Midterm Elections (2022)

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      4 Takeaways From the Rubio-Demings Debate in Florida

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      Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and his Democratic challenger, Representative Val Demings, met for the only debate of the Florida Senate race on Tuesday, a fast-paced, fiery face-off that cruised through a series of the top issues affecting the country and the state.Mr. Rubio, who participated in around a dozen debates as a Republican presidential candidate in 2016, was polished and quick. Taking a more evocative approach, Ms. Demings sought to cast him as heartless, disconnected from the human impact of his policies on issues like abortion and guns.Still, she may not have gotten the kind of viral moment necessary to shift the trajectory of the race in her favor. For months, polls have shown Mr. Rubio with a lead in Florida, a perennial battleground state but one that has shifted to the right.Here are four takeaways:Sticking to the party line on abortion.The candidates largely hewed to their party’s talking points on abortion rights, with each aiming to paint the other as extreme. Ms. Demings accused Mr. Rubio of supporting abortion restrictions without exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening medical conditions.“No, senator, I don’t think it’s OK for a 10-year-old girl to be raped and have to carry the seed of her rapist,” she said. “No, I don’t think it’s OK for you to make decisions for women and girls as a senator. I think those decisions are made between the woman, her family, her doctor and her faith.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With elections next month, a Times/Siena poll shows that independents, especially women, are swinging toward the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights as voters worry about the economy.Georgia Governor Race: A debate between Gov. Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams produced a substantive hour of policy discussion. Here are five takeaways.Aggressive Tactics: Right-wing leaders are calling on election activists to monitor voting in the midterm elections in search of evidence to confirm unfounded theories of election fraud.Jill Biden: The first lady, who has become a lifeline for Democratic candidates trying to draw attention and money in the midterms, is the most popular surrogate in the Biden administration.Mr. Rubio dismissed those attacks. While he called himself “100 percent pro-life” and indicated that he personally supported strict abortion laws, he cast the issue as theoretical, saying that bans without exceptions would be unable to pass because they lack popular support.For his part, Mr. Rubio pressured Ms. Demings to name a clear week limit on the procedure, falsely accusing her of backing abortion “on demand, for any reason, at any time, including the moment before birth.” She replied that she supported abortion until viability — the standard set by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, commonly understood to be around 24 weeks.A Florida phenomenon: property insurance chaos.A portion of the debate focused on an issue that’s fairly specific to Florida: a property insurance market in free-fall. Homeowners in Florida pay the highest premiums in the country, nearly three times the national average, according to the Insurance Information Institute. So far, six Florida property insurance companies have been declared insolvent and others are canceling or not renewing policies.Ms. Demings accused Mr. Rubio of doing nothing on the issue as a member of the state House, saying she had asked the governor to call a special session to tackle the crisis.Mr. Rubio countered that there had been a special session when he was speaker in 2007. Legislation passed that year expanded the offerings and reduced the rates of the state’s insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance. Mr. Rubio blamed former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for another term as the Democratic nominee, for the sharp increase in rates since then.The temperature rose when guns came up.One of the most heated exchanges came when the moderator asked whether the candidates would support a federal ban on the sale of assault weapons to people under 21 — an idea that Mr. Rubio dismissed as useless, pointing out that a 15-year-old was accused in a recent shooting rampage in Raleigh, N.C.“Where did he get the gun? He didn’t get it from a gun show. He certainly didn’t buy it. He’s 15 years of age,” Mr. Rubio said. Instead, he promoted a “red flag” bill he sponsored to allow law enforcement authorities to confiscate guns if a person shows warning signs of violence — while denouncing as “crazy” a red-flag provision in the bipartisan gun law that Congress passed this year.He claimed that provision would allow “your co-worker who has a grudge against you” to “go to a judge and take away your guns.”Ms. Demings responded with clear anger, accusing Mr. Rubio of betraying the victims of massacres in Florida like the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and the Parkland shooting, and of making promises to victims’ families that he “had no intentions of keeping.” She went on: “How long will you watch people being gunned down in first grade, fourth grade, high school, college, church, synagogue, the grocery store, a movie theater, a mall and a nightclub, and do nothing?”Rubio was more detailed on foreign policy.Mr. Rubio gave more detailed responses than Ms. Demings to questions about China and about how the United States should respond if Russia used tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or attacked a NATO ally.Ms. Demings said repeatedly that the United States needed to hold Russia and China “accountable,” but gave no examples of what that might involve. At one point, she said that if China were to try to take over Taiwan, “there has to be a response,” and added that she and her colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee were discussing the matter. Mr. Rubio also, to some extent, deferred to other decision makers; he said, for instance, that the response to an attack on a NATO member would have to be a joint decision by the alliance. He also threw in a mocking line about transgender people, suggesting that the Pentagon needed to focus on military superiority rather than “proper use of pronouns.”But his responses contained a level of detail that Ms. Demings’s did not. Among other things, he discussed the range of ways Russia could escalate in Ukraine — short-range nuclear missiles and a conventional attack on an airport in Poland were two possibilities he mentioned — and called for efforts to decrease dependence on Chinese manufacturers and strengthen American military capacity in the Indo-Pacific region.Near the end of the debate, Ms. Demings accused him of feigning foreign policy expertise, saying, “Look, the senator can play national security expert all he wants.”Mr. Rubio replied, to applause: “I don’t know what she means by playing national security expert. I’m the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee and was the previous chairman of it, so it’s actually my job.” More

