Midterm Elections (2022)

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      GOP Begins Ballot Watching Push Ahead of Election Day

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      Tedium and suspicion mix as skeptical observers monitor the largely monotonous work at a sprawling elections office near Las Vegas.NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — The questions began soon after the doors opened to the public at a sprawling elections office inside a warehouse, and they kept coming until the sky was dark and a cold wind was blowing outside. Hundreds of thousands of ballots for Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, are processed, sorted and counted here, against a backdrop of mountains and desert.Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun.The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.The activity has not produced reports of major disruptions or problems. But on Thursday, local officials were taking no chances at the vote counting center in Clark County: For almost every observer, the elections office had an “ambassador” to escort and observe the observers. Suspicions ran high.“What are those boxes for?” an older woman in a red coat inquired, pointing to a couple of empty bins. She was sitting behind a glass barrier encircling a cavernous vote tabulation area that had been transformed into a large fishbowl. A county official assured her that he would check; he later said they were used to store damaged ballots. Then she asked why county workers were allowed to bring in bags, fretting that they could be used to smuggle ballots, and was told they were most likely used by the staff to carry in their lunches.Another observer wanted to know what was written on some blue sticky notes that were too far away to read. (They are used to alphabetize unopened ballots.) And a third, a 61-year-old dental hygienist named Caryl Tunison, asked, “Why do you not have cameras in every area here?” while she paused from writing in a notebook on her lap. She was sitting face to face with a young woman about three yards away, a county worker who sat on the other side of a glass partition and was placing envelopes in a bin.In a statement, the county elections department said that it “goes above and beyond what the law requires for observation.”“We recognize the value of helping observers understand the process and responding to their questions, and work to provide answers to their wide variety of questions every day,” the statement read.Sealed ballot boxes stored in cages at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesMonitoring elections has long been part of the voting process. But this year, the Republican National Committee has worked alongside outside groups like the Election Integrity Network to seek out activists who believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and elections in general being corrupted. The Election Integrity Network is a group led by Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, and organized by Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.A number of Republican candidates around the country have stated that they may not accept election results if they lose, heightening concerns among many elections experts. But election officials say that they, too, are far better organized this time around. That high level of organization — and the scrutiny from election denial activists — was evident on a recent visit here.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.Many of the observers are people like Ms. Tunison, who believes the 2020 election was stolen and who said she was encouraged in her newfound activism by her pastor. She repeated a conspiracy theory, which circulated on social media after the 2020 election, that several swing states simultaneously halted counting to thwart Donald Trump. “Who was able to call all the counties and get them to stop counting all at once?” she asked.“I just think the whole system is kind of messed up,” she added in an interview as she was leaving. “We could do much better. I think the whole system should be scrapped and started over with something that’s actually secure.”And what would it be replaced with? “I’m not exactly sure, but I know that it should be mechanical,” she said, with “no internet access to any machine.” But she also said maybe tabulation could be done with “something like the blockchain,” referring to the same technology that is at the heart of Bitcoin.Baseless theories about foreign plots to hack voting machines have ricocheted around the right-wing media for two years and have been pushed by well-funded Trump allies, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.In fact, there is no evidence of widespread fraud or malfeasance in elections. And while there is a criminal investigation underway of election tampering in Georgia, it is examining the conduct of Mr. Trump and his circle of advisers.Still, a number of Republican lawyers have primed poll monitors to search for irregularities that could be used to bring legal challenges to the results later on.That would repeat a strategy used in some states in 2020, but many involved say they are better organized this election cycle. Even as the monitoring was taking place on Thursday in Clark County, a local judge rejected a bid by the R.N.C. to have more representation on panels that verify ballot signatures.At the Clark County office, ballots come in from polling places and drop boxes and are brought to a loading dock in the back of the warehouse. Then they are moved through a series of stations where observers from the public can view how they are handled.The number of observers fluctuated throughout the day and into the night. There was a woman in a leather hat complaining that she had been treated rudely by a county worker, a man watching while he twiddled a Rubik’s Cube.A young man from the R.N.C., who declined to comment, monitored late into the evening, while toting around a book by Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager, called “The Changing World Order,” which ponders the rise of China and the twilight of America.Placards throughout the office inform the observers of state law and guidelines. They are prohibited, the placards say, from “talking to workers within the central counting” area or from “advocating for or against a candidate.”Much of the work is monotonous. In one area, stacks of ballots that had been through a sorting machine were hand counted for verification purposes. Watching the workers count the ballots was a tedious business. One observer, whose hair was pulled back in a pink scrunchie, paused from her own note taking to lean over and whisper to a reporter who was taking his own notes. She offered the friendly admonition of an armchair editor: “It’s going to be a boring article.”Unopened mail-in ballots being sorted at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesIn another room, a group of seven observers watched as ballots were fed through the ballot sorting machine. Those that looked good were put into green bins set out on a long table in the middle of the room. Ballots with signatures that could not be verified using county records were sorted into red bins for further review. The sound of the thrumming machine was not unlike a train going over tracks.