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      Kari Lake and the Rise of the Republican Apostate

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      On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.He told Ms. Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about Covid-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees‌. “The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust” of the public, he said.Ms. Ingraham’s guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen back on to her show. Dr. Jensen was, in Ms. Ingraham’s telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who’d had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. “You were vilified,” Ms. Ingraham said. “I was vilified for featuring you.”By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the State Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, at the party’s endorsement convention. Dr. Jensen’s Covid theories proved central to his message. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t popular,” he said at the G.O.P. convention. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t politically safe.”At the heart of Scott Jensen’s candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor who downplays, if not outright denies, the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Dr. Jensen’s self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today’s Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the “corrupt, rotten media” that wants to “brainwash” Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.It is possible to see Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that’s almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.Watching Dr. Jensen’s swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They’ve experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” from memory. He embraced F.D.R.’s New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say, “the Democratic Party left me.”This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.Reagan’s ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous “read my lips” quip — and the voters cast you out.After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Mr. Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.Instead, Mr. Trump’s sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America’s greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about “American exceptionalism” and the “city upon a hill,” the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the “finest fighting force” the world had ever seen, and so on.Mr. Trump’s trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. “We don’t win anymore, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s China with our trade agreements,” he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. “No matter what it is, we don’t seem to have it.”No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Mr. Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like “strangers in their own land.” Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Mr. Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he’d tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were “un-American” and “evil.” Court decisions he opposed were a “disgrace” and judges who ruled against him were “putting our country in great danger.”By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Mr. Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who’d renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn’t deliver what Mr. Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan’s Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Mr. Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but Mr. DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.A judge had dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, Mr. DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general’s office replied that such a theory could mean as many as eight million audits every election. It would “mean that no election results would ever be final.” (The court dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit, saying he had “merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”)Mr. DePerno’s argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that Mr. DePerno is the state Republican Party’s nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state’s election laws.A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, Mr. DePerno’s legal background only enhances his credibility. “He is a killer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DePerno, whom he has endorsed. “We need a killer. And he’s a killer in honesty. He’s an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here.”Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Mr. Trump’s praise with her insistence that Mr. Biden is not the lawful president. Ms. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media’s credibility. “I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she told The Times in an interview. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.” In one campaign ad, Ms. Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. “The media isn’t just corrupt,” she says in another spot. “They are anti-American.”As for Dr. Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his Covid theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor’s public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Dr. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of Covid-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Mr. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6 percent of Covid-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Mr. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?”Dr. Jensen’s popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn’t want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno, Dr. Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate’s path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Dr. Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Ms. Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and Mr. DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by today’s apostate candidates — Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and others — is that they don’t want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Mr. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president’s legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.It’s why Ivy League graduates like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Mr. Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors’ mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Governor Jensen could, for example, pack his state’s medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak. A Governor Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party’s most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern G.O.P. has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It’s “a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change,” says Mr. Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake and Mr. DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”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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      ‘This is a blueprint’: abortion rights ballot proposal takes off in Michigan

