Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Forecasting the Future of Election Prediction Markets

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      After flying under the radar as academic experiments, the markets are facing close regulatory scrutiny. But they are worth preserving, our columnist says.I’ve used prediction markets for years, never for trading but rather as a source of information, an interesting adjunct to polls, economic and political models, and traditional reporting, especially when elections grow near.But the U.S. prediction markets that allow people to place legal bets on American elections have run into regulatory problems.PredictIt, the larger of the two prediction markets operating in the United States, has emerged over the last several years as a go-to source for journalists and academics seeking to harness the “wisdom of crowds” for a sense of where the elections are heading.At the moment, the bets on its site amount to a forecast of Republican control of both the House and the Senate. PredictIt’s older and more purely academic counterpart, the Iowa Electronic Markets, is showing the same essential picture.Kalshi, a third and overtly commercial derivatives market, had hoped to start trading contracts on the outcome of the midterm elections by now, but its application has stalled at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.The various markets — PredictIt, the Iowa market, overseas markets like Betfair in Britain and predecessors like the Irish sites Intrade and Tradesports — have had plenty of glitches through the years. They aren’t always accurate, and their results, if not interpreted carefully, look deceptively extreme. A thin edge in election polling can be magnified in these markets as a definitive advantage, but they are often fundamentally correct. Academic studies have found that they stack up quite well against opinion polls and standard political forecasts.Such markets have also provided compelling results in experiments aimed at estimating Hollywood movie box office results, improving weather forecasts and providing corporations and the Defense Department with information on security, health care and product quality control issues.They all work on the basic notion that when markets are broad and efficient enough and money is at stake, the collective information embodied in their prices is closer to the truth than the conclusions that most individuals can come up with on their own.This may well be true over the long run, but one flaw in this approach is obvious if you have been following the stock, bond, foreign exchange or commodity markets this year: Over short periods, markets are as fickle as a cat. I see no reason to assume that election markets are inherently wiser or steadier than the stock market, which I don’t trust as a guide to much of anything over short periods.Still, prediction markets are fascinating, and provide a worthwhile source of data on a vast array of subjects. They also have tremendous financial possibilities.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.“Prediction markets are going to be a very big business,” said William R. Hambrecht, an early investor in Silicon Valley companies like Apple and Adobe and a major investor in Aristotle, the company that runs PredictIt. “I don’t think you can overstate the potential, once the regulatory issues are resolved.”An Old American PastimeBetting on elections is, technically, illegal in the United States. But the reality is that it has been commonplace since the early days of the republic, Koleman Strumpf, a Wake Forest University economist, said in an interview.By the late 19th century, New York City had become a national center for betting on both finance and politics. Early in the 20th century, whenever elections rolled around, traders outside the New York Stock Exchange placed high-volume wagers on the Curb Market, a rollicking, over-the-counter outdoor marketplace for stocks, bonds and politics.In the current era, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission has permitted the two low-stakes markets — the Iowa Electronic Markets and PredictIt — to operate under academic exemptions.But in August, the commission ordered PredictIt to cease operations by Feb. 15. The agency hasn’t publicly explained its reasons for the cancellation, which PredictIt is fighting in the courts. One issue may be PredictIt’s popularity — the volume of betting on the site has sometimes exceeded the limits set when PredictIt began operating as an educational venture in 2014.A week ago, the commission staff recommended against Kalshi’s bid to start a higher-stakes trade in futures contracts on the control of Congress resulting from the midterm elections. The commission tends to side with its staff’s recommendations, but has not indicated how it will rule on the Kalshi case.In an email, Steven Adamske, a commission spokesman, said only: “Kalshi’s application is still pending, and I don’t have a timeline for when it will be announced.”In an interview, Tarek Mansour, a founder of Kalshi, pointed out that his exchange already offered robust trading on important questions like the future of inflation in the United States and the path of Federal Reserve interest rate increases, and that it was running an unofficial contest asking people to forecast the elections.“That’s an effort at educating people about our site,” he said. “We agree that we need regulation, and we are waiting patiently for guidance from the C.F.T.C.”The Two Election MarketsIt is possible that once the midterms are over, only the Iowa market will remain as a legal outlet for election betting. It has functioned since 1988 as a modest, money-losing “Internet-based teaching and research tool” that allows up to 2,000 people — students of the University of Iowa and anyone else with the money and interest — to place bets of $5 to $500 on the outcome of events, including U.S. elections.As long as it sticks to these unequivocally educational goals and people at the university are willing to take the time and effort to keep it running, its future seems reasonably secure.“It’s a labor of love,” said Thomas S. Gruca, the director of the prediction market and a professor at the university’s Tippie College of Business. “It takes a lot of time from a lot of volunteers to keep it going. But a lot of people are learning a lot because of it.”PredictIt is something of a hybrid. It is a joint venture. One partner is Victoria University of Wellington, a New Zealand institution. The other is Aristotle, a for-profit American political consulting, compliance, data and software company, whose founder, John Aristotle Phillips, first gained national attention in 1976 as “the A-bomb kid” — a Princeton undergraduate who successfully designed an atomic bomb in a physics class project.“It was about arms control,” he told me in an interview. “I showed that a bomb could be built, and that we needed more controls.”Aristotle does the day-to-day work running PredictIt, and the university has been playing a passive role. While the data from the prediction market at the University of Iowa is regularly used in classrooms and in research there, that is not the case for Victoria University.“We are not aware of any scholars at Victoria University of Wellington using the data, but, as they don’t need to come through us to access it, that would be a question better directed to PredictIt,” Katherine Edmond, the university’s director of communications, said in an email.PredictIt is used extensively by scholars around the world, but mainly by Americans, who are listed on its site, and have relied on it for years, as have journalists like me. In addition to filing suit, Aristotle has applied for permission to become a commercial exchange, like Kalshi, a move that would end the restrictions on its size and scope.A Modest PredictionFrom the standpoint of many economists, the prediction markets, for all their flaws, have been spectacularly successful.“There’s tremendous social utility to having these markets operate, and having this information available,” said Eric Zitzewitz, a Dartmouth professor who has studied prediction markets extensively. “There’s a lot of demand for them — people enjoy participating in them and consuming the information they provide.”Betting on elections won’t go away, no matter what the regulators decide. Such betting could migrate to overseas markets or to unregulated markets in cyberspace that are outside U.S. regulatory control.Far better, I think, would be to allow them to operate within U.S. borders as transparent, robust — and carefully regulated — operations. Until now, both the Iowa market and PredictIt have been small enough to be fairly innocuous in terms of their effects on elections themselves. When big money flows into prediction markets — as I suspect it one day will — the potential for real trouble will be far greater. Markets can be manipulated and corruption flourish, so smart and active regulators are needed to keep markets honest.That’s true for the stock market. Regulating U.S. prediction markets will become far more critical when large sums are focused directly on the outcome of elections, which are, after all, the foundation of our democracy. Prediction markets are important enough to be preserved. But elections are important enough for regulators to move slowly and carefully. More