“I was being lulled to sleep,” said Matt Robison, a 60-year-old service technician for a propane company who came with his wife of 39 years, Sandra. They had not come on behalf of any particular group, but because of their own concerns about the last election.“These people have a job to do, and it looks like they’re doing their job,” said Mr. Robison. “If there’s ballots being shredded or anything like that, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to see that. But I personally feel like there had been — I don’t know about necessarily in Nevada — but there had been election tampering in 2020. But the thing is I think that what we’re able to witness here shows people doing their jobs.”Election officials have long hoped that letting skeptics into the process would convince them to reject the conspiracy theories. That seemed a tall order in Clark County.Mr. Robison described himself as uncomfortable with “woke ideologies” and as a fan of “2000 Mules,” the film promoting conspiracy theories that have been discredited by experts, media outlets and government agencies.“You know, Dinesh D’Souza’s film?” he said, referring to the film’s director, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud. The film’s two star experts, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, were recently jailed for contempt of court.Still, he was cautious about what he thought about the 2020 election. “Unless I can see it, unless I actually witness something, then I can’t confirm,” he said, adding that if he “put my right hand in the air and swear solemnly to tell the truth and the whole truth,” the “truth would be I don’t know.”His wife, a gun training instructor, is more strident in her views and has come more often to observe. Her husband said, jokingly, that “she’s addicted.”Ms. Robison expressed dissatisfaction with the county and the observation process and wanted to see the ballots being unloaded in the back of the building — “the entire chain of custody,” as she put it.The county elections department said in its statement that its “observation plan was reviewed by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and upheld by the court before the primary election” and that “this included identifying the areas where observation would be provided.”For Trump supporters like Ms. Robison, the 2020 election was a catalyst.“There’s no question in my mind and a lot of other people’s minds that 46 should not be in the White House,” she said, referring to President Biden. “It was a stolen election.” More

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      In 2022, Reality Has a Conservative Bias

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      “Reality,” Stephen Colbert remarked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.” That was back when he played a caricature of a conservative instead of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the point of his current late-night role, at least), and the line rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade where reality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Party’s theories of the world.In that period, the years from the invasion of Iraq through the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the conceit that the Iraq war would disarm a dictator (the armaments in question mostly did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East (it did, but not for the better). It staked its domestic policy on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the strength of the George W. Bush-era economy right up to the point when the worst financial crisis since the 1920s hit.Then in Obama’s first term, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and easy money would lead to runaway inflation or debt crisis (they did not), that Obamacare would wreck the health care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an appropriate prescription in a slowly recovering economy (it was a good long-term goal but not an ideal 2010 priority). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically were not.I was a participant in some of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. So I have experience from which to observe that the Democrats in 2022 find themselves struggling because reality has finally changed sides, and now has a conservative bias.What has reality delivered? To a Democratic Party that convinced itself there were few near-term limits on how much stimulus could be pumped into the economy, it has delivered the worst inflation since the 1980s.To a Democratic Party that spent the Trump era talking itself into a belief that immigration enforcement is presumptively immoral and that a de facto amnesty doesn’t have real downsides, it has delivered the southern border’s highest-recorded rate of illegal crossings.And to a Democratic Party whose 2020 platform promised to “end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons while continuing to reduce crime rates,” it has delivered a multiyear spike in homicide rates that’s erased at least 20 years of gains.The key thing to stress about all of these developments is that they don’t prove that liberals are simply “wrong about crime” or “wrong about inflation,” any more than the events of 2003-12 simply proved that conservatives are “wrong about foreign policy” or “wrong about entitlements.”Rather, ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.Thus in the current situation, the fact that right now America is suffering a serious crime wave doesn’t prove that Democrats (and many Republicans) were wrong about criminal justice reform 10 or 15 years ago. It just suggests that there’s a point at which de-carceration or decriminalization may need a tough-on-crime corrective.Likewise Democrats weren’t wrong about the risks of inflation being low in the Obama era or in the recent past. It’s just that except for a few Cassandras like Larry Summers they were wrong to imagine that those risks could be forever minimized, that there was no upper bound on Covid-era spending. In the same way today’s inflation doesn’t retrospectively vindicate the Obama era’s deficit hawks — but it does suggest that some of their proposals might be worth revisiting.So the question for the aftermath of Tuesday’s election isn’t whether Democrats will abandon their ideology but whether that ideology can adapt itself to what reality is saying.And whether for Joe Biden or for his possible successors, a recent model is available: Just after the era when Colbert’s quip had bite, a leader emerged who persuaded the G.O.P. to abandon its fixation on deficits and just run the economy hot, who endorsed universal health insurance and pledged to protect entitlements, and who acknowledged that the Iraq war had been a grave mistake and promised a less utopian, more realistic foreign policy.That’s right: It was Donald Trump who closed the gap — in rhetoric, if not always in his eventual policymaking — between the Republican Party and reality. Now the Democrats, facing a cold rendezvous with reality’s conservative bias, need leaders who can do the same.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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      White House Clarifies Biden’s Coal Remarks After Outrage From Manchin

