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Why is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?
ExplainerWhy is the midterm vote count taking so long in some US states?Key races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia – which could decide the makeup of Congress – are still undecided. Here’s why Two days after the US midterm elections, a sense of deja vu is descending over the country. In a replay of the excruciating events in 2020, when Joe Biden’s presidential victory was declared four days after the polls closed, Americans are yet again asking themselves why they have to wait so long for election results.US midterm elections 2022: Senate and House remain in balance as counting continues – liveRead moreLater in the week, it remained elusive which main party will control both chambers of Congress. In the Senate, Republicans hold 49 seats and the Democrats 48, with two states – Arizona and Nevada – not yet called, and Georgia headed to a runoff.In the House there are still more than 40 seats yet to be called, with at least a dozen of them highly competitive.So what is it about the US electoral system that makes counting votes apparently so tortuously slow?Where are counts still happening, and why?Responsibility for running fair and fast elections, like much of the way the country is governed, is devolved to each of the 50 states. How the count is done, and its speed, varies slightly between each state. (Election deniers have tried to imply that slow counts are somehow irregular or fraudulent. They are not.)The big picture here is that counts are taking extra time in races that are very close. News networks are hesitant to project winners because the margins between candidates are narrow and there are many ballots left to count – and so the need for patience may be justified.In this cycle, much of the heat is engulfing just three states: Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.What’s going on in Arizona?Several of the most consequential races are happening in the border state of Arizona. A US Senate contest between the Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters could determine which party controls the Senate.There are also consequential state races, including for governor and secretary of state, in which prominent election deniers endorsed by Donald Trump have a shot at winning. So far only 70% of the Arizona vote has been counted.To understand why that is, you have to zoom in to Maricopa county, which covers the state capital, Phoenix. It contains 60% of all votes in Arizona and is the second largest voting jurisdiction in the nation.The number of people who vote early has increased dramatically since the pandemic. This year Maricopa county also saw a surge in the number of early ballots that were dropped off on election day – they are known as “late earlies” – rising to 290,000, the largest number in the state’s history and 100,000 more than in 2020.Each early ballot has to be verified to check that the voter’s signature matches the signature in the voter rolls, and after that is done it is sent to a bipartisan panel for approval and processing. That all takes time, as we are witnessing.Many people have drawn a comparison of Arizona’s vote count with that of Florida, which called its results within hours of polls closing on Tuesday. That state’s system allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots as soon as they are received; mail-in ballots have to be requested and must be received by an election supervisor no later than 7pm on election day. But the main reason why Ron DeSantis won his re-election race so quickly on Tuesday was because it was a blowout, with the incumbent Republican governor garnering 59% of the vote while his challenger, Charlie Crist, received only 40%.Had the candidates we are watching in Arizona or elsewhere had such a convincing lead, we would probably not still be waiting for their races to be called. Nonetheless, there are questions that Arizona is going to have to face in future elections.Stephen Richer, who is the recorder of Maricopa county, said that after the dust settles “we will likely want to have a policy conversation about which we value more: convenience of dropping off early ballots on election day or higher percentage of returns with 24 hours of election night”.What about Nevada?Nevada is going a bit faster than Arizona, with 83% of the votes counted, but this year the count could last through Sunday. But like in Phoenix, there are still large numbers of ballots yet to be processed in the big urban areas of Las Vegas and Reno.The state runs its elections largely through mail-in ballots, and that in itself bakes in time. For a mail-in ballot to be counted it has to be postmarked by election day, but the state now allows until four days after election day – 12 November – for the physical envelope to arrive.There is a debate to be had about the merits of such a system. Many election officials stress that it is more important to have a system that is convenient, accurate and accessible than one that is fast.The count in Nevada also has a lot riding on it. That includes a very close race between the sitting US senator Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt; three tight contests for US House seats; and a battle involving one of the most visceral election deniers, Jim Marchant, who is running for the job of top election official.And Georgia?Georgia has completed its returns for its critical US Senate race, with the Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock squeaking ahead of the Trump-endorsed former football star Herschel Walker. But this state runs a system whereby if neither candidate marshals more than 50% of the vote – which neither did – there has to be a runoff election. That feels like groundhog day too – we had to wait until the January after the 2020 election for two Georgia runoff contests to be called before we knew that the Democrats would control the Senate. At least Georgia has speeded up the process: the new voting law SB 202 has significantly shortened the period for this runoff, which will take place on 6 December.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Postal votingArizonaNevadaGeorgiaUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More