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      A Poll Reversal

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      Republicans have swiftly gained ground near the end of midterm elections polling.In the last days before Tuesday’s midterm elections, the polls have increasingly reached a consensus on the state of the race: Republicans lead.Most pollsters over the past few weeks have found Republicans opening a modest but consistent lead when they ask voters whether they’ll back Democrats or Republicans for Congress.The results are a reversal from polls conducted just over a month ago, when Democrats seemed to have the advantage.If the recent polls are right — and they may not be — Republicans will almost certainly take the House. The big question on election night would be whether and where individual Democratic candidates could withstand a hostile political environment. Control of the Senate would depend on it.How Republicans got hereIn one sense, the new Republican strength was foreseeable. The president’s party almost always gets pummeled in midterm elections, especially when his approval rating is as low as President Biden’s, which is hovering just over 40 percent. In the era of modern polling dating back nearly a century, no precedent exists for the president’s party to hold its own in the House when his approval rating is well beneath 50 percent.But for Democrats, the usual midterm losses for the party in the White House — or even a better than usual outcome — may still be something of a disappointment. Democrats seemed to be in a fairly strong position as recently as a few weeks ago. They gained support over the summer after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and amid rising concerns about the state of American democracy and gun violence. Some news also helped the party politically: falling gas prices and Biden’s surprising legislative successes.What is the most important problem facing the country today? More

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      Oprah Winfrey Is Supporting Fetterman, Not Oz, in the Pennsylvania Senate Race

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      Dr. Mehmet Oz owes much of his fortune and no small amount of his fame to Oprah Winfrey.But Ms. Winfrey, who branded Dr. Oz as “America’s Doctor” on her famed television show and went on to co-produce a spinoff, “The Dr. Oz Show,” announced her support on Thursday for her protégé’s Democratic rival, John Fetterman, in the tightly contested U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania.“If I lived in Pennsylvania, I would have already cast my vote for John Fetterman for many reasons,” Ms. Winfrey said during a virtual midterms-focused event, according to a clip shared by the Fetterman campaign late Thursday.A high-profile liberal who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and offered public support for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, Ms. Winfrey had appeared as though she would sit out announcing her views on the Pennsylvania race. Last year, after Dr. Oz declared his candidacy, leaping into politics from 13 years as the celebrity host of his medical-advice show, Ms. Winfrey offered a noncommittal statement that “it’s up to the residents of Pennsylvania to decide who will represent them.”Dr. Oz, who was a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon in New York in the early 2000s, became a regular guest offering health advice on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” over five seasons. Ms. Winfrey’s company, Harpo Productions, helped create Dr. Oz’s own daytime show in 2009.The Fetterman campaign on Friday called the Oprah comments “a November surprise,” suggesting they could spur many voters. Although Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement of Mr. Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary is sometimes said to have helped him defeat Hillary Clinton, Ms. Winfrey’s comments in a 2022 Senate race would likely carry far less weight.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.On Friday, a spokesman for Mr. Fetterman, Joe Calvello, called the endorsement “a devastating rebuke.” The communications director for the Oz campaign, Brittany Yanick, said “Doctor Oz loves Oprah and respects the fact that they have different politics. He believes we need more balance and less extremism in Washington.”The Senate race in Pennsylvania is one of several critical contests on Tuesday that could determine which party will control the chamber. Dr. Oz, the Republican nominee, has significantly gained on Mr. Fetterman in the polls since this summer, leaning heavily on messages about public safety and the economy.Polling by The New York Times and Siena College last week found Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, up slightly against Dr. Oz, by a 49-percent-to -44-percent margin. But the poll was largely conducted before a debate showing by Mr. Fetterman, who had a stroke in May, that raised Democratic anxieties. (His doctor said recently, adding that Mr. Fetterman has “no work restrictions.”)Dr. Oz’s politics were largely unknown through his long years in the television limelight, thought he took liberal positions on abortion and gun control that he later disavowed in the Republican primary race for Senate. He won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, who cited his potential appeal to suburban women who had watched him for years on TV.Ms. Winfrey made her comments on the Pennsylvania race during a virtual event for OWN Your Vote, part of the Oprah Winfrey Network, which aims to provide “Black women with tools and resources to overcome voter suppression in the November election,” according to its website. Dr. Oz has struggled to connect with Black voters in Philadelphia, who are a crucial Democratic constituency.During the virtual event, Ms. Winfrey also warned that “if we do not get fired up,’’ the wrong elected officials would be in position to make “decisions about how we care for our bodies, how we care for our kids, what books your children can read, who gets protected by the police and who gets targeted.” She ticked off a list of Democrats vying in other close races for Senate in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia, and she said she would have supported each of them if she were registered to vote in the state.“John doesn’t seek endorsements at all, he’s focused on the voters,” said Neil Makhija, the executive director of the group Indian American Impact and a friend of Mr. Fetterman’s, who confirmed his involvement in outreach to Ms. Winfrey’s allies. “But I think the campaign certainly recognized, if there was one endorsement that would be particularly powerful, it was Oprah’s.” More

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      Can Campaigning on Abortion Rescue the Democrats?

