Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Fight Over Warnock’s Senate Record Comes Down to Electric Vehicles

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      Hyundai’s huge new plant outside Savannah could be a model for bipartisanship and a central achievement for Raphael Warnock, whose biggest efforts otherwise fell short. But Republicans aren’t giving him credit.The groundbreaking ceremony in October for the Hyundai electric vehicle plant under construction outside Savannah should have been a moment for bipartisan bonhomie, with the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and a Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, both shoveling dirt to begin the largest economic development project in the state’s history.Instead, in this hyperpartisan moment in a bright-purple state, that triumph has been tarnished by a multipronged and acrimonious debate. Should state economic incentives or federal climate legislation get the credit? Did federal electric-vehicle tax breaks help or hurt the project? Above all, how should the brief Senate record of Mr. Warnock play in voters’ calculations ahead of his runoff election on Tuesday against Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee?Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, has only two short years of experience in elective office. Democrats say he has much to show for it: not a lot of flash, they concede, but the hard work and demonstrated skill of a legislative professional.His accomplishments are mainly modest but meaningful: science funding for historically Black colleges and universities, new access to grants for Georgia transit authorities, funding to replace aging highway-rail intersections, and new programs to improve maternal health care.His biggest achievement may have been his relentless push for a $35-a-month out-of-pocket cap on insulin costs, which survived for Medicare recipients in the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Biden in August, but was blocked by Republicans for those with private health insurance.There is no doubt that where Mr. Warnock swung hardest, he missed: He dearly wanted to expand health insurance access for the working poor in Georgia and other Republican-led states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Tax credits for low-income workers to buy private policies made it through the House under Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better bill but died in the Senate.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, with Mr. Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia last year. Senate Democrats say Mr. Warnock is needed as a key 51st vote for the party in the chamber.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Warnock was also the torch bearer for voting rights legislation that fell to a filibuster in the Senate. Promoted by Democratic leaders as the passionate heir to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who once preached from the same Ebenezer pulpit, Mr. Warnock was given ample floor time to make his case in the loftiest of terms, and his vulnerable position in the 2022 election was supposed to add urgency to his appeals.But he could not persuade two Democratic colleagues, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to reshape filibuster rules to let expanded access to the polls pass with a simple majority.One of Mr. Warnock’s earliest campaign ads this year featured him allowing: “A magician? I’m not. So in just a year in the Senate, did I think I could fix Washington? Of course not.”What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      Herschel Walker Stresses Georgia Roots on Campaign As Many Top Republicans Shift Away

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      Before the November election, Mr. Walker had help from Republicans far and wide. Now, he’s relying heavily on Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia to pull him ahead of Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent.For weeks during the general election, Herschel Walker was joined on the campaign trail by top Republican senators, party leaders and conservative activists eager to help the former football star’s Senate bid in Georgia. Now, with certain exceptions, he’s often been the only draw at his events.The shift reflects fresh doubts at the top of the Republican Party, where disappointing midterm election results last month have triggered an identity crisis among conservatives reeling from losses in a third consecutive campaign cycle.The uncertainty has affected Mr. Walker’s campaign, where his team has avoided appearances with former President Donald J. Trump, who had endorsed him and whose divisiveness has been particularly acute among Georgia voters.According to a recent private poll of likely runoff voters in Georgia, conducted for a pro-Walker super PAC, just 36 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of Mr. Trump, compared to 59 percent who said they had an unfavorable view of him. The same survey showed that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican re-elected to a second term last month despite Mr. Trump’s attempts to unseat him, was viewed favorably by 60 percent of voters and unfavorably by 33 percent.But containing Mr. Trump has become something of a chess match for Mr. Walker’s team.Senator Lindsey Graham joined Mr. Walker at his campaign event on Thursday.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMeanwhile, few other Republicans have appeared with Mr. Walker during the runoff.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesFears about the former president’s penchant for prioritizing his own grievances — as he did during a disastrous runoff for Republicans in the state just two years ago — convinced some Walker advisers not to seek help from some of Mr. Trump’s potential White House rivals in 2024. The benefit of campaigning with rising stars in the party, like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, wasn’t worth the risk of provoking the former president, these advisers said.It’s unclear whether Mr. DeSantis or Mr. Youngkin was particularly interested in helping Mr. Walker, who was slightly behind incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock in a CNN/SSRS poll released Thursday. While Mr. DeSantis recently signed an online fund-raising plea for the Walker campaign, both men campaigned almost exclusively this year with candidates for governor.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      A Conservative’s Take on the Chaotic State of the Republican Party