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      Rubio and Demings Have Their First and Only Debate

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      Follow our live coverage of Marco Rubio and Val Demings’s debate for Senate in Florida.Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and his Democratic challenger, Representative Val Demings, will face off on Tuesday evening in a debate in Lake Worth Beach, Fla.It is the only scheduled debate in the Senate race in Florida, where polls have consistently shown Mr. Rubio ahead. Florida has trended to the right in the past few years, transforming from the nation’s most famous swing state to fairly reliable Republican turf. But with Mr. Rubio’s leads in the single digits, Democrats are holding out hope for an upset.Mr. Rubio, a onetime presidential candidate who is seeking a third term in the Senate, has focused heavily on crime and on economic issues like inflation that polls show are drawing swing voters toward Republicans.Ms. Demings, who was elected to Congress in 2016 after being the first woman to lead the Orlando Police Department, has not shied away from the issue of public safety but has also emphasized abortion and, in a state recently devastated by Hurricane Ian, climate change. A livestream of the debate will be available from WPBF-TV in Florida.According to Federal Election Commission filings, Ms. Demings has raised $65.5 million for her campaign, significantly more than Mr. Rubio’s $44.5 million. But Mr. Rubio has more money on hand for the final weeks of the campaign. More

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      U.S. to Release Millions More Barrels of Oil to Contain Gas Prices

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      The Department of Energy will release 15 million more barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and plans additional releases this winter.WASHINGTON — The United States plans to release millions of additional barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in December and to make additional releases over the winter, White House officials said on Tuesday evening.The releases from the strategic reserve this year have been a dramatic step by the United States to contain its gasoline prices and stabilize energy prices around the world. The latest move comes three weeks ahead of the midterm elections and amid growing concern that inflation could worsen as winter approaches and the conflict in Ukraine drags on.Officials said the United States would release an additional 15 million barrels of oil from the reserve in December, exhausting the 180 million barrels that President Biden authorized to be sold earlier this year. The sales were intended to serve as a “wartime bridge” as domestic production in the United States ramps up, but White House officials said on Tuesday that Mr. Biden is prepared to authorize additional oil sales later this winter if needed.The reserve can hold about 700 million barrels of oil and has about 400 million remaining. White House officials say they intend to replenish the reserve when world oil prices decline to a range of $67 to $72 a barrel; they are now hovering around $90.Mr. Biden is expected to announce the plan on Wednesday. Officials said he would also call on refining companies not to gouge prices and to pass lower energy costs resulting from the oil releases onto consumers.Gas prices in the United States eased over the summer as the United States sold oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and concerns about a global recession deepened. They have increased again in recent weeks after the Saudi-led OPEC Plus decided to scale back petroleum supplies on the market by up to two million barrels per day to bolster the price of oil.The move angered Mr. Biden, who said last week that “there will be consequences” for Saudi Arabia’s decision.The White House has faced criticism from Republicans for depleting the strategic reserve ahead of the midterm elections, even as Republicans have made the specter of rising gas prices a central campaign theme.“Draining our emergency supplies is a shortsighted and dangerous choice that imperils our energy security at a critical time of global uncertainty,” Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, said last week.The Biden administration has defended the decision, insisting that all Americans benefit from lower gas prices and that energy prices around the world are elevated because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.“President Biden has said for months how he is committed to doing everything that he can, in his power, to address Putin’s price hike,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday. “Should the president not do everything that he can to lower prices?” More

