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      Liz Cheney’s PAC to Run Ad Against Lake and Finchem, Both Republicans, in Arizona

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      A leadership PAC sponsored by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, announced on Friday a $500,000 media buy in Arizona, where it will air a television spot urging voters to reject Kari Lake, the Republican running for governor, and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominee for secretary of state.“I don’t know that I’ve ever voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in Arizona, I absolutely would,” Ms. Cheney says in the ad. “If you care about the survival of our republic, you cannot give people power who will not honor elections.”Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem have both run campaigns amplifying former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Cheney, vice chair of the panel investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, lost her August primary in a landslide to Harriet Hageman, a Trump-backed challenger. While her future political plans remain vague, for now, she has said she plans to focus her efforts on blocking Mr. Trump from returning to power.Ms. Cheney has previously singled out Ms. Lake as an election denier whom she planned to campaign against. “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure Kari Lake is not elected,” Ms. Cheney said at the Texas Tribune Festival last month.The move is in line with Ms. Cheney’s efforts to keep election deniers out of office.She also endorsed Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, in a competitive race against Tom Barrett, a Republican state senator and 2020 election denier who has refused to say whether he would respect the results of the 2022 midterm elections.Ms. Cheney, who is arguably the most vocal critic of Mr. Trump in the Republican Party, has fielded dozens of endorsement requests from Democratic candidates, but the nod to Ms. Slotkin is her first of the midterm cycle. The race in Michigan’s seventh district is considered a tossup and is one of the Republican Party’s top targets as it seeks to win back the majority in the House.“I’m proud to endorse Elissa Slotkin,” Ms. Cheney, who served with Ms. Slotkin on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Thursday. Ms. Slotkin also served in the Bush administration when Ms. Cheney worked at the State Department.“While Elissa and I have our policy disagreements, at a time when our nation is facing threats at home and abroad, we need serious, responsible, substantive members like Elissa in Congress,” Ms. Cheney said, encouraging Republicans and independents, as well as Democrats, to support her.Ms. Cheney is scheduled to campaign with Ms. Slotkin in Michigan on Nov. 1 at an event billed as an “evening for patriotism and bipartisanship.” More

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      Kari Lake, Glenn Youngkin and a Post-Trump Era

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      TUCSON, Ariz. — It can be hard to make sense of endings and beginnings in politics and history, but what if we’ve already reached the post-Trump era?Consider the case of Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s former private equity co-C.E.O. governor with a sunshine demeanor, and Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican nominee for governor, a wild proponent of Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him. Theoretically, a Youngkin-Lake event would be a clash of vibes, an effort to mainstream Ms. Lake. But Mr. Youngkin campaigned for her last week, across several events — a decision that drew anguish from a segment of conservatives and hard questions from reporters in televised settings. In real life, there was no clash. It wasn’t one of those awkward, painful episodes in which a more traditional Republican makes an explicit transaction with a party dominated by Mr. Trump. Everything was smooth and cohesive — a joint case about the Republican Party of today.Mr. Youngkin cheerily warned the crowd that everything — our American values and institutions — could fall apart just like that, bam. “You take your eye off the ball and you lose an election, because remember, elections have consequences, and the next thing you know, everything can change.” And Ms. Lake is smooth as hell, a real pro after decades on TV, fluidly moving from offhandedly claiming that Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and the founding fathers would have been America First Republicans to offering a self-deprecating joke to giving advice on persuading independent voters to telling a nighttime crowd to “vote these bastards out,” dialing it up or down, depending on the situation.Looking at this pair one way, you could see Donald Trump’s endless influence over the Republican Party. But if you zoomed out, neither of these people has that much to do with Mr. Trump personally. Neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake owes him an inarguable debt for name recognition, neither particularly mimics his mannerisms, neither cropped up in the background of surreal scenes at the White House, neither has lived some embarrassed, poisoned-in-real-time transition from Trump critic to supporter before a national audience. Really, neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake had much to do with anything that happened nationally between June 2015 and January 2021.This observation — about their distance from a formative era of American life, and its centerpiece — felt very true in Arizona last week, and like a real break from other things in Republican politics. It also coexists with another possibility: that Mr. Trump could be fading politically at the same time that his core support is hardening. This dual reality would not necessarily diminish the force and reverb of his actions, but it might produce asymmetrical results. When people talk about a post-Trump era, there’s usually a subtext that it would involve a clean break and his permanent exit from political life. If we are entering a post-Trump period, though, rather than Mr. Trump being something to get past, he could remain a major factor in politics but no longer the sole reference point around which each development moves.So much in the political conversation still centers on the prospective choices of Mr. Trump and people’s responses to them, as if we were forever in the loop of the period when Mr. Trump’s prominence still felt surreal. But time has passed, and people’s lives have continued — and things have already changed. Arguably, you can see this in some conservatives’ intense focus on restricting trans health care or avoiding Covid recommendations, two issues that have outpaced Mr. Trump’s promotion of them, even if he opened the portal to their prominence.Consider Ms. Lake and Mr. Youngkin, there in the morning light of a Tucson sports bar. Their political careers would probably not exist without Mr. Trump, but their appeal to Republicans rests on a post-Trump political foundation.For a segment of Republicans — and particularly conservative writers and operatives — Mr. Youngkin reflects a fusionist dream, in which a Republican can win without entirely handing himself over to Mr. Trump while adopting MAGA’s aggressive education politics, including on gender identity. Ms. Lake has taken up Mr. Trump’s principal cause, that of the 2020 election result — and she continues to allege fraud — but sets that aside when she wants to, in favor of talking at her rallies last week about fentanyl, the intense anti-Covid-vax vibes she’s embraced, taxes or an idea to two-track high school so juniors have the option of switching into vocational training.You can see the possible fissures between Mr. Trump and Republican politics, in the efforts, too, of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Like Mr. Youngkin, he has undertaken a similar pre-presidential-campaign trip around the country to rally for midterm Republicans, even Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, who was in Washington on Jan. 6 and whom many national Republicans have avoided. Mr. DeSantis exists in a more transitional space between the initial Trump era and wanting to challenge him in 2024. But he has also isolated and advanced a strain of Trumpism: a kind of power politics that emphasizes public displays of, depending on your vantage point, accountability or retribution. In Pittsburgh at the event for Mr. Mastriano, after detailing various accomplishments and fights, Mr. DeSantis moved into a segment on restricting trans health care for minors and ideology. “We must fight the woke in our schools,” he said. “We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.”The Lake-Youngkin events involved a looser vibe — one featured vintage airplanes on display and Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” blasting. Both public events also involved Mr. Youngkin leading a crowd in reciting the opening of the Declaration of Independence — the kind of slightly sentimental thing that draws a certain kind of conservative to Mr. Youngkin, the type of conservative who flipped out when Mr. Youngkin announced he would campaign for Ms. Lake, who is maybe the most prominent stop-the-steal type on the ballot this year, running to oversee a battleground state.On the question of the 2020 election, there are a few ways to look at the Lake campaign. One is that it doesn’t matter what she believes, only what she says, because people straight up listen to what politicians say, without the metatextual strategic filter often applied by political operatives and the media. Over the past year, a lot of Republican discourse centered on ballot drop boxes, and now in Arizona, guys in tactical gear are reportedly staking them out.If Ms. Lake is elected, though, the belief question matters, given that she would help oversee a state’s next elections. Maybe she really does believe fraud corrupted the 2020 election. A third way to consider it is that she’s playing it up with laser focus on the Republican base. This seems to have been the opinion of Jan Brewer, a former Arizona governor and a proto-Trump politician herself. “I want to hear her tell me she did all this because she wanted to win and that it got a little bit out of control,” Ms. Brewer told The Times this summer.Mr. Trump has reportedly told donors that you can ask Ms. Lake about anything — the weather, the family — and she’ll work it back to the 2020 election: “Oh, the weather in Phoenix is OK, but you can never have great weather unless the election is fair.” You can even hear him tell Blake Masters a version of this line over the phone. Anecdotes like this capture Mr. Trump’s central destabilizing essence: compulsively