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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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      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

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      Kari Lake Won’t Pledge to Accept Election Results, and More News From the Sunday Shows

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      Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, refused on Sunday to commit to accepting the results of her election, using much of the same language that former President Donald J. Trump did when he was a candidate.“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”The host, Dana Bash, then asked, “If you lose, will you accept that?” Ms. Lake, who is running against Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, responded by repeating, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”“The people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs,” she added, setting up a framework in which, if Ms. Hobbs were to win, Ms. Lake could present the result as evidence of election fraud. That is one of the arguments Mr. Trump made, suggesting that the 2020 election must have been fraudulent because the idea of President Biden receiving majority support was unbelievable.Four years earlier, in 2016, Mr. Trump told supporters, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win.”In the interview on Sunday, Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor, continued to embrace Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and said, “The real issue, Dana, is that the people don’t trust our elections.”This is a common argument among Republicans, many of whom have stoked public distrust in elections and then used that distrust to justify restrictions on voting. Ms. Lake said the distrust dated back more than two decades, citing the 2000 presidential election dispute and Democrats’ claims of irregularities in 2004 and 2016, even though the Democratic candidates conceded and there were no extrajudicial efforts to overturn the results.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Here is what else happened on the Sunday morning talk shows.Lake and Hobbs discussed inflation.Before the exchange about elections, Ms. Lake talked about the topics that dominate campaigns when democracy is not at issue — as did Ms. Hobbs in a separate interview on CNN.Ms. Lake said she would address the impacts of inflation by eliminating Arizona’s taxes on rent and groceries and using the state’s general fund to replace lost revenue for local governments. Ms. Hobbs said she would provide child care assistance and a tax credit for career and technical education and try to increase housing construction to lower home prices.Ms. Hobbs also reiterated her support for abortion rights. When asked if she supported “any legal limits” on abortion, she did not endorse any, noting that abortions late in pregnancy were very rare and saying, “Politicians don’t belong in those decisions.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Ms. Lake, who has campaigned on promises of an immigration crackdown, was asked whether she believed the United States had a responsibility to accept asylum seekers fleeing political violence.“We have a great legal immigration system, a very generous legal immigration system. But we can’t afford to take on the world’s problems right now when so many Americans are struggling, so many Arizonans are struggling,” Ms. Lake said. She also said that many asylum applications were fraudulent.Evan McMullin said he wouldn’t join either party.Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, is posing an unexpectedly strong challenge to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, though Mr. Lee is still favored. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. McMullin said unequivocally that he would not caucus with either party, even if his affiliation made the difference between a Democratic or Republican majority.Mr. McMullin, who also ran for president as an independent in 2016, said that his campaign was building a “coalition” of support across party lines and that he had made a commitment to that coalition to “maintain my independence.”The host, Chuck Todd, pressed him multiple times, first asking whether that commitment would extend through all six years of a Senate term and then asking twice whether his thinking would change if party control were on the line. His responses were consistent.“I will not caucus with Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “I’m going to maintain my independence because I think our country needs that, and certainly our state needs that. I’ve made that commitment, and for party bosses and others in Washington, they’re going to have to figure out what this means for them.”He argued that having an independent senator would give Utah more influence.