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      Eric Greitens to Face New G.O.P. Attacks in Missouri Senate Race

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      The long-awaited effort to stop Eric Greitens from becoming the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri is finally getting underway.The big question is whether it’s too late to stop him.A robust, well-financed Republican campaign to highlight Greitens’s personal scandals — which include allegations of domestic and sexual abuse — is set to begin on Friday, starting with at least $1 million in paid television ads.Politico first reported the arrival of the new super PAC, Show Me Values, which is being led by Johnny DeStefano, a longtime aide to Representative John Boehner of Ohio who became a powerful figure inside the Trump White House.The leaders of the drive to halt Greitens, which is being spearheaded by a coalition of in-state donors, hope to fundamentally alter the dynamics of a race that has been stagnant for months by sounding a drumbeat of allegations about disturbing and erratic behavior by the former Missouri governor.But as they look to avoid jeopardizing what is most likely a safe Republican Senate seat, they face a tight timeline ahead of Missouri’s Aug. 2 primary, and it is unclear whether new details about Greitens’s alleged conduct will resonate with G.O.P. voters.The front-runner: Eric GreitensGreitens’s history has long been subject to scrutiny — and new accusations have steadily emerged.In 2018, he resigned as governor amid allegations that he had sexually abused a hair stylist with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Greitens denies the accusations, which the woman detailed in sworn testimony during an impeachment inquiry led by fellow Republicans in the state.His ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, left him after those allegations came to light and moved to Texas. The couple are now waging a bitter court battle over custody of their elementary-school-age children.Sheena Greitens, second from left, during a court session in her child custody case against her former husband on Thursday in Columbia, Mo.David A. Lieb/Associated PressIn a sworn affidavit released in April, Greitens accused her former husband of a pattern of abusive behavior, including allegedly “cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face” and “yanking him around by his hair.”The former governor has denied all wrongdoing, and on Thursday his campaign pointed to a previous statement provided to The New York Times by Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate. The alleged abusive behavior “never happened,” Parlatore said.At a court hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for Sheena Greitens, Helen Wade, said that her client had received death threats this week after the former governor released a violent new political video that shows him armed with a shotgun and storming a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, along with what appears to be a SWAT team wielding military-style rifles. Wade did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment on Thursday.The kingmaker: Rex SinquefieldFor now, Greitens is ahead of his nearest opponent, Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, by about 3.5 percentage points, polling averages of the race show.Schmitt has the backing of Save Missouri Values, a super PAC bankrolled by Rex Sinquefield, a wealthy retired investor who is a dominant player in state politics.Sinquefield, who is also the primary funder of Show Me Values, the new anti-Greitens super PAC, is best known for his devotion to three “idiosyncratic passions,” according to a critical 2014 profile in Politico Magazine: “promoting chess, dismantling the traditional public school system and eliminating income taxes.”Until now in the Senate primary campaign, not one television ad has aired laying out Sheena Greitens’s most recent allegations. One of the new ads from Show Me Values will focus on her accusations, saying that Eric Greitens has faced “scandal after scandal,” according to two people familiar with its contents.The most effective knock on Greitens with likely Republican primary voters in Missouri, polling conducted by a rival campaign discovered, might sound a bit surprising.It involved informing them that he had previously identified as a Democrat and traveled to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to hear a young, progressive senator named Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination for president.The X Factor: TrumpThe president’s endorsement could be decisive — and everybody knows it.Allies of both Schmitt and Representative Vicky Hartzler, another Senate candidate who is closely trailing Schmitt in most polling, have been cautioning Trump and his allies against backing Greitens.One argument that seems to resonate with the former president, according to people who have spoken with him: Don’t risk upsetting your pristine endorsement record in 2022 Senate races.On Wednesday, after Katie Britt defeated Representative Mo Brooks in a G.O.P. primary runoff for a Senate seat in Alabama, Trump boasted that his scorecard remained perfect in Senate primaries this year.“With the great ALABAMA win by Katie Britt tonight, I am pleased to announce that WE (MAGA!) are 12 WINS & ZERO LOSSES in U.S. Senate Primary races this cycle,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media site. He made no mention of the fact that he had previously endorsed Brooks before souring on his candidacy.Eric Schmitt, left, the attorney general of Missouri, is hoping for a surge to win the Republican nomination for Senate.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn Missouri, Trump’s notoriously chaotic decision-making process is complicated by the fact that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s fiancée, are backing Greitens.The younger Trump has advised his father to allow the primary to develop further before endorsing anyone, according to two people familiar with his thinking. A spokesman for Trump said that, to his knowledge, an endorsement was not “imminent,” and that he had not seen any draft announcements.Allies of Greitens are eager to link any effort to attack him to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who is a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McConnell’s team did not return phone calls on Thursday, but there is no evidence that his allies have any connection to the new super PAC.Republicans in Washington worry that if Greitens manages to win the primary, he might saddle their party with an embarrassing, and expensive, candidate who could throw the seat to Democrats.Guilfoyle is the national finance chair of Greitens’s campaign. Despite her help, his campaign has struggled to raise money, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, forcing him to rely almost exclusively on one Republican donor — the billionaire shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, who has given at least $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Greitens’s candidacy.The potential sleeper: Josh HawleyAllies argue that Hartzler, a House lawmaker from western Missouri, has the best chance at beating Greitens. They are counting on the clout of Josh Hawley, the arch-conservative freshman senator who holds the state’s other Senate seat.Her campaign this week began airing a new ad promoting the endorsement of Hawley, who has capitalized on his opposition to the certification of the 2020 election results to earn Trump’s favor and build a nationwide grass-roots donor base.Polls show that Hawley is the state’s most popular politician, and the Hartzler campaign hopes to use his fund-raising prowess and omnipresence on Fox News to move voters in the state’s socially conservative hinterlands. Hawley raised about $400,000 for the campaign over a span of four days, his aides said.“There’s a lot of Republicans running for the Senate,” Hawley says in the ad. “I know all of them.”That’s an understatement: Hawley was the attorney general of Missouri while Greitens was governor, and the two men are not exactly friends.Josh Hawley, left, and Eric Greitens, right, with Steven Mnuchin at a Trump rally in St. Louis in 2017. Whitney Curtis/Getty ImagesIn 2018, Hawley accused Greitens of misusing the donor list of his veterans charity and called on him to resign over the allegations involving the hair stylist.The move helped sideline Greitens, a potential rival for Missouri’s other Senate seat, which Hawley assumed after defeating Claire McCaskill, the incumbent Democrat, in 2018.“Fortunately for Josh,” Greitens shot back at the time, “he’s better at press conferences than the law.”What to read tonightThe Jan. 6 committee revealed on Thursday that a White House lawyer told Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department attorney pushing a Trump-backed plan to subvert the 2020 election results, that he would be committing a felony if he helped to overturn the outcome. Catch up with our live coverage of the day’s big hearing here.In a separate development, federal investigators carried out a predawn search on Clark’s home in connection with the Justice Department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 contest, Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman report.The day’s other big political news: The Supreme Court struck down New York’s gun law, most likely limiting the ability of state and local governments to restrict guns outside the home. Hours later, the Senate advanced a bipartisan gun safety bill that responded to a spate of mass shootings.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      A Recession Would Hurt Democrats. Some Warn It’d Also Hurt Democracy.