advancing something wild or false even as he comments on those who go along with it. Then again: Ms. Lake told this exact anecdote herself, in public.In Scottsdale, after Mr. Youngkin and Ms. Lake’s last event of the day, a Swiss reporter brought up confidence in the voting process, citing local Republicans’ concerns that some candidates might not accept the results of the election. (“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake recently said on TV.) “People in Switzerland also feel like,” the reporter said, “does democracy work if you don’t accept the outcome?”Ms. Lake responded by calling her opponent, the current secretary of state, incompetent and unprepared for the upcoming election. Then Mr. Youngkin, unprompted, jumped in to talk about his own record on election processes — arguing that it isn’t just Republicans who doubt elections, citing 2000 and 2016. “This is not a Republican problem; it’s an American challenge,” he announced, sitting next to someone who last year said the Arizona secretary of state “should be locked up.”Ms. Lake then pulled out a printed stack of news stories from over the years in which, e.g., Jimmy Carter suggested Mr. Trump was an illegitimate president and Russians tried to hack voting machines. One reporter shouted several times, “Governor, has any other president besides Donald Trump tried to overturn an election?” with Mr. Youngkin defaulting to the things he’d already said, avoiding mention of Mr. Trump. Multiple aides called the next question as the last, which Ms. Lake disregarded and continued calling on people until some staffer finally cranked up Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”In the cold light of politics, for Ms. Lake, in a country where a sizable chunk of voters say they would consider supporting a candidate who doesn’t believe Joe Biden won the election he won, transforming voter fraud concerns into an atmospheric, passive problem would be a way to crab-walk out of a year spent personally amping up the idea that the election was stolen. And for Mr. Youngkin, it’s a way to commit to the Republican Party such as it is, as though time had begun in 2021.Mr. Trump has become predictable in a certain way: You can usually anticipate what his reaction will be to things and what he’ll demand from people, no matter how staggering and corrosive. What happens if a party that orbited him starts to detach from him a little bit and becomes, therefore, even more unpredictable? It’s hard to truly know what will happen if Ms. Lake becomes governor of a large state and how she’d govern.And in politics more broadly, it might still come to pass that Mr. Trump rolls through a presidential primary and straight into 2024, ushering in an eternal Trump era. But you can also imagine, in a party that has reshaped itself to Mr. Trump, his own obsession with the past puts him at a disadvantage with people who, unlike him, can discard it when they want.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Kari Ann Lake’s Hijacking of Martin Luther King

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      Meet Kari Lake. She is the election-denying, antisemite-endorsing former television news anchor who is the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona.She is Donald Trump in lipstick. But she delivers her divisiveness in the calm and measured tones of a person reading the news rather than a man who froths at the mic.She parrots Trump’s disgusting generalizations about immigrants, saying last month: “The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m going to just repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him in a lot of trouble. They are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime, and they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”Like Trump, she refuses to commit to accepting the result of the Arizona election — unless she wins. All she would say last week when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether she would accept the outcome was, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.” Well, of course.In the same way that Trump sought to brand Hillary Clinton a racist — calling her in 2016 “a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future” — Lake is telling CNN that her opponent Katie Hobbs is “a twice-convicted racist.”Convicted? If racism were a crime for which one could be convicted, America wouldn’t have enough prisons to hold the guilty, and Lake’s buddy Trump would be the mascot of the cellblock.Now Lake is joining Trump in invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in self-serving ways. On Martin Luther King Day in 2020, Trump tweeted: “It was exactly three years ago today, January 20, 2017, that I was sworn into office. So appropriate that today is also MLK jr DAY. African-American Unemployment is the LOWEST in the history of our Country, by far. Also, best Poverty, Youth, and Employment numbers, ever. Great!” Trump will always find a way to make things about himself.But Lake one-upped Trump in disrespecting King’s legacy, at a campaign event on Tuesday with the failed Democratic presidential hopeful (and now former Democrat) Tulsi Gabbard.Gabbard said during their exchange that she became a Democrat because she was “inspired” by the “party of Dr. Martin Luther King” and John F. Kennedy, “a party that said we respect your individual freedoms and civil liberties and a