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      ‘This is a blueprint’: abortion rights ballot proposal takes off in Michigan Campaigners feel groundswell of support for proposal to stop a 1931 abortion ban from going into effectIn the spring of this year, Julie Falbaum’s 20-year-old son walked into a frat party filled with about 50 of his peers, holding a stack of petitions. They were for a campaign to protect abortion.“Who wants to be a dad?” he yelled. Like a park-goer throwing bread to pigeons, he chucked the forms around the room and watched as dozens of young men swarmed to sign them.Abortion on the ballot: here are the US states voting on a woman’s right to chooseRead moreThe campaign to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution was already under way here even before Roe fell, and it has become an embittered battle in Michigan – to keep a 90-year-old abortion ban off the books. Campaigners fear that ban would criminalise doctors and pregnant people and deny essential medical care, such as miscarriage medication, now that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists in the US.The battle in Michigan has seen death threats and vandalism from pro-choice militants. On the anti-choice side, it has involved dirty tactics from the Republican party, who tried to block a petition brought by nearly 800,000 Michiganders over formatting errors, and who have peddled a wide campaign of misinformation.Julie Falbaum, a campaigner for the yes campaign on Proposal 3, which would enshrine reproductive rights, believes her son’s story – that he managed to collect so many signatures at a frat party without a campaign plan – is reflective of a broad coalition of support for “Prop 3”, which is supported by men and women, young people and older people, Republicans and Democrats.“I see Michigan as pivotal to the future of democracy in the United States,” says Deirdre Roney, 60, who travelled from Los Angeles to campaign for the ballot in Detroit, where she grew up. Explaining that Detroit is the biggest voting bloc in Michigan, and that Michigan is one of the swingiest states in the country, she adds: “This is a blueprint. If this passes in Michigan, other states can use it.”Indeed, Michigan’s elections are at the center of a national abortion debate that has spiraled to extremes. Since the constitutional right to abortion fell on 24 June, almost half of US states have banned it, or tried to.“I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more votes for [Proposal] 3 than for the governor’s race,” says Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser for the Lincoln Project, a coalition of Republicans and former Republicans who campaign to keep Trump out of office.Timmer, who was a Republican party strategist for more than 30 years, says statewide abortion bans are turning people off the party.“The Republicans have used abortion for decades as a means to motivate their pro-life religious base. And for most everybody who was engaged in that rhetoric, it was always theoretical. They never really had to worry about real-life consequences – and now they do,” says Timmer.“It’s a simple question of: how long should my daughter, my sister, my wife, my granddaughter go to prison? Should my doctor go to prison? Quite honestly, that’s crazy. Most rational people would say no to that.”Alisha Mcneeli, 44, a lifelong Republican who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will be voting for the proposal, which also enshrines contraception rights and IVF.“I have always been a pro-choice Republican,” says Mcneeli, 44, a community outreach director for the Michigan child protection registry.“Since I’ve become a mother, I’m more pro-choice than ever. Being a parent is the hardest thing – physically, emotionally and financially – that I’ve ever done in my life. I wholeheartedly believe that if a woman is not ready, she should not be forced to.”A 2016 Trump voter, Mcneeli will also vote Democratic for her national representatives in the midterms. She says Lindsey Graham touting a national 15-week ban on abortion – a proposal that didn’t pass in the Senate – could be enough to turn her away from the party for ever.“I feel like I’m slowly already doing that. He promised this was not going to even be talked about at the federal level. He completely lied. That makes me sick, I’m so angry about it,” she said.Falbaum says the biggest change in attitude she has seen since she started working on the petition earlier this year is the gender split.“In the past, it was a woman’s issue. It was: ‘Talk to my wife, my girlfriend, I don’t know about those things.’ And now I hear men not only understanding that it’s not a woman’s issue, but actively supporting it,” explains Falbaum.Jeff Bolanger, 69, is one of them. He lives in downtown Ann Arbor, a small and relatively liberal city near Detroit that is home to the University of Michigan. “I don’t really think it’s appropriate to control people’s choices about that,” Bolanger said.Joaquin Gabaldon, 30, also says he’s voting yes when Falbaum and Roney knock his door.“I mean it’s healthcare, it’s rather straightforward,” he said.In Wayne county’s Grosse Point, a wealthy, mostly white, mostly Democratic area that has recently seen more election deniers and Trump supporters, several people on the doorstep said they hadn’t heard of Proposal 3, but would support it in theory. In suburban Sterling Heights, in the divided Macomb county, Ed Bristow, 60, who works in human resources, opposes Proposal 3: “It just cuts into the sovereignty of the family unit.”Democrats in Michigan joke that the signage of the no campaign – “Vote no. Too confusing. Too extreme” – makes them look silly: absent a real critique of the ballot initiative, instead they focus on making voters feel they can’t understand for themselves. But a lot of emotive misinformation is circulating, including materials from the Catholic church that suggest a number of policies could arise from voting yes including child sterilisation and abortion without parental consent – none of which has been proposed.Darci McConnell, the communications director for the yes campaign, cites recent polling showing 64% of Michiganders support Proposal 3. “They’re very invested in misinformation, because they know people don’t want to ban abortion – that a 1931 law has no support,” she says of the no campaign.“There’s been a lot of misinformation,” says Pastor John Duckworth of Wayne county. “People have been saying you don’t have to be a doctor to perform an abortion [under Proposal] 3. They’re talking about gender reassignment surgery. None of that is true.”Referring to African Americans, he said: “There weren’t many laws from 1931 that benefited my community.“Now of course, [black voters] are not a monolith,” he added. “But alongside Roe came protections for gay marriage, for interracial marriage, for contraception … This is about civil rights. For people who have had their bodies controlled for hundreds of years, this is very scary.”Falbaum described a middle-aged man she saw on the day the supreme court decision leaked. She went out to set up her petition stand to get abortion on the ballot at a farmer’s market in downtown Ann Arbor – only someone had gotten there before her.“I said, ‘You’re first in line for the concert tickets!’” jokes Falbaum. “And he tells me his mom died in a back alley abortion, protecting him and his siblings before Roe was passed – because she knew she could not support another child. To honour her memory, he wanted to be first to sign the petition.”How will she feel if Michigan votes yes on 8 November, as the polls suggest?“It feels like a culmination of my life’s work,” says Falbaum, tearing up. “It just makes me feel safe.”TopicsMichiganAbortionUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Barack Obama Lamented the Attack on Paul Pelosi. Then He Got Heckled.