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      Lisa Chow and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWith an unpopular president and soaring inflation, Democrats knew they had an uphill battle in the midterms.But the fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer the party a way of energizing voters and holding ground. And one place where that hope could live or die is Michigan.On today’s episodeLisa Lerer, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.A demonstrator in Detroit supporting a ballot measure that would bolster abortion protections in Michigan.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesBackground readingSome top Democrats say that their party has focused too much attention on abortion rights and not enough on worries about crime or the cost of living.The outcome of the midterms will affect abortion access for millions of Americans. Activists on both sides are focused on races up and down the ballot.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Lisa Lerer contributed reporting.Fact-checked by Susan Lee.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Sofia Milan, Ben Calhoun and Susan Lee.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello and Nell Gallogly. More

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      Town That Inspired Debunked Voter Fraud Film Braces for Election Day

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      It was a jumpy, 20-second video clip that touched off a firestorm: During a local primary election two years ago, the former mayor of this farm town of San Luis, Ariz., was filmed handling another voter’s ballot. She appeared to make a few marks, and then sealed it and handed a small stack of ballots to another woman to turn in.That moment outside a polling place in August 2020 thrust this town along the southern border into the center of stolen-election conspiracy theories, as the unlikely inspiration for the debunked voter fraud film “2,000 Mules.”Activists peddling misinformation and supported by former President Donald J. Trump descended on San Luis. The Republican attorney general of Arizona opened an investigation into voting, which is still ongoing. The former mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years probation for ballot abuse — or what the attorney general called “ballot harvesting” — a felony under Arizona law.Ms. Fuentes is one of four women in San Luis who have now been charged with illegally collecting ballots during the primaries, including the second woman who appears on the video. But there have been no charges of widespread voter fraud in San Luis linked to the presidential election. Liberal voting-rights groups and many San Luis residents say that investigators, prosecutors and election-denying activists have intimidated voters and falsely tied their community to conspiracy theories about rampant, nationwide election fraud. The film “2,000 Mules,” endorsed by Mr. Trump, has helped to keep those claims alive, and is often cited by election-denying candidates across the country.But the episode also unleashed long-simmering and real frustrations in San Luis over political control. Some residents cheered what they call a long-overdue crackdown on local corruption, which they say is a real issue.It has all added up to a sense of division and unease in a close-knit city of roughly 37,000 where Cesar Chavez died, a place built by generations of Mexican farm workers, where lines of migrant workers travel back and forth every day across the border to harvest lettuce and broccoli.“They’re running scared,” Luis Marquez, a retired police officer and school board member, said of voters. “They feel they’re going to get nailed if they do something wrong.”Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesThe border wall in San Luis, on Sunday. Lines of migrant workers from this close-knit town travel back and forth every day across the border to harvest lettuce and broccoli.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesNow, many here say they are afraid to cast ballots or help with voting in the midterms, for fear of receiving a visit from investigators, being monitored by activists or running afoul of a relatively new Arizona ballot abuse law that largely prohibits collecting ballots on behalf of voters other than family members or housemates.The practice is legal in more than a dozen states, and often used to help housebound seniors or people in low-income neighborhoods and rural areas vote. Conservative critics have called it a potential source of voter manipulation and fraud, though their allegations of widespread election fraud are unfounded. The terms “mule” or “ballot harvesting” are used to describe the practice of illegally ferrying other voters’ ballots to polls.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.“They’re running scared,” Luis Marquez, a retired police officer and school board member running for re-election in San Luis, said of voters. “They feel they’re going to get nailed if they do something wrong.”As early voting began last month, Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced that two more San Luis residents — one of them a current city councilwoman — had been indicted on charges of ballot abuse during the 2020 primary election. Separately, the Yuma County sheriff is investigating 26 potential voting cases across this county in Southwest Arizona.José Castro, a local Baptist pastor, has been trying to persuade his congregants to go to the polls. Two longtime friends, Tere Varela and Maria Robles, normally visit a senior center during elections to guide Spanish-speaking retirees through the ballots. But they said they were planning to stay away in November.“We don’t want to help,” Ms. Robles said one recent afternoon. “We’re afraid.”“Is that the purpose of this?” Ms. Varela asked. “To keep us from voting?”Members of the Sol Azteca dance company performed on Sunday at a church fund-raising festival at San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesA sunset view from San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church on Sunday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesSan Luis offers a glimpse into the tensions unfurling across this strained democracy as Election Day approaches. So far, more than 33 million early votes have been cast nationwide with few reported problems, but there have also been flashes of volatility: election workers have been threatened, poll watchers have staked out ballot boxes and elected officials are girding for challenges to the legitimacy of the midterm results.Arizona was a flash point in Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims immediately after the 2020 presidential election, and the scene of a divisive partisan audit of ballots. Crowds of angry, armed Trump supporters gathered nightly outside election offices.Since then, Republican nominees for statewide office have spread falsehoods about election fraud, and several voters have filed complaints saying that they had been filmed and questioned by strangers at ballot drop boxes. The volunteer poll watchers, some masked or armed, described themselves as there for “election security.” Their presence is part of an organized national effort by conservative groups galvanized by lies that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.The authorities in the Phoenix area have stepped up security in response. The sheriff of Maricopa County has referred two incidents to prosecutors, and said his officers would sit outside polling places “if that’s what we have to do to protect democracy.”Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is also Arizona’s Democratic candidate for governor, has referred six voter-intimidation complaints to the U.S. Justice Department. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona restricted election-monitoring activists from filming voters, carrying weapons near polling sites or spreading election falsehoods online.The upheaval over voting in San Luis erupted shortly after the 2020 primaries. That year, the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office announced on Aug. 7 that it had opened an investigation in coordination with the attorney general’s office after local elections officials received complaints of election tampering.Some of those complaints had originated with two local Republicans, David Lara and Gary García Snyder.Campaign signs, including for Luis Marquez, seen on Sunday near the border wall in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMayor-elect Nieves Riedel in San Luis on Monday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesAfter they complained to law enforcement, Mr. Snyder and Mr. Lara said they were contacted by two leaders with True the Vote, a conservative vote-monitoring group based in Houston that for years has promoted false claims of rampant fraud. The organization’s leaders, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, traveled to Arizona later in 2020 to meet with Mr. Snyder and Mr. Lara, the men said.Inspired by what they heard in Yuma, True the Vote focused on proving, through voter fraud, the existence of an elaborate national conspiracy to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election — a theory since debunked by experts, governmental agencies and media outlets that have looked into it.This spring, Salem Media Group, a conservative media company, and the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza released “2,000 Mules,” which centered on Ms. Engelbrecht, Mr. Phillips and their claims. In the film, an unidentified woman from San Luis appears, saying that the city’s elections have been “fixed” for years by local politicians running a cash-for-votes scheme.Ms. Fuentes, the former San Luis mayor, and the woman seen on the video with her, Alma Juarez, were charged in December 2020 with violating Arizona’s ballot abuse law. Earlier this year, they each pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, for accepting four ballots of other San Luis residents.Ms. Fuentes became the first person in Arizona sentenced to jail time under the law, enacted in 2016. Ms. Fuentes’s lawyer, Anne Chapman, criticized the sentence as “an unjust result in a political prosecution.”Activists with the Arizona Voter Empowerment Task Force, a voter-rights group, said the law prohibiting “ballot harvesting” had the effect of criminalizing ballot collection efforts that had helped older residents and people with disabilities in rural and low-income communities like San Luis get their ballots to the polls.People bought breakfast from a food truck before sunrise in San Luis on Monday.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesDavid Lara was one of two local Republicans who complained of election tampering in San Luis.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesWhile more than 80 percent of Arizona voters typically cast early ballots, many of them through the mail, there is no home-mail delivery in San Luis, limited public transportation and many people do not have cars, making it harder to vote.Ms. Fuentes has many admirers in San Luis who praised her for fighting to register and turn out voters.She first ran for office in 1994 and served multiple terms on the City Council and was still on the school board when she was sentenced last month to 30 days in jail. Now, she will be barred from holding elected office or voting.“My mom is not a criminal,” said her daughter, Lizette Esparza. “It’s a political persecution.”Ms. Fuentes had also been charged with forgery and conspiracy, but ultimately pleaded guilty only to a charge relating to ballot collection. A sentencing report from her defense team said she was “extremely remorseful for her involvement in this matter” but had done nothing fraudulent. Her lawyers wrote that in the Election Day video in which Ms. Fuentes handled another voter’s ballot, she was actually checking to make sure the ovals were properly filled.But other residents said the criminal investigation shined light on real corruption and bare-knuckle politics inside their city. In 2012, for example, Ms. Fuentes and others in city government challenged a political rival’s ability to hold office based on her limited English proficiency.In interviews, several residents said they had grown cynical about politics in San Luis. They felt that local officials hoarded power and traded votes for government jobs and benefits. In a court filing, prosecutors with the attorney general’s office said the video of Ms. Fuentes indicated she had been “running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods.”Nieves Riedel, who runs a prominent home-construction business, is a Democrat who rejects lies about the 2020 election. But she was also convinced that some of her city’s leaders had for years tilted local races and manipulated voters into casting ballots for powerful incumbents.“Was voter fraud being committed in the city of San Luis? Yes,” she said. “But not at the national level. It’s small-town politics.”Over the summer, Ms. Riedel won an election to become San Luis’s next mayor. She said she was concerned with improving the jammed two-lane roads and providing better jobs and colleges to keep young adults from leaving. She said she was dismayed, but not surprised, to see outsiders latch onto her city’s troubles for their own ends.“Both parties are capitalizing on this, to settle scores and prove points,” Ms. Riedel said. “I can assure you that both parties can care less about the people of San Luis.”As voting gets underway in San Luis and the candidates for City Council and school board knock doors and plant campaign signs along the desert roads, Mr. Lara said he would again be on the hunt for irregularities. He is coordinating efforts to monitor the main ballot drop box in San Luis.“We have our people,” he said, but declined to be more precise about their activities. “We don’t want to tip off the enemy.” More

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      Wisconsin Republicans Stand on the Verge of Total, Veto-Proof Power