government of, by and for the people.” But, she added, “unfortunately that party no longer exists today.”Let’s stop here and start to set the record straight. The Democratic Party is not the party of Dr. King. He was devoted to principles and policies, not parties. In fact, he once said: “I don’t think the Republican Party is a party full of the almighty God, nor is the Democratic Party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either.”He was, however, bound to the idea of equality, fairness and truth, things that are anathema to the modern Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, are fighting for voting rights, which King championed, even as Republicans rush to suppress voting.Gabbard is obscene in her obtuseness, but what else can you expect from her?After Gabbard’s distortions about the Democratic Party of her youth disappearing, Lake chimed in, saying, “I’m a true believer that if M.L.K., Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were alive today, if J.F.K. were alive today, if our founding fathers were alive today, they would be America First Republicans.”Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that the founders worried and wrote endlessly about their fear of demagogues like Trump, whom Lake supports and whose lies she propagates.Let’s set aside the fact that Kennedy railed against core Republican policies that remain relatively unchanged, saying in a 1947 speech that the “Republican policies that brought disaster to the country in the late ’20s are good enough for the Republicans of today” and describing their agenda as “stringent labor laws, which strangle labor’s freedom by restraint” and “tax reductions which benefit the prosperous at the expense of the poor, at a time when the buying power in the upper ranges of income is abnormally high, while the buying power in the lower ranges of income is abnormally low.”Let’s instead focus on what has become a standard tactic for Republicans: co-opting King’s legacy, saying that he would have supported people who now stand for exactly what he opposed.It is a brazen act of blaspheming, an attempted theft of moral authority being conducted in broad daylight. And it’s not new. It has been happening for at least a decade, and writers and researchers have long been writing about it. What is striking to me is not that it happened but the consistency and longevity of the fraud.This is not an extemporaneous error but a concerted, coordinated effort to distract and deceive, to claim the antithesis of their political position as their own political avatar.So I say to Lake and all Republicans invoking King while working against his ideals: Keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouths!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

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      Democratic Party leaders turned toward inflation and the economy after a summer focus on abortion. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said the G.O.P. would seek spending cuts.With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.” More

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      Why Republicans Are Surging

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      Democrats had a golden summer. The Dobbs decision led to a surge of voter registrations. Voters handed Democrats a string of sweet victories in unlikely places — Alaska and Kansas, and good news in upstate New York.The momentum didn’t survive the fall.Over the past month or so, there’s been a rumbling across the land, and the news is not good for Team Blue. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican for Congress, and 45 percent said they planned to vote for a Democrat. Democrats held a one-point lead last month.The poll contained some eye-popping numbers. Democrats were counting on abortion rights to be a big issue, gaining them broad support among female voters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to favor Democrats, has evaporated. In September, women who identified as independent voters favored Democrats by 14 points. Now they favor Republicans by 18 percentage points.Republicans lead among independents overall by 10 points.To understand how the parties think the campaign is going, look at where they are spending their money. As Henry Olsen noted in The Washington Post last week, Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should be safe — places that Joe Biden won by double digits in 2020. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.If Republicans are competitive in places like that, we’re probably looking at a red wave election that will enable them to easily take back the House and maybe the Senate.So how should Democrats interpret these trends? There’s a minimalist interpretation: Midterms are usually hard for the president’s party, and this one was bound to be doubly hard because of global inflation.I take a more medium to maximalist view. I’d say recent events have exposed some serious weaknesses in the party’s political approach:It’s hard to win consistently if voters don’t trust you on the top issue. In a recent AP-NORC poll, voters trust Republicans to do a better job handling the economy, by 39 percent to 29 percent. Over the past two years, Democrats have tried to build a compelling economic platform by making massive federal investments in technology, infrastructure and child welfare. But