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      McCarthy Suggests a GOP-Led House Would Question Ukraine Aid

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      WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, said that if his party wins a majority in next month’s midterm elections, its members would be unwilling to “write a blank check” to Ukraine, suggesting it could be more difficult for President Biden to get congressional approval for large infusions of aid to bolster the country’s war against Russia.“I think people are going to be sitting in a recession, and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he said in a recent interview with Punchbowl News. “Ukraine is important, but at the same time, it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”Mr. McCarthy’s comments reflected the rising tide of isolationism in the Republican Party, especially in the House, where an increasing number of libertarian-minded conservatives who have adopted former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” position have vocally opposed authorizing billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as it fights off an unprovoked attack from Russia.That impulse led 57 House Republicans to vote in May against a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. In the Senate, 11 Republican senators opposed the aid package after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, forcefully marshaled support for the legislation in his conference.In total, Congress has approved more than $60 billion to Ukraine this year alone by overwhelming margins, the largest amount of military aid the United States has committed to any country in a single year in nearly half a century, since the Vietnam War.Mr. McCarthy, who is in line to be speaker if his party wins control of the House, voted for the aid package in May, as did his top two deputies. His remarks on Tuesday casting doubt on his party’s appetite to send more aid underscored the precarious balance he is attempting as he tries to straddle the rift among Republicans between the traditional, hawkish conservatives and the harder-right, more anti-interventionist members whose support he needs to be elected speaker.The House Republicans who are poised to run the committees with oversight of the war should they win the majority are largely hawks who have backed the aid to Ukraine, indicating that some in the party may be reluctant to turn their backs on Kyiv. And many Democrats have supported the money for Ukraine, suggesting that even if most Republicans were opposed, the House could still muster bipartisan support to approve such aid.Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday in response to Mr. McCarthy’s remarks that there was still “broad bipartisan support” for aiding Ukraine.“We want to ensure that our NATO partners are stepping up to the plate and bearing the burden of the cost,” Mr. McCaul said, adding of Mr. McCarthy, “I think he’s just saying we’re not going to write a blank check without oversight and accountability, which my committee will be providing.” More

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      Mastriano’s Time at War College Draws Scrutiny in Governor’s Race

