered voters of color powered Biden’s victory as well as those of Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Democrats are wary of inadvertently signaling that the new voting rules could mean that those communities’ votes will be wasted this year.Kim Rogers, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, stressed in an interview that despite Republicans’ attacks on the integrity of American elections, “our system works.”She noted that American elections are subject to “bipartisan checks and balances at every level,” with Democrats and Republicans alike enlisted to certify disputed votes and official results — while arguing that preserving these checks and balances is exactly what’s on the ballot this year.As for the new laws in states like Georgia, she said, “voters of color have faced these suppression tactics for generations” and expressed confidence that voters would overcome those barriers just as they did in 2020.But that system is under severe strain. Republican county officials in New Mexico, upstate New York and rural Pennsylvania have said they will refuse to certify votes from digital machines, and election officials across the country have faced death threats.Many Democrats were highly critical of the Biden administration’s strategy for pushing an overhaul of voting rights through Congress. It failed in January while facing unified Republican opposition and skepticism from centrist Democrats, led by Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration’s point person for voting rights, has faced repeated questions about what she has done to find workarounds in lieu of federal legislation, beyond making the occasional speech.Democrats pushed to appropriate federal funds to protect election workers in legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, but Republicans have resisted. On Wednesday, the House passed its version of an overhaul bill, but the Senate will need to pass its own, different version, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported.His article contained a quote from Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is the leading Republican author on the Senate side but has provoked concerns among Democratic colleagues, including Tim Kaine, with whom I spoke in March. They say that she is merely maneuvering to run out the clock at the bidding of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.“We can work together to try to bridge the considerable differences,” Collins told Hulse. “But it would have been better if we had been consulted prior to the House sponsors’ deciding to drop their bill.”What to readThere is scant evidence that the charitable giving of Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, matches the promises his company made. David A. Fahrenthold and Shane Goldmacher contacted the charities to ask.J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate in northern Ohio, has promoted himself as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan. But Neil Vigdor looked at the U.S. Air Force records, and there is no sign that the candidate was deployed there.Maggie Astor has been tracking the ratings that the National Rifle Association gives to political candidates since 2008. She has found that the Democratic break from the group is complete: For the first time in at least 25 years, not a single Democrat running for Congress received an A.A rash of retirements has complicated Democrats’ efforts to hold the House, Catie Edmondson writes. Instead of battle-tested incumbents, first-time candidates are defending the districts.The American public’s views of Donald Trump have remained stable across different measures in recent months even as he faces multiple investigations, Ruth Igielnik writes.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Elise Stefanik Says She’s Confident a Republican Wave Is Coming to the House

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      Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, also spoke about her PAC’s success in backing female candidates, 23 of whom are running in the fall.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent in Washington.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, predicted on Wednesday that her party would pick up as many as three dozen House seats in November, despite signs that the red wave many predicted months ago might not form after all.And, brushing aside concerns from many Republicans that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has saddled them with an unpopular position that is energizing Democrats all over the country, Stefanik told reporters defiantly at a news conference that “we will have a pro-life Republican majority in the next Congress.”Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014 to her upstate New York seat as a relative moderate, became a star of the MAGA universe thanks to her role as President Donald J. Trump’s chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during his first impeachment trial.She has translated her Trump-refracted fame into a fund-raising boon for female Republican candidates she is boosting in critical House races — a move that is also helping build a base in the G.O.P. House conference for a politician with big ambitions.