Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Can Democrats Avoid a Midterm Wipeout?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.It is one of the most enduring trends in American politics that the president’s party tends to fare poorly during midterm elections. And in 2022, that trend was supposed to reassert itself with a vengeance: As inflation climbs at its fastest pace in four decades, Joe Biden’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight.But despite those grim conditions, the midterms could be surprisingly competitive: In a July poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 41 percent of registered voters said they preferred Democrats to control Congress, compared with 40 percent who preferred Republicans.Here’s what people are saying about the state of the races, whether Democrats stand a chance of keeping one or both of their majorities in Congress, and what could change the forecast between now and November.Why the races look closer than expectedIf the Times/Siena polling made one thing clear, it’s that voters are not pleased with the way the country is being run. Even as the unemployment rate hovers around a 50-year low, Americans are deeply anxious about the economy: Just 10 percent of registered voters rated it as “good” or “excellent.” More broadly, political malaise seems the order of the day: A majority of respondents said the nation was too divided to solve its challenges, and just 13 percent said the country was heading in the right direction.But there are a few factors insulating Democrats from all this negative sentiment.As The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, recent news is actually helping Democrats in some ways: This summer, the Supreme Court has handed the right significant victories on abortion, climate policy, religious rights and gun laws, galvanizing voters who lean Democratic on those issues and shifting the national political discourse away from the Republican Party’s preferred turf of immigration, crime and school curriculums. Recent mass shootings have also played a role in this shift.In the past several years, the Republican Party has made inroads with less affluent, less educated voters while shedding support among higher-income, higher-educated voters. As a result, the electoral playing field has become less tilted toward Republicans, according to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends. While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he told Thomas B. Edsall, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Republicans are also reconfiguring their relationship with Donald Trump, whose grip on the party isn’t as strong as it once was, particularly as the fallout from the House Jan. 6 investigation compounds. According to the Times/Siena College poll, nearly half of Republican primary voters would prefer someone other than Trump for president in 2024. As Jake Lahut reports for Insider, that fault line has created potential pitfalls for Trump-backed Senate candidates, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, who have won their primaries but have struggled to break away in general election matchups against their Democratic opponents.The odds: According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Republicans have roughly the same chance of reclaiming a Senate majority as Democrats do of retaining theirs. In the House, though, Republicans are still heavily favored. Why? House candidates are both more numerous and more anonymous than Senate candidates, Silver explains, so voters’ feelings about the national political environment tend to be determinative.As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote this month, “If Democrats keep the Senate without the House, they still would not be able to pass legislation without Republican support.” But, he added: “Senate control nonetheless matters. It would allow President Biden to appoint judges, Cabinet secretaries and other top officials without any Republican support, because only the Senate needs to confirm nominees.”The abortion factorBecause the Supreme Court returned the power to regulate abortions to the states last month, abortion will be a live issue this midterm season in a way it hasn’t been for many decades. Five states will have ballot measures asking voters whether to amend their constitutions to either enshrine or proscribe the right to abortion. And in other states, the issue has raised the stakes in competitive races for the legislature and the governor’s mansion.There are two ways abortion’s centrality could help Democrats in November, Ed Kilgore argues in New York magazine. “The first and most obvious is that it could keep in the Democratic ranks a significant number of suburban swing voters who voted for the Donkey Party in 2018 and 2020 but who might swing back to the G.O.P. without Trump totally dominating the landscape and with economic issues in the forefront,” he writes. “The second possible effect is to boost the turnout rates of certain pro-Democratic groups of voters who often skip non-presidential elections.”Mainstream Democrats have historically treated abortion as a divisive issue best left on the periphery of their campaign strategy. (Biden himself did not utter the word “abortion” until more than a year into his presidency.) But this election season, some Democrats are actively campaigning on the issue, wagering that the Supreme Court’s abrogation of the constitutional right to abortion could prompt a backlash from voters. In Georgia, for example, Stacey Abrams, the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, has started making direct appeals to swing voters and portraying her opponent, the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, as the mind behind one of the nation’s most extreme abortion laws, which bans abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.Similarly, Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who is