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      Republicans already hold tremendous power in America. They have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices. They have more state trifectas (control of both legislative houses, as well as the governor’s seat) than Democrats. And come 2023, they will also control the House of Representatives.But there’s a hollowness at the core of the modern G.O.P. It’s hard to identify any clear party leader, coherent policy agenda or concerted electoral strategy. The party didn’t bother putting forward a policy platform before the 2020 election or articulating an alternative policy vision in 2022. It has hardly reckoned with its under-performances in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. At this point, it’s unclear whether there’s any real party structure — or substrate of ideas — left at all.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]All of which raises the question: What exactly is the Republican Party at this point? What does it believe? What does it want to achieve? Whose lead does it follow? Those questions will need to be answered somehow over the next two years, as Republican politicians compete for their party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election and Republican House members wield the power of their new majority.Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We disagree on plenty, but I find him to be one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary Republican Party. So I invited him on the show for an inside-the-tent conversation on the chaotic state of the current G.O.P. and the choices it will have to make over the next two years.We discuss how the party is processing the 2022 midterms, why Dougherty thinks Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Republican nomination again in 2024, whether the G.O.P. leadership actually understands its own voters, how Ron DeSantis rose to become one of the party’s leading 2024 contenders, whether DeSantis — and the G.O.P. more broadly — actually have an economic agenda at this point, why Trump’s greatest strength in 2024 could be the economy he presided over in 2018 and 2019, why Dougherty doesn’t think Trump’s political appeal is transferable to anyone else in the Republican Party, what kind of House speaker Kevin McCarthy might be, which Republicans — other than Trump and DeSantis — to watch out for, and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)Gina Sierra“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. More

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      Before He Takes On ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Ron DeSantis Should Read His Karl Marx

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      With their new majority, House Republicans are planning to take on “woke capitalism.”“Republicans and their longtime corporate allies are going through a messy breakup as companies’ equality and climate goals run headlong into a G.O.P. movement exploiting social and cultural issues to fire up conservatives,” Bloomberg reports. “Most directly in the G.O.P. cross hairs is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is under pressure from the likely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to replace its leadership after the nation’s biggest business lobby backed some Democratic candidates.”I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “the entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.That the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, railed this week against the “raw exercise of monopolistic power” by Apple, for example, has much more to do with the cultural politics of Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, than any real interest in the power of government to regulate markets and curb abuse. (In fact, DeSantis argued in his book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” that the Constitution was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process” and stop any popular effort to “undermine the rights of property.”)Nonetheless, there is something of substance behind this facade of conflict. It is true that the largest players in the corporate world, compelled to seek profit by the competitive pressures of the market, have mostly ceased catering to the particular tastes and preferences of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the American public. To borrow from and paraphrase the basketball legend Michael Jordan: Queer families buy shoes, too.Republicans have discovered, to their apparent chagrin, that their total devotion to the interests of concentrated, corporate capital does not buy them support for a cultural agenda that sometimes cuts against those very same interests.Here it’s worth noting, as the sociologist Melinda Cooper has argued, that what we’re seeing in this cultural dispute is something of a conflict between two different segments of capital. What’s at stake in the “growing militancy” of the right wing of the Republican Party, Cooper writes, “is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” It is the patriarchal and dynastic capitalism of Donald Trump against the more impersonal and managerial capitalism of, for example, Mitt Romney.To the extent that cultural reactionaries within the Republican Party have been caught unaware by the friction between their interests and those of the more powerful part of the capitalist class, they would do well to take a lesson from one of the boogeymen of conservative rhetoric and ideology: Karl Marx.Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.But that’s a subject for another day and a different column.For now, I’ll simply say that the problem of “woke capitalism” for social and political conservatives is the problem of capitalism for anyone who hopes to preserve anything in the face of the ceaseless drive of capital to dominate the entire society.You could restrain the power of capital by strengthening the power of labor to act for itself, in its own interests. But as conservatives are well aware, the prerogatives of workers can also undermine received hierarchies and traditional social arrangements. The working class, after all, is not just one thing, and what it seeks to preserve — its autonomy, its independence, its own ways of living — does not often jibe with the interests of reactionaries.Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda. Play within those restraints, goes the bargain, and you can do whatever you want. Put differently, the right doesn’t have a problem with capitalism; it has a problem with who appears to be in charge of it.There is even a clear strategy at work. If you can stamp out alternative ways of being, if you can weaken labor to the point of desperation, then perhaps you can force people back into traditional families and traditional households. But no matter how hard you try, you cannot stop the dynamic movement of society. It will churn and churn and churn, until eventually the dam breaks.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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      Warnock Turns to Obama in Final Days of Georgia Runoff Campaign