“My own experience going through impeachment No. 1, where I played an outsized role on the House Intelligence Committee — we built up a national donor list,” Stefanik said Wednesday at a briefing at the Republican National Committee about the midterm elections. “We’ve been able to have that donor list support other women candidates across the country.”Stefanik, 38, founded her political action committee, Elevate PAC, or E-PAC, in 2018, when only 13 Republican women served in the House of Representatives. At the time, her goal was to elect more conservative women to Congress.In 2020, 11 of the 15 House seats that Republicans flipped were won by women that E-PAC had endorsed. Today, there are 34 Republican women in the House.During this campaign cycle, Stefanik’s organization has raised and donated more than $1 million directly to female Republican candidates, and 23 women endorsed by E-PAC are running in the general election. Since its creation, E-PAC has raised $4 million to date.Another part of Stefanik’s aim is to help with news coverage. “One thing that is very clear to me is Democrat women get outsized coverage in the media,” Stefanik said. “They get magazine covers.” Those she helps, she said, “deserve glossy magazines as well.”The outcome of those races will help determine Stefanik’s clout as a queenmaker in the current, Trump-controlled version of the Republican Party. Her activities are also a key part of the G.O.P.’s overall midterm strategy to expand beyond the core political base of right-wing and conservative voters with a more diverse slate.The push to elevate female candidates comes as the Republican Party struggles to overcome political gains Democrats have made on the issue of abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In an election year when political tensions are running high over gender and social issues, liberal groups are willing to give Stefanik only so much credit for helping to elect women.“There are challenges that all women face in running for office,” said Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. “I understand why there’s a need for this on both sides of the aisle.”But she added, “To support women’s rights, to support our freedoms, we think it’s critical that we elect Democratic, pro-choice women.”Stefanik shrugged off questions about how the issue of abortion will affect the midterms. Her party has struggled to unite behind a strategy on a fraught social issue that is reshaping campaigns across the country and, in some cases, forcing Republicans to backpedal on hard-line positions they took to win their primaries.“On the issue of abortion, Democrats are working overtime to force the American people to rethink what their top priorities are,” Stefanik said. “In every poll, inflation is the No. 1 issue. In my district, Second Amendment issues are second. Our candidates know how to communicate on this issue.”Stefanik also emphasized that many of the candidates she is backing are mothers. “I think that’s a very compelling message to voters,” she said, noting that one congressional candidate in Ohio, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, gave birth just days ago.E-PAC’s slate of candidates includes seven who are Hispanic, four who are veterans and one who is Black. Stefanik said it was the most diverse group of candidates her PAC had supported to date.Stefanik said she had no ideological litmus test for candidates to gain her organization’s financial backing and endorsement.This cycle, she has backed candidates who falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, like Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District and Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh District.Vega has come under attack for questioning on tape whether a woman was less likely to become pregnant after a rape.Stefanik also supported Representative Mayra Flores, who won a special election in Texas’s 34th District after saying, falsely, that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was stoked by members of Antifa and used a hashtag associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in tweets that were later deleted.At the same time, Stefanik is backing Barbara Kirkmeyer, a state senator running in Colorado’s competitive Eighth District, who said President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.Stefanik simply interviews candidates who are able to raise $250,000 in their first quarter, she said, and decides which of them have what it takes, based on her gut feeling and experience.“I interview and talk with everyone,” she said. “I put candidates through their paces. I ask how they would answer certain questions from the media.”After meeting hundreds of candidates across the country over the years, she said, “I’m able to tell pretty quickly, No. 1, if they have the fire in the belly, and also if they’re speaking from the heart on behalf of their district. I don’t do any ideological litmus test. These are all strong, conservative Republicans.”Karoline Leavitt with Senator Ted Cruz before her primary. “When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said of Stefanik’s political action committee.Brian Snyder/ReutersIn some cases, Stefanik’s endorsements have put her at odds with leadership. She endorsed Leavitt, a 25-year-old hard-right Republican who served as an assistant in Trump’s White House press office before winning the G.O.P. nomination for a House seat in New Hampshire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was backing Leavitt’s rival, Matt Mowers, in the primary.“When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said on Wednesday, joining Stefanik briefly as an example of an E-PAC success story. She said that Stefanik, whom she once worked for, was “someone that I leaned on, not only for financial support through E-PAC but also for advice and support.”Republicans are expected to win back control of the House next year, although in recent weeks, the political winds that once favored them have shifted toward Democrats.Still, for Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to hold virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold.Stefanik said she remains bullish about a red wave.“I remember on election night in 2020 when people said Nancy Pelosi would pick up 15 seats,” she said, referring to the House speaker. “Well, Republicans picked up 15 seats.”She added: “Eighty percent of their dollars are on defense. Do I think we have the opportunity to earn that historic majority of 35 seats? I do. I’ve always thought that this cycle.”What to readToday’s big story: Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization, former President Trump and three of his children of what she called “staggering fraud.” Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess wrote the main article examining the 220-page claim, and I have a short piece on the politics at play.The House voted mostly along party lines to overhaul the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump tried to exploit to overturn his defeat, Carl Hulse reports.At the United Nations, President Biden called on countries to unify in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Moscow’s goal, he said, is “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state.” Follow our live coverage of the U.N. General Assembly here.The Federal Reserve tightened interest rates by a further three-quarters of a percentage point fewer than seven weeks before the November elections, an effort to stem inflation that remains stubbornly high. Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was fundamentally healthy, however. The Times’s economic team covered all the angles here.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Elections

      Public Schools Will Be on the Ballot in November

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      I believe America needs high-quality education that’s available to all children as an engine of economic mobility and as a building block for preparing the next generation of engaged citizens. I also know that in general, public school parents — like me — are satisfied with their children’s education, even if they aren’t exceedingly confident in the system. As I wrote in March: “It’s a bit like the adage about Congress: People tend to like their own representatives (that’s why they keep sending them back year after year) but tend to have a dim view of Congress overall.”That said, I’m concerned about what seems to be a creeping loss of faith in public schools. As Anya Kamenetz put it recently, “Extended school closures during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.” For some, that contract has not been repaired, and they still fear that public schools can’t meet an acceptable standard — not just for their children but for everyone.And I’m worried that some proponents of public schooling, and some politicians, have given short shrift to this breakdown. At times, they’ve seemed to wave away parental fears about kids falling behind by characterizing the concept of learning loss as a “hoax” or suggesting that parents shouldn’t have a say in what schools teach. But if, for example, your third grader is now struggling to read because remote first grade was a disaster, that’s very real and could have long-term ramifications.As the midterms rapidly approach, and both houses of Congress have the potential to flip to Republican control, I wonder if Democrats have paid enough attention to disenchanted parents. In July, The 74, a news site that covers education issues, ran a story with the headline: “Rash of New Polls Raises Red Flags for Democrats on Education.” The gist of it is that voters used to trust Democrats more than they trusted Republicans on education, and that trust has eroded significantly over the past few years. Perhaps that’s not fair, but voters get to have the final say.Other polls show that education is a more salient issue than it was before the pandemic. In an overview of issues from the 2018 midterms, Pew Research didn’t include education when surveying voters about what they considered “very big” problems; the closest one mentioned was “affordability of a college education.” In Pew’s 2022 midterm overview, however, education ranked sixth, with 58 percent of registered voters saying it’s a matter that’s “very important” to them. This election year, according to Pew, voters care more about education than abortion, immigration and climate change. (Notably, this poll was conducted during the first two weeks of August, after Roe v. Wade was overturned.)All of this dovetails with what the longtime pollster and communications analyst Frank Luntz, known for his work with Republican candidates and campaigns, has been hearing in focus groups over the past couple of years: Many children are still reeling from the challenges of the pandemic, and not all parents have faith that the public school system can help their kids recover. “I’ve done work with so many education reform efforts, and parents just felt forgotten,” he said.Luntz added that some parents say: “It’s my number one issue, my major source of frustration. I’m furious at the Democrats for turning it into an ideological issue and at the Republicans for dropping it, and for turning to other things.” Even if they don’t change their votes, they are moving with their feet: A recent survey cited by The 74 found: “Between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9 percent drop in families saying their children are enrolled in traditional public schools.”While most children are still educated in the traditional public school system and many parents either can’t afford to pull their kids or have limited options if they do so, I wanted to hear directly from parents about why their children had left traditional public schools for charters, private schools and home schooling in the past few years. I put a call out for these families in one of my newsletters earlier this month and so far 143 readers have responded. Obviously, this wasn’t a scientific poll — there are about 90,000 traditional public schools in the United States. But I read every email and I had follow-up phone conversations with 17 parents.Among the parents who emailed, there was a good deal of racial, religious and geographic diversity. There was less diversity, however, when it came to socioeconomic status and levels of formal education.Nearly every