up for re-election in “notoriously swingy” New Hampshire, has leaned into the issue. “I will fight and never back down,” she said in a June television ad raising the possibility of a national abortion ban. “Protecting our personal freedoms isn’t just what’s right for New Hampshire. It’s what makes us New Hampshire.”Whether this strategy will end up redounding to the Democrats’ benefit remains an open question. Since the court overruled Roe v. Wade, most polls have shown approximately a three-point shift in the Democrats’ direction on the generic ballot, which asks whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, compared with surveys by the same pollsters before the decision came down.But some are skeptical that the shift will endure through November or prove significant enough to turn the electoral tide. “Does it have an effect? Absolutely,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told The Times. “Does it fundamentally change the landscape? No. Not in an off-year election, when your president’s approval rating is below 40 percent and gas is $5 a gallon.”What to watchInflation: According to the Times/Siena College poll, 78 percent of voters say inflation will be “extremely important” when they head to the polls. “It’s a very negative thing politically for the Democrats,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former economic adviser for the Obama administration. “My guess is that the negative views about inflation are so deeply baked in that nothing can change in the next few months to change them.”Unless, of course, they get worse: Republicans are seizing on fears of rising prices in campaign ads, which economists warn could push prices even higher by entrenching inflationary expectations.A surprise announcement from Trump: “Should former President Trump decide, against the advice of nearly every Republican strategist alive, to announce his candidacy before the midterm elections in November, he might energize Democratic voters enough to minimize their losses at the margins,” Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report writes. “I am not sure it would save one or both majorities, but it certainly has the potential to have a greater impact than abortion, guns, and Jan. 6 combined.”Another polling failure: As this newsletter has explored, the polling profession has been in something of a state of crisis since the 2016 election. Pollsters are having a harder and harder time reaching working-class voters, who have been trending Republican, and so polls have routinely overestimated Democratic support. As Cohn writes, “It’s hard not to wonder whether the good news for Democrats might simply be a harbinger of yet another high-profile misfire.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“This election could answer the biggest midterm question: Abortion or the economy?” [Politico]“Where the Midterms Could Most Affect Abortion Access” [FiveThirtyEight]“Could the Midterms Be Tighter Than Expected?” [The New York Times]“Democrats’ Risky Bet: Aid G.O.P. Extremists in Spring, Hoping to Beat Them in Fall” [The New York Times]“Sorry, Democrats. Don’t get your hopes up for the midterms.” [The Washington Post] More

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      3 Senate Hopefuls Denounce Big Tech. They Also Have Deep Ties to It.

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      For Republicans running for the Senate this year, “Big Tech” has become a catchall target, a phrase used to condemn the censorship of conservative voices on social media, invasions of privacy and the corruption of America’s youth — or all of the above.But for three candidates in some of the hottest races of 2022 — Blake Masters, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz — the denunciations come with a complication: They have deep ties to the industry, either as investors, promoters or employees. What’s more, their work involved some of the questionable uses of consumer data that they now criticize.Mr. Masters and Mr. Vance have embraced the contradictions with the zeal of the converted.“Fundamentally, it is my expertise from having worked in Silicon Valley and worked with these companies that has given me this perspective,” Mr. Masters, who enters the Republican primary election for Senate in Arizona on Tuesday with the wind at his back, said on Wednesday. “As they have grown, they have become too pervasive and too powerful.”Mr. Vance, on the website of his campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat, calls for the breakup of large technology firms, declaring: “I know the technology industry well. I’ve worked in it and invested in it, and I’m sick of politicians who talk big about Big Tech but do nothing about it. The tech industry promised all of us better lives and faster communication; instead, it steals our private information, sells it to the Chinese, and then censors conservatives and others.”But some technology activists simply aren’t buying it, especially not from two political newcomers whose Senate runs have been bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a longtime board member of the tech giant. Mr. Thiel’s own company, Palantir, works closely with federal military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies eager for access to its secretive data analysis technology.“There’s a massive, hugely profitable industry in tracking what you do online,” said Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a new liberal interest group pressing for stricter regulations of technology companies. “Regardless of these candidates’ prospects in the Senate, I would imagine if Peter Thiel is investing in them, he is investing in his future.”Mr. Masters, a protégé of Mr. Thiel’s and the former chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm, oversaw investments in Palantir and pressed to spread its technology, which analyzes mountains of raw data to detect patterns that can be used by customers.Palantir’s initial seed money came from the C.I.A., but its technology was adopted widely by the military and even the Los Angeles Police Department. Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel personally pressed the director of the National Institutes of Health to buy into it.Sharecare, a website whose consortium of investors included Mehmet Oz, answered consumer questions about health issues.Dr. Oz, the Republican nominee for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, was part of a consortium of investors that founded Sharecare, a website that offered users the chance to ask questions about health and wellness — and allowed marketers from the health care industry the chance to answer them.A feature of Sharecare, RealAge Test, quizzed tens of millions of users on their health attributes, ostensibly to help shave years off their age, then released the test results to paying customers in the pharmaceutical industry.Mr. Vance, the Republican nominee in Ohio and another Thiel pupil, used Mr. Thiel’s money to form his venture capital firm, Narya Capital, which helped fund Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app whose privacy policies allow it to share some user data for targeted advertising.The Vance campaign said the candidate’s stake in Hallow did not give him or his firm decision-making powers, and Alex Jones, Hallow’s chief executive, said private, sensitive data like journal entries or reflections were encrypted and not sold, rented or otherwise shared with data brokers. He said that “private sensitive personal data” was not shared “with any advertising partners.”Peter Thiel has bankrolled Mr. Masters and J.D. Vance in their Senate campaigns.Marco Bello/Getty ImagesAll three Senate candidates have targeted the technology industry in their campaigns, railing against the harvesting of data from unsuspecting users and invasions of privacy by greedy firms.“These companies take this data and sell precisely targeted ads so effective they verge on predatory,” Mr. Masters wrote in an opinion article last year in The Wall Street Journal. “They then optimize their platforms to keep you online to receive ever more ads.”In a gauzy video posted in July 2021, Mr. Masters says, “The internet, which was supposed to give us an awesome future, is instead being used to shut us up.”Mr. Vance, in a campaign Facebook video, suggested that Congress make data collection illegal — or at least mandate disclosure — before technology companies “harvest our data and then sell it back to us in the form of targeted advertising.”In a December video appearance soon after he announced his campaign, Dr. Oz proclaimed, “I’ve taken on Big Pharma, I’ve gone to battle with Big Tech, I’ve gone up against agrochem companies, big ones, and I’ve got scars to prove it.”It is not surprising that more candidates for high office have deep connections to the technology industry, said Michael Rosen, an adjunct fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively about the industry. That’s where the money is these days, he said, and technology’s reach extends through industries including health care, social media, hardware and software and consumer electronics.“What is novel in this cycle is to have candidates ostensibly on the right who are arguing for the government to step in and regulate these companies because, in their view, they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves,” Mr. Rosen said.He expressed surprise that “a free-market, conservative-type candidate thinks that the government will do a fairer and more reliable job of regulating and moderating speech than the private sector would.”Technology experts on the left say candidates like Mr. Masters and Mr. Vance are Trojan horses, taking popular stances to win federal office with no intention of pursuing those positions in the Senate.On his website, Mr. Vance says, “I’m sick of politicians who talk big about Big Tech but do nothing about it.”Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMs. Haworth, whose group has taken aim at platforms like Facebook and Amazon, said states like California were already moving forward with regulations to prevent online marketers from steering consumers to certain products or unduly influencing behavior.She said she believed that Republicans, if they took control of Congress, would impose weak federal rules that superseded state regulations.“Democrats should be calling out the hypocrisy here,” she said.Mr. Masters said he was sympathetic to concerns that empowering government to regulate technology would only lead to another kind of abuse, but, he added, “The answer in this age of networked monopolies is not to throw your hands up and shout ‘laissez-faire.’”Multinational technology firms like Google and Facebook, Mr. Masters said, have exceeded national governments in power.As for the “Trojan horse” assertion, he said, “When I am in the U.S. Senate, I am going to deliver on everything I’m saying.”It is not clear that such complex matters will have an impact in the fall campaigns. Jim Lamon, a Republican Senate rival of Mr. Masters’s in Arizona, has aired advertisements tarring him as a “fake” stalking horse for the California technology industry — but with limited effectiveness. At a debate this month, Mr. Lamon said Mr. Masters was “owned” by his paymasters in Big Tech.But Mr. Masters, who has the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, appears to be the clear favorite for the nomination.Representative Tim Ryan, Mr. Vance’s Democratic opponent in Ohio, has made glancing references to the “Big Tech billionaires who sip wine in Silicon Valley” and bankroll the Republican’s campaign.John Fetterman, the Democratic opponent of Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, has not raised the issue.Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Mr. Vance, said he was very serious about his promises to limit the influence of technology companies.“J.D. has long been outspoken about his desire to break up Big Tech and hold them accountable for their overreach,” she said. “He strongly believes that their power over our politics and economy needs to be reduced, to protect the constitutional rights of Americans.”Representatives of the Oz campaign did not respond to requests for comment. More