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The key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midterms
ExplainerThe key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midterms In several states, Republican candidates who dispute the 2020 election results are running for positions that would give them control over elections
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When will we know who won US midterm races — and what to expect
Several races on the ballot this fall will have profound consequences for American democracy. In some states, Republican candidates who doubt the 2020 election results, or in some cases actively worked to overturn them, are running for positions in which they would have tremendous influence over how votes are cast and counted. If these candidates win, there is deep concern they could use their offices to spread baseless information about election fraud and try to prevent the rightful winners of elections from being seated.In total, 291 Republicans – a majority of the party’s nominees this cycle – have questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a Washington Post tally.What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?Read moreUp and down the ballot, election deniers are running for offices that could play a critical role in future elections.They’re running to be governors, who play a role in enacting election rules. They’re running to be secretaries of state, who oversee voting and ballot counting. They’re running to be attorneys general, who are responsible for investigating allegations of fraud handling litigation in high-stakes election suits. They’re running to be members of Congress, who vote to certify the presidential vote every four years. They’re running to be state lawmakers, who can pass voting laws, launch investigations, and, according to some fringe legal theories, try to block the certification of presidential electors.Here’s a look at some of the key candidates who pose a threat to US democracy:Doug MastrianoUpdate: Mastriano lost to the Democrat Josh Shapiro on election night.Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was the “point person” for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania as lawyers put together fake slates of electors for Trump, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. He also organized an event with Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election in which speakers spread misinformation about the election. He hired buses and offered rides to the US Capitol on January 6 and was there himself. He has supported the idea of decertifying the presidential race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, which is not possible.If elected, Mastriano would wield considerable power over elections in Pennsylvania. The state is one of a handful where the secretary of state, the chief election official, is appointed by the governor. Mastriano has said he has already picked someone, but hasn’t said who. The Philadelphia Inquirer has speculated he could pick Toni Shuppe, an activist who has spread voting misinformation and false theories linked to the QAnon movement. Mastriano has also said he would decertify election equipment and cause all voters in the state to reregister to vote.Mark FinchemFinchem, a member of Arizona’s state house of representatives, is the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, which would make him Arizona’s chief election official. Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers, was at the US Capitol on January 6. He introduced a resolution this year to decertify the election. In 2020, he was one of several lawmakers who signed a joint resolution asking Congress to reject electors for Joe Biden.He has said, falsely, that Joe Biden did not win the election in Arizona in 2020. “It strains credibility,” he told Time magazine in September of Biden’s victory. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” When a reporter asked him whether it was possible that people he didn’t know voted for Biden, Finchem said: “In a fantasy world, anything’s possible.”Kari LakeA former news anchor with no prior political experience, Lake made doubting the 2020 election a centerpiece of her successful bid to win Arizona’s GOP nomination for governor.If she wins the governor’s race, Lake would be one of the statewide officials charged with certifying the results of the presidential election. She has called the 2020 election “corrupt and stolen” and said she would not have certified it. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to require ballots in Arizona to be counted by hand, which experts say is unreliable and costly. She has backed ending mail-in voting, which is widely used in Arizona.Abraham “Abe” HamadehThe Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, Hamadeh has never held elected office and is making his first attempt to win a seat. Hamadeh, a former prosecutor, said he would not have signed off on Arizona’s election results, which showed Joe Biden won. Hamadeh, who is endorsed by Trump, has called the 2020 election “rotten, rigged and corrupt” and said if he won, he would “prosecute the election fraud of 2020 and secure the 2024 election so when Donald Trump runs and wins again in 2024, everyone will know it’s legitimate”.Blake MastersMasters, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Arizona, is endorsed by Trump and has received major financial backing from his former boss the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Early in his race, Masters posted a video saying: “I think Trump won in 2020.” He also said he would have objected to certifying the 2020 election results during the primary, as other Republican senators did on January 6.Since winning his primary, he has sought to soften his views on the topic. He removed language from his campaign website that claimed the election was stolen. During a debate, he pointed to media coverage and big tech going against Trump instead of outright saying the election was stolen. But he has strongly stated the election was stolen to certain audiences, telling Fox News that he still believes Trump won. And Trump himself called Masters after a debate against the Democratic senator Mark Kelly, with Trump telling Masters he had “got to go stronger” on election fraud claims to win in November.His rhetoric on elections has remained heated during the general election. When Trump came to Arizona in October, Hamadeh told the crowd he would “lock up some people and put handcuffs on them”, but then, during a debate with his opponent, Democrat Kris Mayes, he would not say exactly who should be locked up or for what.Andy BiggsUpdate: Biggs won re-election against the Democrat Javier Ramos, confirmed on Wednesday.Arizona’s Biggs was one of 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying the election results, but his involvement in January 6 went further than that. Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Stop the Steal” protests, has said that Biggs helped him formulate strategy, according to Rolling Stone. Biggs is also said to have requested a pardon for his actions around January 6.Anthony KernAs an Arizona state representative in 2020, Kern was present at the Capitol on 6 January. He also briefly participated in a widely panned review of the 2020 election in Maricopa county that provided fodder for more baseless claims but ultimately affirmed Biden’s victory. He also signed on to a letter requesting that Pence delay the count of the electoral vote. Trump endorsed Kern in November 2021, saying Kern “supported decertifying” the election results.Jim MarchantMarchant is the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada. He is linked to the QAnon movement; he has said he was pushed to run for the position by Trump allies and a prominent QAnon influencer. He leads a coalition of far-right candidates seeking to be secretary of state in key battleground states.He lost a 2020 congressional race by more than 16,000 votes, but nonetheless challenged the result by alleging fraud. He has since traveled around the state pressuring counties to get rid of electronic voting equipment and instead only hand-count paper ballots. Such a switch would be unreliable – humans are worse at counting large quantities of things than machines – as well as costly, and take a long time, experts say. He has falsely said voting equipment is “easy” to hack and said that Nevadans’ votes haven’t counted for decades. He has claimed there is a global “cabal” that runs elections in Nevada and elsewhere.Kristina KaramoUpdate: Karamo lost to the Democrat Jocelyn Benson, confirmed on Wednesday.Karamo, the GOP nominee for secretary of state in Michigan, became nationally known after the 2020 election when she claimed she witnessed wrongdoing as ballots were being counted in Detroit. The allegations were debunked, but Karamo, a community college professor who has never held elected office, went on to rise in conservative circles. She appeared on Fox News and was a witness at a high-profile legislative hearing about election irregularities. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to try to overturn the election. She has claimed “egregious crimes” were committed and said on a podcast: “It’s time for us decent people in the Republican party … to fight back. We cannot have our election stolen,” according to Bridge Michigan.Abortion on the ballot: here are the US states voting on a woman’s right to chooseRead moreShe has also come under fire for comments on her podcast comparing abortion to human sacrifice and opposing the teaching of evolution in schools, according to Bridge Michigan.Matthew DePernoDePerno lost to the Democrat Dana Nessel, confirmed on Wednesday morning.DePerno, a lawyer who has never held elected office, became a celebrity in conservative circles for his work after the 2020 election. He helped lead a lawsuit in Antrim county, in northern Michigan, where a clerk made an error and posted incorrect information on election night. He claimed election equipment was corrupted, and a judge authorized an investigation of the county’s election equipment that became the basis of an inaccurate report that Trump allies used to spread misinformation about the election. A Republican-led inquiry into allegations of fraud found his actions to be “misleading and irresponsible”. DePerno has said he would arrest Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat serving as Michigan’s top election official, as well as Dana Nessel, his Democratic opponent in the attorney general’s race.DePerno also faces potential criminal charges for unauthorized access to voting equipment. A special prosecutor is investigating the matter.Steve CarraCarra won his re-election bid