Midterm Elections (2022)

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      Biden Pitches Economy to a Skeptical Public in New Mexico

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      ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — President Biden sought to persuade Americans on Thursday that the economy is doing better on his watch than many believe and warned that Republicans would make it harder for the middle class to afford education, health care and other necessities if they win Congress next week.“The economy is up, price inflation is down, real incomes are up, gas prices are down and need to come down further,” Mr. Biden told a rally of supporters in New Mexico as he stumped for Democrats running for governor and Congress. “The American people are beginning to see the benefits of an economy that works for them,” he added, while conceding that “a lot of Americans are still in trouble.”In a speech heavy on statistics, the president rattled off a series of indicators meant to bolster his argument, citing near-record-low unemployment, a burst of new manufacturing jobs, expanded access to health care, export growth, reduced federal deficits and rising gross national product. He pointed to policies he has championed to forgive student loan debt, curb the cost of prescription drugs for retirees and force large corporations that have paid little or no taxes to pay at least 15 percent.“How many of you have any student debt?” he asked the crowd gathered at the Ted M. Gallegos Community Center. “Say goodbye! Say goodbye!”Mr. Biden’s stop in New Mexico opened a five-day swing that will also take him to California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Maryland by Election Day, mostly to blue states where a Democratic president with mediocre approval ratings is still welcome.Some of his economic claims were incomplete or misleading — gasoline prices, for instance, have come down since peaking last summer but remain significantly higher than when Mr. Biden took office. Yet the president’s biggest challenge in the few days remaining before Tuesday is changing the minds of enough Americans who do not see the economy in such robust terms. While jobs are plentiful, inflation hit a 40-year-high this year, eating away at many household budgets and souring the public mood.In a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College, 47 percent identified economic issues as the most important factors in deciding their votes and a new survey by CNN indicated that three-quarters of Americans believe the economy is in recession even though it grew at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent last quarter.In a nod to public pessimism, Mr. Biden sought to make the case that it could be much worse if Republicans win next week and manage to reverse his policies, noting that they are already in court trying to invalidate his student loan forgiveness and have floated reductions in Social Security and Medicare.He mocked Republicans who were “whining” about the minimum corporate tax rate he signed into law and want to eliminate it to cut taxes for the wealthy. And he said they would reverse his new law capping the cost of medicines like insulin.“It’s reckless and irresponsible,” he said. “It would make inflation considerably worse” and “badly hurt working-class and middle-class Americans.” More

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      Why Won’t Gavin Newsom Back Karen Bass or Rick Caruso?

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      As the race for Los Angeles mayor has tightened to a dead heat between Representative Karen Bass and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, the veteran congresswoman has deployed a who’s who of endorsements from fellow Democrats.President Biden. Hillary Clinton. Senators Alex Padilla and Bernie Sanders. Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor, was beside her for her campaign kickoff. Former President Barack Obama endorsed her recently.Increasingly striking, however, has been one notable absence: Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has steadfastly refused to endorse either candidate, both Democrats.“I have deep respect for both of them, and I have not gotten involved in that race,” Mr. Newsom said in a television interview this summer after a runoff narrowed the field in the officially nonpartisan race to the two contenders.Mr. Caruso, he noted, had been “incredibly helpful and supportive” on a statewide economic development task force the governor had created during the pandemic, and Ms. Bass was “a remarkable leader going back — well before my time, even — in politics.”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.In other statements, the governor has added that he prefers not to endorse in contests between two fellow Democratic contenders. Mr. Caruso, a former Republican who has spent nearly $100 million dollars, most of it his own money, on a record-setting campaign for the city’s top office, registered as a Democrat shortly before he announced his candidacy. A spokesman for the governor responded to a request for comment with his former remarks.But political observers in Sacramento and Los Angeles note that the governor has abandoned that stance in at least two races. In a hotly contested state Senate contest in Sacramento, Mr. Newsom has endorsed a Sacramento City Councilwoman, Angelique Ashby, over Dave Jones, who won the state party’s endorsement. And in a race for Los Angeles County supervisor on the affluent Westside of the city, he endorsed the former state Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg over the mayor of West Hollywood, Lindsey Horvath.Mr. Caruso and Mr. Newsom also share a political consultant. But other clients of that firm, Bearstar Strategies, including Sen. Padilla, have endorsed Ms. Bass.