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      PHILADELPHIA — President Biden came under fire from a crucial member of his own party, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, on Saturday after making comments that suggested coal plants in the United States would be shuttered as the nation shifts to solar and wind power.The backlash came as Mr. Biden was on a final campaign swing before Tuesday’s midterm elections, and it reflected cracks in the Democratic Party’s coalition ahead of votes that will determine which party controls Congress next year. The response also led the administration to apologize and clarify the president’s remarks, which it said were being misconstrued.“The president’s remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday.At a speech in California on Friday, Mr. Biden was discussing America’s energy transition and was lamenting the cost of using coal.“No one is building new coal plants, because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant,” Mr. Biden said. “So it’s going to become a wind generation.”He added, “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.”In his rebuke of Mr. Biden, Mr. Manchin, a prominent centrist, criticized the president for saying that coal mines and plants should be shut down in favor of wind and solar plants. He called the comments “outrageous and divorced from reality.”“Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” Mr. Manchin said. “The president owes these incredible workers an immediate and public apology, and it is time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.”Republicans also seized on Mr. Biden’s comments, criticizing him for pursuing an energy policy that could cost American jobs.“We know how this ends,” Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, said on Twitter. “People lose their livelihoods. You pay more for energy.”The controversy over Mr. Biden’s remarks came as he was preparing to join former President Barack Obama for a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon.Ms. Jean-Pierre said that Mr. Biden and Mr. Manchin had worked closely on legislation in the past year and that the president was an advocate for West Virginia. Noting that oil and natural gas production had increased under Mr. Biden’s watch, she said that the president was laying out the course of America’s energy transition.“No one will be left behind,” she said. More

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      At Fetterman Rally, Obama Mocks Oz and Tells Crowd to Vote for Democracy

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      PITTSBURGH — Former President Barack Obama, campaigning for the first time with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, urged Democratic supporters on Saturday to vote to save democracy and abortion rights. Mr. Obama also mocked Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican in the Senate race, as a television pitchman with no interest in helping working people.Dr. Oz had “answers,” Mr. Obama said, referencing the candidate’s years as host of a TV show that sometimes promoted dubious health advice. But, he added, those answers were the wrong ones.“You want to lose weight? Take raspberry ketones,’’ Mr. Obama said. “If somebody is willing to peddle snake oil to make a buck, then he’s probably willing to sell snake oil to get elected.”The rally was held in a park in the shadow of the University of Pittsburgh’s 42-story Cathedral of Learning, a popular last stop on the campaign trail for Democrats seeking to rally young voters before Election Day. The crowd, numbering more than 1,000, seemed to pulse with affection for the former president, who spoke for about 35 minutes.Mr. Fetterman spoke for about 10 minutes, his speech still halting since a stroke in May, and noted that Dr. Oz would appear later in the day with former President Donald J. Trump in the Pittsburgh exurbs. Mr. Fetterman said he was proud to share a stage with a former president who was “sedition-free.”Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesRuth Fremson/The New York TimesIn his speech, Mr. Obama outlined the differences between electing Democrats or Republicans on Tuesday. It was a choice, he said, “between politicians who seem willing to say and do anything to get power, and people who see you and know you and care about you and share your values.”Mr. Obama laced his speech with examples of how civility, adherence to truth and respect for the political opposition had eroded since he ran for office. He attributed that deterioration to Republicans during Mr. Trump’s presidency.Mr. Obama blamed social media that “amped up” conspiracy theories and hatred, warning of the potential for political violence. Mentioning the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Obama decried people “in leadership positions” who, after such an attack, “make light of it, they joke about it.”“More people are going to get hurt,” he said.He also called out “big celebrities” who have reposted “vile antisemitic conspiracy theories online,” an apparent reference to the basketball star Kyrie Irving and the rapper Kanye West.“You don’t have to be a student of history to understand how dangerous that is,’’ Mr. Obama said.Later on Saturday, Mr. Fetterman, Mr. Obama and President Biden are scheduled to rally in Philadelphia, capping a day in which they could reach nearly a quarter of Pennsylvania’s active Democratic voters. More

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      How Kari Lake Went From News Anchor to Outspoken Critic of the Press

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      Former friends and colleagues of Ms. Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, say they remember her far differently from the candidate they see today.One longtime former co-worker in the television news business recalled that Kari Lake detested guns and practiced Buddhism. Another former local news anchor, Stephanie Angelo, who did not work with Ms. Lake but later became close friends with her, described Ms. Lake back then as “a free spirit” and “liberal to the core.”“Her saying that abortion should be illegal — absolutely not,” Ms. Angelo said. “The Kari I knew would never have said that, and she wouldn’t have believed it either.”But in her run for governor of Arizona, Ms. Lake — a former local Fox News anchor — has refashioned herself as a protégé of Donald Trump and a die-hard Christian conservative who wields her media expertise as a weapon and has turned her former industry into a foil. In her closing pitch to voters ahead of the election on Tuesday, Ms. Lake, 53, has been campaigning against the press as much as she has against Katie Hobbs, her Democratic rival, riling up audiences against reporters in attendance, whom she calls the “fake news,” and pledging to become the media’s “worst nightmare” if elected.It’s a far cry from the person many journalists she worked with remember.Seven of Ms. Lake’s former colleagues at the local Fox station in Phoenix, where she read the news for more than two decades, and two others who consider themselves her former friends said Ms. Lake had once expressed more liberal views on subjects including guns, drag queens and undocumented immigrants. They said she used to admire Barack and Michelle Obama, and pointed out that she had donated to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign. Some requested anonymity because they did not have permission to speak to the press or feared retaliation from Ms. Lake or her supporters.During a campaign stop with veterans in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Wednesday, she called reporters “monsters” and said, “Let’s defund the press.” In another rally on Thursday night in Phoenix, she lashed out at “the media” more times than she mentioned Ms. Hobbs.The attacks on her former industry exploit trends that, in recent years, have shown stark declines in Americans’ trust in television and newspapers — and that, most recently, amid bitter partisan fights over local school boards and pandemic restrictions, have even captured increasing charges of bias against local news, long seen as one of the most trusted sources of information.Many supporters first got to know Ms. Lake as a local television anchor before she decided to run for governor. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMs. Lake has adapted many of the skills she learned in television to her campaign for governor. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThey are also part of an old playbook: Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, criticized networks over their ratings and media coverage he disliked throughout his time in the White House and his presidential campaigns. At his recent rallies, he still takes time to denounce news stories and the reporters in attendance. Republicans’ trust in traditional media continues to drop, with many preferring to rely on a thriving ecosystem of fringe right-wing outlets and partisan fare.At Ms. Lake’s events, some of her loudest applause lines and showers of boos come when she mentions the news industry, even though many of the reporters at her events now increasingly include those from right-wing media who amplify her message. In Scottsdale, many people raised their hands when she asked how many of them consumed little to no “fake news media.” In Phoenix, people cheered and whistled when she expressed indifference toward negative coverage of her campaign. She asked them to look at the reporters set up on risers in the back. “How many of you really don’t care what the big news media says?” she said to applause.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.Her supporters tend not to care or believe that she once leaned liberal. Those who watched her newscast often cannot cite specific stories she worked on, but they do recall her charisma and sharp presentation. They now appreciate her TV-polished and combative style.That includes Jeanine Eyman and her daughter, Joanna, who were waiting in line outside a sports park in Mesa, Ariz., in October to watch Ms. Lake speak at a Trump rally. They said they admired that she was a news insider turned outsider. “To step down when you don’t agree with the politics going on, I think that made a huge statement for what she believes and the person that she is,” Jeanine Eyman said.Reece Peck, a media scholar and the author of “Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class,” placed Ms. Lake in an influential class of conservatives that includes former President Ronald Reagan: telegenic Republicans who had no political experience or public ideological core but quickly rose in politics because they came from the media world.Ms. Lake was particularly effective as a candidate, he said, because she emerged from “square and trusty local news.” He added: “She was a student of mass tastes” and could now “speak to audiences on that mass register.”Ms. Lake has declined to respond to multiple requests for interviews or to criticism from her former news colleagues.Before Ms. Lake started her professional journalism career, she interned at the same radio station where Mr. Reagan once worked. She often cites this fact on the trail, along with her admiration for Mr. Reagan, a conservative hero who she said spurred her to register as a Republican as soon as she turned 18.Ms. Lake taking a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut she often says now that she left her job as a prominent television news anchor in Phoenix in early 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when she came to believe the media was pushing a “biased” and “immoral” agenda by refusing to cover unproven Covid treatments and by repeating talking points from Dr. Anthony Fauci.She started her campaign for governor with a debut ad that featured her smashing television sets playing newscasts with a sledgehammer. She has since called for the arrest of Mr. Fauci, publicized unproven Covid treatments and fueled Mr. Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was “crooked.”She has criticized drag queens and surgery for transgender people, and she echoes Mr. Trump’s rhetoric against immigrants, promising to finish his border wall and declare an “invasion” on the nation’s southwestern border. She has presented herself as a staunch opponent of abortion and “a lifetime member” of the National Rifle Association. And she has called reporters “the right hand of the Devil.”It is a metamorphosis that has shocked former colleagues and others who knew her.Richard Stevens, who performs as the popular drag queen Barbra Seville, said Ms. Lake used to invite him as a news contributor to comment on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. He recalled watching Ms. Lake argue in defense of undocumented immigrants on air. She often came to his drag shows, he said, and the two became close. He also performed as Ms. Seville at her house, including in front of her children, he said.“Kari is not afraid of drag queens, Kari is not afraid of gay people,” Mr. Stevens said, calling Ms. Lake “an opportunist.” “I have had every reason to believe that she is as liberal as me.”The contradictions have not stopped Ms. Lake’s momentum in what remains a neck-and-neck race. “People know her,” Ms. Angelo, the former local news anchor, said. “They are familiar with her face, with her voice, and they trust her even though her positions now are contrary to everything that she has stood for up until the last year.”Ms. Lake is engaged in a tight race with the Democratic nominee for governor, Katie Hobbs. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMs. Lake speaks during a “Latinos for Lake” rally in Tucson in September.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBrenda Roberts, 67, a retired legal secretary who was in the audience at the Phoenix rally, said she was initially skeptical of Ms. Lake but came around because the candidate seemed to believe in what she said. “She expresses what we’re all feeling — we’re really upset about the border,” Ms. Roberts said. “We’re upset about inflation. We’re really upset about the way that Biden has destroyed the economy.”Part of Ms. Lake’s rise has had to do with how she has applied the Trump media playbook, sometimes with her own touches. Some of her campaign videos resemble movie trailers and are embellished with cinematic sound effects. Her husband, Jeff Halperin, an independent videographer, often films her events and interactions with the press. She has also been quick to call impromptu news conferences seemingly timed for the early-evening newscast.Ms. Lake assembled one of those gaggles last month after a man was arrested in connection with a burglary at Ms. Hobbs’s campaign headquarters. Pointing to a large placard with a photo of someone in a chicken suit, Ms. Lake joked that a person had been caught rummaging through her campaign headquarters and that she had evidence to believe it was Ms. Hobbs herself — a jab at Ms. Hobbs, as well as reporters, whom she claimed were suggesting the Lake campaign bore responsibility for the Hobbs campaign burglary.