against Roger Williams, confirmed on Wednesday.Carra, who is running for re-election to the Michigan house of representatives, signed a letter in 2020 asking Mike Pence to delay Congress’s counting of electors. He also sponsored legislation to require an audit of the 2020 race, even after the 2020 results were already confirmed there.Kim CrockettCrockett lost to the Democrat Steve Simon, confirmed on Wednesday.Joe Biden won Minnesota by more than 230,000 votes in 2020. But Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, has nonetheless called that victory into question.Crockett has described the 2020 election as “rigged” and agreed with an interviewer who suggested it was “illegitimate”. She has said, “I don’t think we’ll ever know precisely what happened” when it comes to the 2020 race. That is false – there’s no evidence of fraud or other malfeasance in Minnesota, which had the highest voter turnout in the US in 2020.Crockett has harshly criticized Steve Simon, the incumbent secretary of state, for reaching a court settlement that required the state to count late-arriving ballots (an appeals court blocked the agreement). If elected, Crockett has pledged to cut the early voting period in the state (Minnesota has one of the longest early voting periods in the US), get rid of same-day voter registration, and require photo identification to vote.Audrey TrujilloTrujillo lost to Democrat Maggie Toulouse Oliver on election night.Trujillo, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in New Mexico, has called the 2020 election a “coup”.“Until we get a handle on the voter fraud in NM, all elections are going to continue to be rigged. Why run? Run to lose? Thoughts anyone?” she tweeted last year.She has also appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she falsely suggested Biden could not have won the election because she only saw Trump signs in the state (Biden easily won the state by nearly 100,000 votes). She supported an effort in one county not to certify the primary election because of unproven fraud allegations.She has also pushed other conspiracy theories related to school shootings and Covid vaccines, according to Media Matters.Tim MichelsMichels lost to the Democrat Tony Evers, confirmed on Wednesday.Michels, the Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, said earlier this year that the 2020 election was “maybe” stolen. Donald Trump, who lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, only requested a recount in two of the state’s largest counties, both of which affirmed Biden’s victory in the state.After pressure from Trump, Michels said this year he would consider signing legislation to decertify the 2020 election, which is not legally possible.Ken PaxtonPaxton won his re-election bid against the Democrat Rochelle Garza, confirmed on Wednesday.Paxton, seeking his third term as Texas attorney general, was one of Trump’s closest allies in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 race. He filed a lawsuit at the Texas supreme court seeking to block Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania from certifying their election results.Burt JonesA state senator who is running to be Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Jones served as one of 16 fake electors in Georgia in 2020. He helped amplify Trump’s baseless fraud claims after the 2020 vote and was among a group of state senators who called on Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to convene a special session to address changes to election law – a suggestion Kemp rejected. If elected lieutenant governor, he would oversee the Georgia senate and have a role in controlling the flow of legislation in the chamber.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansPennsylvaniaArizonaNevadaMichiganexplainersReuse this content More - in Elections
Which Election Races Are Still Being Called, and When Will We Have Results?
Who will control the Senate and the House? Settle in for a long wait.For the second Election Day in a row, election night ends without a clear winner.It could be days until a party is projected to win the House of Representatives.It could be a month until we know the same for the Senate.Here’s the state of the race for both chambers and when — maybe, just maybe — we’ll know the outcome.The HouseRepublican control of the House was all but a foregone conclusion heading into Tuesday, but Democrats outran the polls and projections.Republicans will have to claw their way to a majority, seat by seat. The Needle suggests Republicans are likelier than not to win the House, but it is no certainty. As of 5 a.m. Wednesday, there was only enough information to have them projected to win 197 seats — 21 short of the 218 needed for a majority.They’re nowhere close to being called the winner in many of these races — in many of these states, late mail ballots have the potential to help Democrats. It will take days to count these ballots.Meanwhile, Democrats lead in another group of races where Republicans might wind up mounting a comeback.The SenateThe fight for control of the Senate will come down to four states: Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona.Wisconsin is the only one that could be resolved by early this morning. The Republican Ron Johnson led by just over one percentage point at 7 a.m. Eastern, with 94 percent of the vote counted. A handful of counties might still have a modest number of absentee ballots to report, which could let the Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes close some of the gap. Either way, the number of absentee ballots should be ascertained fairly quickly. They ought to be counted fairly quickly as well.On