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      Class Divisions Harden Into Battle Lines in Arizona’s Republican Primary

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      PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. — As Shardé Walter’s family cut back on everything from camping trips to Eggo waffles to balance their inflation-strained budget this summer, she became more and more fed up with the Republicans who have governed Arizona for more than a decade.“You’ve got those hoity-toity Republicans, and then you’ve got ones like me — just trying to live,” Ms. Walter, 36, said as she waited for former President Donald J. Trump to arrive at a rally on Friday for his slate of candidates in Arizona’s bitterly fought Republican primaries.“We’re busting our asses off,” she continued, “but we’re broke for no reason.”The Aug. 2 Republican primary in Arizona has been cast as a party-defining contest between traditional Republicans and Trump loyalists, with the power to reshape a political battleground at the heart of fights over voting rights and fair elections. Several leading Republican candidates in Arizona for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate have made lies about the “stolen” 2020 election a centerpiece of their campaigns.But the choice between traditional conservatives and Trump-backed firebrands is also tapping into working-class conservatives’ frustrations with a state economic and political system firmly controlled by Republicans, highlighting the gap between voters who have profited from Arizona’s rising home values and tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, and those who feel left out and are eager to punish the Republican establishment at the ballot box.“It’s like ‘The Great Gatsby’ — old versus new,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research with the polling firm OH Predictive Insights, which is based in Phoenix. “It’s a very telling moment for the G.O.P. Are they going the way of MAGA, or the McCain-Goldwater conservative way that gave them dominance over the state?”Supporters watched Mr. Trump speak on an outdoor screen at the Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott Valley, Ariz.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSeveral leading Republican candidates in Arizona for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and U.S. Senate have made lies about the “stolen” 2020 election a centerpiece of their campaigns.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesNational surveys of Republicans show that voters’ views of Mr. Trump and the 2020 election are fracturing along lines of education.A New York Times/Siena College poll released this month found that 64 percent of Republican primary voters without a college degree believed that Mr. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Forty-four percent of Republican voters with a bachelor’s degree or more said Mr. Trump was the winner.Mr. Trump was still a clear favorite for Republican voters with a high school degree or less, with 62 percent saying they would vote for him in the 2024 Republican presidential primary if the election were held today. Less than 30 percent of Republican primary voters with college degrees said they would vote for Mr. Trump.In Arizona’s race for governor, the Republican establishment has coalesced around Karrin Taylor Robson, a wealthy real estate developer pitching herself as a competent leader who has been reliably conservative ever since her days as a staff member in the Reagan White House.The Trump wing of the party is locked in behind Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed former news anchor who has stoked an anti-establishment rebellion fueled by falsehoods about the 2020 election and provocations like vowing to bomb smuggling tunnels on the southern border.Ms. Robson has cut into Ms. Lake’s early lead in the polls, but recent surveys suggest that Ms. Lake is still ahead.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      Big Tech and the Fed

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      Some tech companies’ earnings are flagging, in what could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve.Still big.Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat tech earnings say about the economy The long-booming bottom lines of major tech companies are all of a sudden smaller than expected. That might be a good thing. Big Tech sailed through the pandemic with its profits mostly intact. The fact that some firms’ results are now flagging could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve, which is trying to engineer a slowdown as it fights the nation’s worst bout of inflation in four decades.The big question for investors, and perhaps the Fed, is whether the profits of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and the other tech giants, along with corporate America in general, have fallen enough.Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, kicked off what appears to be a disappointing round of quarterly reports for the U.S.’s largest tech companies yesterday. Meta will release its results this afternoon, with Apple and Amazon rounding out Big Tech’s earnings announcements tomorrow.Microsoft’s profits, while below expectations, were still up. Sales of its signature software products, like Office, rose 13 percent. Its cloud services were up 40 percent. And LinkedIn, the professional social network Microsoft bought in 2016, grew 26 percent from a year ago, continuing to benefit from the tightest job market in decades.Alphabet’s sales rose 13 percent. In another good sign for the economy, the jump was driven by better-than-expected sales in its core Google search engine business, while results were mixed elsewhere. A jump in expenses and an exit from its Russian-related businesses caused profits to slump 14 percent.The results were positive enough for investors. Alphabet’s shares rose nearly 5 percent on the earnings news to $110. Microsoft’s shares jumped $10, or nearly 4 percent, to $262. Executives at both companies said they saw evidence of a weaker economy. “We are not immune to what is happening in the macro broadly,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said on a call with analysts. Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, told analysts that a pullback in spending by some advertisers reflected “uncertainty about a number of factors.”Few are betting that the earnings reports will change the Fed’s approach. Its policymakers are meeting this week, and they are widely expected to continue raising benchmark interest rates. While central bankers “will likely acknowledge a recent weakening in economic momentum, the Fed will likely feel the need to appear resolute in battling inflation until there are clear signs that it is abating,” wrote David Kelly, the chief global strategist of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, in a note to clients earlier this week.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Kraken, the crypto exchange, is under investigation for possible sanctions violations. The Treasury Department is looking into whether Kraken illegally allowed users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens. Shares of Coinbase, a larger crypto exchange, plunged yesterday after reports that the S.E.C. was investigating whether it allowed trading in unregistered securities. Cathie Wood’s Ark funds reportedly dumped Coinbase shares yesterday for the first time this year.Antitrust legislation aimed at Big Tech may be off the table for now. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told donors at a Capitol Hill fund-raiser yesterday that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which he had promised to bring to a vote this summer, lacks the support needed to get it to the Senate floor, Bloomberg reported. The bill’s bipartisan backers have been pressuring Schumer to act fast, before midterm elections that could change the balance of power in Congress.One America News, once a dependable Trump promoter, is struggling to survive. The network is being dropped by major carriers and faces a wave of defamation lawsuits for its outlandish stories about the 2020 election. OAN’s most recent blow is from Verizon, which will stop carrying the network on its Fios television service this week. It is now available to only a few thousand people who subscribe to regional cable providers.Teva Pharmaceuticals reaches a tentative $4.25 billion settlement over opioids. The proposed settlement, which is with some 2,500 local governments, states and tribes, would end thousands of lawsuits against one of the largest producers of the painkillers during the height of the opioid epidemic.Florida’s largest utility secretly funded a website that attacked its critics. Florida Power & Light bankrolled and controlled The Capitolist, a news site aimed at Florida lawmakers, through intermediaries from an Alabama consulting firm, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. The site claimed to be independent, but it advocated rate hikes and legislative favors in efforts that were directed by top executives at the utility.BlackRock downshifts on E.S.G. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, slashed its support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues this year, backing only 24 percent of such resolutions in the proxy season that ended in June, down from 43 percent in the previous period. The firm, which has long led the conscious investing movement, said this year’s proposals were “less supportable” and cited new regulatory guidance that opened the door to a broader range of policy-related proposals.The firm has criticized overly “prescriptive” resolutions. In a May memo, BlackRock signaled that Russia’s war in Ukraine was straining global energy supplies and shifting its calculations. “Many climate-related shareholder proposals sought to dictate the pace of companies’ energy transition plans despite continued consumer demand,” wrote the firm’s global head of investment stewardship, Sandy Boss. She noted that shareholders generally supported fewer environmental and social proposals this year as well, voting for 27 percent of resolutions, down from 36 percent in the previous proxy period.Opposition to E.S.G. is mounting. The environmental, social and governance investment push has been labeled “woke capitalism” by critics and is under fire from executives like Tesla’s Elon Musk, major investors like Bill Ackman and Republican politicians. In a speech yesterday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 hopeful, said that big government and big business were together advancing a “pernicious woke agenda.”E.S.G. supporters say critics may have a point. Andrew Behar, C.E.O. of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, agrees that many supposed E.S.G. investments don’t reflect true sustainability — with ever more capital directed toward the idea and many funds failing to live up to their promises. Behar argued that more corporate disclosures — which anti-E.S.G. groups oppose — would help to ensure that green investing actually works. He argues that critics also ignore a key financial incentive driving investor interest: knowing and lowering the costs of environmental issues throughout company operations, including risks from changing weather and the transition to more sustainable models. “We don’t have an E.S.G. problem,” Behar told DealBook. “We have a naming problem.”