“You love to smear Republicans,” Ms. Lake told reporters.In a statement responding to Ms. Lake’s news conference, Sarah Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Hobbs campaign, doubled down on Ms. Hobbs’s earlier remarks charging Ms. Lake with fanning “the flames of extremism and violence.” Ms. Lake released another video on Thursday again slamming Ms. Hobbs and reporters for the burglary coverage.In the final stretch of the midterms, top Democrats, including Mr. Obama, have made stops in Phoenix urging people not to support Ms. Lake, as they have cast the election as a battle to preserve democracy. “If we hadn’t just elected someone whose main qualification was being on TV, you can see maybe giving it a shot,” Mr. Obama said to laugher from the audience. At her event in Phoenix, Ms. Lake argued she was not in the race for the fortune or fame — “I’ve already had fame — it’s overrated” — but for Arizonans.She lamented the loss of friends over her evolution and told supporters that she had not believed her former television news colleagues would unfairly attack her as they did Mr. Trump. “But I’ll tell you what: The patriotic America-loving friends I’ve gained will make up for any friend that I lost a million times over,” she said, as people broke into another round of cheers.Ms. Lake has adapted the Trump media handbook to her own campaign. Rebecca Noble for The New York Times More

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      How the Price of Gas Became America’s Most Important Political Issue

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      President Biden knows the political power of the price of gasoline.About two weeks ago, fearing what an uptick in gas prices might do to Democrats at the ballot box in the midterms, Mr. Biden announced the release of 15 million barrels from the United States’ emergency petroleum stockpile in an effort to drive down prices. A gallon now costs $3.78 on average compared with $5.03 five months ago, but that is still higher than what Americans want to pay.To show he means business, Mr. Biden went a step further this week, calling on Congress to consider a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which are reaping record gains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a spike in oil prices. “It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering,” Mr. Biden said.As he contemplates whether these measures will be enough to save his party on Tuesday, he seems to be recalling the early days of his political career. Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the age of 30, just as the energy crisis of the 1970s was changing life as Americans had known it. In October of that year, in response to America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC’s Arab members imposed an embargo on the United States, sending prices soaring by more than sevenfold.To understand the consequences of this price hike, the young senator from Delaware hitched a ride on a 47,000-pound big rig hauling hollow-shell pipe for a 15-hour, 536-mile journey through five states. After talking to hundreds of angry truckers at a stop in Shiloh, Ohio, Mr. Biden was sympathetic. The winter storm he had just driven through was, he said, “nothing compared to the snow job truck drivers I met believe the government is handing them.”The energy situation would spell political trouble for President Richard Nixon, already deeply wounded by Watergate, as Americans blamed elected officials for their troubles. Millions of Americans were waiting in lines to fill up their tanks and feeling the pinch of higher prices on their family budgets. “What is worse than ‘Watergate’ and all the various charges against the president? Answer — the gas crisis in Bergen County,” a suburban New Jersey man wrote to his senator. “We the American People are tired of the lack of competent and effective leadership,” the Concerned Citizens of Maryland told Mr. Nixon.Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, accused his predecessors of “gross mismanagement” as he ran for president seeking to quell the energy crisis. But after his 1976 election, Mr. Carter wasn’t so lucky: A second oil shock struck in 1979, this one triggered by unrest in Iran. Prices soared again, up more than 1,000 percent since the start of the decade. “I’ll give it to you straight,” Mr. Carter said in 1979. “Each one of us will have to use less oil and pay more for it.”There was a “panic at the pumps,” as a New York service station representative called it at the time, leading to gas riots, violence, economic chaos and more. Long lines lasted for hours and soaring prices broke the dollar-a-gallon barrier, resulting in a sense of defeat and national decay. Americans are being “crucified on the cross of inflation,” a group of Chicago truckers said. “People are freaking out,” the California Energy Commission’s chairman said. No one came in for more blame than Mr. Carter. “Energy affects the life of every goddamn American, and most of them are mad at us,” a White House aide told Newsweek. “Energy is our Vietnam,” another official said.In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Mr. Carter — the first Democratic president of Mr. Biden’s political career — in a landslide.By the end of the 1970s, the price of a gallon of gasoline had become one of the most explosive issues in American political life. It still is. When presidents see gas prices tick up, they inevitably get a sick feeling in their stomachs. Rising gas prices tend to correlate with a decline in presidential approval ratings, which in turn erodes support for the incumbent party at the polls.In times of economic instability, gas prices are the most visible and easily understandable gauge of how the nation is faring: Outsize placards on every street corner and at every rest stop are a constant reminder for many citizens that times are tough, neon signs that shine projections of pocketbook pain down to the thousandth of a decimal. You don’t need to know much about macroeconomics or public policy to know that you’re being squeezed.America lives under the shadow of King Oil because our lives are organized around our cars and our cars run on gasoline.The roots of this dependence go back to before the 1970s oil shocks, to the postwar years when America’s economy boomed, thanks to cheap and plentiful gas. The country was building a massive system of interstate highways made possible by the 1956 Interstate Highway Act; developers erected single-family suburban homes that required a car trip just to pick up a pint of milk; the government failed to invest in mass transit. Gas stations competed with giveaways and free windshield washings. The drive-in movie theater and the drive-through restaurant had become icons of American culture. Cars grew and grew in size until they became living rooms on wheels. With their tail fins, luxurious interiors and powerful engines, cars were the embodiment of American freedom.Until they weren’t. “The great American ride is ending,” the title character in “Rabbit Is Rich,” John Updike’s iconic novel of late-’70s America, thinks to himself as he surveys his car lot. Instead of singing about the open road, Johnny Cash made commercials, paid for by oil companies, about the need to “drive slow and save gas.”Gas lines in Midtown Manhattan in May 1979.