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      By trying to tame inflation, some commentators say, the Federal Reserve could bring about a recession — just as an unrepentant Donald Trump appears to be eyeing another White House bid.Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, made the understatement of the year on Wednesday when he noted offhandedly to reporters, “Clearly, people do not like inflation.”And how.According to Fox News’s latest national poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that “inflation and higher prices” represented the most important issue influencing their ballot decision in November. Just 12 percent of voters called guns their top priority, the second-place issue. Seventy-one percent disapproved of the job President Biden is doing on inflation.This is not exactly a vote of confidence in the federal government. In the past, this level of public dissatisfaction has typically led to major political upheaval.Inflation ran at a rate of 8.6 percent in May, the fastest annual pace in four decades. Voters do not seem to be buying the White House’s argument, backed up by the Fed and places like the World Bank, that global factors beyond Biden’s control like the pandemic, supply-chain crises and the war in Ukraine are driving the increase in prices.Nor do they seem to be giving the administration much credit for an unemployment rate that is down to 3.6 percent, just a tick above its prepandemic level.The Fed might be Biden’s best hope. After the Federal Open Market Committee announced on Wednesday that it would raise short-term interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, Powell said the Fed’s goal was to bring inflation closer to its 2 percent target while keeping the labor market “strong.”He hastened to add: “We’re not trying to induce a recession now. Let’s be clear about that.”‘A democracy-wrecking election’Yet some commentators, notably David Frum of The Atlantic, have begun to fret that in trying to tame inflation, the Fed will do exactly that — start a recession, just in time to doom Biden or whomever Democrats nominate in his stead in 2024.Understand Inflation and How It Impacts YouInflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Greedflation: Some experts contend that big corporations are supercharging inflation by jacking up prices. We take a closer look at the issue. Inflation Calculator: How you experience inflation can vary greatly depending on your spending habits. Answer these seven questions to estimate your personal inflation rate.For Investors: At last, interest rates for money market funds have started to rise. But inflation means that in real terms, you’re still losing money.Frum noted the historically tight link between economic growth and a president’s chances of re-election. Citing the possibility that an unrepentant Donald Trump will run again, he argued that a downturn this year or next could result in “a democracy-wrecking election the next year.”He concluded: “So the Federal Reserve has a more than usual obligation this week to measure its policy appropriately. A miscalculation in monetary policy in 2022 could reverberate through long ages of American history ahead.”Others have criticized Biden’s decision last fall to nominate Powell for a second term, leaving the president handcuffed in blaming the Fed chair for the parlous state of the economy. Powell was, after all, Trump’s pick for Fed chair — and Biden, the thinking goes, could have thrown him overboard and started afresh.That would have been a very Trump-like move. Powell resisted months of intense pressure from the 45th president to lower interest rates, including comments describing the low-key Fed chairman as an “enemy” of the United States. Central bankers prize their distance from politics, mindful that their credibility with financial institutions around the world is crucial to their effectiveness.So in renominating Powell, Biden made sure to emphasize his respect for his institutional prerogatives. “My plan is to address inflation,” the president said. “It starts with a simple proposition: Respect the Fed and respect the Fed’s independence.”Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, with President Biden last month. Some Democrats had urged Biden to choose a Fed chair of his own.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Fed’s relationship with politicsLet’s set aside the fraught question of whether Trump’s re-election could bring about the end of American democracy. Does the Fed, in fact, have an “obligation” to consider how its actions might affect the U.S. political system?On a simple reading of the law, not really. The Federal Reserve Act gives the Fed the authority to regulate the nation’s money supply, to foster the “long-run potential” of the U.S. economy and to promote the goals of “maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.”Frederic Mishkin, a former member of the Fed’s board of governors, no doubt spoke for many in the finance world when he wrote in an email, “I most strongly disagree with the view that the Federal Reserve should adjust its policy to favor or harm any politician.”He added, “The Fed should be as apolitical as possible, and its policy focus should be on stabilizing both inflation and output fluctuations, as is mandated by congressional legislation.”But it’s hard to divorce the Fed from its historical roots, founded as it was in an era of great political turmoil driven by frequent financial panics.The Fed was successfully established in 1913 because President Woodrow Wilson won the assent of William Jennings Bryan, the most influential populist leader of the time, by guaranteeing that government officials appointed by the president, not private sector bankers, would run the board.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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      Winning When Trump Is Against You: A How-To Guide

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      Are you a Republican who broke with Donald Trump but hope to win your upcoming primary?Maybe you said that Joe Biden is the duly elected president, condemned Trump’s demagogy on Jan. 6 or merely suggested that he tone down his social media posts.This handy guide is for you.So far, Trump’s preferred candidates have won primaries for Senate seats in Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. One of those candidates, J.D. Vance, overcame his past comments ripping Trump as “cultural heroin” by undergoing a wholesale reinvention of his political persona.Others, like Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, have defied him and survived, without such a radical about-face.So what explains why some Trump critics succeed and others don’t? Here, based on a review of the results of this year’s primaries and conversations with roughly a dozen Republican strategists, are a few lessons:1. Do not vote to impeach him.This much is clear at the midway point of this year’s election calendar: The Republican base