“With Senator Lee, we get none of that,” he said. “He sits on his hands until it’s time to vote no, and then he goes and complains about our country on cable news, and I’m just not going to do that.”Mr. McMullin said that he would not have voted for the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act “as written” but that he supported parts of it, including allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. He would not say whether he would support federal legislation on abortion, saying only that he opposed bans without exceptions for rape and incest and supported increasing access to contraception.The Colorado Senate candidates made their cases.Senator Michael Bennet and his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea, were interviewed back-to-back on CNN.The main topic was inflation, for which Mr. O’Dea blamed the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package passed in March 2021 and the Biden administration’s energy policies. Mr. Bennet, a Democrat, blamed “broken global supply chains” and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (The causes of inflation — which is happening all over the world — are complex, and multiple factors are driving it.)Mr. Bennet said he believed the Inflation Reduction Act would live up to its name once its provisions kick in fully next year. He emphasized the billions of dollars it includes for clean energy development, arguing that the funding would allow the country to “increase our energy independence and our economic strength and reduce emissions” at the same time.Mr. O’Dea called for loosening the permitting process for new energy projects, naming natural gas alongside renewable energy but, notably, not mentioning oil or coal. “It’ll cause the price to come down, inflation will go away — that’s how you do it,” he said.Mr. O’Dea also said, as he has before, that he did not want Mr. Trump to run for president again and would “actively campaign against” him in a Republican primary; he named Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott as candidates he could support instead. He did not say what he would do in the general election if Mr. Trump won the primary.In case you missed it …Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Together, they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party and a potential threat to American democracy.In Oregon’s wild governor’s race, an independent candidate is siphoning Democratic votes and Phil Knight, the billionaire Nike co-founder, is pouring in money, giving an anti-abortion Republican a path to victory.A new breed of veterans is running for the House on the far right, challenging assumptions that adding veterans to Congress would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. More

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

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

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      Abortion Is Motivating Voters, but Republicans Would Rather Change the Subject

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      In Wisconsin, Tim Michels, a Republican running for governor, promised activists that he would never “flip-flop” on his support for an 1849 law that bans abortion except when a woman’s life is threatened. Less than three weeks later, he changed his stance.In the Phoenix suburbs, staffers whisked away Juan Ciscomani, a Republican House candidate, citing an urgent text, after he was asked by a voter whether he supported abortion bans.And in New Hampshire, Don Bolduc, the Republican running for governor, described abortion as a distraction from the “really important issues.”In races across the nation, Republican candidates are waffling on their abortion positions, denying past behavior or simply trying to avoid a topic that has long been a bedrock principle of American conservatism. Less than a month before the midterm elections on Nov. 8, the party lacks a unified policy on abortion, unable to broadly adopt a consistent response in the three and a half months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Republican positioning on abortion drew renewed attention last week, when Herschel Walker, the party’s Senate nominee in Georgia, was accused by an ex-girlfriend of paying for one abortion and unsuccessfully urging her to get a second one. Mr. Walker takes a hard-line stance against the procedure, supporting abortion bans with no exceptions for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.For decades, Republicans pushed to overturn federal abortion rights, viewing the issue as an easy rallying cry to identify with a culturally conservative base. Focusing on the country’s highest court allowed them to largely avoid getting into the weeds on thorny issues — life-threatening pregnancy complications, exceptions for child rape, diagnoses of rare and fatal conditions in fetuses. And given that few voters fully believed Roe would be overturned, they were rarely pressed on the specifics of their views.The court ruled in June that each state can formulate its own abortion policy, exactly what small-government conservatives had long wanted. But it had another consequence, plunging the party into months of politically toxic debates.“You hear some of these Republican state legislators, and it’s like, for the first time they are thinking about this and realize that this is a complicated issue with lots and lots of circumstances that are not black and white,” said Christine Matthews, a pollster who has worked for Republicans. “A lot of these male legislators are realizing, ‘Oh, this is really hard to legislate.’”To escape some of those difficult questions, many Republican candidates have been trying to avoid the debate altogether. For weeks, some Republicans have been erasing sections about abortion from their websites, changing their positions on state bans and trying to refocus the national conversation on inflation, crime and the country’s southern border.