the other end of the spectrum is Georgia, which seems unlikely to be resolved before a Dec. 6 runoff election. A New York Times analysis of the results by precinct and state absentee files suggests that Senator Raphael Warnock (who leads) is unlikely to reach the 50 percent necessary to avoid the runoff, barring an unusual number of provisional or late mail ballots. Unlike in 2020, there weren’t many absentee ballot requests this year.If Wisconsin goes for Mr. Johnson and Georgia is stuck in runoff purgatory, there’s only one way for the Senate to be decided quickly: One party wins both Arizona and Nevada. It appears neither will do that soon.Of the two, Nevada is the clearer case. Still, the race is too close to call. The Republican Adam Laxalt leads the Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto by 2.7 percentage points at this hour, but most of the remaining vote is expected to be Democratic-leaning mail ballots and provisional ballots, including from same-day registrants.The Needle suggests a close race, but much remains uncertain, as the exact number of outstanding ballots is unclear. The turnout in the state appears fairly low, suggesting that a large number of ballots might remain. It is also unclear how long it will take to count them. Last time around, Joe Biden was projected to win only on Saturday, even though he won by a fairly comfortable two points and seemed poised to gain in the late ballots. At this point, such a clear path to victory seems unlikely for either candidate.The situation in Arizona is even less clear, but here there is at least a chance of a quick resolution. The Democrat Mark Kelly leads by six percentage points, 52 percent to 46 percent, with most of the Election Day and early votes counted. Most of the remaining vote is the mail ballots that were returned to the state near the election, including on Election Day, along with provisional ballots.These days, mail and provisional ballots are typically good for Democrats. But this is not a normal case. A large majority of voters cast ballots by mail in Arizona, so the mail ballots are not nearly as favorable toward Democrats. Instead, a strange pattern has emerged in recent years: Democrats mail in their ballots well ahead of the election, leaving Republicans to turn in their ballots near the election or simply prefer to vote in person. In 2020, Donald J. Trump won the ballots counted after Election Day by a wide margin here, turning a four-point lead for Mr. Biden at this hour in 2020 into a race won by less than a point.This time, the Republican Blake Masters will need to mount an even larger comeback — at least as measured in percentage point margin. It may seem daunting, but it may not be quite as challenging as it looks: There might be about twice as many outstanding mail ballots, as a share of all voters, as there were at this time in 2020.Mr. Kelly seemingly has a healthy lead from the early vote, but there is no hard evidence that a Masters victory is impossible. We’ll probably begin to get a sense of whether these mail ballots look like 2020’s mail votes as soon as today. More
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Nevada Election Results Could Take Days, Officials Say
Overwhelmed election officials in Nevada say that they have been flooded by thousands of mail-in ballots, and that it may take several days to count the votes and upload results.Last year, the state began requiring that mail-in ballots be sent to every registered voter. While ballots must be postmarked by Election Day, they can be counted if they arrive as late as Saturday.Elections officials have emphasized the need for patience and have not offered predictions on how quickly they will be able to offer tallies.Jamie Rodriguez, the interim registrar of voters in Washoe County, said she was expecting roughly 16,000 mail-in ballots to arrive on Election Day. She said that those votes would not be counted until Thursday because poll workers were so behind.“Understand that whatever results posted tonight, if there are close races, there are definitely still a large number of votes to be counted,” Ms. Rodriguez said on Tuesday night.And even the results that have come in came slowly. Nevada does not post its results until the last voter in the state casts a ballot, and the polls did not officially close until after 9 p.m. local time. Tallies did not start coming in until late Tuesday, after many contests on the East Coast had already been called.Long waits and continuous warnings from elections officials did not prevent the candidates in a competitive race for a Nevada Senate seat from projecting confidence about their standing. Early Wednesday morning, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, was slightly behind her Republican opponent, Adam Laxalt.“We have a lot of our votes coming in all across the state, yet to be tabulated,” Mr. Laxalt said on election night at a party in Las Vegas. “We are going to win this race.”“We had people voting in the snow and then the rain because they want a better Nevada and a better America,” he added. “Unfortunately, we’re in for a long night and maybe a few days into this week as all the votes are tabulated.”Ms. Cortez Masto was also upbeat, but made the situation clear: “We won’t have results for several days.”The lag means Nevadans will also have to wait for results in other competitive state races, including the governor’s race between the incumbent, Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Joe Lombardo. Mr. Lombardo held a narrow lead early Wednesday morning. More
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Democrats, Don’t Despair. There Are Bright Spots for Our Party.