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      Mr. Obama was reflecting on the level of hostility in American politics when a man in the crowd at a rally for Democrats in Detroit shouted at him.Former President Barack Obama was twice interrupted by hecklers on Saturday at a campaign rally in Detroit for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other Democrats, a reminder that it is easier to call for civility in American politics than to achieve it.In the first incident, less than 10 minutes after Mr. Obama took the stage, a man in the crowd shouted at him while he was lamenting Friday’s attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, and the rise of violent political rhetoric.“We’ve got politicians who work to stir up division to try to make us angry and afraid of one another for their own advantage,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes it can turn dangerous.”Moments later, the man, who was not identified, shouted “Mr. President” at Mr. Obama, creating an off-script exchange that the former president tried to use to drive home his point. The rest of what the man said was not picked up by microphones or cameras.“This is what I mean,” Mr. Obama said. “Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime.”Mr. Obama told the man, “You wouldn’t do that a workplace. It’s not how we do things. This is part of the point I want to make. Just basic civility and courtesy works.”About seven minutes later, another heckler interrupted Mr. Obama, who later said that the current lack of respect in political discourse was different from when he first ran for president in 2008. At the time, he said, he could visit Republican areas and engage in a positive dialogue with those who disagreed with him politically.But that’s not the case now, said Mr. Obama, who juxtaposed the concession of Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent for president in 2008, with former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.“American democracy is also on the ballot,” Mr. Obama said. “With few notable exceptions, most Republican politicians right now are not even pretending that the rules apply to them. They seem to be OK with just making stuff up.”Mr. Obama said that Republicans had not taken responsibility for their shortcomings as a party and were looking to assign blame for electoral defeats. He recalled his overwhelming defeat in a Democratic primary for a House seat in 2000.“I got whooped, and let me tell you, I was frustrated,” Mr. Obama said. “You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t claim the election was rigged. I took my lumps.” More

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      Governor’s Races Enter Final Sprint on a Scrambled, Surprising Map