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      FRANKS FIELD, Wis. — The three counties in Wisconsin’s far northwest corner make up one of the last patches of rural America that have remained loyal to Democrats through the Obama and Trump years.But after voting Democratic in every presidential election since 1976, and consistently sending the party’s candidates to the State Legislature for even longer, the area could now defect to the Republican Party. The ramifications would ripple far beyond the shores of Lake Superior.If Wisconsin Democrats lose several low-budget state legislative contests here on Tuesday — which appears increasingly likely because of new and even more gerrymandered political maps — it may not matter who wins the $114 million tossup contest for governor between Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Tim Michels, a Republican. Those northern seats would put Republicans in reach of veto-proof supermajorities that would render a Democratic governor functionally irrelevant.Even though Wisconsin remains a 50-50 state in statewide elections, Democrats would be on the verge of obsolescence.“The erosion of our democratic institutions that Republicans are looking to take down should be frightening to anyone,” said John Adams, a Democratic candidate for the State Assembly from Washburn, on the Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior. “When you start losing whole offices in government, I don’t know where they’re going to stop.”Laura Gapske, a Democratic candidate for the Assembly, is running against a Republican who tweeted during the Capitol riot, “Rage on, Patriots!”Tim Gruber for The New York TimesWisconsin’s state legislative districts are heavily gerrymandered.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThis rural corner of Wisconsin — Douglas, Bayfield and Ashland Counties — has become pivotal because it has three Democratic-held seats that Republicans appear likely to capture; two in the Assembly and one in the State Senate. Statewide, the party needs to flip just five Assembly districts and one in the Senate to take the two-thirds majorities required to override a governor’s veto.That outcome — “terrifying,” as Melissa Agard, a Democratic state senator and the leader of the party’s campaign arm in the chamber, described it — would clear a runway for Republican state legislators to follow through on their promises to eliminate the state’s bipartisan elections commission and take direct control of voting procedures and the certification of elections.Wisconsin is not the only state facing the prospect of a Democratic governor and veto-proof Republican majorities in its legislature.North Carolina Republicans, who also drew a gerrymandered legislative map, need to flip just three seats in the State House and two in the State Senate to be able to override vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, a Democrat in a tight contest for re-election, already faces veto-proof Republican majorities, as do the Democratic governors of deep-red Kentucky and Louisiana.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.Wisconsin Republicans, who have had a viselike grip on the Legislature since enacting the nation’s most aggressive gerrymander after their 2010 sweep of the state’s elections, make no apologies for pressing their advantage to its limits. Mr. Michels, the party’s nominee for governor, told supporters this week, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”Former Representative Reid Ribble, a Republican who served northeastern Wisconsin, said, “There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandered House or State Assembly seats, and there’s some truth to that.”But he added: “At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a district in rural Wisconsin that would elect a Democrat right now.”Republican control of the Wisconsin Legislature is so entrenched that party officials now use it as a campaign tactic. Craig Rosand, the G.O.P. chairman in Douglas County, said that because Democrats had so little influence at the State Capitol, voters who want a say in their government should elect Republicans.This northwest corner of Wisconsin has voted Democratic in presidential elections going back decades.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“The majority caucus always determines what passes,” he said. “Having a representative that’s part of the majority gets them in the room where the decisions are made.”Of Wisconsin’s 33 State Senate seats, 17 are on the ballot on Tuesday, including two Democratic-held districts that President Donald J. Trump carried in 2020. The picture is similarly bleak for Democrats in the State Assembly, where President Biden, who won the state by about 20,000 votes, carried just 35 of 99 districts.“When you can win a majority of voters and have close to a third of the seats, it’s not true democracy,” said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the State Assembly. “We are very much at risk of people deciding that it’s not worthwhile for them to continue to engage because they see how rigged the system is against the people of the state in favor of Republican politicians.”As former President Barack Obama campaigned for Wisconsin Democrats on Saturday in Milwaukee, he addressed the implications of Republican supermajorities in the Legislature.“If they pick up a few more seats in both chambers, they’ll be able to force through extreme, unpopular laws on everything from guns to education to abortion,” Mr. Obama said. “And there won’t be anything Democrats can do about it.”The Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature say they will bring back all 146 bills Mr. Evers has vetoed during his four years in office — measures on elections, school funding, pandemic mitigation efforts, policing, abortion and the state’s gun laws — if they win a supermajority or if Mr. Michels is elected. Mr. Evers warned of “hand-to-hand combat” to find moderate Republican legislators to sustain vetoes if he is re-elected with a G.O.P. supermajority.Mr. Adams, the Assembly candidate, knocked on voters’ doors on Thursday in Franks Field, Wis.