“I do believe it’s caught them slightly off guard with just how bad an issue this is for them,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who leads focus groups. “The party has opted for changing the conversation entirely because abortion is just bad terrain for them.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.Some party leaders and strategists have urged candidates to adopt poll-tested positions popular with large swaths of independent voters: No restrictions on contraception, no bans before about 15 weeks and including exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. But those policies conflict with the long-held goal of the party’s socially conservative wing that views abortion as akin to murder, and they also clash with some of the past language and positions of Republican candidates.That has left candidates, particularly those in purple states, caught between the more moderate views of independent voters and a conservative base that views the court’s ruling as the beginning of restrictions, not the end. Now, many of the party’s candidates in the most competitive contests are racing to recast their positions.Tim Michels, a Republican running for governor of Wisconsin, said he supported an 1849 law that bans abortion except when a woman’s life is threatened. Weeks later, he changed his stance.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“I’m winning because people see a strong leader, a man of conviction, a man who doesn’t waffle, a man who doesn’t flip-flop,” Mr. Michels, the Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, told Republican activists and officials on Sept. 6 about the state ban. “I’m going to stick with what I know is right.”He reversed his position late last month, saying that, if elected, he would sign legislation to expand exceptions to include rape and incest.Many of the pivots have been even less artful. In Maine, a former governor, Paul LePage, is running to lead the state again and repeatedly stumbled over a question about whether he would sign more restrictive abortion laws if elected. “I don’t know what you mean by 15 weeks, 28 weeks. Because I don’t know,” Mr. LePage said after a protracted exchange on a debate stage last week.And in Arizona, a spokesman for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, had to clarify last week that Ms. Lake was not advocating changes to the state’s near-total abortion ban after she told a Phoenix talk-radio host that the procedure should be “rare and legal.”In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Ms. Lake said she was trying to articulate how far the Democratic Party had moved from its Clinton-era talking points of “safe, legal and rare,” asserting that the procedure has become “anything but rare.” But she refused to say whether she would pursue restrictions on abortions sooner than 15 weeks into pregnancy, diverting the conversation to adoption and falsely casting her Democratic opponent as supportive of “abortion right up until birth.”Her remarks follow guidance circulated by party strategists who are urging their candidates to flip the script, labeling Democrats as the “extremists” on the issue. A memo from the Republican National Committee offering talking points for candidates encouraged a focus on rising prices and violent crime.Republican strategists and party officials argue that the potency of the issue is fading as economic concerns grow more intense.“To sustain that level of interest and enthusiasm in the current political climate for five months is very difficult, especially with more pressing personal pocketbook issues hurting voters,” said Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster engaged in a number of midterm races.Mark Graul, a longtime Republican strategist based in Wisconsin, said that right after the Supreme Court decision, the abortion issue was “very much front and center.”But in the final weeks of the race, Mr. Graul said, voters are saying, “‘I care about that, but I care about how much it costs to fill up my car and buy groceries. And is my family going to be safe?’” He added: “I think they’re starting to care about that more.”While polls show that the majority of voters support a federal right to an abortion, Democrats are not favored to maintain control of Congress, given still-high inflation, concerns about crime and President Biden’s low approval ratings.Still, Democrats are trying to ensure that Republicans cannot escape so easily. After decades of treating the issue as a second-tier priority, the Democratic Party has made abortion rights a centerpiece of its fall campaign, spending nearly $213 million to blanket the airwaves with ads about it, according to AdImpact, an advertising-tracking firm.Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster and strategist, called the political debate over abortion rights “the best thing going for the Democrats.”“It can’t be the only thing going for the Democrats,” she added. But many Republicans, she said, are “having a lot of difficulty” discussing the issue.The need to square decades of opposition to abortion rights with the new political environment has led to some complicated contortions for Republicans, some of whom have tried to cast themselves less as drivers of abortion bans and more as bystanders.Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a Republican who faces a tough race for re-election, said he supported not only the 15-week federal ban but prohibiting abortion starting at conception. But Mr. Bacon also argues that such a policy would never pass the Senate because it would be unable to garner the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster — essentially telling voters not to worry about his positions because they will be blocked by Democrats.Kari Lake stated that abortions should be “rare and legal” but said she was misunderstood.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times“Whether we have a pro-abortion majority in the House and Senate, or a pro-life majority in the Senate or House, you’re not going to get past a 60-vote threshold in the Senate,” he said, in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “So the reality is, most of this is going to be done at the state level.”In his primary race, Joe Lombardo, the sheriff of the Las Vegas area who is running for Nevada governor, summarized his position on abortion with three words: “Joe is pro-life.”But a 747-word note published on his campaign website late last month reversed his stance on an abortion rule in Nevada. He said he would not repeal an executive order protecting women from being prosecuted for seeking an abortion in the state, which has emerged as a safe haven for the procedure as neighboring Utah, Arizona and Idaho have restricted access.An ad by a conservative group in Nevada echoes that argument, accusing Democrats of “scaring” voters about the state’s abortion laws and saying politicians cannot change the rules allowing the procedure until 24 weeks.The claims by Mr. Lombardo and the group ignore the power of executive orders to add new restrictions and the possibility that Congress could pass a national ban, superseding state law with a stricter federal standard.Not all Republicans have been so quick to finesse their stances.A campaign ad released last week by Jeff Crossman, the Democratic candidate for Ohio attorney general, takes aim at the Republican incumbent and his public questioning of the existence of a 10-year-old rape victim who left the state for an abortion. The child was blocked from obtaining an abortion in Ohio because she was three days past a six-week limit on abortions. The attorney general, Dave Yost, initially said the report was likely to be a “fabrication.”“Dave Yost, you disgust me,” a woman identified only as Geri of Northeast Ohio says to the camera in the ad. “When a 10-year-old was raped and impregnated, Yost went on national TV and called it a hoax? I am a grandmother, and I have a 10-year-old granddaughter.”Mr. Yost has resisted calls to apologize for doubting the victim. “I don’t understand what you think I need to apologize for,” he said in an interview with a local television program. “We didn’t even know the identity, and still don’t, of that poor victim.” More

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      Arizona Governor Candidates Speak, and More Campaign News From the Sunday Shows

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      Katie Hobbs and Kari Lake were interviewed back-to-back on CBS, Stacey Abrams spoke on Fox News and Republicans stuck with Herschel Walker despite reports that he had paid for an abortion.There will be no debates in one of the most competitive governor’s races in the country — between Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state of Arizona, and Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor endorsed by Donald J. Trump — because Ms. Hobbs has refused to participate, arguing that Ms. Lake would create a “circus.”In what might be the closest they come to a debate, they were interviewed back-to-back on “Face the Nation” on CBS on Sunday, with a focus on immigration and abortion.The host, Major Garrett, pressed Ms. Lake on her proposal to create an interstate compact in which Arizona and other states would make immigration arrests independent of the federal government, and Ms. Lake defended it in incendiary fashion, saying the Biden administration had abdicated its duty to protect states from invasion.She cited Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution — which says that without congressional consent, states cannot “enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay” — and claimed that Arizona met the conditions of the clause.Ms. Hobbs, interviewed afterward, said Ms. Lake’s proposal was “empty rhetoric” that “would do absolutely nothing to increase border security” but “would bring untold levels of chaos into our state.” She said she agreed that the Biden administration needed to take stronger action on border security, but blamed a series of presidents and Congresses under both parties for failing to pass comprehensive immigration reform.Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, at a campaign rally last month in Tucson.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesOn abortion, Ms. Lake accused Ms. Hobbs of supporting the procedure “right up until birth” — a common, and misleading, Republican claim against Democrats — and falsely claimed, “If you are in the hospital in labor, the abortionists are for giving you an abortion if you desire one.