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      Deep-red Oklahoma is in play for Democrats. New York and Oregon are within reach for Republicans. And several swing states have tight races with high stakes on abortion, elections and other issues.Democrats and Republicans raced on Saturday into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor, as the G.O.P. moves within striking distance of flipping the top office in a series of blue and battleground states and Democrats show surprising strength in several other contests.With pivotal races for the House and the Senate appearing to shift toward Republicans, the nation’s far more variable and highly consequential races for governor are drawing huge influxes of money. Democrats are also sending in their cavalry, dispatching former President Barack Obama to a rally in Georgia on Friday before appearances in Michigan and Wisconsin on Saturday and in Nevada on Tuesday.The stakes in these races have become broader and clearer in recent months. The Supreme Court has given states the power to write their own abortion laws, and Republican candidates in places including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the validity of the 2020 election.Republican candidates for governor, who enjoy a favorable political environment but in many states are being outspent by Democrats, have slammed the airwaves with an avalanche of crime ads. Incumbent Democrats have hit back by pointing to money they have pumped into law enforcement agencies and hammering Republicans for opposing abortion rights.The current president and his predecessor, both unpopular with swing voters, are absent from the closest races. President Biden recently stumped for the party’s struggling nominee in liberal Oregon and is headed to New Mexico next week. Mr. Trump is holding rallies in places that are safe for his party, like Iowa and Texas, or where he is aiming to prop up Senate candidates, as in Pennsylvania and Ohio.While the governor’s race in deep-red Oklahoma has become newly competitive for Democrats, and the party has a comfortable lead in divided Pennsylvania, the sour national mood has put the leadership of blue states like New York, New Mexico and Oregon within reach for Republicans. A G.O.P. governor in any of those states could block efforts to expand abortion access and other Democratic priorities.Some Democratic candidates, trying to turn the narrative around, have gone so far as to claim they are fighting an uphill battle — even in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by two to one.“I’ve always said I was an underdog,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in Queens on Friday, a day before her Republican opponent, Representative Lee Zeldin, was set to appear with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. “There’s circumstances sometimes you can’t control. You don’t know what’s happening nationally. There’s national waves. There’s a lot of forces out there.”Gov. Kathy Hochul with President Biden in Syracuse on Thursday. Democrats are throwing money into a last-ditch push to shore up her campaign against Representative Lee Zeldin. Kenny Holston for The New York TimesRepublicans have solidified their hold on the traditional presidential battlegrounds of Florida and Ohio, with incumbent governors building enormous fund-raising advantages and sizable polling leads, and Democrats have all but given up in those states. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has never been seriously threatened by former Representative Beto O’Rourke.In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has centered her campaign on her effort to maintain abortion rights, is confronting a narrowing race against her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, though she still holds polling and financial edges. Mr. Obama will hold a rally for Ms. Whitmer in Detroit on Saturday.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.In an interview on Friday, Ms. Dixon, who opposes abortion rights, said she had “been on television and radio as much as possible” to make up for Ms. Whitmer’s cash advantage. Since the beginning of September, the governor and Democrats have spent four times as much on television ads as Ms. Dixon and Republican groups have.Asked if she would welcome a final-week visit by Mr. Trump, who last held a rally in the state on Oct. 1, Ms. Dixon mentioned a different surrogate — one who three years ago was running for president as a Democrat.“We’ve already had President Trump here,” she said. “We have other great people. Tulsi Gabbard is coming in this weekend.”Tudor Dixon with her family in Muskegon, Mich. Her campaign has far less money than Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but polls in their race have narrowed.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesMs. Whitmer said that “Potus was here a while ago, and having Barack Obama here now is great,” referring to Mr. Biden by his presidential acronym. She added, “The whole world understands Michigan is a really important state on the national map and the consequences of this race are big.”The lone incumbent Republican governor in a competitive race is Brian Kemp of Georgia, who is leading his rematch with Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who lost to him narrowly in 2018. Polls show Mr. Kemp with a solid advantage, though there is some doubt about whether he will eclipse the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in December..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-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve 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.And in Arizona’s open-seat race for governor, the Republican nominee, Kari Lake, a television anchor-turned-Trump acolyte, is in a close race with Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, who is widely seen as having mounted a lackluster campaign. A victory by Ms. Lake could have major implications for future elections in Arizona, given her relentless false claims that the 2020 contest was stolen.Yet the presence on the ballot of Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat who has led in polls of his race, may help Ms. Hobbs survive.Unlike other Democratic candidates for governor in battleground states, Josh Shapiro, right, of Pennsylvania has a healthy lead in the polls.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesIn some states, Democratic candidates are putting up a stiff challenge or are even ahead. In 12 of the 13 closest governor’s races, the Democratic candidates and their allied groups have spent more money on television advertising since Sept. 1 than their Republican opponents have, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.In Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, has built a yawning gap between himself and his underfunded far-right rival, Doug Mastriano, who has promised to ban abortion without exceptions and enact major new voting restrictions. Democrats are also far ahead of Trump-endorsed Republicans in Maryland and Massachusetts, liberal states where moderate Republicans have had recent success in governor’s races.But Democrats who swept into governor’s mansions in the 2018 electoral rejection of Mr. Trump now find themselves battling decades of history. Michigan and Wisconsin — where Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, is neck-and-neck with Tim Michels, a Republican — have not elected a governor of the same party as the sitting president since 1990, while Kansas and New Mexico have not done so since 1986.Tim Michels, the Republican nominee in Wisconsin, is in a razor-thin race against Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesAt the same time, Republicans, who hold 28 governorships compared with Democrats’ 22, are attacking their Democratic rivals over crime in contests across the country.Few Republicans in close races have done so quite like Mark Ronchetti, a former TV weatherman running against Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, which Mr. Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020.Since the beginning of September, 82 percent of the television ad spending from Mr. Ronchetti and the Republican Governors Association has been about crime, according to AdImpact data. Of all of the nation’s Republican candidates for governor, only Mr. Zeldin in New York has made crime more of a focus of his ads.Albuquerque, whose metropolitan area includes about half of New Mexico’s population, set a record for homicides in 2021. The killings are a staple of local television news coverage, so Mr. Ronchetti’s ads bashing Ms. Lujan Grisham on crime are often sandwiched between those news reports.“We’ve always had challenges of making sure we can have a safe city,” Mr. Ronchetti said in an interview. “For the most part, this was a safe place to raise your kids. But it’s gotten out of control.”Ms. Lujan Grisham’s closing advertising features sheriffs saying she has provided funding for more police officers. Democratic advertising has also highlighted Mr. Ronchetti’s opposition to abortion.Perhaps no Democratic nominee has put up as surprising a performance as Joy Hofmeister in Oklahoma.Joy Hofmeister, left, and Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma during their debate, when she pointed out that the state’s violent crime rate was higher than that of California and New York. Sarah Phipps/The Oklahoman, via Associated PressMs. Hofmeister, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, had a viral debate moment this month when she correctly noted that Oklahoma’s violent crime rate under Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, was higher than the rates in California and New York.Mr. Stitt protested that it wasn’t true.“Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?” he said. “That’s what she just said.”In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Hofmeister credited her strength in Oklahoma, where Mr. Trump won 65 percent of the vote in 2020, to focusing on local issues even as Mr. Stitt tries to nationalize the race by tying her to Mr. Biden.“He is reading from a national script,” she said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with reality. It’s this formula that he thinks somehow is going to work.”Luis Ferré-Sadurní More