“I think this is personal for him,” Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic strategist in Los Angeles, said on Thursday. “I think he feels like he has a good relationship with both of them, and from everything I know, that’s true.”And, Mr. Carrick and others said, there are obvious downsides for the governor in picking a favorite.“Karen Bass has been a good, strong Democrat for a long time and is a supernice person, and if you’re the governor of California, you don’t want to antagonize the entire Democratic base,” said David Townsend, a veteran Democratic political consultant in Sacramento. “But if you’re thinking about your future, you also don’t want to pick fights with people who have a lot of money.”Mr. Newsom’s national profile has risen sharply in the year since he beat back a Republican-led recall, and his name has come up as a future contender for the White House, although he has insisted that he has “sub-zero” interest in a presidential run.In liberal Los Angeles, it was unclear how much difference Mr. Newsom’s backing would make at this point, with the voting deadline only days away.“It’s interesting to insiders,” said John Shallman, a Los Angeles political strategist with long experience in local races. “But I don’t think voters would care — and for her, it wouldn’t matter unless it came with resources.”Mr. Caruso has outspent Ms. Bass by more than 10-to-one, he noted: “She needs more than names — she need money now.” More

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      What if Every Moment Since Jan. 6 Was Just the Calm Before the Storm?

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      Richard Ringer, a 69-year-old Democratic state House candidate in Pennsylvania, is an early riser, and on Monday he was up before 5 a.m. when he heard someone at his garage door. He looked out the window, saw a man with a flashlight, and assumed it was the same person who had twice vandalized his house in the past month.Just a couple of weeks earlier, Ringer says, he found a message spray-painted on his garage door; though the rain partly rinsed it off, the words “Your Race” and “Dead” were visible. Then, last Thursday night, he says he came home to a brick thrown through his window.So when Ringer saw the intruder on Monday, he says, he ran outside and tackled him. But the man was quickly able to pin Ringer down, and beat him unconscious. Ringer doesn’t know for certain that the violence was political — the police are investigating — but given the graffiti, and the fact that his neighborhood in Fayette County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, is usually quiet and safe, he suspects it was. “I’m not really surprised that this is happening locally, and is happening to me, just because of what has been going on and the enthusiasm for Trump around here,” he told me.Ringer’s assault made the local news, but hasn’t been much of a story nationally. Perhaps that’s because it’s just a small detail in a growing tapestry of menace. All over this febrile country, intimations of mayhem are gathering. Vigilantes in Arizona, some armed and wearing tactical gear, have harassed and intimidated voters at the sites of ballot drop boxes, cheered on by Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state. In Nevada, where a millionaire far-right Republican official named Robert Beadles has systemically targeted election workers, Reuters reported that the top election officials in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have resigned, retired or declined to run again.And, most notably, a MAGA fanatic named David DePape broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, leaving him unconscious in a pool of his own blood. More shocking than the attack itself has been the response to it from the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party. Some officials spread lurid lies that Pelosi was attacked by a gay lover. Others jeered about it. “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor, said to laughter at a campaign event. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”It’s hard to feel sanguine about a society whose political class cannot muster the solidarity to universally condemn the terroristic bludgeoning of an old man. It’s why Joe Biden’s speech on Wednesday night, in which he spoke about the attack on Pelosi and the role that Trump’s big lie is playing in the midterms, was at once so necessary and so unpromising. He was trying to appeal to a patriotic consensus about democracy that simply no longer exists.“Disunion and chaos are not inevitable,” said Biden, standing at a podium in Union Station. “There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.”Biden wasn’t warning that America might spiral into either autocracy or low-level civil war. He was trying to offer hope that it might not. The very fact that he had to insist there’s an alternative to disunion and chaos is a sign of how bad things have gotten.Political violence is not exclusively perpetrated by conservatives. The recent beating in Florida of a Marco Rubio canvasser — a man who turned out to have ties to white supremacists — appears to have been motivated by anti-Republican animus. But, as my colleagues on the editorial board wrote on Thursday, the right is far more violent than the left, and Republicans wink at assaults committed by extremists in a way that Democrats do not.The message of all the chuckling about Paul Pelosi is clear: The right believes its enemies have no rights, and no longer sees the need to pretend otherwise. Donald Trump taught the Republican Party that it needn’t bother with hypocritical displays of decency, that it can revel in cruelty, transgression and the thrill of violence. Now it’s taking that lesson into the first post-Jan. 6 election. The tense calm of the last 20 months has often felt like being in the eye of a hurricane. Now the terrible weather is coming back.In a widely cited essay, the centrist pundit Josh Barro criticized