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      The crowning chapter of Doug Mastriano’s military career — a stint on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College — has flared up in his campaign for Pennsylvania governor.Two former professors at the War College in Carlisle, Pa., publicly declared Mr. Mastriano unfit for public office. A photograph surfaced of Mr. Mastriano posing in a Confederate uniform with other faculty. And Mr. Mastriano’s Ph.D. dissertation has been criticized as deeply flawed, with a former academic adviser saying his doctorate rests “on very shaky grounds.”Mr. Mastriano — the Republican nominee for governor in a crucial battleground state — received his Ph.D. in history from the University of New Brunswick in Canada in 2013, the year after he joined the faculty of the War College. His research focused on a World War I hero, Sgt. Alvin York, who credited his exploits killing and capturing German soldiers to divine intervention and who inspired the 1941 Gary Cooper movie “Sergeant York.”“I think Mastriano really likes that story because York became the kind of spiritual warrior that Mastriano sees himself as being,” said Jeffrey Scott Brown, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick who advised Mr. Mastriano but objected to his academic techniques. Dr. Brown’s criticisms included Mr. Mastriano’s amateur archaeological sleuthing on a French battlefield and his credulity in accepting divine intervention to explain Sergeant York’s heroics.“I’ve been concerned about this for a decade,” Dr. Brown said in an interview.Mr. Mastriano, who has a policy of not interacting with the news media except for right-wing outlets, did not respond to detailed questions sent to his campaign.Struggling with poor fund-raising and a strategy of courting only the Trump-centric base, Mr. Mastriano is trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, by double digits in polling.On Friday, Mr. Mastriano held a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., with Jack Posobiec, a far-right provocateur and Navy veteran who helped spread the “PizzaGate” hoax — the false rumor in 2016 that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic officials were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor. “We’re going to shock all the prognosticators,” Mr. Mastriano told a crowd of about 350, according to The Erie Times-News. He added, “We’re going to take our state back by storm.”Mr. Mastriano, 58, capped off a three-decade military career by teaching for five years at the War College, which educates top officers in graduate studies focused on leadership and military-civilian relations.Two former faculty colleagues said his role as a candidate and state senator in two areas — spreading lies about the results of the 2020 election, and marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — violated his military oath.“The officer corps is sworn to defend the Constitution rather than any one person or president,” Tami Davis Biddle, who was chair of the War College’s faculty council, wrote in an opinion article for a Harrisburg newspaper. “None of its members is entitled to toy with insurrection, treat Jan. 6 as legitimate protest, or follow election deniers who would undercut our most important political institutions.”In an interview, Dr. Biddle, who retired last year, said: “If you’re going to say the 2020 election was won by Trump, that was simply not true. To lobby for keeping Trump in office when he had lost an election was outrageous.”Mr. Mastriano, who led the charge in Pennsylvania to overturn President Biden’s election, pushed to have the State Legislature appoint a slate of false electors. He organized buses to take protesters to Washington on Jan. 6 and bypassed police barricades breached by other marchers. He has said that as governor he could decertify voting machines at will and might require all Pennsylvania voters to re-register in order to cast ballots.Another former War College faculty member, Rick Coplen, a West Point graduate and a combat veteran, said Mr. Mastriano had tried to “undermine our democracy.”Mr. Coplen was a professor of economic development at the War College for a decade. He accused Mr. Mastriano of “helping former President Trump in trying to overthrow the legitimate, clearly understood and agreed-upon electoral results.” His concerns were reported earlier by The Philadelphia Inquirer.Mr. Coplen ran unsuccessfully this year in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat in South Central Pennsylvania. He said his criticism of Mr. Mastriano was not motivated by partisanship.“This is about the fundamental stuff of American democracy,” he said in an interview. “When I was 18 years old, like my fellow West Point cadets, I raised my right hand and pledged the same oath to the U.S. Constitution. That’s most important, regardless of party.”Dr. Brown, at the University of New Brunswick, was a member of the examining board for Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation.He objected to Mr. Mastriano’s field research in France that claimed to precisely identify the location of Sergeant York’s heroics, which Dr. Brown said was conducted amateurishly with members of Mr. Mastriano’s son’s Boy Scout troop. He also objected to assertions in the dissertation that Sergeant York was protected by the hand of God. On Page 223 of his dissertation, Mr. Mastriano writes, “The idea that York survived the carnage because of Divine Intervention also speaks of a miracle.”Sgt. Alvin York in 1919.U.S. Army, via Associated PressDr. Brown said such a statement was unscholarly. “You’re allowed to discuss someone’s belief — that York believed there was literal divine intervention,” Dr. Brown said. “But to present it as settled historical fact is not acceptable for professional historians.”Another scholar, James Gregory, a history graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, has identified what he says are multiple errors in Mr. Mastriano’s treatise. After he reported 35 problematic passages to the University of New Brunswick, Mr. Mastriano added 21 corrections in 2021. But Mr. Gregory insisted there were many more issues that, in his view, added up to academic dishonesty.Dr. Brown shared documents he wrote in 2013 spelling out his own objections, including an email he said was sent to Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation supervisor raising “serious misgivings.” Nonetheless, the Ph.D. was granted. Dr. Brown’s name appears on the dissertation, which, he said, surprised him because he had been told he was no longer needed on the evaluation committee.The University of New Brunswick, which released the dissertation last month under pressure, said in a statement it could not discuss Mr. Mastriano’s degree without his consent. It added that two independent academics would review the university’s procedures to ensure that its granting of doctorates meets “the highest standard.” More

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      Some Republicans Want to Count Votes by Hand. Bad Idea, Experts Say.