regards having voted to impeach Trump as the ultimate act of betrayal.The former president has already induced the retirements of four of the 10 House Republicans who supported his impeachment in 2021, while helping to oust another — Representative Tom Rice, who lost his coastal South Carolina seat on Tuesday by more than 25 percentage points.One impeacher, Representative David Valadao, is clinging to second place ahead of a Trump-friendly challenger in his district in California, where the top two vote winners of any party move forward to the general election.Four others — Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse of Washington, and Peter Meijer of Michigan — have yet to face the music.Only one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump over Jan. 6 is running for re-election this year: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. In her case, a new voting system engineered by her allies could help her fend off a challenge from Kelly Tshibaka, a former federal government official who has the former president’s backing.2. Choose your location wisely.Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who did not vote to impeach Trump, made the former president’s enemies list for criticizing him on television after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. He called her a “grandstanding loser” and mocked her for filming a video praising him in front of Trump Tower in New York.But she never got fundamentally out of step with the South Carolina Lowcountry, a libertarian-leaning area with a history of electing iconoclastic lawmakers. Mace grew up in Goose Creek, just outside Charleston. That local familiarity gave her an intuitive feel for navigating issues like offshore drilling, which is unpopular in the coastal region.Understand the June 14 Primary ElectionsTakeaways: Republicans who embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies did well in Nevada, while his allies had a mixed night in South Carolina. Here’s what else we learned.Winners and Losers: Here is a rundown of some of the most notable wins and losses.Election Deniers Prevail: Republicans who deny the 2020 election’s result are edging closer to wielding power over the next one.Nevada Races: Trump-inspired candidates captured key wins in the swing state, setting the stage for a number of tossup contests against embattled Democrats.Texas Special Election: Mayra Flores, a Republican, flipped a House seat in the Democratic stronghold of South Texas. Her win may only be temporary, however.“She did a much better job of staying aligned with her district,” said Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman who was White House chief of staff during Trump’s first impeachment.Rice, by contrast, “almost took the attitude to dare people to throw him out,” Mulvaney said — standing emphatically by his impeachment vote despite representing a district that Trump won by more than 18 percentage points in 2020.The backbone of Rice’s district is fast-growing Horry County, a historically conservative region filled with “angry retirees,” according to Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist based in Greenville.But just down the coast in Mace’s more upscale district, Trump outperformed his approval ratings in 2020 — a sign, Felkel said, that there are “a lot of people who like Trump’s policies but don’t like Trump.”3. Speaking of which: Don’t break with the base on policy.Mace has been described as a moderate, but that’s a misnomer: She holds a 95 percent lifetime rating from the Club for Growth and a 94 percent score from Heritage Action, two groups that gauge lawmakers’ fealty to conservative principles. Rice scored 83 percent on both indexes — dangerous territory in the deep-red Pee Dee region of South Carolina.Although the Club for Growth stayed out of her race, Mace did benefit from $160,000 in spending from Americans for Prosperity, another conservative outside group funded by the Koch brothers. No national outside groups spent money on Rice’s behalf.Even minor heresies, like Mace’s support for legalizing marijuana, underscored her carefully cultivated image as an independent thinker and gave her a useful measure of distance from Trump.“Nancy polished the ring; she didn’t kiss the ring,” Felkel said.4. Run against a weak opponent.Russell Fry, the state representative who defeated Rice on Tuesday, was a known quantity in the state who happily played the part of a generic pro-Trump Republican.Katie Arrington, a former state lawmaker and Pentagon official who won Trump’s endorsement against Mace despite his private doubts about her candidacy, is another story.Voters certainly heard about the former president’s preference: At least 75 percent of voters in the district were aware that he had endorsed Arrington, according to the Mace campaign’s internal polling.Russell Fry’s election night event in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He happily played the part of a generic pro-Trump Republican against Representative Tom Rice, who voted in favor of impeachment.Jason Lee/The Sun News, via Associated PressBut Mace and her allies pummeled Arrington with ads accusing her of voting to raise gasoline taxes as a member of the state legislature, noting that her security clearance had been suspended while she was a defense official in the Trump administration and calling her “just as bad as Biden.”Mulvaney, who campaigned for Mace, noted an additional factor: that Arrington had lost the district to a Democrat in 2018.“Trump doesn’t like losers, and that’s what Katie was,” Mulvaney said.5. Get yourself a strong local surrogate.Although Arrington had Trump in her corner, Mace had the backing of Nikki Haley, a popular two-term former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador under Trump who now lives in the district.It proved enormously valuable. Like Mace, Haley has toed a careful line toward Trump, criticizing him on occasion but never fundamentally breaking with her former boss. She has an 82 percent approval rating among South Carolina Republicans, according to a poll conducted in May, just a few points below Trump.Haley raised more than $400,000 for Mace and appeared at two of her campaign rallies, in addition to recording get-out-the-vote videos and robocalls and sending texts. She also cut a television ad calling Mace “a fighter,” a “strong, pro-life mom” and a “tax-cutter” that ran for six weeks, airing 446 times in two ad markets. Mace’s campaign also mentioned Haley’s endorsement in its closing TV spot.Rice made the puzzling decision to invite Paul Ryan, the former House speaker, to stump for him in the closing weeks of the campaign. Ryan, who tangled often with Trump before quitting politics to join the board of Fox News and starting a small think tank, hails from Janesville, Wis. — more than 800 miles from Myrtle Beach.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More

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      Will Nevada Turn Red in the November Midterms?