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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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      A Democratic Group Pours $20 Million Into State Legislative Races

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      With the battle for state legislatures taking on an elevated importance during this midterm cycle, a Democratic super PAC is investing more than $20 million in state legislative races, with about 70 percent of the funds going to support candidates in 25 districts across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.The investment is from Forward Majority, the super PAC, as Democrats across the country are pouring significant resources into state legislative races. Last month, the States Project, another Democratic super PAC, pledged to spend $60 million in legislative races in five states. And Tech + Campaigns, another Democratic group, has pledged to spend $8 million on such races.State legislatures have long been dominated by Republicans, who have excelled at motivating their voters to engage beyond federal races. The party made a concerted effort to win state legislatures ahead of the 2010 redistricting cycle and then proceeded to draw gerrymandered legislative maps to help shore up their control. As a result, Republicans have complete control of 29 state legislatures.But with the Supreme Court set to rule in a case that could give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over federal elections, Democratic groups have been aggressively playing catch-up, reaching parity with Republicans in television ad spending this year.Forward Majority, however, is focusing more of its spending on the detailed aspects of campaigning, like voter registration and a tactic known as “boosted news,” or the practice of paying to promote news articles on social media newsfeeds.The group has been targeting suburban and exurban districts that are split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats with a push to register new Democrats, who may be voters who have moved or who haven’t been engaged in a while, and encourage them to vote on the whole ballot instead of just the top of the ticket.“Even as we see Joe Biden, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer win at the top of the ticket, we are still losing those races down-ballot,” said Vicky Hausman, a co-founder of Forward Majority. “So we have been obsessed with finding ways to add additional margin and add additional votes in these races.”Republicans have noticed the increased investments of Democrats in state legislative races and have sounded the alarm to donors.“We don’t have the luxury of relying on reinforcements to come save us,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, wrote to donors last month. “We are the calvary.”The path for Democrats in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania is narrow, but Ms. Hausman pointed to the thin margins in recent state legislative battles as an encouraging sign.“The Virginia House was decided by about 600 votes in 2021,” she said. “The Arizona House came down to about 3,000 votes in two districts in 2020. So it is going to be a dogfight.” More

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      Ballot Measures in Swing States Could Have Sizable Impact on 2024 Voting