Biden’s speech because it implied that voters concerned about democracy must vote for Democrats whatever their policy preferences. “The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available,” he wrote, adding, “This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy.” I find this argument bizarre. It is simply a fact that only one party tried to overturn the 2020 election, and only one party is trying to insulate itself from the will of voters in future elections. As the Wisconsin Republican candidate Tim Michels put it recently, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”It may be that Biden’s efforts to alert the country about what’s coming are doomed. In a recent CBS poll, 56 percent of likely voters said they believe that if Republicans win in the midterms, they will try to overturn Democratic election victories. The same poll showed that, if the election were held today, 47 percent plan to vote for Republicans, and only 45 percent for Democrats. Those who prioritize the preservation of democracy in America are probably already Democratic voters. Still, Biden had an obligation to try to focus our attention on a mounting threat.Though Republicans are likely to do well on Tuesday, many elections will probably remain unsettled. Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, wrote that because of a state law prohibiting the counting of mail-in ballots before Election Day, results there will probably take several days. Nevada will also take several days after the election to count mail-in ballots. Some Republicans, including Lake and Finchem, won’t commit to accepting the result if they lose. We can expect others to sow doubt about the process if they start falling behind as mail-in votes come in.As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer put it, “When it comes to the postelection crisis, 2020 was like the beginning of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ and 2022 will be more like the part where the walking mops multiply out of control.” We should be ready for what could soon be unleashed.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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      Why Aren’t the Democrats Trouncing the Republicans?

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      My big takeaway from this election season would be this: We’re about where we were. We entered this election season with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Democrats had a slight advantage. We’ll probably leave it with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Republicans have a slight advantage. But we’re about where we were.Nothing the parties or candidates have done has really changed this underlying balance. The Republicans nominated a pathetically incompetent Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, in Georgia, but polls show that race is basically tied. The Democrats nominated a guy in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and has trouble communicating, but polls show that that Senate race is basically tied.After all the campaigning and the money and the shouting, the electoral balance is still on a razor’s edge. What accounts for this? It’s the underlying structure of society. Americans are sorting themselves out by education into two roughly equal camps. As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.“Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon,” Eric Levitz writes in New York Magazine, “it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every Western democracy.”Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward. Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is largely about this: infrastructure jobs, expanded child tax credit, raising taxes on corporations. This year the Democrats nominated candidates designed to appeal to working-class voters, like the sweatshirt-wearing Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio.It doesn’t seem to be working. As Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman and Nate Moore noted in a survey of polling data for the American Enterprise Institute last month, “The gap between non-college and college whites continues to grow.” Democrats have reason to worry about losing working-class Hispanic voters in places like Nevada. “If Democrats can’t win in Nevada,” one Democratic pollster told Politico, “we can complain about the white working class all you want, but we’re really confronting a much broader working-class problem.” Even Black voters without a college degree seem to be shifting away from the Democrats, to some degree.Forests have been sacrificed so that Democratic strategists can write reports on why they are losing the working class. Some believe racial resentment is driving the white working class away. Some believe Democrats spend too much time on progressive cultural issues and need to focus more on bread-and-butter economics.I’d say these analyses don’t begin to address the scale of the problem. America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms.Politics has become a religion for a lot of people. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education no longer just have different ideas about, say, the role of government, they have created rival ways of life. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education have different relationships to patriotism and faith, they dress differently, enjoy different foods and have different ideas about corporal punishment, gender and, of course, race.You can’t isolate the differences between the classes down to one factor or another. It’s everything.But even that is not the real problem. America has always had vast cultural differences. Back in 2001, I wrote a long piece for The Atlantic comparing the deeply blue area of Montgomery County, Md., with the red area of Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania.I noted the vast socio-economic and cultural differences that were evident, even back then. But in my interviews, I found there was a difference without a ton of animosity.For example, Ted Hale was a Presbyterian minister there. “There’s nowhere near as much resentment as you would expect,” he told me. “People have come to understand that they will struggle financially. It’s part of their identity. But the economy is not their god. That’s the thing some others don’t understand. People value a sense of community far more than they do their portfolio.”Back in those days I didn’t find a lot of class-war consciousness in my trips through red America. I compared the country to a high school cafeteria. Jocks over here, nerds over there, punks somewhere else. Live and let live.Now people don’t just see difference, they see menace. People have put up barricades and perceive the other class as a threat to what is beautiful, true and good. I don’t completely understand why this animosity has risen over the past couple of decades, but it makes it very hard to shift the ever more entrenched socio-economic-cultural-political coalitions.Historians used to believe that while European societies were burdened by ferocious class antagonisms, Americans had relatively little class consciousness. That has changed.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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      Joe Biden and the Parable of the Raisin Bran

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      A remark in a local television interview undercut the president’s message: that his administration was tackling rising prices for gasoline and groceries.It escaped the notice of most in the national political press.But a stray comment President Biden made in a local television interview last week spoke volumes about Democrats’ struggle to find a winning message on inflation.“By the way,” Biden began, “the food prices — the main driver of food prices — is not the price of beef and eggs, etc., although they’re up. It’s packaged goods, packaged goods.”Then the gaffe: “You’re going to see people not buying Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. You’re going to see them buying other raisin bran, which is going to be a dollar cheaper.”Needless to say, eat generic raisin bran is not exactly a poll-tested, winning message. Clips of that comment went viral on the right, racking up tens of thousands of views on conservative YouTube and TikTok channels.Perhaps the president was reading the business section of The New York Times, which reported this week on how food companies are banking huge profits. Or perhaps he was just falling into the politician’s trap of playing pundit, which is rarely a good idea.Either way, Biden’s remark undercut what he had just claimed seconds earlier — that his administration was succeeding in tackling rising prices for gasoline and groceries.“We’re getting them down,” he said. “I told you I’d bring them down. We’re bringing it down.”True for gas, less so for groceries. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cranked up interest rates another notch, indicating that the people who can shape the U.S. economy don’t believe they have licked the inflation problem.More to the point, Biden’s raisin bran comment unintentionally revealed just how inconsistent the Democratic Party’s message on inflation has come across to voters.Some of it has been bad luck — above all, the fact that Biden took office during a pandemic that scrambled global supply chains, driving up costs that businesses then duly passed along to consumers. “We’re not as bad as Turkey” is a hard case to make at the polls.There were also costly communications mistakes along the way. Last spring, administration economists were insisting that inflation would be “transitory.” That assessment proved to be wildly optimistic, and Republicans have not let voters forget it.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.When the war in Ukraine drove a fresh jump in prices, Democrats deployed the phrase “Putin’s price hike” to try to mitigate the damage. There were also scattershot attempts at whacking Corporate America for “price-gouging” — meatpackers and oil companies being among the main villains — although some liberal economists questioned the logic.In remarks on inflation in May, Biden tried out a new phrase: “the ultra-MAGA agenda,” referring to a plan by Senator Rick Scott of Florida that would require Congress to reauthorize spending for Social Security and Medicare. Republicans, including Scott, have distanced themselves from the idea.Finally, with the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage in August, Democrats had accomplishments that they could credibly argue would address rising costs for families. The legislation included price caps for insulin and provisions allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, for instance. In isolation, those policies were overwhelmingly popular, polls showed.But that sentiment may have been an illusion: Polls also indicated that only a third of voters had heard of the new law and that the majority did not believe it would reduce inflation.Biden has spoken about the economy in speeches far more often than any other subject; he has made 22 appearances since August for midterm-related events, according my count. Even so, progressives complain that Democratic candidates neither put significant resources or energy into promoting those achievements, nor do they adequately punish Republicans for their own positions.Democrats felt crippled, too, by the president’s poll numbers: Few candidates were eager to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a leader whose approval rating went negative in August 2021 and has hovered around the low 40s ever since.In a prime-time speech on Thursday, Biden made his closing pitch to voters, arguing about the threat Republicans posed to democracy — not about what he had done to address inflation. Even though he spoke about the economy earlier in the day, his democracy speech led the news.