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      If a red wave arrives in November, as many expect, it will likely wash ashore in landlocked Nevada, a state whose recent history of Democratic victories masks just how hard-fought those triumphs have been.In presidential elections, Republicans have not won Nevada since 2004, when President George W. Bush carried the state narrowly over John Kerry. Races for statewide office have been more contested, but still dominated by Democrats on the whole.This year could be different. Nevadans will cast their final ballots on Tuesday in primary elections that will decide what sorts of candidates will be carrying the G.O.P. banner in November. And as of now, it looks as if many of those Republicans might very well be elected.Much has been written about the woes of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year. Whenever her name appears in national news coverage, it’s invariably accompanied by some version of the phrase “one of Democrats’ most endangered incumbents.”Her likely opponent is Adam Laxalt, a former state attorney general whose father, Pete Domenici, was a senator in New Mexico — a fact that was a closely held family secret until 2013. Laxalt’s grandfather was Paul Laxalt, who served as both governor and senator in Nevada.Heading into Election Day, Laxalt looks to be comfortably ahead of his top primary opponent, Sam Brown, a retired Army captain. Laxalt helped lead Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election results in Nevada in 2020.House seats on fireLess well understood than the Senate stakes is the fact that all three of Democrats’ House seats in Nevada are also at risk in November.The Cook Political Report rates all three districts as Democratic tossups. House Majority PAC, the main outside spending arm of House Democrats, has reserved more dollars in ad spending in Las Vegas than in any other media market in the country.There’s Representative Susie Lee, who squeaked by her Republican opponent by fewer than 13,000 votes in 2020. Lee’s likely opponent is April Becker, a lawyer who has the backing of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House.Representative Steven Horsford, whose district stretches from northern Las Vegas to the middle of the state, could also be in trouble. In March, his wife, Sonya Douglass, popped up on Twitter to say she would “not be silent” about the decade-long affair he has admitted to having with Gabriela Linder, a former intern for Senator Harry Reid.Douglass criticized his choice to “file for re-election and force us to endure yet another season of living through the sordid details of the #horsfordaffair with #mistressforcongress rather than granting us the time and space to heal as a family.”Linder hosted an “audio memoir” of the affair under a pseudonym, Love Jones, called “Mistress for Congress.”After Horsford responded to her first series of tweets, Douglass wrote: “This statement is worse than the first from May 2020. The lies never end. Let’s pray @stevenhorsford comes to grips with reality and gets the help he needs.”Horsford’s likely opponent is Annie Black, a state lawmaker who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Last week, Black sent out a fund-raising appeal to supporters with the subject line, “The Real ‘Big Lie’ is that Biden Won ‘Fair and Square.’”The Democratic primary to watchThen there’s Representative Dina Titus, whose historically safe Las Vegas seat is now decidedly unsafe thanks to a decision by Nevada Democrats to spread some of the voters in her old district across the two others.That move prompted a vulgar complaint by Titus, who blasted the redistricting move as “terrible” during remarks at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. town hall event in December.“They could have created two safe seats for themselves and one swing,” Titus said. “That would have been smart.” She added: “No, no, we have to have three that are very likely going down.”Titus, in an interview, noted that she had represented parts of her new district when she was in the Nevada Legislature. “It’s like coming home,” she said. “Been gone awhile, but I’m back.”But first, Titus faces a primary challenge from Amy Vilela, an activist who last week secured the backing of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Vilela was a co-chair of the Sanders presidential campaign in 2020. She previously ran in a primary against Horsford in 2018, losing by a large margin.This time, Vilela is running a progressive insurgent campaign against what she called “complacency” by Titus and the Democratic establishment, which she said was causing low enthusiasm among voters.“We definitely have to start delivering on our promises and start addressing the needs of the working class instead of the donor base,” Vilela said in an interview.“Well, let’s put it in perspective,” Titus responded, pointing to her record of bringing federal dollars to Nevada. “When Amy tries to portray herself as the progressive and me as the establishment, look at all the endorsements I have. She’s a Democratic Socialist, and I’m the progressive Democrat.”Tourists and traffic have returned to Las Vegas since the start of the pandemic, but gas prices and rents have climbed.Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times‘We fell off the skyscraper and quickly hit bottom’If Nevada flips to red in November, the state’s economic struggles will be a powerful reason.Nevada’s unemployment rate surged to 28.5 percent in April 2020, just after the coronavirus pandemic throttled the tourism industry, which makes up a huge portion of the state’s economy. The unemployment rate is now 5 percent, still not quite at prepandemic levels.Democrats say that without their help, the economic suffering would have been worse. And Mike Noble, a pollster who works in Nevada, said that while a Republican sweep was a possibility, “a lot of things would need to go right for the G.O.P. to make that come to fruition since the Democrats have the advantage of incumbency.”Inflation is posing a potent new threat. As of Monday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in Nevada was $5.66, well above the $5 national average. That’s in a state with an anemic public transit system, where you need a car to get most places. And rents in Las Vegas, a place with a famously transient population, are rising faster than in nearly any other city in the country.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Our Racial Reckoning Could Have Come Sooner. What Made 2020 Different?