“I quit Starbucks. I had to. I just didn’t feel like that was justifiable. It’s like a small car payment.” — Fontaine Weyman, a 43-year-old songwriter from Charleston, S.C., on changing her coffee habits. Many Americans are dealing with the fastest inflation of their adult lives across a broad range of goods and services.Instagram tries to explain itself Instagram responded yesterday to criticism from some of its most popular users, including Kylie Jenner, about new features that made it more like its top rival, TikTok, the fast-growing video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, said that it was experimenting with several changes, and that he knew users were unhappy. “It’s not yet good,” he said of some of the tweaks in a video post. He stressed Instagram’s commitment to photos, the app’s original focus, but said, “I’m going to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.”Reels, a short-video product, is one of the six main investment priorities at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, according to an internal memo last month from Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer. Cox said that users had doubled the amount of time they spent on Reels year over year, and that Meta would prioritize boosting ads in Reels “as quickly as possible.” Last week, Instagram announced that almost all videos in the app would be posted as Reels.The changes come as Meta heads into a new phase. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, has cut costs, reshuffled his leadership team and made clear that low-performing employees will be let go, writes The Times’s Mike Isaac. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on a call late last month. In recent months, profit at Meta has fallen and revenue has slowed as the company has spent lavishly on augmented and virtual reality projects, and as the economic slowdown has hurt its advertising business.The high-profile complaints about Instagram’s revamp started in recent days, when Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul with 361 million Instagram followers, shared an image on the site that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”“PRETTY PLEASE,” Kim Kardashian, Jenner’s half sister and the seventh-most-followed Instagram user, echoed in a later post. Yesterday, Chrissy Teigen, a model and author with 39 million followers, responded to Mosseri in a tweet, saying, “we don’t wanna make videos Adam lol.”Companies have reason to listen when social media stars speak up, writes The Times’s Kalley Huang. In 2018, after Snapchat overhauled its interface, Jenner tweeted: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me….” Within a week, Snap, the app’s parent company, had lost $1.3 billion in market value.THE SPEED READ DealsThe activist investor Elliott Management reportedly has a stake in Paypal and is pushing it to cut costs faster. (WSJ, Bloomberg)Twitter shareholders will be asked to vote on Elon Musk’s potential acquisition in September. (Bloomberg)PolicyThe Senate advanced an industrial policy bill that includes more than $52 billion in subsidies for chip makers building U.S. plants. (NYT)The short seller Carson Block is being sued over a $14 million award from the S.E.C. that raised questions about the agency’s whistle-blower program. (Bloomberg)After Apple launched a “buy now, pay later” service, the top U.S. consumer finance regulator warned Big Tech about undermining competition in the sector. (FT)A federal judge ruled that Uber doesn’t have to offer wheelchair-accessible cars in every city. (The Verge)Best of the restCredit Suisse, which reported larger second-quarter losses than expected, replaced its C.E.O. (FT)Customers are paying billions of dollars in fees for “free” checking. (Bloomberg)The default settings in Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft products that you should turn off right away. (NYT)This man sells mud to Major League Baseball. (NYT)“The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets” (NYT)R.I.P., Choco Taco. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Forbidden From Getting Help Returning Absentee Ballots, Disabled Voters Sue Wisconsin

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      Several disabled voters are suing Wisconsin’s Elections Commission in federal court after learning that they can no longer get help returning absentee ballots, a reversal that they argue is unconstitutional.The lawsuit, filed on Friday in United States District Court in Madison, seeks to restore a decades-old precedent that allowed people with disabilities to receive assistance from family members and caregivers with the return of absentee ballots.The accommodation was struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on July 8 in a 4-to-3 ruling by the court’s conservative majority, which concluded that only voters themselves could return their absentee ballots in person. The ruling did not address the handling of ballots that are returned by mail.It also prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin.The lawsuit filed on Friday concerns only the issue of who is authorized to return absentee ballots, something that Republicans have sought to clamp down on in Wisconsin and other states, falsely claiming that Democrats engaged in fraudulent ballot harvesting during the 2020 election.Timothy Carey, 49, who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy and lives in Appleton, Wis., is one of four plaintiffs listed in the lawsuit. He said in an interview on Tuesday that he had voted absentee for 30 years, enlisting the help of a nurse or his parents to return his ballot. As someone who relies on a ventilator and cannot use his hands, he said a mandate that he return his own ballot presented a particular hardship.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 6The state of the midterms. More

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      How Can Democrats Persuade Voters They’re Not a Party of Rich Elites?