The Democratic Party and Senator Mitch McConnell rarely see eye to eye on anything. But if Democrats hold the line in the elections on Tuesday and keep control of the Senate — and we still have a shot — it will come down to candidate quality.That’s the phrase that Mr. McConnell used this past summer alluding to his Republican Senate nominees.Going into Tuesday’s vote, Democrats face fierce headwinds like inflation and the typical pattern of losses in midterm elections for the party in power. But unlike some Republican candidates — a real-life island of misfit toys — many Democratic Senate candidates have been a source of comfort: the likable, pragmatic, low-drama Mark Kelly in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, the heterodox populists John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Tim Ryan (Ohio). If the party can defy the odds and hold the Senate, there will be valuable lessons to take away.For many election analysts, the hopes of the summer — that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe could help Democrats buck historical trends — look increasingly like a blue mirage, and Republicans seem likely to surf their way to a majority in the House.Yet the battle for the Senate is still raging, and largely on the strength of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman. Their races also offer insights that can help Democrats mitigate losses in the future and even undo some of the reputational damage that has rendered the party’s candidates unelectable in far too many places across the country.In a normal midterm year, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kelly would be the low-hanging fruit of vulnerable Democrats, given that they eked out victories in 2020 and 2021 in purple states.But they bring to the table compelling biographies that resist caricature. Mr. Kelly is a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut whose parents were both cops. Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, quotes Scripture on the campaign trail and compares the act of voting to prayer.They’ve rejected the hair-on-fire, hyperpartisan campaign ads that endangered incumbents often rely on. Mr. Kelly’s ads highlight his bipartisanship and willingness to break with the Democratic Party on issues like border security — he supports, for example, filling in gaps in the wall on the border with Mexico.Mr. Warnock, too, has focused on local issues: His campaign has highlighted his efforts to secure funding for the Port of Savannah and his bipartisan work with Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to help Georgia’s peanut farmers. These ads will probably not go viral on Twitter, but they signal that Mr. Kelly and Mr. Warnock will fight harder for the folks at home than they will for the national Democratic agenda.In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman have showed up in every county, red or blue, in their states. Democrats can’t just depend on driving up the margins in Democratic strongholds — they also need to drive down Republicans’ margins in their strongholds.Mr. Fetterman is holding to a slim lead in polls. Most analysts doubt Mr. Ryan can prevail in what is a tougher electoral environment for a Democrat, but even if he loses, he helped his peers by keeping his race competitive, and he did it without a dollar of help from the national party. He forced national Republicans to spend about $30 million in Ohio that could otherwise have gone to Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.Anything could happen on Tuesday. Politics, like football, is a game of inches. It’s still possible that Democrats could pick up a seat or two. It’s also plausible that Republicans could take seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and even New Hampshire.But when the dust settles on the election, Democrats need to do some real soul-searching about the future of our party. We look likely to lose in some places where Joe Biden won in 2020. And what’s worse, we could lose to candidates who have embraced bans on abortion and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, views shared by a minority of the American people. This outcome tells us as much about the Democratic brand as it does the Republican Party.Fair or not, Democrats have been painted as the party of out-of-touch, coastal elites — the party that tells voters worried about crime that it’s all in their heads and that, by the way, crime was higher in the 1990s; the party that sneers at voters disillusioned with bad trade deals and globalization and that labels their “economic anxiety” a convenient excuse for racism; the party that discounts shifts of Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party as either outliers or a sign of internalized white supremacy.If Democrats are smart, they’ll take away an important lesson from this election: There is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat. To win or be competitive in tough years in places as varied as Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, we need to recruit and give support to the candidates who might not check the box of every national progressive litmus test but who do connect with the voters in their state.Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Ryan offer good examples. Both have been competitive in part because they broke with progressive orthodoxy on issues like fracking (in Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman was called the “enemy” by an environmentalist infuriated by his enthusiastic support for fracking and the jobs it creates) and trade deals (in Ohio, Mr. Ryan has bragged about how he “voted with Trump on trade”).It also means lifting up more candidates with nontraditional résumés who defy political stereotypes and can’t be ridiculed as down-the-line partisans: veterans, nurses, law enforcement officers and entrepreneurs and executives from the private sector.In some states, the best candidates will be economic populists who play down social issues. In others, it will be economic moderates who play up their progressive social views. And in a lot of swing states, it will be candidates who just play it down the middle all around.It might also mean engaging with unfriendly media outlets. Most Democrats have turned up their noses at Fox News even though it is the highest-rated cable news channel, but Mr. Ryan has made appearances and even put on air a highlight reel of conservative hosts like Tucker Carlson praising him as a voice of moderation and reason in the Democratic Party. In the frenzied final days of the campaign, Mr. Fetterman wrote an opinion essay for FoxNews.com.This year we still might avoid losing the Senate. And Democrats can avoid catastrophe in future elections. It all comes down to two words: “candidate quality.”Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”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?