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      Why was there an all-encompassing racial reckoning in this country starting in the spring of 2020? And why then? Examining that question reminds us that history is driven — by general trends classifiable as progress or decline — but also just happens. Specifically, chance factors, what historians sometimes call “contingency,” have greater effects than we are always inclined to notice.As the physicist Cameron Gibelyou and the historian Douglas Northrop note in their useful “Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything,” “To state that an event was contingent in general, without further qualification, means that the event would not have been possible without a certain sequence of previous events or actions being taken by particular actors, that it did not have to happen the way it did.”Ancient examples include the Ming dynasty’s decision not to pursue imperial goals across the sea after 1433. Otherwise, China might have established worldwide colonies in advance of Europeans, and the trajectory of world history would be quite different. The Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.E. held the Persians off from Greece, after which Greek culture flowered in ways that helped forge the intellectual and artistic culture of Europe. It is interesting to imagine the different cultural developments that might have ensued if Persia had conquered and maintained dominion over Greece and then beyond.Contingency matters in our times as well. We might propose, for example, that the murder of George Floyd set off a reckoning on race in America. However, that is more a description than an explanation.There have been other relatively recent cases of gruesome and unjustifiable killings of Black people by the police that have become national touchstones and yet did not result in racial reckonings of the kind we’ve seen since 2020: When, in 1999, the police gunned down Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of a New York City apartment building as he was reaching for his wallet, the media coverage was intense and sustained. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in a role now quite familiar, served as a kind of spokesman for Diallo’s family.Yet there was nothing we would describe as a racial reckoning in the wake of Diallo’s death, nor did the initiative on race that President Bill Clinton started in 1997 result in anything like the intensity of discussion, or changes in language and norms, that our current reckoning has.We might suppose that social media needed to emerge before such a thing could happen. But then social media was largely the reason the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin (though not by a police officer) and Michael Brown became national causes célèbres in 2012 and 2014. Yet while these cases did intensify national awareness of the generally uneasy and often perilous relationship between Black people and law enforcement in this country, they didn’t occasion a comprehensive reassessment of racism, its nature and its role in creating today’s inequalities in the way Floyd’s murder did.One might propose that what happened in 2020 happened because Black America was by then especially fed up — weary and disgusted with the nation’s refusal to more seriously address police violence. I imagine that analysis when I recall historian and former assistant attorney general Roger Wilkins in 2005 describing some Watts rioters of 1965 as “fed up” with the bleak circumstances of many citizens in Watts and South Central Los Angeles at the time. He was responding to my query about why it was in the late 1960s — after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — that the nation experienced 1967’s “long, hot summer” riots and, in 1968, more riots in Black neighborhoods in various parts of the country, including Washington, D.C. (in response, in part, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.). Those riots were initiated by Black people in protest, rather than, as I wrote, earlier race riots in American cities that “involved white bigots storming into Black neighborhoods and terrorizing residents.”Today, I cannot help wondering whether we can really say that Black people in the late ’60s were more fed up than at times past. And I similarly wonder if there is reason to suppose that Black Americans were less fed up post-2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the miserable government response to it and the nationwide discussion of what that signaled about racism — inspiring Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke” and David Simon’s succès d’estime, “Treme” — than we were in 2020.I would suggest that what conditioned the racial reckoning of 2020 was partly contingency. To wit, I think the pandemic was the determining factor.Tragically, hideously, Americans learn of Black people dying under appalling circumstances, involving police officers, quite often. Think of Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner — whether these circumstances lead to criminal convictions, or charges, which they often don’t. Few of us, especially those of us who live in New York City, will ever forget Garner’s words, “I can’t breathe,” though even his death wasn’t a fulcrum in quite the way Floyd’s was. In May 2020, there was something besides the injustice and brutality of Floyd’s murder that motivated the surge of nationwide demonstrations: the fact that we had been in pandemic isolation for two months and that around that same time it was becoming clear that conditions were not going to change anytime soon.I don’t mean to imply that this outcry was insincere or cynical. But I suspect that what helped make the difference was the pandemic lockdown. At that unusual and challenging time, for many people, being outdoors and connecting with other people was understandably a uniquely powerful temptation. The lockdown also gave a broader range of people — beyond those already committed to activism — the time to reflect, and to devote their energies to things beyond themselves, something they may not have done under normal circumstances.As such, it could be that if there had not been a lockdown, the Floyd protests would have been smaller in scale and shorter in duration. Further, one could surmise that if the sequence of events had taken place a few months earlier, with the lockdown beginning in the fall and Floyd’s murder happening in the colder months of January or February, this, too, would have, hypothetically, made protests smaller, less likely or shorter-term in many locations. And this probably would have decreased the chances that the protests stimulated a think-in about racism that would still be going strong two years later.There’s a case that the pandemic shaped the racial reckoning in another way. A controversial aspect of the reckoning has been the examples of workplace disciplinary actions that have become commonplace in its wake, out of a general sense of these actions as inherent to the mission of reconsidering racism. (In this newsletter, I’ve written about more than one.) That a number of these instances involve social media should come as no surprise: These platforms place a kind of scrim curtain between people that can lessen our sense of dehumanization as unnatural.It’s not unlike what can happen to us on video chat applications such as Zoom or messaging programs such as Slack. Contempt and condemnation can come more easily to us when directed to a static avatar on Twitter or someone in a box on a screen than to a person we are in the same room with. Chat features and direct-message side exchanges also allow factions to build up opposition as a general meeting runs, in a way that passing notes and sharing dismissive facial expressions cannot. The way we’ve learned to communicate in the past few years, sometimes normalizing real-time shaming and dismissing, has set new norms that now feel like the default, even as live meetings become routine again.In short, I think that without a pandemic, and an ensuing year-plus when a good deal of our interactions were virtual, America would not have entered an extended racial reckoning. It wasn’t that Black Americans were, two years ago, at some unique tipping point, nor was it that white Americans opened in an unprecedented way to hearing out Black America’s concerns from the sheer goodness of their hearts.It was the confluence of a pandemic, a grievous murder and the time of year in which these occurred, with the magnitude and tone determined partly by the fact that all of this happened when handy group communication technologies had become widely established and were available to spend workdays on.History is like this, including that of race and racism. On race, contingency should be included in how we chronicle it, and not only now but in the past and the future. The civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s were related, in part, to the novelty of television. Future progress on race will almost certainly be driven by factors beyond protest and critique, in ways no one could have predicted beforehand.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      How South Dakota Voters Won a Power Struggle With G.O.P. Legislators