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      Over the past two years, Republicans have pursued an array of changes to how Americans vote. The past few weeks have drawn attention to a particularly drastic idea: counting all ballots by hand.Officials in Cochise County, Ariz., recently pushed to do that in next month’s election, and whether or not they go through with it, the efforts may spread. Republicans in at least six states introduced bills this year that would have banned machine tabulation, and several candidates for statewide offices have expressed support, including Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominees for Arizona’s governor and secretary of state, and Jim Marchant, its nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state.The New York Times spoke with six experts in election administration, and all said the same thing: While hand counting is an important tool for recounts and audits, tallying entire elections by hand in any but the smallest jurisdictions would cause chaos and make results less accurate, not more.“People who think they would have greater confidence in this process think so because they haven’t seen it,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization focused on election technology. “The process in real life would not inspire confidence at all on this scale.”The proposals often stem from false claims by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies that voting technology was somehow to blame for Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. Most of those claims center on electronic voting machines, but some extend to scanners and tabulators that count paper ballots.The right-wing arguments against tabulators rely not on evidence that they have been compromised — because there is none — but on the possibility that they could be. In a lawsuit filed in April, Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem asked a federal court to mandate hand counting in Arizona, arguing that the state’s ballot scanners were “potentially unsecure” and denied voters “the right to have their votes counted and reported in an accurate, auditable, legal and transparent process.” The court dismissed the case, and Ms. Lake and Mr. Finchem are appealing.Research indicates that hand counting increases errors.A study published in 2012 looked at discrepancies between initial counts and recounts in New Hampshire and found that, on average, those discrepancies were 0.8 percentage points smaller in towns that used scanners than in towns that counted by hand. A study in 2018 analyzed two statewide races in Wisconsin and found that “vote counts originally conducted by computerized scanners were, on average, more accurate.”What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      ‘El voto latino’: 10 votantes hispanos conversan

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      En septiembre, reunimos a un grupo de 10 votantes latinos de Texas, Florida y Arizona, una combinación de demócratas, republicanos y electores independientes que planeaban votar o estaban dispuestos a votar por candidatos republicanos en las elecciones de mitad de mandato de Estados Unidos de este año.

      “¿Creen que el Partido Republicano hace algo que desanima a los votantes latinos?”, preguntó la moderadora. “¿Hay algo en la forma en que los demócratas se dirigen a la comunidad latina o hablan de ella que desanime a los votantes latinos?”.

      “Cuando Trump dijo que los mexicanos eran violadores —aunque tal vez no se refería a todos— me dejó un mal sabor de boca. Digo, mucha gente le aplaudió eso. Y yo pensaba: ‘Ah, así son las cosas’”, dijo uno de los participantes.

      “Cuando la primera dama dijo que nosotros éramos tan singulares como los tacos del desayuno, eso se me quedó grabado”, dijo otra participante, refiriéndose a los comentarios de Jill Biden en una conferencia de este año para UnidosUS, un grupo latino de derechos civiles.

      Varias de las personas que conversaron en este debate dijeron que ninguno de los partidos realmente les habló de manera personal e informada. Una parte del problema es que no hay una sola forma de hablar con los votantes latinos porque, como nos recordaron los participantes, no hay un votante latino típico. “Hay todo un espectro de hispanos”, dijo un participante. Y tal vez no se debería hacer la distinción entre votantes latinos y otros votantes: “Primero somos estadounidenses”, dijo otro participante.

      Lo que está claro es que ambos partidos tienen la oportunidad de vincularse con electores como los que hablamos, tanto para fortalecer su apoyo como para aclarar conceptos erróneos. Nuestros participantes pensaron que los republicanos eran más sólidos en una variedad de temas, como el crimen y la seguridad, el control de armas, la seguridad nacional, la inmigración y la economía. Pero sobre el tema del aborto, la mayoría favoreció a los demócratas. Un participante pensó que los demócratas en general apoyaban la desfinanciación de la policía, y otra participante se refirió a los comentarios de Donald Trump sobre los mexicanos como: “Siento que solo dijo lo que otros piensan”.

      En este punto es un cliché decir que los votantes latinos son poderosos políticamente, que a menudo tienen posturas políticas complejas, que no es un hecho que votarán por los demócratas. Lo que sigue después de estos clichés solo se aclarará en las próximas semanas, meses y años, a medida que los políticos, los medios de comunicación y el país presten más atención a votantes como quienes participaron en esta discusión.

      Lenin

      33 años, Texas, independiente, vendedor de seguros

      Orlando

      53 años, Florida, independiente, dibujante de diseño asistido por computadora

      Lourdes

      42 años, Texas, se inclina por los demócratas, recepcionista

      Sally

      60 años, Texas, republicana, asistente de una aerolínea

      Christina

      43 años, Texas, se inclina por los republicanos, ama de casa

      Kelly

      38 años, Texas, independiente, reclutadora

      Jerry

      22 años, Florida, republicano, banquero

      José

      39 años, Florida, se inclina por los demócratas, financiero

      John

      58 años, Arizona, republicano, fotógrafo

      Cindy

      35 años, Florida, se inclina por los republicanos, administradora de casos financieros More