‘Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working’Republicans, meanwhile, had a much simpler task in this election: blame Democrats for everything.In one telling episode recounted by Republican strategists, the National Republican Congressional Committee ran a small series of digital ads during the Fourth of July congressional recess in 2021 highlighting the cost of food. They resonated strongly with voters, even in focus groups run by Democrats.At the time, however, Democrats were still trying to convince the public that prices were not, in fact, rising.“Planning a cookout this year?” the White House said on Twitter. “Ketchup on the news. According to the Farm Bureau, the cost of a 4th of July BBQ is down from last year. It’s a fact you must-hear(d). Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working. And that’s something we can all relish.”A graphic accompanying the tweet read: “The cost of a 4th of July cookout in 2021 is down $0.16 from last year.” In response, Representative Burgess Owens, a Republican of Utah, said on Twitter that the Biden administration was “bragging about saving us $0.04 on sliced cheese.”At the time, the Consumer Price Index had risen 5 percent between May 2020 and May 2021; the most recent numbers indicate that the index has climbed by 8.2 percent in the 12 months through September.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, a former lawyer and the chairman of the Republicans’ House campaign arm, said in an interview that he was bringing his courtroom experience to the task of winning back the seats his party lost in 2018. He advised G.O.P. candidates to make Biden’s handling of inflation their top line of attack.“It’s something I learned when I was trying cases in front of juries,” Emmer said. “You figure out what the theme of the case is.” The same goes for politics, he said: “You know what your message is, and you hammer at it every single day.”“Democrats spent the last two years rescuing America’s small businesses, saving jobs, getting a pandemic under control and investing in America’s future,” Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York shot back. “Tom Emmer and his motley crew of MAGA extremists were hawking deadly conspiracy theories and ripping away 50 years of reproductive freedom — that’s what’s on the ballot Tuesday.”Grocery shopping in the Queens borough of New York City.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThey had a hammerHammer it they did. For election ads, Republican researchers clipped examples of Democratic politicians taking their cues from the White House and downplaying the rising costs early on.Ads running nonstop in Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District, for instance, show Representative Dan Kildee saying that inflation was “transitory.” In the state’s Seventh District, Republicans have tried to undercut Representative Elissa Slotkin’s bipartisan image with incessant commercials that claim she voted with Biden “100 percent of the time” and that she “doesn’t get” Americans’ financial struggles.“She voted for trillions in new spending. That’s fueling inflation. I’ll stop the out-of-control spending,” Slotkin’s opponent, Tom Barrett, says in one of them.Republicans have said much less about how they would address inflation if they retake the majority in Congress; economists are highly skeptical that cutting the federal budget when the economy is softening would help.But few Democrats have delivered as sharp a rejoinder as former President Barack Obama, who mocked Republican ideas at a recent campaign rally in Michigan.“When gas prices go up, when grocery prices go up, that takes a bite out of people’s paycheck,” Obama said. He added, “Republicans are having a field day running ads talking about it, but what is their actual solution to it?”“I’ll tell you: They want to gut Social Security, then Medicare, and then give some more tax breaks to the wealthy,” he continued. “And the reason I know that’s their agenda is, listen, that’s their answer to everything.”But there are few signs that the Democrats’ counterattacks are working. In polls, voters now give Republicans an enormous edge on who would do a better job on the economy. In the latest Wall Street Journal survey, only 27 percent of voters said that Biden’s policies “had a positive impact on the economy.”Forecasting models using economic indicators predict that Republicans will pick up as many as 45 House seats next week, though other factors could limit Democrats’ losses, and it’s anyone’s guess who will win the Senate.Emmer, for one, expressed bewilderment that Democrats did not have better answers to Republican attacks on inflation. As early as February 2021, he said, “We knew this is the issue, we knew it was coming.”But when some Democratic lawmakers voiced their concerns that spring about rising prices, he said, their leaders “refused to listen to them.”What to readRepublican candidates are focusing on crime and public safety, but their message is rooted not so much in data or policy as in voters’ feelings of unease. Julie Bosman, Jack Healy and Campbell Robertson have the details.Danny Hakim reports on Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, of Nevada and her Republican rival, Adam Laxalt. Both parties are shoveling money into a pivotal contest defined by two top issues, the economy and abortion.Early turnout is high in most states, Nick Corasaniti writes, and experts see broad Republican energy as well as Democratic enthusiasm in major battlegrounds. But changes in how people vote have added new uncertainty.Fueled by billionaires, political spending is again shattering records, Jonathan Weisman and Rachel Shorey report.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      From Opinion: What’s Driving Your Vote?