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      Today, at an unassuming event space in Washington overlooking the Capitol, a coterie of progressive thinkers and doers gathered for an intimate conference that could not have been more different from the boisterous gathering hosted just down the road by the conservative America First Policy Institute.The purpose of Tuesday’s liberal gathering was to discuss ways to counter a narrative that appears to be gaining traction with voters: that Democrats are now the party of economic elites, while Republicans represent working-class Americans.The G.O.P., of course, has been trying to pull off exactly this feat for decades — with mixed success.Richard Nixon spoke of a “silent majority” of Americans who were turned off by what they saw as the cultural excess of the 1960s. One famous attack line from Nixon’s re-election campaign painted George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, as the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion.”Ronald Reagan, a sunnier type, appealed to the patriotism and conservative social values of blue-collar workers in places like Ohio’s Mahoning Valley by aggressively confronting the Soviet Union abroad and speaking openly about his Christian faith.A shift for the partiesBut it was Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate baron from Manhattan, who arguably pulled off the major realignment of the two parties along educational and class lines. Now, Republican politicians boast that theirs is the party of working people. They speak much less often, in public at least, about “tort reform,” “double taxation” and other phrases that the business community once regularly injected into the political conversation.This shift has alarmed many Democratic Party strategists. Americans without a college degree still represent the majority of voters, fueling critiques like Ruy Teixeira’s jeremiad against what he characterizes as overly educated cultural snobs who, in his view, are leading Democrats to ruin.Many of those critiques urge Democrats to alter their cultural message to reach voters who might not share their views on, say, structural racism or immigration.But the wonks and operatives huddling at Tuesday’s series of panels and hallway discussions would argue that party leaders are failing on two more fundamental levels: They don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and they aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress turned liberal activist, organized the event with Adam Jentleson, a former top aide to Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader and senator from Nevada who died last year.Jentleson, who now runs a progressive communications strategy firm called Battle Born Collective along with Rebecca Katz, said in an interview, “Democrats must find a more effective way to meet working-class voters where they are, and channel their very real anger — or else Republicans will.”Adam Jentleson with Senator Harry Reid in 2015. Jentleson, who now helps run a progressive communications strategy firm, supports an economic approach he calls “inclusive populism.”Tom Williams/Roll Call, via Getty ImagesJentleson championed an economic philosophy called “inclusive populism” — essentially, left-leaning economics without the nastiness of past populist movements, which have often channeled working-class voters’ resentment toward immigrants or racial minorities.Not everyone could agree on what to call their nascent movement, with one attendee noting that the term “populist” comes freighted with historical baggage.Brandishing a fresh survey commissioned by the progressive group Fight Corporate Monopolies and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm led by Margie Omero, Jentleson argued that “a populist economic message is highly effective, and it’s crazy that Dems aren’t already moving in this direction as fast as possible.”Omero, who presented her findings at the conference, said that while Democrats’ problems with white working-class voters might be the most acute, workers without college degrees of all backgrounds are drawn to the general tenets of “inclusive populism” — whatever one calls it — and are highly receptive to messages that blame, say, oil companies for the high price of gasoline.Among the other speakers at Tuesday’s gathering — which was called Sound Check — were Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat from New York’s Westchester County; Heather McGhee, the board chairwoman of Color of Change, a civil rights group; and Zachary Carter, a journalist and the author of a biography of John Maynard Keynes.In his talk, Carter bashed unnamed economists of the “old guard” of the Democratic Party, who he said were misdiagnosing the causes of inflation and prescribing, essentially, higher unemployment and lower wages as the answer.“The story we are hearing from the old guard is not fundamentally compelling in a democracy,” Carter said. “Their critique is premised on the idea that most working people actually have it too good, and attempts to improve their well-being can only make things worse.”An informal coalition of progressive groups helped put on the event: Way to Win, a donor community led by Ms. Hunt-Hendrix; Fight Corporate Monopolies, a relatively new advocacy group led by Sarah Miller, founder of the American Economic Liberties Project; the Economic Security Project, led by Taylor Jo Isenberg; and Popular Comms, a progressive strategy group co-founded by Jonathan Smucker.Lessons from PennsylvaniaSmucker, whose background is in political organizing in eastern and central Pennsylvania, gave a presentation on lessons learned from the 2018 campaign for Congress of Jess King, who ran as an inclusive populist in Lancaster, Pa.King, who styled herself a working mom who refused to take “corporate” donations, wound up losing her race after a court decision left the district solidly Republican.She would have been able to overcome the district’s original lean of six percentage points toward the G.O.P., though not the 14-point structural advantage she ultimately faced in the general election, Smucker said.What helped