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      As the former president rallied with Senator Raphael Warnock on Thursday, Mr. Warnock’s Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, faced new accusations of violent behavior.At a campaign rally for the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, former President Barack Obama urged voters to head to the polls and expand Democrats’ majority in the Senate.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesATLANTA — The final days of Georgia’s Senate runoff campaign have formed a familiar pattern. Democrats try to stir enthusiasm with high-profile surrogates and a million-dollar ad campaign. Republicans largely find themselves in damage control mode. And yet neither party can claim the upper hand, as one of the most hotly contested races of the midterms remains a tossup.That pattern played out on Thursday as former President Barack Obama visited Georgia for the second time in just over a month to campaign with Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent facing Herschel Walker, the Republican former football star.Hours before the evening rally, Mr. Walker’s campaign was the focus of attention after a woman who had been in a long-term relationship with Mr. Walker said that he had attacked her in a rage in 2005 after she caught him with another woman.Mr. Walker’s campaign did not comment about the allegations from the woman, Cheryl Parsa. Ms. Parsa, who said she had been in a five-year relationship with Mr. Walker, described how he had put his hands on her throat and chest and swung his fist at her as she ducked out of the way.The discordant split screen on the campaign trail on Thursday illustrated the stark differences between the imagery of the two campaigns in a race that polls show remains within the margin of error.For Democrats, Mr. Obama’s visit was the emotional high point of weeks of nearly nonstop organizing, canvassing and voter mobilization ahead of the runoff election on Tuesday. His last visit to Georgia came in October during the general election, just shy of two weeks before Election Day. His event in Atlanta with Mr. Warnock on Thursday was viewed by Democrats as an ironclad way to ensure that Black voters, a must-win constituency in the state, remain enthusiastic, despite back-to-back elections and runoffs that have sent Georgia voters to the polls four times in the last two years.“We can’t be complacent,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of hundreds of supporters in Atlanta. “We have to run through the tape. That means all of us doing our part to make sure that Raphael Warnock goes back to the United States Senate.”What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More

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      Arizona’s Cochise County Certifies Election Results as Officials End Protest

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      Officials in Cochise County gave final approval to the midterm results after a judge ordered them to end the stall tactics.An Arizona county whose Republican supervisors had refused to certify last month’s election results relented on Thursday under court order, ending an unusual standoff that had threatened to delay the formal end of the election in the closely watched battleground state.In a hastily arranged meeting, the board of supervisors in Cochise County voted 2 to 0 to approve the final canvass of votes in the largely rural county in the southeast corner of the state. The move came hours after Judge Casey F. McGinley of Pima County Superior Court ordered members of the board of supervisors to take action by the end of the day.Whatever concerns they had about the election, “it is not a reason to delay” finalizing the results, Judge McGinley said at a hearing on the matter.The board’s two Republican members, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, had said they were stalling to hear out the concerns of right-wing activists promoting a legal theory — one previously debunked by federal election officials and rejected by the state’s courts — that the state’s electronic voting equipment was invalid.But in an interview this week with The New York Times, Ms. Judd characterized the delay as a way to protest the election in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, where Republican candidates have clashed with Republican election officials over unproven claims that November’s election was compromised by technical problems.Before she voted to give up the protest, Ms. Judd acknowledged she would be disappointing some people.Peggy Judd, vice chairwoman of the Cochise County board of supervisors, after the election certification on Thursday.Rebecca Noble for The New York Times“I’m going to make a lot of people happy, and some people are going to stay mad at me anyway, but that’s OK, too,” she said. “I’m a person and our lives are all like that, ups and downs and happy and sad.”Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, sued the Cochise County board of supervisors on Monday for refusing to certify the county’s election by the deadline. The action had threatened to delay the statewide certification of the results beyond the legal deadline of Dec. 5.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat who defeated the Republican Kari Lake in the governor’s race last month, argued in the lawsuit that the Cochise County board had overstepped its bounds. Judge McGinley on Thursday agreed, saying the board had “exceeded its lawful authority” in delaying certification.His decision followed a brief but chaotic hearing in which the county board members appeared without a lawyer. The county attorney, Brian McIntyre, had for weeks opposed a series of efforts by Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby to audit or delay certification of last month’s election, arguing that they were illegal.In the hearing, Ann English, the board’s chairwoman and its lone Democratic member, spoke up in opposition and expressed concerns about a board meeting scheduled for Friday, in which Mr. Crosby had hoped to have a group of Arizona election deniers and representatives of Ms. Hobbs’s office present their cases against and for certification — “a sort of a smackdown,” she said.“I think it’s a circus that doesn’t even have to happen,” Ms. English told Judge McGinley in the hearing. “I’ve had enough. I think the public’s had enough.”Ann English, the chairwoman of the board of supervisors, after Cochise County’s midterm election certification meeting on Thursday.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMs. English and Ms. Judd voted to end the standoff. Mr. Crosby did not attend the board meeting.Mr. Crosby and Ms. Judd had at various times said that their efforts were necessary to assuage the concerns of their constituents, citing a variety of election conspiracy theories and false claims that have taken root in a large swath of the Republican electorate.In a rebuke of some of these theories, a federal district judge in Arizona found on Thursday that Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, the losing Republican candidate for secretary of state, had made “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in a lawsuit that the judge, John J. Tuchi, said was worthy of sanctions.The judge found that Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem did not meet the standards for receiving sanctions themselves, “although the court does not find that plaintiffs have acted appropriately in this matter — far from it.” He said he would determine who among the lawyers involved in the case should be sanctioned.Alan Dershowitz, one of the lawyers on the case, and other attorneys for Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The legal fallout from the election in Arizona is likely to continue. Ms. Lake has said she plans to file a lawsuit contesting the results of the election as soon as Monday, as does Abe Hamadeh, the Republican candidate for attorney general, who is trailing his opponent by only around 500 votes.Mr. Hamadeh already filed such a suit last week, but it was dismissed on Tuesday after a state judge found it was “premature.”Ken Bensinger More