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      Coming on the same night that voters in San Francisco ousted their lightning rod of a district attorney, Chesa Boudin — in what was widely interpreted as a setback for progressive ideas on criminal justice — it would have been easy to overlook what happened on Tuesday in South Dakota.But the results there are no less consequential for national politics. Voters in South Dakota sent a resounding message of their own to the state’s conservative power structure: We’re in charge here, not you.The immediate issue was a constitutional amendment requiring that certain voter-initiated referendums must pass by 60 percent, rather than a simple majority. The measure was defeated decisively, with more than two-thirds of voters rejecting the proposed new threshold.But this wasn’t just a political process story. It was the latest round in a national fight between voters and state legislatures, who have been battling for primacy on issues like marijuana legalization, gerrymandering and health care. Last year, my colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti took a broad look at Republican-led efforts to limit ballot initiatives, which have grown only more intense in the last 12 months.In South Dakota, the ballot question was pushed by Republican state lawmakers who are hoping to defeat a November referendum on expanding access to Medicaid. To David Daley, the author of several recent books on grass-roots democracy, it was a classic example of the power struggle playing out in state capitols across the country.“Whenever citizens effectively use the ballot initiative to make policy changes the legislature opposes, lawmakers bite back, and they bite back hard,” Daley said.Raising the threshold for ballot drives is an increasingly common tool. A new report by RepresentUs, a nonpartisan group that promotes ballot initiatives, found that since 2017, at least four states have passed laws that impose supermajority requirements and put them in front of voters as a ballot question, out of at least 64 bills proposed.And it’s not always Republican lawmakers pitted against progressive voters.“We’ve seen legislators attempt to threaten and limit the ballot-measure process in red, blue and purple states,” said Anh-Linh Kearney, a research analyst for RepresentUs, pointing to Democratic-controlled Colorado, which raised the requirement for passing ballot measures to 55 percent in 2016.Not-so-subtle tactics to target referendumsChris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, described a “growing trend of tactical ways to make the process harder,” pointing to her group’s tally of 108 laws introduced this year in 26 states that would make technical tweaks to the rules surrounding ballot initiatives.Understand the June 7 Primary ElectionBy showing little enthusiasm for progressive and Trumpian candidates alike, voters in seven states showed the limits of the ideologies of both parties.Takeaways: For all the talk of sweeping away the old order, the primaries on June 7 largely saw the establishment striking back. Here’s what else we learned.Winners and Losers: Here is a rundown of some of the most notable wins and losses.California Races: The recall of a progressive prosecutor showed the shifting winds on criminal justice. In Los Angeles, Rick Caruso and Representative Karen Bass are heading to a runoff mayoral election.New Mexico’s Governor Race: Mark Ronchetti, a former television meteorologist, has won New Mexico’s Republican nomination for governor.Since 2017, Fields Figueredo said, the center had counted a fivefold increase in bills introduced and enacted that would make it more difficult to pass ballot measures.Sometimes those tweaks take Kafkaesque forms.In Arkansas, for instance, a drive to establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission ran into a deviously written 2015 law requiring that canvassers for the ballot initiative pass a federal background check conducted by the State Police.But there was a catch. The State Police could not do federal background checks. So the group behind the ballot drive, Arkansas Voters First, pulled what information it could from publicly available records and submitted thousands more signatures than required. The secretary of state rejected those background checks on the grounds that the canvassers had not “passed,” and threw out more than 10,000 signatures.Litigation followed. In a 2020 decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court sided with the secretary of state, ruling that the statute had mandated the background checks, whether or not the task was impossible. In a dissent, Justice Josephine Linker Hart pointed out the absurdity of the statute, noting that “the State Police do not ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ the subject of a background check” — they merely share the information from the relevant databases.“It was wild,” said Bonnie Miller, who led the Arkansas Voters First petition drive. “I’m still not over it.”A court later threw out the background-check requirement, but the cat-and-mouse game goes on: The Arkansas General Assembly passed a new law that lengthened the list of offenses that disqualify paid canvassers. And a measure similar to the one South Dakota voters just rejected, raising the threshold for successful ballot initiatives to 60 percent, is now on the ballot.Miller feels as if she’s battling for the very principle behind voter-led referendums. “This threshold, it’s just death to direct democracy in our state,” she said.‘People want the ability to make decisions for themselves’Opponents of the South Dakota amendment had a couple of factors working in their favor.There’s the state’s long history with ballot initiatives: Father Robert Haire, a radical Catholic priest, helped pioneer the concept as an activist with the Populist Party in the 1880s.Then there’s the fact that Medicaid is popular. Voter-led petitions have already powered Medicaid expansion in Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks information and trends about the country’s health care system, has found that three-quarters of Americans hold a favorable opinion of the program — including 76 percent of independents and 65 percent of Republicans.At this point, only 12 states have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, despite its popularity. As you can see from this interactive map, also put together by Kaiser, these states are concentrated in the Deep South, along with Kansas, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming. But when Kaiser asked people in those states whether they wanted to expand Medicaid’s coverage, 61 percent said yes.And finally, Fields Figueredo said, voters have a deep-seated aversion to having their choices limited by politicians — setting up inevitable clashes with lawmakers who “don’t like being told what to do.”“People want the ability to make decisions for themselves,” she said.What to read“We’re bleeding out, and you’re not there”: Families of the Uvalde, Texas, massacre pleaded with Congress today to enact new gun control laws.Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas said this week that the state would investigate fake accounts on Twitter — an issue that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has pointed to as he appears to waver on a blockbuster deal to buy the platform. What’s in it for Paxton and Texas? David McCabe and J. David Goodman explain.The Supreme Court is expected to release some enormously important rulings in the coming weeks. David Leonhardt previews the five biggest ones.Rick Caruso will face Representative Karen Bass in the general election for Los Angeles mayor.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesAbout last night’s election results …Last night, we wrote about four candidates we were watching in Tuesday’s primaries, and 24 hours later, we have some results — but as expected, we’re still waiting for more.In one of the three Republican primary challenges we were monitoring, the incumbent is safe. In the other two, it’s too soon to say.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Is Jan. 6 a Winning Political Issue in California? We’re About to Find Out.