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesA Trump flag in Ashland, Wis. In the latest round of redistricting, three state districts that President Biden won were redrawn, and now would have been carried by Donald J. Trump.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Katy, bar the door,” Mr. Evers said Thursday during an interview on his campaign bus in Ashland. “They’re going to shove all this stuff down our throat and it’s going to happen quickly and before anybody can pay attention. It could be bad.”Mr. Evers predicted that Democrats would be able to narrowly sustain veto power in the Assembly. The State Senate, he said, is “tougher.”In northwest Wisconsin, the three incumbent Democratic legislators decided against running for re-election under new, more Republican-friendly maps. Under the old maps, Mr. Biden carried each of the districts, which are home to large numbers of unionized workers in paper mills, mines and shipyards. Under the new lines Republicans adopted last year, Mr. Trump would have won them all.Kelly Westlund, a Democrat running for the State Senate here, spent Wednesday morning going up and down the long driveways of rural homes 15 miles south of Superior. It was grueling door-to-door outreach that illustrated the difficulty of introducing herself to voters as a new candidate in a new district that includes three media markets.“You don’t find a whole lot of folks here that are super jazzed about Joe Biden,” Ms. Westlund said. “But you do find people that understand there’s a lot at stake.”Her pitch included warnings about what would happen if Republicans flip her seat and claim a supermajority. Few of the voters she met knew much about the candidates for the Legislature — but they did express strong feelings about the national parties.“The Democrats have to own up to a certain amount of things that are going on now,” said John Tesarek, a retired commercial floor installer who would not commit to voting for Ms. Westlund. “I’m not totally certain I’m hearing them own up to much.”Gov. Tony Evers said in an interview that if Republicans gain supermajorities, “they’re going to shove all this stuff down our throat and it’s going to happen quickly.” Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe picture wasn’t much different during early voting at the city clerk’s office in Superior.Ann Marie Allen, a hospital janitor, said she had voted for Mr. Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democrat challenging Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican. But she said she had also backed Ms. Westlund’s Republican opponent, Romaine Quinn, because she liked that he had his toddler son in his commercials. Mr. Quinn has spent eight times as much on TV ads as Ms. Westlund has.“There was no smut in his ads,” Ms. Allen said. “You know how they cut down on other people? There wasn’t that much of that.”Chad Frantz, a plumber, said he had voted a straight Republican ticket.“I’ve been watching the Democrats bash every Republican,” he said. “They’ve been trying to make out every guy that’s a Republican running for a position into a male chauvinist pig.”Mayor Jim Paine of Superior, a Democrat, said Republicans were capitalizing on “fissures” in local Democratic politics between union workers and environmentalists.“Labor and the environment are both very important, but it’s leading to very real challenges,” Mr. Paine said. “They’re breaking up. That’s why you see more Republicans getting elected.”The Republicans likely to head to Madison are far different from their Democratic predecessors.Nick Milroy, a moderate Democrat, won seven terms in the Assembly and ran unopposed for a decade until he was re-elected in 2020 by just 139 votes. His old district was Democratic in presidential years; Mr. Trump carried the new one by two percentage points.Storefronts in Ashland, which sits on Lake Superior.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesKelly Westlund, a Democrat running for the State Senate, canvassing voters near Superior, Wis. “You don’t find a whole lot of folks here that are super jazzed about Joe Biden,” she said.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe Republican who would replace him is Angie Sapik, a marketing executive. During the Capitol riot in 2021, Ms. Sapik tweeted, “It’s about time Republicans stood up for their rights,” “Rage on, Patriots!” and “Come on, Mike Pence!”In a brief phone call, Ms. Sapik agreed to an interview, then ended the call and did not respond to subsequent messages.Her Democratic opponent is Laura Gapske, a Superior school board member who said she had to call the police after receiving threatening calls when advertising that promoted Ms. Sapik’s candidacy included her cellphone number.Democrats here described an uphill battle against better-funded Republican opponents, with the political atmosphere colored by inflation, concerns about faraway crime and an unpopular president.They also spoke of the difficulty of spreading their message in what is effectively a news desert.Mr. Adams, the Assembly candidate, is running in a district Mr. Trump would have carried by four points. Last week, Mr. Adams — an organic farmer who previously worked at small-town newspapers in Minnesota and Montana — drove two hours each way to Rhinelander to be interviewed by a local TV station.“Because we live in a low-media environment up here, too many of us are getting our cable news and not enough are getting our local news,” he said. “If Fox News is telling the story of Democrats, then we lose.”Mr. Adams and other Democrats spoke of the challenge of spreading their message, with thinly staffed newspapers and distant TV stations that pay little attention to the area. Tim Gruber for The New York Times More