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAppeals to conservation went unheeded. Americans refused to consume less; we resisted developing new forms of energy. As a result, the nation was running in place. Americans wanted everything to be the same.By the time Mr. Reagan left office in 1989, there were over 30 million more cars on the road than there had been at the start of the energy crisis in 1973. And in spite of calls for energy independence, America got more and more of its oil from the Persian Gulf. It was not a surprise, then, that President George H.W. Bush, himself an oilman, launched a military operation in 1991, Operation Desert Storm, in response to Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait. “We cannot allow any tyrant to practice economic blackmail,” he said.President Bill Clinton’s term did little to wean America off its oil addiction. During his administration, S.U.V.s, which were not subject to fuel efficiency standards, were coming to dominate the market. No wonder that in 2000, as gas prices spurted up, in advance of the election, Mr. Clinton released oil from the strategic reserve, a fail-safe created in the 1970s. His solution to higher prices was to flood the market with product rather than to stem demand, hoping to bolster the electoral prospects of Al Gore, his vice president and a passionate environmentalist.That story has continued to play out. In 2008, congressional Republicans attempted to lay the blame for record-high prices on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling it the “Pelosi Premium.” The strategy failed, given the collapse of the economy when George W. Bush was in the White House. But the effort reflected the political reality of prices at the pump, still the case today. The question is: How long can this last?Mr. Biden has watched as his party’s political fortunes have been driven by the ups and downs of energy prices since the early 1970s. Over those nearly 50 years he has undoubtedly discovered the tension at the heart of this: While politicians live and die in the short term, it’s only long-term policies that can offer an enduring solution.Gas prices are down now, but are they down enough to help his party next week? And will they stay down ahead of the 2024 presidential election? Those questions are most likely on the top of Mr. Biden’s mind.In 1981, when Mr. Reagan, soon after taking office, used his executive authority to get rid of the price controls on oil that had come into effect during the crisis, Mr. Biden objected. “We must continue to fight for more responsible energy economic policy,” he wrote in an op-ed. By that he meant a “permanent” windfall tax on oil companies, which at the time were reaping record profits. The taxes would pay for relief from the “excessive costs” of energy.In the 1970s, Democrats thought the oil hikes that followed war and revolution in the Middle East required an equally drastic political response: price controls, rationing and corporate profit caps. Today, with OPEC price hawks taking advantage of another war, polls suggest that Mr. Biden would see enormous political and electoral dividends by imposing temporary price and profit controls on the industry. Some economists, like the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, agree.So, too, do many members of Congress. “We know that big oil companies are exploiting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to drive up prices at the pump for American families,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat, recently told me. “This sort of profiteering is unacceptable and we need to put a stop to it. A windfall profits tax would help us take on corporate power and deliver relief directly to families.”Now Mr. Biden is listening to the lessons of his long career. His release from the strategic petroleum reserve comes after a similar move nearly a year ago, followed up by a failed effort to get OPEC to increase its production and the jawboning of oil companies. “You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends,” the president said. “Not now. Not while a war is raging.” Instead, he said, “Bring down the price you charge at the pump.” Or else — as he told the companies this week.But just as he is trying to ease Americans’ pain, he also recognizes that the permanent solution comes from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels from foreign powers, like Russia and Saudi Arabia, that see oil as a geopolitical weapon. Even a young Joe Biden understood this: In the weeks after the 1973 Arab embargo, he was one of five senators who voted against the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and instead supported funding mass transit.What was never really on the table was using less gas and driving fewer cars. President Carter tried to solve the energy crisis, in part, with a famous prime-time speech asking the United States to change its wasteful, self-indulgent ways, as Americans were waiting in gas lines. It was a colossal failure. The installation of solar panels on the White House roof, when Mr. Carter promised that 20 percent of all energy would come from the sun and other renewable sources by 2000, also fell flat.Mr. Biden knows this. That’s why he has worked hard to make renewable alternatives a reality with the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate bill investing historic amounts into a green transition. And as much as he, like so many presidents, champions himself as a “car guy” who loves his 1967 Corvette Stingray, he has also celebrated recent pushes like Ford’s to phase out combustion engines.But those changes take time. Just as they have since the 1970s, voters want relief and they want it now. In 1973, Mr. Biden said his constituents felt that “the federal government isn’t listening.” Nearly half a century later, as Americans take to the polls, Mr. Biden wants them to know “who is standing with them and who is only looking out for their own bottom line.”Even as Mr. Biden might get minimal short-term benefits from his energy and climate policies — and minimal relief in gas prices in the near future — history may look back on his record as a turning point, when America didn’t just start ending its gas addiction but went further into alternatives that began making our country and our politics less in thrall to King Oil.Meg Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America” and “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s.”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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      I Write About Post-Roe America Every Day. It’s Worse Than You Think.