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      How Herschel Walker Could Win Georgia’s Senate Race

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      Despite all the tough headlines, he could prevail. Here are two theories about how the runoff could unfold.The steady stream of tough headlines for Herschel Walker has always obscured one stubborn fact about the Senate race in Georgia: He could still win.With the runoff election just days away, the conventional wisdom holds that Senator Raphael Warnock is waltzing toward re-election against an inexperienced Republican opponent who has a thin grasp on policy issues, avoids reporters, faces serious allegations about his personal conduct and has been known to ramble on the stump. But if things were that simple, Warnock would have won handily in November.And if there’s one thing American politics keeps teaching us, it’s to be humble about predicting what voters will do. With that in mind, here are two basic ways to look at the Georgia runoff on Tuesday:The case for WarnockUnder this theory, the runoff is Warnock’s to lose.Many Republicans will stay home, the thinking goes, because they no longer believe that their vote matters much. It’s hard to make the case that 51 Democrats in the Senate, as opposed to 50, would represent some huge threat to conservative priorities and values. Denying Democrats a majority vote on Senate committees is not the kind of argument that fires up the Republican base.Runoff elections are driven by who can persuade more of their supporters to vote yet another time. And Warnock has a battle-tested turnout operation that has now performed well over three elections.The Walker campaign, by contrast, is relying on Gov. Brian Kemp — who is no longer on the ballot — to drag a weak candidate across the finish line. Senate Republicans have basically rented Kemp’s field program for the runoff, but it’s not at all clear that an operation built to turn out voters for Kemp can change gears so easily. Walker drew about 200,000 fewer votes than Kemp did, suggesting that there’s a large chunk of Republican voters who find the Senate hopeful unworthy. Forced to stand on his own two feet, Walker might crumble.Democrats are also outspending Republicans heavily down the stretch. Since Nov. 9, they’ve spent more than double what Republicans have spent on the runoff on digital and television advertising — nearly $53 million versus a little over $24 million, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. The two parties were much closer to parity in the three months before Election Day, though Democrats had a slight edge in spending.The case for WalkerThe second theory rests on the fact that Georgia is still fundamentally a right-leaning state, as this year’s blowout race for governor showed. Perhaps the state’s historical tendencies will prove decisive in the runoff, whatever Walker’s deficiencies as a candidate.Warnock finished ahead of Walker in the general election by fewer than 40,000 votes. The Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver, received more than 81,000 votes — and he is not on the ballot this time. Oliver earned about 50,000 votes more than the Libertarian candidate did in the race for governor, suggesting that he was a sponge for conservatives who could not stomach Walker. If only 46 percent of Oliver’s supporters vote for the Republican this time, Warnock’s margin on Nov. 8 will be completely erased.It’s possible, too, that voters who chose Kemp but not Walker in November will change their minds — if they show up, that is. Walker drew a lower share of the vote than Kemp did, not just in metro Atlanta but also in the most conservative areas of the state. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker ran behind Kemp by at least six percentage points in eight counties — most of them Republican strongholds, with the exception of Cobb County.Walker’s indictment of Warnock was always a simple one: He’s another vote for President Biden’s agenda. And, Biden, with an approval rating in the 30s or low 40s, is about as popular in Georgia as the Florida Gators. So Warnock was careful, during his lone debate with Walker, not to associate himself too closely with Biden.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More