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      Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies

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      FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — Standing before a dozen volunteer poll workers gathered in an old wood-paneled community auditorium that would soon be transformed into a polling place, Mac Warner invited his audience to look at his socks.They were stitched with the hashtag #TRUSTEDINFO2020: a souvenir of a campaign that Mr. Warner, West Virginia’s secretary of state since 2017, had waged with his fellow secretaries across the country before the last presidential election, an effort to raise awareness of disinformation efforts targeting voters.“Don’t get your information from Facebook,” he told the poll workers. “Don’t get it from Google. Don’t get it from social media. Get it from trusted sources.”A former officer in the Army with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps who has assisted government ministries running elections in Afghanistan, Mr. Warner earned the respect of his fellow secretaries of state — most of whom, like Mr. Warner, serve as the top election official in their states — in 2020 for his particular commitment to fighting misinformation and security threats at the ballot box.But some of them have been more reluctant to praise him since December 2020, when he climbed onstage at a rally outside the State Capitol in Charleston the month after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election, holding up a sign that said “STOP THE STEAL.”“It’s so important to keep him in office,” Mr. Warner, speaking of Mr. Trump, told an interviewer from Right Side Broadcasting Network at the rally.Today, Mr. Warner walks a delicate line. He acknowledges that Joseph R. Biden Jr. “was elected,” in 2020, but questions whether the election was run fairly in some states. He has worked to debunk conspiracy theories about voting machines and laments the rise of fringe views within his party. But he also compares the voting rights bills congressional Democrats tried to pass this year to the foreign influence campaigns he fought in 2020, and he blames the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in part on the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a long-shot challenge to the election from Texas’s attorney general, which he supported.“I believe that’s what spurred on the Jan. 6 people,” he said.In 40 states, secretaries serve as the chief elections officer, overseeing the voting process — a role that only rarely attracted attention until Mr. Trump and his allies, promoting a range of lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, thrust it into the center of partisan politics.Mr. Trump has continued to loudly blame his loss on secretaries of state in several states — most often Georgia, where Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, resisted Mr. Trump’s direct entreaties to overturn the election. A handful of secretary of state races have commanded national political attention and spending this year as Trump loyalists like Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan have campaigned for the office on claims of the stolen election.“When I ran for this job in 2019, the first question I always got was, ‘What does your office do?’” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky. “I don’t get that question anymore.”Testing voting machines in Fayette County in West Virginia. Voting machines are often a target of conspiracy theorists.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesRegardless of how the most outspoken election deniers perform on Tuesday, the furious political climate has already transformed an office whose occupants have often prided themselves on their remove from partisan trench warfare. At a time when Republican and Democratic congressmen barely talk to each other, secretaries of state still speak with warmth about their colleagues from the other party. They socialize over cocktails at annual meetings and exchange text messages over election law cases they vigorously disagree about.But those relationships have been tested by the last two years, several secretaries of state said in interviews. Democrats have been offended by some Republicans’ sowing doubt without evidence about elections in other states. Republicans charge that Democrats have used Mr. Trump’s election lies as a pretext to paint legitimate conservative policy aims as threats to democracy.“It’s still a good working relationship,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state. “But I would say it is fraught with the realities of what’s going on outside of us.”Secretaries of state, who are elected on party tickets in most of the country, have never been immune to partisan politics. Still, “as we were approaching Election Day” in 2020, said Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the Democratic secretary of state of New Mexico who at the time was the chairwoman of the national association, “we still felt very much on the same page.”But as Mr. Trump’s election claims persisted, fissures began to appear. Democrats were dismayed to see Mr. Warner and Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, speak at Stop the Steal rallies at their respective state capitols in late 2020.At a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in August 2021, in response to a wave of highly partisan reviews billed as “audits” of the 2020 election results, a group of four Republican and four Democratic secretaries of state drew up a resolution setting clear standards for audits. The measure passed unanimously with the exceptions of Mr. Warner, who voted against it, and Mr. Ashcroft, who abstained, and shortly after that left the association entirely in protest of the measure, which he argues violated the group’s bylaws.Neither Mr. Warner nor Mr. Ashcroft directly claims that the election was stolen. Both have instead maintained that a significant number of ballots were cast “outside of the law” in key states on account of expansions in remote voting made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and that these issues have yet to be sufficiently settled in court.Although many legal challenges to the election were rejected by judges on the merits, others were dismissed on technical grounds. One postelection challenge, to the use of drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin, won in the state’s Supreme Court this year.Some Republican secretaries who stood by the outcome of the 2020 election have nevertheless given credence to lesser claims, directly or indirectly. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, has publicly rebuked conspiracy theorists’ claims about the election in Ohio, but also raised questions about “things that happened in other states” in interviews. “Could it have changed the electoral count?” he said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in April. “Who knows.”In December, Louisiana’s Voting Systems Commission, a panel led by the Republican secretary of state Kyle Ardoin, invited Phil Waldron, a prominent election conspiracy theorist, to testify at a hearing. In January, Mr. Ardoin announced that Louisiana would no longer participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a cross-state information-sharing platform used to maintain voter rolls, which had lately become the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.This has angered some Democratic secretaries of state, who note that election officials and often secretaries of state themselves have faced personal threats as a result of the conspiracy theories that their Republican counterparts have been reluctant to check.In October, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making threats against Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, on social media.Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, and her counterpart in Kentucky, Michael Adams, at a conference for secretaries of state this summer.Matthew Hinton/Associated PressBut some Democratic secretaries of state said they were sympathetic to the increasingly difficult position that colleagues like Mr. LaRose and Mr. Ardoin are in. Since last year, a grass-roots movement driven by right-wing conspiracy theories has put pressure on election officials, even those in deeply red states, to respond to convoluted claims of malfeasance.Mr. Adams of Kentucky and John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state of Alabama, have both been vilified by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and influential election denier, over bogus claims of fraudulent votes in their states, both of which Mr. Trump won easily in 2020.In solidly Republican Montana, the state’s Republican secretary of state has had to fend off efforts to gain access to voting machines in several counties by activists and Republican state legislators who had attended an August 2021 conference hosted by Mr. Lindell.As recently as that August, “we didn’t really see election denialism happening in all 50 states,” Mr. Adams said, noting that it was limited to battlegrounds. Now, he said, “it’s gone everywhere.”Republican secretaries were also rattled this spring when Republican incumbents in South Dakota and Indiana lost primary elections to candidates who refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in the last election. Running to replace Barbara Cegavske, the term-limited Republican secretary of state of Nevada, is Jim Marchant, a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a Trump-loyalist group funded by prominent election deniers. He is leading in the polls.Mr. Adams, who ran for office in 2019 on Republican priorities like strict voter I.D. laws and regular clearance of voter rolls, has found that his record on these issues counts for little with many in the crowds he now encounters at Republican events in his state, he said.“How do you reason with someone that really thinks that Venezuelan socialists are hacking into paper ballot counters that don’t have a modem?” said Mr. Adams, who is seeking re-election next year. “All I can do is just say all day, every day, that it’s not true. And just hope that I’ll survive.”Several secretaries of state said that, as the prospect of an election denier bloc emerging among their ranks drew closer to reality, it had drawn Democrats and Republicans closer together as they openly wondered what would become of their once-convivial interactions.“It may be very challenging to have some of these same conversations or bipartisan happy hours with people who are spewing nonsense about us or demonizing those of us who are not in their party,” said Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state.A preview of sorts was offered this July in Baton Rouge at the annual conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State. During a meeting there with federal cybersecurity officials, Cord Byrd, Florida’s newly appointed Republican secretary of state, launched into a speech condemning electronic voting, according to several people in attendance. (A spokesman for Mr. Byrd said this account was “unequivocally false.”)But the secretaries also took heart when Mr. Merrill, a generally Trump-friendly Republican, offered his own experience as an election observer in Russia as testimony that paper ballots were just as manipulable as electronic voting.Mr. Merrill is term-limited, and will be leaving his post this year. A spokeswoman for Wes Allen, the Republican running to replace him, said that Mr. Allen believed the 2020 election was “conducted in a safe and secure manner” in Alabama. Asked who Mr. Allen believed had won the 2020 election nationwide, she declined to answer. More