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      “In 1918 my great-great-grandmother died of an illegal abortion. Over 100 years later, I am in this fight to ensure that abortion access is preserved, that people are able to access the care she was denied.” Celia Hoffman23, Gen Z, Washington, D.C. “War, authoritarian regimes, economic failures and climate change are producing waves of refugees. We need a coherent immigration policy and process for accepting a share of them.”Richard J. Schulte82, silent generation, Northfield, Minn. More

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      Cherokees Ask U.S. to Make Good on a 187-Year-Old Promise, for a Start

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      The demand that Congress honor a treaty and seat a nonvoting delegate comes amid growing clashes over sovereignty and a tight race for Oklahoma’s governor, a Cherokee citizen.TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — In 1835, U.S. officials traveled to the Cherokee Nation’s capital in Georgia to sign a treaty forcing the Cherokees off their lands in the American South, opening them to white settlers. The Treaty of New Echota sent thousands on a death march to new lands in Oklahoma.The Cherokees were forced at gunpoint to honor the treaty. But though it stipulated that the Nation would be entitled to a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives, Congress reneged on that part of the deal. Now, amid a growing movement across Indian Country for greater representation and sovereignty, the Cherokees are pushing to seat their delegate, 187 years later.“For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor that promise,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a recent interview in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma. “It’s time to insist the United States keep its word.”The Cherokees and other tribal nations have made significant gains in recent decades, plowing income from sources like casino gambling into hospitals, meat-processing plants and lobbyists in Washington. At the same time, though, those tribes are seeing new threats to their efforts to govern themselves.A U.S. Supreme Court tilting hard to the right seems ready to undermine or reverse sovereignty rulings that were considered settled, while new state laws may affect how schools teach Native American history. And tribes are embroiled in a caustic feud with Oklahoma’s Republican governor — despite his distinction as the first Cherokee citizen to lead the state — that has helped to make his re-election bid next week a tossup.Amid such challenges, the Nation is trying to cobble together bipartisan support for its delegate, who, if seated, would resemble the nonvoting House members representing several territories and the District of Columbia. Such delegates cannot take part in final votes, but can introduce legislation and serve on committees.A new hospital for the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Many tribal nations are pouring income from sources like casino gambling into health care and other needs.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesKimberly Teehee, the Cherokee Nation’s nominated delegate for a nonvoting seat in Congress. She is a Democrat and former adviser to President Barack Obama.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesKimberly Teehee, nominated in 2019 for the delegate position, said the role would open a new space for Indigenous representation. “We have priorities that are similar to other tribes when it comes to deployment of dollars, accessing health care, public safety, preserving our culture,” Ms. Teehee said. “This treaty right allows us to have a seat at the table.”The Cherokee Nation has about 430,000 citizens, Ms. Teehee said, which is more than the combined population of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all of which have their own delegates in Congress.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.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.Debunking Misinformation: Falsehoods and rumors are flourishing ahead of Election Day, especially in Pennsylvania. We debunked five of the most widespread voting-related claims.So far, the Nation has drawn backing from Native American leaders across the country, as well as measured support from members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, including Representative Tom Cole, a Republican and member of the Chickasaw Nation.The House Rules Committee, led by Mr. Cole and Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, is expected to hold a hearing on the Cherokee delegate in mid-November. Even if control of Congress changes in next week’s midterm elections, that could open the way for a vote before the end of the year.Tribal nations across the United States are closely following the debate, eyeing the possibility that it could set a precedent. The Choctaw Nation may also have the right to a delegate under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830, signed before its removal from what is now Mississippi. Similarly, the Delaware Nation’s treaty with the United States in 1778 could allow its members a delegate.