those policies do not seem to be moving voters. As The Times’s Jim Tankersley has reported, Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races are barely talking about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included direct payments to citizens.I thought the child tax credit expansion would be massively popular and could help create a Democratic governing majority. It turned out to be less popular than many anticipated, and there was little hue and cry when it expired. Maybe voters have a built-in uneasiness about income redistribution and federal spending.Democrats have a crime problem. More than three-quarters of voters say that violent crime is a major problem in the United States, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden worked hard to give the Democrats credibility on this issue. Many Democrats have walked away from policies the party embraced then, often for good reasons. But they need to find another set of policies that will make the streets safer.Democrats have not won back Hispanics. In 2016, Donald Trump won 28 percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2020, it was up to 38 percent. This year, as William A. Galston noted in The Wall Street Journal, recent surveys suggest that Republicans will once again win about 34 to 38 percent of the Hispanic vote. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading the Democrat Charlie Crist by 16 points among Hispanics likely to vote.The Jan. 6 committee and the warnings about MAGA fascism didn’t change minds. That committee’s work has been morally and legally important. But Trump’s favorability rating is pretty much where it was at the committee’s first public hearing. In the Times poll, Trump is roughly tied with Biden in a theoretical 2024 rematch. According to Politico, less than 2 percent of broadcast TV spending in House races has been devoted to Jan. 6 ads.It could be that voters are overwhelmed by immediate concerns, like food prices. It could be that voters have become so cynical and polarized that scandal and corruption just don’t move people much anymore. This year Herschel Walker set some kind of record for the most scandals in one political season. He is still in a competitive race with Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia.The Republicans may just have a clearer narrative. The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life. But I’ve been watching the campaign speeches by people like Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.In other words, candidates like Lake wrap a dozen different issues into one coherent class war story. And it seems to be working. In late July she was trailing her opponent by seven points. Now she’s up by about half a point.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Arizona Sends Report of Voter Intimidation to Justice Dept. for Investigation

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      A voter in Arizona who tried to use a ballot drop box this week was “approached and followed” by a group of people, according to a complaint that the Arizona secretary of state’s office said on Thursday it had referred to the U.S. Justice Department and the state attorney general for investigation.The voter was dropping off their ballot at a box at the Maricopa County Juvenile Court in Mesa, according to the secretary of state’s office, which did not identify the voter.“The S.O.S. has talked to the voter, informed Maricopa County, and referred the report to the D.O.J. and A.G.’s offices for further investigation,” said Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, which is led by Katie Hobbs, who is also the Democratic nominee for governor. No other details about the complaint were provided.A spokeswoman for the Justice Department confirmed that the department had received the referral but declined to comment further. A spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general’s office — led by Mark Brnovich, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s Senate nomination this year — also confirmed receipt and said: “Everyone should feel safe exercising their voting rights. If someone feels threatened, please contact local law enforcement right away.”Arizona has been a center of the national efforts by right-wing activists and some Republican officials that disrupt voting in the name of election integrity, a campaign fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.Kari Lake, the Republican running for governor against Ms. Hobbs, has promoted those false claims and refused to commit to accepting the results of next month’s election; Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, has also promoted false election fraud claims. On Wednesday, Ms. Lake told CNN that she had not heard about the voter intimidation complaint but said: “It just shows you how concerned people are, though. People are so concerned about the integrity of our election.” (Ms. Lake’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.)The incident reported by the secretary of state’s office is not isolated. On Wednesday, a group of people from Clean Elections USA, an organization that promotes debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud, photographed election workers and voters outside the Maricopa County election headquarters, drawing a rebuke from the chairman of the county board of supervisors, according to the Arizona Republic.Such activities are also not confined to Arizona. Right-wing activists across the country have been trying aggressively to monitor or disrupt voting, though officials have said they are prepared to handle the challenges and to administer the Nov. 8 election and count votes securely and accurately.Ballot drop boxes have been a particular focus for election deniers, many of whom falsely claim that the boxes are insecure. More