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      The Dobbs Decision Revealed How Weak the Pro-Life Movement Really Is

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      For most of my adult life, I have hesitated when asked whether I identify as a member of the “pro-life” movement, despite my unconditional opposition to abortion. For one thing, I am not conscious of taking part in anything that resembles activism, though my wife volunteers as a birth assistant and doula for women who would otherwise receive very poor care.Another reason for my wariness is that I have little patience for “gotcha” follow-up questions about my views on the death penalty and health care policy. While I happen to oppose capital punishment as it is currently practiced in the United States and support single-payer health care, mandatory paid leave and generous child benefits, I do not think that opposition to abortion — what I consider to be the state-abetted killing of hundreds of thousands of infants each year — requires those views. If this means I am not “pro-life,” so be it.But the main reason for my ambivalence about the label “pro-life” is my longstanding concern about the cohesion and commitment of the anti-abortion movement. For too long, too many members were more focused on overturning Roe v. Wade than on persuading the American people about the nature of personhood. This equivocation about means and ends, which subsumed a clear moral question into the murk of judicial theory and political strategy, has always given me pause.In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe, I am sad to report that my misgivings have been vindicated. The court’s decision may have been a great victory for proponents of states’ rights and a necessary prelude to ending abortion, but the pro-life movement appears less powerful now than it has in years. Certainly, the blithe assumption that the movement included an overwhelming majority of Republican politicians and voters was spectacularly mistaken.In August, for example, what looked like a solidly conservative electorate in Kansas rejected an amendment to the State Constitution that would not have criminalized abortion but merely allowed the Legislature to consider such a ban. During this year’s midterm election campaigns, conservative Senate candidates such as J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona have suddenly adopted equivocal positions on abortion that harken back to the compromises with which many socially conservative Democratic politicians were comfortable two decades ago.At the end of last month, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, expressed his opposition to federal legislation that would ban abortions after 15 weeks. He argued that “the best way to save most babies is to allow states, each state, to protect babies in the way they deem most appropriate for their state.”How large a share of the right-of-center electorate does this waffling speak for? Whatever the exact proportions, it is certainly larger than the one represented by Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in my home state of Michigan, whose forthright opposition to abortion does not include the usual litany of exceptions. Public polling suggests that Ms. Dixon will lose. (Anecdotally, I can say that Republican voters even in rural southwest Michigan tend to regard Ms. Dixon’s views on abortion as inconvenient at best, especially in a year when Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic incumbent, should be vulnerable on economic and other issues.)It wasn’t always this way. In the early 1970s, opponents of abortion were often zealous activists like L. Brent Bozell Jr., whose anti-abortion sit-ins, explicitly modeled after those of the civil rights movement, were frequently denounced by the conservative press. After 1973, when Roe was decided, these opponents called for overturning the decision not simply because it was poorly reasoned and insufficiently grounded in the text of the Constitution, but because they regarded abortion as an unthinkable moral atrocity to which no one had a right, constitutional or otherwise. Roe may have been a weak piece of jurisprudence (as even many proponents of legal abortion conceded), but the ultimate goal of those who denounced it was not to rectify the state of the judiciary.These priorities should not have changed when the judicial philosophy known as originalism emerged as the most likely means of overturning Roe. But at some point during the intervening years, the wires got crossed.For decades now, originalism and opposition to abortion have been treated as synonymous by proponents and detractors alike. Pro-life organizations have routinely issued statements that are indistinguishable from originalist rhetoric in their denunciations of “judicial activism” and their emphasis on “the role of a Supreme Court justice, which is to interpret the Constitution without prejudice and to apply the law in an unbiased manner.” Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most prominent originalist, appears as a matter of course on lists of pro-life heroes, even though he maintained that democratic majorities could legitimately legalize abortion if they chose to do so.Whose cause was really being advanced by such an alliance between a moral crusade and a constitutional theory? Originalism has won the day, but the anti-abortion cause has not.I believe that this state of affairs is a direct consequence of conflating what should have been an argument about principles with a question of tactics. The longer we nodded along with one another about what looks now like an ill-considered strategy — vote for the Red Team so that it can get the White House and a Senate majority, which it will use to confirm judicial nominees who, if the right case emerges, may undo a half-century-old legal precedent — the less attention we paid to whether we were all really trying to accomplish the same thing.I do not mean this cynically, though it’s true that many Republican politicians have been happy to instrumentalize abortion without having any serious underlying convictions themselves. Rather, I mean to bemoan the consequences of allowing abortion to be talked about at a remove, which has prevented generations of abortion opponents from cultivating the intellectual habits and the moral vocabulary necessary to advance their position directly.It is one thing to ask a candidate for public office to say that he supports nominees for the judiciary who “interpret the Constitution as written.” It is quite another to ask him to say, with philosophical consistency, that he regards abortion as the unjustified taking of human life, and that even horrifying circumstances of impregnation — rape, for example — do not alter the metaphysical status of those killed.If Dobbs has shown us anything, it is the limited usefulness of constitutional theory to the pro-life movement. The future of the cause will require sustained engagement with the questions of biology and metaphysics upon which the anti-abortion position has always depended, questions that lie outside politics in the conventional sense of the word. Legal thinking is by nature unsuited for such efforts — and perhaps even corrosive to them.The anti-abortion movement’s legal gambit reminds us of the danger for any cause of eliding first-order moral questions into second-order questions about tactics. The ends may not always justify the means, but in making these calculations it is helpful if one begins with the recognition that they are not identical.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