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      Democratic candidates have shied away from talking about the Capitol siege. That could change if voters flock to a former federal prosecutor running for a House seat in California.On Tuesday, we’ll get an unusually clear test of the political power of Jan. 6 at the ballot box.In California’s newly drawn 41st Congressional District, a pro-business Republican who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election faces a primary for a House seat against a Democratic former federal prosecutor who worked cases against several alleged Capitol rioters.No race provides a starker contrast between voters’ usual kitchen-table concerns and what the leading challenger cast in an interview as a battle for “the future of democracy.”A G.O.P. House veteran and a young DemocratThe Republican incumbent, Representative Ken Calvert, embodies a changing G.O.P.He has represented the area for three decades, though the district’s boundaries, which now stretch from suburban areas east of Los Angeles to Palm Springs, have changed over the years. He was first elected to the House in 1992 as a traditional, Chamber of Commerce-style conservative, but has moved rightward along with his party.He voted on Jan. 6, 2021, against certifying President Biden’s victory, but later published an op-ed article denouncing the mob at the Capitol. Donald Trump has endorsed him, though Calvert’s website makes no mention of that fact. He prefers to talk about the price of gas in a state where the average gallon now costs $6.25.Calvert has faced accusations of ethical lapses during his time in office, though he has always denied wrongdoing. After the police discovered him in a parked car with a woman in 1993, he acknowledged having sex with a prostitute, saying he had been “lonely” after a recent divorce.In California’s unusual primary system, voters in the district will decide which two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party.The leading Democratic challenger is Will Rollins, a 37-year-old former assistant U.S. attorney in California who has made Jan. 6 the central theme of his campaign. In his ads, such as this introductory video, he talks about the danger to democracy posed by domestic extremism and misinformation — ideas most other candidates in his party rarely emphasize.Rollins saw a “huge rise in domestic terrorism cases” during his five years as a Justice Department prosecutor focused on national security and counterterrorism, he said in an interview, culminating in his work assisting colleagues in Washington reel in alleged participants in the Capitol riot.One of the cases he helped with was that of Gina Bisignano, a Louis Vuitton-clad salon owner from Beverly Hills who gained notoriety for shouting “They will not take away our Trumpy Bear” through a bullhorn on Jan. 6. Bisignano initially pleaded guilty to six federal charges, but later sought to withdraw her plea.“It was the experience of working on those cases and seeing ordinary American citizens, radicalized enough to invade the U.S. Capitol for the first time since the War of 1812, that got me thinking more seriously about how broken our information system is,” Rollins said.Among other ideas, he proposes to revive and modernize the Fairness Doctrine, a Cold War-era law that required broadcasters to report evenhandedly on political topics.“That doctrine wasn’t perfect,” Rollins said. “But it did enable us to defeat fascism and win the Cold War because we didn’t waste time debating nonsense, like whether the polio vaccine had microchips in it, or whether the moon landing was faked, or whether it was actually Nixon who beat Kennedy in 1960.”Rollins said he was first inspired to pursue a career in public service by the Sept. 11 attacks, which took place when he was a junior in high school. He considered joining the military, but was discouraged by laws that still discriminated against gay service members.“I wanted to enlist, but I had a government that told me that there was something defective about who I was,” Rollins said. He chose the law instead, clerking for Jacqueline Nguyen, a federal appeals court judge, before becoming a prosecutor.A centrist insurgency, of sortsUnseating an incumbent is an expensive proposition, but Rollins is showing an ability to raise the kind of money that could carry him into a general election.He has raised a little more than $1 million since the start of his campaign, lagging behind the nearly $1.9 million Calvert has raised this cycle. As of mid-May, Calvert had most of that cash — $1.2 million — still on hand, while Rollins had just shy of $445,428 left heading into Tuesday’s primary.Rollins’s largest donors are three PACs focused on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, including the political wing of the Congressional L.G.B.T.Q.+ Equality Caucus, which donated $5,000 and endorsed his campaign. More than $145,200 of his war chest came from people who gave less than $200.Take Back the House 2022, a joint fund-raising committee led by Republican leaders, has given $95,575 to Calvert. Corporate PACs, including those affiliated with Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton and Raytheon, are also among Calvert’s biggest financial supporters.Through a campaign spokesman, Calvert declined an interview, but emailed a statement.“Riverside County families are confronting a number of challenges in their daily lives,” he said. “Between record-breaking gas prices, high food costs, and baby formula shortages, most of these challenges were created under President Biden’s failed leadership.”“I have consistently spoken out against political or any other kind of violence,” he added.Although national Republicans say they aren’t worried about Calvert, the new 41st District has become more Democratic. It now includes Palm Springs, a left-leaning city that Rollins has made his base. And for the first time, it contains more registered Democrats than Republicans. The area voted for Trump by just one percentage point in 2020.Official Democratic Party groups, daunted by President Biden’s low approval ratings and by a national map that is forcing them to defend dozens of seats, have yet to show interest in the race.But Rollins has drawn about $65,000 in support from Welcome PAC, a relatively new Democratic-aligned outfit that applies insurgent tactics to support center-left candidates in swing districts.Liam Kerr, a founder of the group, said that Rollins was the committee’s first major investment because Calvert had rarely faced a serious challenge, and because the district ought to be winnable for the right Democratic candidate.“People are consuming a lot of polarization porn and underestimating how many swing voters there are out there,” Kerr said.Coming attraction: Hearings on Jan. 6Privately, many Democratic campaign strategists are skeptical that voters will reward their party for focusing on the Capitol siege.They describe it as a “base issue,” or rank the topic somewhere below higher priorities for voters, such as inflation or abortion rights. What preoccupies the Beltway, they say, doesn’t always resonate out in the districts where congressional majorities are won and lost.Which is not to say that Democrats aren’t talking about Jan. 6 at all. The Center for American Progress Action Fund has commissioned a monthslong research project to learn how best to go after the MAGA brand and portray pro-Trump Republicans as insurrectionists and extremists, and has disseminated its findings to Democratic strategists and groups.And next week, the House committee that has been investigating the Capitol riot will hold its first public hearing on its findings, scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern on Thursday — prime-time viewing. Although the panel is bipartisan, Democrats plan to use the hearings to highlight Republicans’ links to the Capitol rioters, culminating in a final report to be delivered a few weeks before Election Day in November.Rollins doesn’t necessarily have the primary sewn up. Shrina Kurani, a charismatic engineer who is running as a problem-solver who can address California’s never-ending water crises, has her share of admirers among Democrats.But if Rollins performs well on Tuesday and starts to gain momentum, expect to hear more about Jan. 6.Alan Feuer More