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      The Midterms Look Very Different if You’re Not a Democrat or a Republican

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      Ross Douthat, a Times Opinion columnist, hosted an online conversation with Liel Leibovitz, an editor at large for Tablet magazine, and Stephanie Slade, a senior editor at Reason magazine, to discuss how they and other “politically homeless” Americans are thinking about the midterm elections.Ross Douthat: Thanks to you both for serving as representatives of the important part of America that feels legitimately torn between the political parties. Liel, in December of 2021 you wrote an essay about what you called “the Turn,” meaning the feeling of no longer being at home on the political left, of being alienated from the Democratic Party by everything from Covid-era school closures to doctrinaire progressivism.Where does “the Turn” carry you when it comes to electoral politics, facing the (arguably) binary choices of the midterm elections?Liel Leibovitz: Nowhere good, I’m afraid. I’m an immigrant, so I have no real tribal or longstanding loyalties. I came to this country, like so many other immigrants, because I care deeply about two things — freedom of religion and individual liberties. And both parties are messing up when it comes to these two fundamental pillars of American life, from cheering on law enforcement spying on Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11 to cheering on social media networks for curbing free speech. “The Turn” leads me away from both Democrats and Republicans.Douthat: Stephanie, you’re a libertarian, part of a faction that’s always been somewhat alienated from both parties, despite (usually) having a somewhat stronger connection to the right. This is not, I think it’s fair to say, a particularly libertarian moment in either coalition. What kind of Election Day outcomes are you actually rooting for?Stephanie Slade: This is tough. As someone motivated by a desire for much less government than we currently have, I’m always going to be nervous about the prospect of a Congress that’s willing to rubber-stamp the whims of a president (or vice versa). So I’m an instinctive fan of divided power. But that preference is running smack up against the almost unimaginable abhorrence I feel toward some of the Republicans who would have to win in order for the G.O.P. to retake the Senate.Douthat: Liel, as someone whose relationship to the left and the Democrats has become much more complicated in recent years, what do you see when you look at the Republican alternative?Leibovitz: Sadly, the same thing I see when I look at the Democrats. I see a party too enmeshed in very bad ideas and too interested in power rather than principle. I see a party only too happy to cheer on big government to curtail individual liberties and to let tech oligopolies govern many corners of our lives. The only point of light is how many outliers both these parties seem to be producing these days, which tells me that the left-right dichotomy is truly turning meaningless.Douthat: But political parties are always more interested in power rather than principle, right? And a lot of people look at the current landscape and say, “Sure, there are problems in both parties, but the stakes are just too high not to choose a side.” Especially among liberals, there’s a strong current of frustration with cross-pressured voters. How do you respond to people who can’t understand why you aren’t fully on their side?Slade: Those seeking power certainly want people to feel like the stakes are too high not to go along with their demands. Yes, there are militant partisans on both sides who consider it traitorous of me not to be with them 100 percent. At the same time, there’s a distinction worth keeping in mind between where party activists are and where the average Republican or Democratic voter is. Most Americans are not so wedded to their red-blue identities.Leibovitz: The most corrosive and dispiriting thing is how zero-sum our political conversation has gotten. I look at the Democratic Party and see a lot of energy I love — particularly the old Bernie Sanders spirit, before it was consumed by the apparatus. I look at the Republican Party and see people like Ted Cruz, who are very good at kicking up against some of the party’s worst ideas. There’s hope here and energy, just not if you keep on seeing this game as red versus blue.Douthat: Let me pause there, Liel. What bad ideas do you think Cruz is kicking against?Leibovitz: He represents a kind of energy that doesn’t necessarily gravitate toward the orthodoxies of giving huge corporations the freedom to do as they please. He’s rooted in an understanding of America that balks at the notion that we now have a blob of government-corporate interests dictating every aspect of our lives and that everything — from our medical system to our entertainment — is uniform.Douthat: This is a good example