parent I spoke to acknowledged, unprompted, how privileged they were to be able to move their children to a new situation, and lamented that this wasn’t an option for all families. Most described themselves as Democrats, supportive of public schools in general and supportive of teachers in particular. Some described their own experiences as students, and how attending quality public schools had changed their lives for the better.Their reasons for taking their kids out of public schools varied, but I noticed some recurring themes:Parents feel alienated by school board politicization. Parents expressed upset about the heated rhetoric they observed over masking, debates about the perceived influence of critical race theory (C.R.T.) and other hot-button topics, and about school systems they felt no longer shared their values. For instance, some parents, typically in more liberal areas, said they felt their districts were prioritizing things like social and emotional learning over the basics of reading, writing and math. Others, who tended to live in more conservative parts of the country, were offended by book banning and anti-C.R.T. frenzy.Rose Berg, who lives in Bee Cave, Texas, moved her two children to private school for this year. She had moved to an Austin suburb because its public schools were said to be excellent, but after conservative PAC-backed candidates were elected to the school board and “the threat of book banning loomed,” she had no doubt that switching to private school was the right decision. She also said gun violence was a major concern, and her move away from public school was “a direct reaction to Uvalde.”Parents whose children have learning differences feel abandoned. Getting your children’s needs met when they don’t fit the public school mold has always been hard, and the pandemic made it harder. Several parents I spoke to have moved their kids into specialized schools because they felt their children weren’t getting what they needed in public schools, despite the fact that they are legally entitled to appropriate support through the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which in the 2020-21 academic year covered 15 percent of all public school students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.Some of these parents were happier now that their children were in specialized schools. Others expressed that even though their kids were doing well at new schools, cordoning off children with learning differences from everybody else is bad for society as a whole.Jenna Gibilaro’s family moved from Brooklyn to Orlando, Fla., to find schooling that she felt met the needs of her older son, who has autism. She told me over the phone that from her perspective, district officials “set up roadblocks” to getting appropriate services. This has the effect of discouraging families of children with learning differences from staying in the system. “That’s the sense I got,” she said.Parents who are essential workers had to choose between their jobs and public schools. Elizabeth Bell, a nurse who lives in Tulsa and was the director of operations at a hospital group during the pandemic, moved her daughter to private school because neither she nor her husband could work from home for a prolonged period of time to support their child’s remote schooling. Unlike local public schools in her area, she said, private schools were back open with Covid risk mitigation strategies in place. Part of what’s keeping her kid in private school is that public school aftercare options aren’t as available as they were before the pandemic, and their jobs don’t end at 2:30.Private school tuition is a strain on her family and they’ve had to reorganize their finances. She says she still believes in public schools, but worries their mission has been compromised.Of those who identified as Democrats, a handful said they wouldn’t vote for progressive candidates, were less inclined this year to vote at all or would even consider voting for Republicans on the local level who were committed to strengthening schools. There’s still time for politicians up and down the ballot to highlight their plans for and commitment to improving public education, and to make sure parents know their concerns are being heard.But we’re only weeks from Election Day.While I think the leaching of trust in public education may not be so dire that it determines something like control of Congress, Luntz isn’t so sure. “It’s not slow. It’s fast,” he said. “That is the difference between you writing the story three years ago and you writing the story today. They were losing faith in 2020, 2019; they lost faith in 2022. That is a very important distinction.”Want More?This month, Opinion talked to 12 teachers about their experiences over the past few years. One teacher said she resented politicians who’ve never been teachers driving educational policy, “Because we know what happens in our classroom on a day-to-day basis, and others don’t.”The Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat discusses “Who’s doing the ‘quiet leaving’ from the Seattle public schools.”In The New York Times Magazine, Charley Locke investigates what school districts are doing (or not doing) with their pandemic money in “American Schools Got a $190 Billion Covid Windfall. Where Is It Going?”Tiny VictoriesParenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.My 2-year-old son temporarily forgot the word “yes.” It was “NO” to everything. So we told him when kids said “YES,” great things happened: A special parade came out and music started playing and everybody cheered. Well, wouldn’t you know it … a few days later an unannounced real parade actually went down our street, with marching bands and everything. My son was so proud. He thought he’d brought the “Yes Parade” on himself!— Beth Gazley, Bloomington, Ind.If 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