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      The Massachusetts Race for Democrats’ Next Crusading Attorney General

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      Want to know where Democratic politics are headed? Watch Massachusetts.The state has always had a crusading streak — it was, after all, founded by religious dissidents. Massachusetts prides itself on leading the nation on progressive causes, be it overthrowing the British, outlawing slavery and Jim Crow, establishing universal health care or legalizing same-sex marriage. In an 1858 article in The Atlantic, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. only half-jokingly called the statehouse atop Boston’s Beacon Hill “the hub of the solar system.”The departing attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, gained a national following for suing Donald Trump’s administration in dozens of cases. At the Boston Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, she famously stood in front of an enormous crowd and shouted what would become a signature line: “We’ll see you in court!”So the race to succeed Healey, who is running for governor, is very much worth following. At a time when many Democrats find themselves demoralized by the paralysis in Washington and by President Biden’s low approval ratings, its contours will tell us something about what voters on the left are most passionate about.It is also exposing a fault line within the Democratic Party over corporate money — between those who see it as inherently corrupting and reject it, and those who view it as a necessary evil.The leading candidate in the primary, by all indications, is Andrea Campbell, a former Boston City Council president who finished third in the city’s mayoral race last year. She faces Quentin Palfrey, a former assistant attorney general, voting rights lawyer and official in the Obama and Biden administrations who supports Medicare for all; and Shannon Liss-Riordan, a self-financing labor lawyer who has the backing of major unions.All three are running as different flavors of liberal, fitting what local Democrats say is the public’s appetite for someone willing to wield the power of the office aggressively to protect consumers and correct injustices.“What voters are looking for is people who are going to fight on their behalf,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist in Boston who is not supporting any of the candidates.Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarAfter key races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states, here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Invincibility in Doubt: With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates failing to win, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.G.O.P. Governors Emboldened: Many Republican governors are in strong political shape. And some are openly opposing Mr. Trump.Voter Fraud Claims Fade: Republicans have been accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss.The Politics of Guns: Republicans have been far more likely than Democrats to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms. Here’s why.A tradition of taking on big businessThe attorney general in Massachusetts has a storied muckraking tradition dating to Frank Bellotti, who transformed the office into a formidable platform for law in the public interest during the 1970s and ’80s.Scott Harshbarger sued major tobacco manufacturers, resulting in a huge settlement in the late 1990s; more recently, Healey has gone after pharmaceutical companies that made and marketed opioids, effectively shutting down Purdue Pharma.“It’s the people’s attorney,” said Marie St. Fleur, a former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts who is close to Campbell. “That’s who we are.”This weekend, the three candidates will face their first test when delegates to the Democratic Party’s state convention will vote to decide who receives the party’s endorsement. Any candidate who does not reach 15 percent support among delegates will not make the primary ballot.Palfrey and Liss-Riordan have attacked Campbell for refusing to disavow a super PAC, Better Boston, that spent $1.6 million in support of her mayoral run. Palfrey has said the donations could create “a conflict of interest” if Campbell becomes attorney general. Both have pushed Campbell to sign the People’s Pledge, an agreement to reject corporate donations that was popularized by Senator Elizabeth Warren. She has refused.“That’s probably because they realize that Campbell has the early lead,” said David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, who has seen private polling in the race that heavily favors Campbell.Better Boston has not spent any money so far in the attorney general’s race, though it has not shut down, either. Its donors include Reed Hastings, a chief executive of Netflix, who chipped in $250,000; Andrew Balson, a former managing director at Bain Capital, who likewise gave $250,000; and Jim Walton, an heir to the Walmart dynasty, who donated $45,000. Sonia Alleyne, a former bank executive listed as the chairwoman of the group, did not respond to emails.Critics of corporate money in politics say the super PAC’s looming presence in the race is unprecedented, and has the potential to be corrupting even if the group is not currently active.“I’m not aware of a super PAC spending in an attorney general’s race in Massachusetts, ever,” said Jeff Clements, the president of American Promise, a nonprofit group that supports tightening campaign finance laws, and a former chief of the public law enforcement bureau in the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. “When that kind of raw power can be used to decide who can be the chief law enforcement officer of a state, that’s a big deal.”Campbell has raised nearly $1 million so far, significantly ahead of Palfrey and Liss-Riordan. She rejects what she says are “lies” spread about the financing of her campaign by her opponents, though she has declined to say whether she would disavow Better Boston’s support should it resume spending.“I’m not accountable to corporations or PACs,” she said in a recent television interview, emphasizing that 93 percent of her campaign donations had come from within Massachusetts. “I’m accountable to the people.”Andrea Campbell, right, campaigning last year for mayor of Boston, a race she lost.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesPersonality goes a long wayWith little to fear from Republicans in most general elections, Democrats in Massachusetts tend to race to the left in primaries for attorney general. But the candidates in this race have struggled to differentiate themselves on the issues.Where national Democrats have pivoted to loudly proclaiming their appreciation for America’s police officers, Campbell has gotten into public scrapes with police unions. And while Democrats in Congress have all but abandoned hope of banning military-style rifles like the one used in the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Palfrey is calling to banish gun manufacturers from the state altogether.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More