“I think you’ll see a significant outcry from the rest of Indian Country saying, ‘We want one, too,’” said M. Alexander Pearl, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma and a citizen of Chickasaw Nation. “And I think that they’re right.”Still, the Cherokees could face headwinds in the deeply divided House. Ms. Teehee is a Democrat and former adviser to President Barack Obama. A spokesman for Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the Cherokees’ effort.Mr. Cole, the Oklahoma Republican, has said that he doesn’t object to seating the delegate, but he also noted that “there’s a lot of challenges to it,” including the question of dual representation in the House.“There’s a lot of people that will say, ‘Well, that delegate’s chosen by a council, not by a general election,’” Mr. Cole said this year. “And Cherokees then get two votes: your vote for a council member and their vote for the congressman of their own district, so they sort of get to two bites of the apple.”Downtown Tahlequah on the Cherokee Reservation. The Cherokees were forced to march to Oklahoma after their land in the American South was signed over for use by white settlers.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesSeveral Cherokee leaders and representatives of the federal government celebrated the opening of a meat-processing plant in Tahlequah last month.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesA report by the Congressional Research Service raised other potential legal issues, including the possibility that the delegate provision would not apply now that Oklahoma is a state, not Indian Territory.The debate is lifting the veil on one of the most contentious periods between the United States and Indigenous peoples, when about a quarter of the 16,000 Cherokees who walked what’s known as the Trail of Tears died on their way to Oklahoma. “This is a chance to finally reckon with ethnic cleansing, and massive and catastrophic loss of life,” said Julie Reed, a historian and Cherokee Nation citizen who teaches at Penn State University.The push for a delegate after nearly two centuries also reflects the wider effort by Native Americans to exercise self-governance in ways that would have been unrecognizable to previous generations in Indian Country, a federal designation for land under tribal jurisdiction.Native candidates have recently won congressional seats in states ranging from Alaska to Kansas. Some tribes are buying back ancestral lands. And Indigenous nations are expanding their own criminal justice systems across the country.“The 1950s was the lowest point of Indian sovereignty,” said Robert J. Miller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and a law professor at Arizona State University, citing the failed attempt by the U.S. government to disband tribes and relocate their members to cities. “The comeback has been incredible.”Such breakthroughs, however, are taking place against the backdrop of other challenges, including those before the Supreme Court. In one ruling in June that upended longstanding precedents, the justices expanded the power of state governments over tribal nations.The 5-4 ruling, which allows states to charge non-Indians for crimes committed against Indians on tribal land, stunned experts on Native American law and weakened a major decision from just two years before that had established the authority of tribal or federal courts on Indian land. (Tribal courts would retain authority over Native Americans who commit crimes on the reservation.)Another case set to be heard by the court this year, challenging a 1978 law giving Native Americans preference in adopting Native children, could be just as unsettling. The law was intended to put an end to policies allowing Native children to be forcibly taken from their homes and placed by child welfare agencies in non-Native homes.Plaintiffs, including the State of Texas, argue that the law created a system illegally based on race. But many tribal nations, including the Cherokees, have lined up against the challenge.New measures at the state level are also flaring tempers, including an Oklahoma law banning schools from teaching material that could cause students discomfort or psychological stress because of their race.Fourth graders studying at the Cherokee Immersion School. A lawsuit by teachers and civil rights advocates says that an Oklahoma law could limit the teaching of Native American history.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesChuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, center, said it was “time to insist the United States keep its word” and seat a Cherokee delegate to Congress.