      by

      Despite Republican‌ assurances that their draconian abortion bans wouldn’t hurt women, a flood of heart-wrenching accounts from across the country prove otherwise. Yet even with that outpouring of stories, plus polls showing broad opposition to the bans and an increase in women registering to vote, it’s still unclear if the issue will be the deciding factor for voters in the midterm elections on Tuesday.It should be.This past summer, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. W‌ade, I started publishing a daily newsletter tracking abortion news, ‌following everything from state bans to stories of women denied vital health care. After months of writing about abortion, it’s clear that stripping this right from half of Americans has had a swift, damaging and pervasive impact.What happens in the midterms won’t be about Republicans or Democrats, but whether people cast a vote for the continuation of suffering, or attempt to end the anguish that banning abortion has caused.This isn’t hyperbole. Laws that privilege fetuses over those who carry them haven’t just relegated women to second-class citizenship, they have also led to the denial of lifesaving care in case after case. In‌ affidavits, Ohio health care providers reported having to comfort a sobbing cancer patient who was refused an abortion, and seeing at least three patients who threatened to commit suicide after being denied abortions.In August, a woman in Texas who was denied an abortion for an unviable pregnancy ended up in the intensive care unit with sepsis. Another Texas woman, pregnant and in failing health, was recently told she shouldn’t come back unless she had a condition as severe as liver failure or stroke. A woman in Wisconsin was left bleeding for more than 10 days after an incomplete miscarriage just days after the Supreme Court’s decision; a doctor ‌in Texas was told not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.And then there are the stories of women forced to endure doomed pregnancies. Nancy Davis, a mother of three in Louisiana, ‌was denied an abortion even though her fetus was missing part of its head. Chelsea Stovall in Arkansas, who was 19 weeks pregnant when she found out that her daughter wouldn’t survive, was also refused treatment. After traveling 400 miles to get an abortion, she told a local reporter, “I should be able to say goodbye to her where I want to.”Those are just the adults. ‌This summer, Republicans insisted the story of a raped and pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio‌ was a hoax, and later tried to paint the girl’s experience as a tragic anomaly. In fact dozens of girls in Ohio 14 years old and under had abortions in 2021. In neighboring Kentucky, more than a dozen children aged 14 or younger had abortions last year; two 9-year-olds needed abortions in the past few years. These are victimized children who will now be forced to carry pregnancies, perilous for their small bodies, or leave their home state for care.In other words: real people, across the country, are enduring real suffering. All of which was predictable and preventable.In response to the onslaught of post-Roe horror stories, Republican legislators and abortion opponents have claimed that physicians are misreading the laws and failing their patients as a result. It’s a clever move, attacking those who make them look the worst: doctors who see the devastating impact of abortion bans up close, every day. But conservatives have been planning for the end of Roe for decades, and their laws were written with careful consideration.It isn’t just obstetricians and fertility doctors who fear prosecution, but many types of physicians. At an annual meeting of pulmonologists, a special session was held on how to avoid breaking the law while caring for lung disease patients they may have to advise on ending dangerous pregnancies. Instead of being able to singularly focus on helping sick people get well, these doctors have to worry that doing their job could get them arrested.The impact of abortion bans goes far beyond horrific individual stories; they’ve had a cascading effect into countless areas of Americans’ lives. I spoke to a young woman struggling with infertility in Tennessee, for example, whose state representative told her that I.V.F. doctors could be prosecuted under the abortion ban there for discarding unused embryos (a common part of the I.V.F. process). “We just want to be parents,” she told me.Abortion bans have also put birth control access in danger. For years, conservative legislators and organizations laid the groundwork to falsely characterize some forms of contraception as abortifacients. This distortion has already started to hurt women in states with abortion bans: Because of the law’s ambiguity in Missouri, a chain of hospitals there briefly stopped providing emergency contraception, with a spokesperson explaining, “We simply cannot put our clinicians in a position that might result in criminal prosecution.”At the University of Idaho, the legal counsel advised it against providing students with birth control in light of the state’s abortion ban. Staff members could give out condoms, the guidance said, but only to prevent sexually transmitted infections, not “for purposes of birth control.” Employees were told that even speaking in support of abortion could put them in danger of being arrested and banned from future state employment.Republicans’ abortion laws have even led to a crisis in care in states where abortion is legal. Doctors are so overwhelmed with patients from other states that some clinics have weekslong waiting lists, which, along with the logistical hurdles out-of-state patients face, has led to later abortions — which Republicans claim to oppose. ‌Writing about abortion every day feels like drowning, but what keeps me up at night is knowing that, by and large, we are hearing only from the women who felt comfortable enough going to the media. For every one story shared, there are hundreds or thousands more that we will never know about.Doctors who might otherwise speak up are also being silenced, warned by their employers’ PR and legal teams not to share stories of how abortion bans have affected their work and are hurting women.As Americans head into midterm elections, they need to consider not what Republicans say about abortion — but what they do, and what their laws have already done.Conservatives have claimed that they are not interested in targeting individual women. But in the past year, a teenager in Nebraska who authorities say had an illegal abortion is awaiting trial for concealing a death, and an Alabama county jail reportedly kept pregnant women in detention in an effort to “protect” their unborn fetuses from possible drug exposure.Republicans said women’s lives and health would be protected. They very clearly haven’t been. They said they’d make allowances for sexual assault victims, but states with rape and incest exceptions have language so narrow and vague that they’re near impossible to use.They said that women’s lives wouldn’t meaningfully change — but women are suffering, every single day.Republicans running for office have tried to sidestep the issue, dismissing it as unimportant or deleting any mention of abortion from their websites, knowing how unpopular bans have become.Voters should remember that none of this is accidental. All of this is misery, and hurt is by design. This alone should motivate voters to protect abortion rights.Jessica Valenti is the author of “Sex Object” and publishes a newsletter in which she writes about abortion every day.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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      The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin

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      Whether for her pathbreaking role as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket or for rapping “Baby Got Back” on the Masked Singer, Sarah Palin has, since her debut on the national scene in 2008, made an art of attracting the spotlight.But fame — even in America — can get you only so far, and Ms. Palin’s campaign this year for Alaska’s only House seat has exposed the limits of her celebrity. Her fund-raising has lagged. Her campaign schedule has been unusually light for a candidate heading into a competitive election. And she announced recently that she’d received “crappy advice” from advisers and was no longer trying to raise money. In an unexpectedly close ranked-choice race, she has had to endure the indignity of encouraging voters to support her Republican opponent, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Democrat, Mary Peltola, from running away with the seat.Ms. Palin may be about to fade once again from national politics, but the “mama grizzly” brand she invented is here to stay. Already, a group of female leaders is embracing and iterating on Ms. Palin’s trademark mom-knows-best Republicanism. Some are politicians, railing against the powers-that-be; others are activists, speaking out against school closures and vaccine mandates. As these new mama bears enter the political sphere, they are transforming American discourse, harnessing motherhood itself as a political asset, just as Ms. Palin did before them. Even if she loses her battle to make it to Washington next week, in a broader cultural sense, Ms. Palin has already won the war. And a new generation of GOP women stand poised to carry her complex legacy forward.When John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate in 2008, she was in her 40s and had only served less than two years as governor. Her many doubters noted, correctly, that she wasn’t ready for the job of vice president. But their criticisms were often shot through with a condescension and sexism that had less to do with Ms. Palin’s experience than with her looks, clothes and identity as a mother of five.Few female politicians before her had emphasized their lives as mothers to the extent she did. She held her baby onstage right after accepting the nomination, deliberately presenting herself as a down-to-earth “hockey mom” and later on as a protective “mama grizzly.” Ms. Palin’s folksy demeanor was often ridiculed as a gimmick and Ms. Palin herself as an ignoramus. But the course of political events soon proved that she was on to something. The Tea Party wave during Barack Obama’s first term swept Palin imitators like Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell to national prominence, women who were likely to be found in jeans at the gun range, when they weren’t giving a speech in stilettos. Rather than leaving family life at home the way men always had, which a previous generation of women had seen as a necessity to succeed professionally, this new generation saw how womanhood and motherhood added significantly to their brand. By signaling their tenacity in the domestic sphere, they implied their toughness in the political arena. And they increased their populist appeal.Among those who noticed their potential was Donald Trump’s future adviser, Steve Bannon, who made a 2010 documentary called “Fire from the Heartland” glorifying Mrs. Bachmann and other Tea Party women, as well as a 2011 documentary about Ms. Palin herself called “The Undefeated,” framing her femininity and Everywoman image as an unsung asset for the GOP.Of course, Mr. Bannon and the right as a whole eventually found a different champion, and while Mr. Trump left little room for also-rans like Ms. Palin, his time in office helped her particular strain of conservatism mutate and spread — giving rise to a new, Trumpier version of Ms. Palin’s mama grizzly.This new generation’s pugnaciousness makes Ms. Palin’s “Going Rogue” days look subdued. Conservative moms from all over the country have turned local school board meetings into contentious showdowns over policy and curriculum, organized by groups like Moms for Liberty who say they are “on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” “We do NOT co-parent with the government,” reads the back of one of the T-shirts for sale in the moms’ online merch store.Shades of Ms. Palin can be seen in Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose gun-toting photo-ops recall Ms. Palin’s rural, hunting-and-fishing image. But Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor running for governor in Arizona, is perhaps the paradigmatic New Mama Bear. One moment, she’s literally vacuuming a red carpet for Mr. Trump; the next, she’s calling her Democratic opponent a coward and the media the “right hand of the Devil.” Ms. Lake shares Ms. Palin’s instinct for the spotlight and feel for optics, as well as her affection for copacetic mama bears (Ms. Lake has often used the term). But while Ms. Palin lost control of her image to a skeptical, often condescending news media (remember the infamous Katie Couric interview in which the candidate couldn’t name any newspapers she read?), the steely, intense Ms. Lake has made a sport of antagonizing the reporters on her trail and excelled at turning the exchanges into content. The rise of the New Mama Bear might not have been possible without the fragmentation of a media now more drawn than ever toward controversy and the outrageous.Ms. Lake, who has a knack for generating outrage, stands a very good chance of winning. And she is far from the only one. In the heated conservative debate over schools, the new mama bears have been racking up some important wins, crashing school meetings to protest critical race theory and banning books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes or other content they deem inappropriate from school libraries. Moms for Liberty has claimed huge growth in membership over the past year and made itself a key player in the education battles that have marked this midterm cycle. Top Republicans have embraced the school controversies, showing just how potent this new paradigm has become on a national scale. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who gave the keynote speech at Moms for Liberty’s “Joyful Warriors” conference this summer, endorsed several of their school board candidates, and they went on to win their primaries. The effect could be that the new mama bears see their trademark political issues high on the agenda for the 2024 Republican primary.It’s ironic that Ms. Palin, the mother of mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly borne of her own trailblazing prime. But that’s often how it goes in politics, where an innovation’s impact is obvious only in hindsight — once someone else has perfected it.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a reporter who has covered politics for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.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