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      While the midterm elections in November will decide control of Congress and some governors’ offices, there are other far-reaching issues at stake. Among them: the fate of voter ID rules, early voting expansion and ranked-choice voting.Ballot measures on these issues will appear in several battleground states, where most of the attention has been on marquee races, with a blizzard of campaign ads dominating the airwaves.But the outcome of those measures could weigh significantly on the 2024 presidential election, as Republicans and Democrats haggle over the guardrails of voting.Here is a roundup of ballot measures facing voters across the United States:ArizonaUnder a ballot measure embraced by Republicans, voters would be required to present photo identification when casting ballots in person. If it passes, the state would no longer accept two nonphoto forms of identification — such as a motor vehicle registration and a utility bill — in place of a government-issued ID card or a passport.The measure, which has been criticized by Democrats and voting rights advocates, would also create new requirements for voting by mail. Voters would be required to write their birth date and either a state-issued identification number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on an early ballot affidavit.MichiganA proposed constitutional amendment would create a permanent nine-day period of early in-person voting at polling sites, as well as an expansion of existing options for voters to visit clerks’ offices and other local election offices to cast early ballots.The measure, which was backed by a voting rights coalition and survived a wording-related challenge, with the Michigan Supreme Court weighing in, would also allow voters who are unable to present ID at the polls to sign an affidavit attesting to their identity.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.Michigan would also be required to pay for drop boxes and return postage for absentee ballots, in addition to mail expenses associated with applications.To prevent partisan groups from subverting election results, as supporters of former President Donald J. Trump tried to do in 2020 in Michigan when they put forward a slate of fake electors, canvassing boards in the state would be required to certify results based only on the official record of votes cast.NevadaNevada voters will decide whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for the general election and to overhaul the state’s primary system.Under a proposed constitutional amendment, primaries for statewide and federal offices, but not for president, would be open to all voters, with the top five vote-getters advancing to the general election. The law currently stipulates that voters must be registered as Democrats or Republicans in order to participate in their parties’ primariesIf approved in November, the measure would be placed on the ballot again in 2024 for voters to decide. The earliest that the changes could take effect would be in 2025.In a ranked-choice system during the general election, voters list candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority, officials would eliminate the last-place finisher and reallocate his or her supporters’ votes to their second choices until one candidate has at least 50 percent of the votes.Alaska recently adopted ranked-choice voting, and some Republicans blamed that system for the defeat of Sarah Palin, a former governor and the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, in a special House election in August.New York, Maine and Utah also have some form of ranked-choice voting, as do dozens of American cities.OhioCities and towns in Ohio would be barred from allowing non-U.S. citizens to vote in state and local elections under a constitutional amendment that seeks to rein in the home rule authority of municipalities.Opponents contend that federal law already bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections. But the measure’s supporters say that an explicit prohibition is needed at the state level, despite instances of voter fraud proving to be rare.The issue arose after voters in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small village east of Dayton, voted in 2019 to allow noncitizens to vote for local offices. None have registered since then, though, according to The Columbus Dispatch.NebraskaEmulating other red states, Nebraska could require voters to present photo ID at the polls under a constitutional amendment supported by Gov. Pete Ricketts, a term-limited Republican who is leaving office in January. Critics say the rule change would disenfranchise voters.ConnecticutConnecticut is one of a handful of states that do not offer early in-person voting, but a proposed constitutional amendment could change that.The measure directs the Legislature to create a mechanism for early voting, which would be separate from accepting absentee ballots before Election Day. The timing and details would be decided by lawmakers, who could enact the changes by the 2024 election. More

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      High-profile debates took place in Wisconsin and Michigan on Thursday.

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      Two debates were hosted in marquee political races in Wisconsin and Michigan, both battleground states. Catch up on what happened:Wisconsin’s Senate contestRead four takeaways from the debate.Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat trailing in Wisconsin polls and getting hammered by an onslaught of negative television advertising in his race to unseat Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, tried mightily on Thursday evening in their debate to shift his campaign’s momentum. But he failed to create a singular moment destined to go viral on social and broadcast media.It was a lively affair after last week’s relatively staid debate, but it is unlikely to change the course of the election.Michigan’s race for governorWe have five takeaways from the debate.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and Tudor Dixon, her Republican challenger, on Thursday gave debate viewers a clear contrast of the choice they will have on the Nov. 8 ballot: an outsider versus an experienced politician.It was the first governor’s race in the state in which both contenders are women. Their next debate will be Oct. 25. More