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
- in Elections
Nevada’s Costly, Photo-Finish Senate Race Pits Abortion vs. Economy
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — As Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada took the stage at a high school here this week, she was fighting for her political life.Her re-election bid is seen by many as the tightest Senate race in the country. Republicans are throwing money and energy behind her challenger, Adam Laxalt, a political scion who, like Ms. Cortez Masto, is a former Nevada attorney general.Neither candidate could be called an electric campaigner, and Ms. Cortez Masto had a difficult slot that evening: shortly after John Legend and right before Barack Obama.After the appearance by Mr. Legend — who recently wrapped up a Las Vegas residency and played a couple of songs on a piano for an adoring audience — Ms. Cortez Masto spoke about how her grandfather was “a baker from Chihuahua” and how, before her, “there had never been a Latina elected to the U.S. Senate.”Her biographical bullet points were politely received. Then Mr. Obama took the stage and offered a reminder that his party has still not found a successor to match his charisma.To raucous applause, he hammered home Ms. Cortez Masto’s personal history in his inimitable cadences: “Third-generation Nevadan. Grew up here in Vegas. Dad started out parking cars at the Dunes,” he said, referring to a defunct casino where Ms. Cortez Masto’s father once worked. “She knows what it’s like to struggle and work hard.”Democrats are sending star figures to Nevada as both parties pour money into a political fight that could decide the balance of power in the Senate. The race was the most expensive political contest in Nevada history even before an $80 million splurge over the last month brought total ad spending to $176 million, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed the candidates deadlocked at 47 percent each; Mr. Laxalt had a comfortable lead among men, while Ms. Cortez Masto was likewise leading among women.Mr. Laxalt, a son and grandson of Nevada senators, held a rally in Las Vegas late last month with former Representative Tulsi Gabbard. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Cortez Masto and her allies have sought to focus on abortion rights, attacking Mr. Laxalt over the issue.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAnd increasingly, the campaign seems to be one of economics versus abortion.Democrats are battering Mr. Laxalt over his anti-abortion stance, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Nevada allows abortion up to 24 weeks, and after that in cases where the mother’s health is at risk. Mr. Laxalt has said he would support banning abortions in the state after 13 weeks, or the first trimester.One commercial broadcast Tuesday morning, paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, featured a Nevada woman assailing his abortion position, saying: “I take it incredibly personally that Adam Laxalt is working to take away the rights of my daughters.” Another spot, from the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, includes audio of Mr. Laxalt saying during a breakfast with pastors that “Roe v. Wade was always a joke.”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.Ms. Cortez Masto returned to the topic on Tuesday night: “We know we can’t trust Laxalt when it comes to a woman’s right to choose,” she told the crowd. “This is a man who called Roe vs. Wade a joke, and he celebrated when it was overturned.”So often has Mr. Laxalt been attacked on abortion that he felt compelled to write an opinion column in The Reno Gazette-Journal in August “setting the record straight” on his position. He explained that when he said Roe was “a joke,” it was “a shorthand way of saying that the decision had no basis in the text of the Constitution.”Republican groups and the Laxalt campaign are generally focusing on the economy. Nevada has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and some of the highest gas prices, and a tourism-driven economy that was hit hard by the pandemic.“Inflation isn’t going away,” a narrator says in a Laxalt commercial running this week. “Gas and groceries are too expensive.” Another pro-Laxalt ad features a picture of Ms. Cortez Masto superimposed next to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as both are showered in cash. The spot, from the Senate Leadership Fund — the political action committee of Senate Republicans — makes the case that “Costly Catherine” is a high-spending Democrat.Mr. Laxalt and Ms. Gabbard at the rally in Las Vegas. He and his Republican allies have tried to put the spotlight on economic issues. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesRory McShane, a Republican political consultant who is working on other races in the state, believes the current dynamic favors Republicans.