of the gap between how political professionals see things and how individuals see things. There’s no place for the Bernie-Cruz sympathizer in normal political typologies! But you see in polls right now not just Georgians who might back Brian Kemp for governor in Georgia and Raphael Warnock for senator but also Arizonans who might vote for Mark Kelly and Kari Lake — a stranger combination.Stephanie, what do you think about this ticket-splitting impulse?Slade: Some of this isn’t new. Political scientists and pollsters have long observed that people don’t love the idea of any one side having too much power at once. In that, I can’t blame them.Leibovitz: I agree. But it’s still so interesting to me that some of these splits seem just so outlandish, like the number of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then in 2016 for Donald Trump. That’s telling us that something truly interesting, namely that these tired labels — Democrat, Republican — don’t really mean anything anymore.Slade: We insiders always want to believe that voters are operating from a sort of consistent philosophical blueprint. But we’re seeing a lot more frustration-based voting, backlash voting. This can be fine, in the sense that there’s plenty in our world to be frustrated about, but my fear is that it can tip over into a politics thoroughly motivated by hatreds. And that is scary.Douthat: Right. For instance, in the realm of pundits, there’s an assumption that Republican candidates should be assessed based on how all-in they are for election conspiracy theories and that swing voters should recoil from the conspiracists. That seems to be happening in Pennsylvania, where the more conspiratorial Republican, Doug Mastriano, seems to be doing worse in his governor’s race than Dr. Oz is in the Senate campaign. But in Arizona, Lake is the more conspiratorial candidate, and she appears to be a stronger candidate than Blake Masters is in the Senate race.Which suggests that swing voters are often using a different compass than the political class.Leibovitz: Let me inject a very big dose of — dare I say it? — hope here. Yes, there’s a lot of hate and a lot of fear going on. But if you look at these volatile patterns you’re describing, you’re seeing something else, which is a yearning for a real vision. Voters are gravitating toward candidates who are telling them coherent stories that make sense. To the political classes, these stories sometimes sound conspiratorial or crazy or way removed from the Beltway reality. But to normal Americans, they resonate.Douthat: Or, Stephanie, are they just swinging back and forth based on the price of gas, and all larger narratives are pundit impositions on more basic pocketbook impulses?Slade: Yeah, I’m a little more split on this. Economic fundamentals matter a lot, as do structural factors (like that the president’s party usually does poorly in midterms, irrespective of everything else).Douthat: But then do you, as an unusually well-informed, cross-pressured American, feel electing Republicans in the House or Senate will help with the economic situation, with inflation?Slade: It’s a debate among libertarians whether divided government is actually a good thing. Or is the one thing the two parties can agree on that they should spend ever more money? I don’t have a ton of hope that a Republican-controlled House or Senate will do much good. On the other hand, the sheer economic insanity of the Biden years — amounting to approving more than $4 trillion of new borrowing, to say nothing of the unconstitutional eviction moratorium and student loan forgiveness — is mind-boggling to me, so almost anything that could put the brakes on some of this stuff seems worth trying.Douthat: Spoken like a swing voter. Liel, you aren’t a libertarian, but your particular profile — Jewish immigrant writer put off by progressive extremism — does resemble an earlier cross-pressured group, the original 1970s neoconservatives. Over time, a lot of neoconservatives ended up comfortably on the right (at least until recently) because they felt welcomed by the optimism of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.Do you think that the toxic side of the G.O.P. is a permanent obstacle to completing a similar move rightward for people alienated by progressivism?Leibovitz: Not to get too biblical, but I view Trump less as a person and more as a plague, a reminder from above to mend our ways, or else. And many voters mortified by the sharp left turn of the Democratic Party are feeling, like me, politically homeless right now.But politically homeless is not politically hopeless. The way out for us isn’t by focusing on which of these two broken homes is better but on which ideas we still hold dear. And here I agree with Stephanie. Stopping the economic insanity — from rampant spending to stopping oil production and driving up gas prices to giving giant corporations a free pass — is key. So is curbing the notion that it’s OK to believe that the government can decide that some categories, like race or gender or sexual orientation, make a person a member of a protected class and that it’s OK for the government to adjudicate which of these classes is more worthy of protection.Douthat: Let’s end by getting specific. Irrespective of party, is there a candidate on the ballot this fall who you are especially eager to see win and one that you are especially eager