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesGov. Kevin Stitt signed the law as part of a wave of legislation against “critical race theory,” a phrase used by conservative leaders to describe what they see as efforts to infiltrate classrooms with lessons about structural racism.A lawsuit by teachers and civil rights advocates warned that the law could silence classroom discussion about subjects like the Trail of Tears. And a high school English teacher in the town of Dewey, Okla., recently said she would stop teaching “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the best-selling book by David Grann about the murders of wealthy Osage people in the 1920s.Because the Osage were targeted for their race, the teacher told The Oklahoman that she was afraid of losing her license under the new law.Whitney Red Corn, a director of an early learning center and member of the Osage Nation Congress, said the law felt like “pushback” at a time when tribal nations were exercising rights. “It’s heartbreaking for me that something from our history could be avoided because it’s hard to hear,” said Ms. Red Corn, who took part in an Osage vote calling for the repeal of the law.One of the most bitter disputes of the moment involves Oklahoma’s largest tribes and Governor Stitt, a mortgage banker. After taking office, the governor proposed sharp increases in the fees that the tribes pay to operate more than 100 casinos around the state, prompting backlash.Mr. Hoskin, the Cherokee chief, said he expected a different approach from Mr. Stitt as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. (The New York Times and High Country News previously reported on claims that his citizenship may have been fraudulently obtained by an ancestor, which Mr. Stitt has called “unsubstantiated slander.”)Mr. Stitt has clashed repeatedly with Oklahoma’s tribes. In June, he celebrated the Supreme Court ruling diluting the authority of tribal nations. Donelle Harder, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stitt, declined to say directly whether he supported or objected to the efforts to seat a Cherokee delegate.Regarding Mr. Stitt’s relations with tribal nations, Ms. Harder said, “Governor Stitt has worked to create more fair opportunities for all sovereign nations and all people who call Oklahoma home.”Five of Oklahoma’s largest tribes have publicly endorsed Mr. Stitt’s rival, Joy Hofmeister, a former Republican who switched parties last year. Recent polls in the heavily Republican state have shown the race in a dead heat.Mr. Hoskin called the clash with Mr. Stitt a crucial factor in the Cherokee efforts to bolster sovereignty: “I think he’s the most anti-Indian tribe governor in the history of this state.”Emily Cochrane More

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      White House Deletes Tweet Crediting Biden With Social Security Increase

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      The automatic cost of living increase that Social Security beneficiaries are receiving is a result of soaring inflation, not a policy achievement enacted by President Biden.WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday deleted a widely mocked Twitter post that misleadingly attributed a recent increase in Social Security payments to older Americans to “President Biden’s leadership.”The tweet, which had been posted on Tuesday, was removed without explanation a day later after it had been skewered by critics and contradicted by a new Twitter feature that allows users to fact-check erroneous assertions. The automatic 8.7 percent cost of living increase that Social Security beneficiaries are receiving is a result of inflation running at a four-decade high, not a policy achievement enacted by Mr. Biden.When asked on Wednesday about the removal of the tweet, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, suggested that it had lacked sufficient context.“Look, the tweet was not complete,” she said. “Usually when we put out a tweet, we post it with context, and it did not have that context.”Ms. Jean-Pierre went on to say that Medicare premiums are decreasing even as Social Security payments go up, suggesting that such information would have rounded out the original Twitter post.“That’s a little bit of context that was not included,” she said. “This means that seniors will have a chance to get ahead of inflation due to the rare combination of rising benefits and falling premiums.”In the final days before the midterm elections next week, Mr. Biden has repeatedly criticized Republicans for proposals that could scale back social safety net programs. He has insisted that he and the Democrats would protect and bolster Social Security and Medicare.The tweet that the White House deleted echoed a remark that the president made this week during a speech in Florida, when he declared, “On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.”When pressed about the similar sentiments, Ms. Jean-Pierre suggested that Mr. Biden was not trying to take credit for the cost of living increase.“We believe that we — we want to lay the — we want to lay our argument out fully,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “And that was important to do, as we put out, you know, information like that or as we put out a tweet.”She added: “And that was an incomplete tweet.” More