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.Herschel Walker: A woman who said that the G.O.P. Senate nominee in Georgia paid for her abortion in 2009 told The Times that he urged her to terminate a second pregnancy two years later. She chose to have their son instead.Will the Walker Allegations Matter?: The scandal could be decisive largely because of the circumstances in Georgia, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Pennsylvania Senate Race: John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, says he can win over working-class voters in deep-red counties. But as polls tighten in the contest, that theory is under strain.Ms. Hobbs reiterated that she does not support a gestational limit on abortion, saying, “I support leaving the decision between a woman and her doctor and leaving politicians entirely out of it.” However, even in states like Colorado that have no gestational limit, doctors do not perform abortions on demand until the moment of birth.“Late-term abortion is extremely rare, and if it’s being talked about, it’s because something has gone incredibly wrong in a pregnancy,” Ms. Hobbs said. “A doctor’s not going to perform an abortion late in a pregnancy just because someone decided they want one. That is ridiculous, and she’s saying this to distract from her incredibly extreme position.”Ms. Lake has expressed support for Arizona’s near-total abortion ban, which predates Roe v. Wade and is blocked as courts assess it. On Sunday, she focused on a more recent law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, saying, “We need to draw a line somewhere.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Here’s what else happened on the Sunday talk shows.Republicans stood with Herschel Walker.A claim that Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009 — and the woman’s subsequent assertion that he also wanted her to terminate a second pregnancy in 2011 — upended Mr. Walker’s campaign. But Republicans have circled the wagons around him, and that played out on the Sunday shows.Comments from Don Bacon, a Republican congressman facing a competitive race in Nebraska, were representative of the G.O.P. line. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Bacon was asked if he still supported Mr. Walker and replied, “I sure do, more for the policy positions he’s going to take.”Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign in Georgia has been upended by reporting about his past, but Republicans are sticking by his side.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesAsked by the host, Kristen Welker, whether this suggested Republicans were “willing to win at all costs,” Mr. Bacon said, “I think people make mistakes, and if people acknowledge them and ask for forgiveness, none of us are perfect.” (Mr. Walker has not done that; he has denied the claims, though they are backed up by extensive documentation.)Scott Jennings, a former aide to President George W. Bush who is now a conservative commentator, stated the calculus plainly on CNN’s “State of the Union.”“At the end of the day, the country’s in the ditch, and who are you going to call? The person who’s enabled it or the person who’s going to push back on it? That’s how many are going to analyze it,” Mr. Jennings said, adding later: “When the Senate control is this close, there’s nowhere else to go. This is part of the final matrix for Republicans if they hope to get the majority.”Stacey Abrams discussed abortion and voting rights.An interview on “Fox News Sunday” with Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, touched on a range of subjects, including the reports about Mr. Walker. She accused her opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, of hypocrisy for opposing abortion but not denouncing Mr. Walker.At one point, the host, Shannon Bream, asked Ms. Abrams to respond to a video clip of Kanye West claiming that “there’s more Black babies being aborted than born in New York City.” (This is not true according to city records.) Ms. Abrams affirmed her support for legal abortion and emphasized the disproportionate rates of maternal mortality among Black women, saying, “The right to our medical care should be sacrosanct.”Ms. Bream also asked Ms. Abrams to respond to a recent ruling in which a federal judge found that Georgia’s new voting restrictions — challenged by Ms. Abrams’s organization, Fair Fight Action — “violate neither the Constitution nor the Voting Rights Act.”Ms. Abrams suggested that the judge’s hands had been tied by a Supreme Court ruling last year that weakened the Voting Rights Act. “That’s the reason that I’m pushing so hard for the Voting Rights Act to be restored and expanded, but it’s also why I’m running for governor,” she said.In case you missed it …With four weeks left until the elections, Senate control hangs in the balance. The G.O.P. claimed momentum in the spring. Then the overturning of Roe v. Wade galvanized Democrats. As the momentum shifts again, the final stretch is defying predictability.In 2017, J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, started a nonprofit group to tackle the social ills he had written about in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir. It fell apart within two years.In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate, says he can win over working-class voters in deep-red counties. Some evidence suggests he can, but partisan loyalties may prove more powerful. More