open the door with working-class voters in that district, Smucker said, was an aggressive door-knocking campaign that began with a conversation about “special interests,” Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and the eventual need for a universal health care system — and included large doses of criticism of the leaders of the Democratic Party as disappointing and out of touch.The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months — and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.Hunt-Hendrix said she found the conference “fortifying” at a time when many on the left are discouraged by how the midterm elections are shaping up.Jentleson emphasized that Tuesday’s confab was “a conversation about the future of the party, not a prescription for 2022.”What to readIn competing speeches in Washington, Donald Trump portrayed the country as overwhelmed by crime, Michael Bender reports, while Mike Pence tried to draw subtle distinctions with his former ally and current rival.Previously undisclosed communications among Trump campaign aides and outside advisers provide new insight into their efforts to overturn the election in the weeks leading to Jan. 6, Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater report.As the world faces disasters including climate change and the pandemic, an old question seems newly urgent: Does democracy or autocracy perform better in times of crisis? Max Fisher explores.Several disabled voters are suing Wisconsin’s Elections Commission in federal court, seeking to restore a decades-old precedent that allowed people with disabilities to receive assistance with the return of absentee ballots.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown

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      Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.The overall Democratic fund-raising edge online widened by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period, records show.Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.The current political climate favors Republicans as President Biden’s approval rating plumbs new lows. But nearly a dozen Republican strategists directly involved in fund-raising or overseeing campaigns have expressed concerns about how the fund-raising downturn might limit their party’s gains.Working in the party’s favor is that Wall Street billionaires and other industry titans have cut seven- and eight-figure checks to Republican super PACs, offsetting some of the party’s small-dollar struggles, which some attributed to inflation and others to deceptive tactics that are turning off supporters over time.“We’ve got to raise the money,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said repeatedly on Fox News on Friday when pressed about the 2022 landscape. “We get the money, we win.”For the Senate Republican committee, online fund-raising plunged by $6.7 million in the most recent quarter, to $11 million, from $17.7 million. Top Republican Senate candidates, even those whose fund-raising ticked up, are falling well behind their Democratic rivals in the cash race.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia raised $12.3 million online last quarter.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe money gap is so pronounced that Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, an endangered Democratic incumbent, raised more online last quarter — $12.3 million — than the combined WinRed quarterly hauls of the Republican Senate nominees or presumptive nominees in seven key contests: Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.Money alone does not win political races and, for years, Republicans have grown accustomed to trailing Democrats in online fund-raising. Democratic donors, for instance, poured more than $200 million into losing Senate races in Kentucky and South Carolina last cycle — and neither contest ended up even close.Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

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      The Dystopian Myths of Red America

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      Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners.But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.Let’s start with the politics. The other day The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, reporting from the campaign trail, noted that many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, suggesting that the G.O.P. base agrees with them. Actually, I’d like to see some surveys along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists?Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime.This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a “mixed-race” country.On the domestic violence front, a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left.Finally, about B.L.M.: The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion. That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective.Here’s one point of comparison. Back in April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, pulled a political stunt at the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused a major slowdown of traffic, disrupting business and leading to a lot of spoiled produce. Total economic losses have been estimated at around $4 billion; that is, a few days of border-security theater appear to have caused more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.Yet pointing out these facts probably won’t change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also alluded to in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes. It’s true that violent crime rose during the pandemic, but it rose about as much in rural America as it did in urban areas. And despite that recent rise, violence in many cities is far lower than it was not long ago.In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.But who among the Republican base will acknowledge this reality? Whenever I mention New York’s relative safety, I get a wave of mail saying, in effect, “You can’t really believe that.”The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.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