“You see in the polling that the economy is trumping abortion,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think anything’s stronger than the economy,” he added. “You don’t have to run TV ads to tell people how bad the economy is.”Kenneth Miller, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the Democratic strategy “poses a risk.”“Abortion is very important to a big segment of the electorate, but that also means there are large segments of the electorate that don’t particularly care about abortion either way,” he said. “They may have a pro-choice or pro-life position, but it’s not what drives them to make their vote choice or drives them to turn out.”Mr. Laxalt’s saber-rattling on the economy, however, has plenty of skeptics. Nevada’s largest union, the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers, has sent members — cooks, cleaners, food servers — door to door to make the case for Ms. Cortez Masto and other Democratic candidates. More than half of the union’s members are Latinos, a group Mr. Laxalt has courted in Spanish-language commercials.Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer, said in an interview that Ms. Cortez Masto had been an important ally on pocketbook concerns for union members, including expanding health benefits for workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic.“In 2020, we knocked on 650,000 doors statewide, and that was in the middle of Covid,” he said. “This year, in a midterm, we’re going to hit a million doors, and if we hit those doors, we’re going to win.”Few dispute the importance of the contest.“This race is the 51st seat,” Mr. Laxalt said this summer. “The entire U.S. Senate will hinge on this race.” He was speaking at the Basque Fry, a Republican event started by his grandfather, former Senator Paul Laxalt, whose family hailed from the Basque region straddling France and Spain. Mr. Laxalt is also the son of another former senator, Pete Domenici.Mr. Laxalt has been a divisive politician. He parroted Donald J. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud when he served as the chairman of the former president’s 2020 campaign in Nevada. When he was attorney general, he was caught on a secret recording in which he pressured state gambling regulators on behalf of a major donor, Sheldon Adelson.And Mr. Laxalt’s bid to follow his forebears into the Senate has been fractious. Fourteen of his relatives have come out against him and thrown their support to Ms. Cortez Masto, calling her in a joint statement “a model of the ‘Nevada grit’ that we so often use to describe our Nevada forefathers.”Former President Barack Obama campaigned on Tuesday in Las Vegas for Nevada Democrats. “She knows what it’s like to struggle and work hard,” he said of Ms. Cortez Masto.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“The entire U.S. Senate will hinge on this race,” Mr. Laxalt said this summer. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Obama seized on the episode in his remarks on Tuesday night. “We all might have a crazy uncle, the kind who goes off the rails, but if you’ve got a full Thanksgiving dinner table, and they’re all saying you don’t belong in the U.S. Senate?” he said. “When the people who know you the best think your opponent would do a better job, that says something about you.”In his own closing argument, Mr. Laxalt, who served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the Navy, has tried to link Ms. Cortez Masto to President Biden, who polls show is unpopular in the state.“Her record is, she supported Joe Biden every step of the way,” he said at a recent campaign stop, according to Roll Call. “That’s why she doesn’t want Joe Biden to come here, because then she’s going to have to actually stand next to him and stand next to her voting record.”Ms. Cortez Masto is a protégé of Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader who built a formidable political machine in the state and died last year. “She’s a workhorse, not a show horse,” Mr. Miller said, adding that in a typical year, a moderate like her “should be able to win a race like this by five points, but national conditions are a serious headwind.”Abortion has certainly not been her only issue. She has depicted Mr. Laxalt as a child of privilege in a “Succession”-style video and has put out commercials accusing him of being captive to big oil companies, in part because as state attorney general, he worked to thwart an investigation into Exxon Mobil over its climate policies.But abortion has been the most constant weapon for her and her surrogates.“Catherine’s opponent calls Roe vs. Wade a joke, and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe a historic victory,” Mr. Obama said on Tuesday. “That may not be how most women in Nevada saw it.” More