to see lose?Leibovitz: I’m a New Yorker, so anyone who helped turn this state — and my beloved hometown — into the teetering mess it is right now deserves to go. Lee Zeldin seems like the sort of out-of-left-field candidate who can be transformative, especially considering the tremendous damage done by the progressives in the state.Douthat: OK, you’ve given me a Republican candidate you want to see win, is there one you’d like to see fail?Leibovitz: I know Pennsylvania is a very important battleground state, and the Democrats have put forth a person who appears ill equipped for this responsibility, but it’s very, very hard to take a Dr. Oz candidacy seriously.Slade: I spend a lot of my time following the rising illiberal conservative movement, variously known as national conservatives, postliberals, the New Right and so on. What distinguishes them is their desire not just to acquire government power but to wield it to destroy their enemies. That goes against everything I believe and everything I believe America stands for. The person running for office right now who seems most representative of that view is J.D. Vance, who once told a reporter that “our people hate the right people.” I would like to see that sentiment lose soundly in November, wherever it’s on the ballot. (Not that I’m saying I think it actually will lose in Ohio.)Douthat: No predictions here, just preferences. Is there someone you really want to win?Slade: Like a good libertarian, can I say I wish they could all lose?Douthat: Not really, because my last question bestows on both of you a very unlibertarian power. You are each the only swing voter in America, and you get to choose the world of 2023: a Democratic-controlled Congress, a Republican-controlled Congress or the wild card, Republicans taking one house but not the other. How do you use this power?Leibovitz: Mets fan here, so wild card is an apt metaphor: Take the split, watch them both lose in comical and heartbreaking ways and pray for a better team next election.Slade: If forced to decide, I’d split the baby, then split the baby again: Republicans take the House, Democrats hold the Senate.Douthat: A Solomonic conclusion, indeed. Thanks so much to you both.Ross Douthat is a Times columnist. Liel Leibovitz is an editor at large for Tablet magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast, “Unorthodox,” and daily Talmud podcast, “Take One.” Stephanie Slade (@sladesr) is a senior editor at Reason magazine.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Some Republicans Want to Count Votes by Hand. Bad Idea, Experts Say.

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      Over the past two years, Republicans have pursued an array of changes to how Americans vote. The past few weeks have drawn attention to a particularly drastic idea: counting all ballots by hand.Officials in Cochise County, Ariz., recently pushed to do that in next month’s election, and whether or not they go through with it, the efforts may spread. Republicans in at least six states introduced bills this year that would have banned machine tabulation, and several candidates for statewide offices have expressed support, including Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominees for Arizona’s governor and secretary of state, and Jim Marchant, its nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state.The New York Times spoke with six experts in election administration, and all said the same thing: While hand counting is an important tool for recounts and audits, tallying entire elections by hand in any but the smallest jurisdictions would cause chaos and make results less accurate, not more.“People who think they would have greater confidence in this process think so because they haven’t seen it,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization focused on election technology. “The process in real life would not inspire confidence at all on this scale.”The proposals often stem from false claims by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies that voting technology was somehow to blame for Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. Most of those claims center on electronic voting machines, but some extend to scanners and tabulators that count paper ballots.The right-wing arguments against tabulators rely not on evidence that they have been compromised — because there is none — but on the possibility that they could be. In a lawsuit filed in April, Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem asked a federal court to mandate hand counting in Arizona, arguing that the state’s ballot scanners were “potentially unsecure” and denied voters “the right to have their votes counted and reported in an accurate, auditable, legal and transparent process.” The court dismissed the case, and Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem are appealing.Research indicates that hand counting increases errors.A study published in 2012 looked at discrepancies between initial counts and recounts in New Hampshire and found that, on average, those discrepancies were 0.8 percentage points smaller in towns that used scanners than in towns that counted by hand. A study in 2018 analyzed two statewide races in Wisconsin and found that “vote counts originally conducted by computerized scanners were, on average, more accurate.”What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More