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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
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Barack Obama Lamented the Attack on Paul Pelosi. Then He Got Heckled.
Mr. Obama was reflecting on the level of hostility in American politics when a man in the crowd at a rally for Democrats in Detroit shouted at him.Former President Barack Obama was twice interrupted by hecklers on Saturday at a campaign rally in Detroit for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other Democrats, a reminder that it is easier to call for civility in American politics than to achieve it.In the first incident, less than 10 minutes after Mr. Obama took the stage, a man in the crowd shouted at him while he was lamenting Friday’s attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, and the rise of violent political rhetoric.“We’ve got politicians who work to stir up division to try to make us angry and afraid of one another for their own advantage,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes it can turn dangerous.”Moments later, the man, who was not identified, shouted “Mr. President” at Mr. Obama, creating an off-script exchange that the former president tried to use to drive home his point. The rest of what the man said was not picked up by microphones or cameras.“This is what I mean,” Mr. Obama said. “Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime.”Mr. Obama told the man, “You wouldn’t do that a workplace. It’s not how we do things. This is part of the point I want to make. Just basic civility and courtesy works.”About seven minutes later, another heckler interrupted Mr. Obama, who later said that the current lack of respect in political discourse was different from when he first ran for president in 2008. At the time, he said, he could visit Republican areas and engage in a positive dialogue with those who disagreed with him politically.But that’s not the case now, said Mr. Obama, who juxtaposed the concession of Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent for president in 2008, with former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.“American democracy is also on the ballot,” Mr. Obama said. “With few notable exceptions, most Republican politicians right now are not even pretending that the rules apply to them. They seem to be OK with just making stuff up.”Mr. Obama said that Republicans had not taken responsibility for their shortcomings as a party and were looking to assign blame for electoral defeats. He recalled his overwhelming defeat in a Democratic primary for a House seat in 2000.“I got whooped, and let me tell you, I was frustrated,” Mr. Obama said. “You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t claim the election was rigged. I took my lumps.” More
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Obama to Georgia Democrats: ‘Resist the Temptation to Give Up’
ATLANTA — Former President Barack Obama implored Georgia Democrats not to “tune out” politics and to “resist the temptation to give up,” as he tried to energize his party’s most loyal voters in a state that could decide control of the U.S. Senate. Speaking to a crowd of several thousand, Mr. Obama noted the many issues that may be dampening voter enthusiasm — inflation, rising crime and the war in Ukraine — making little mention that those ills have happened while his party controls Washington. But he cast the midterm elections as a fight not over policy differences, but the health of democracy. “I get why you might be worried. I understand why it might be tempting sometimes to tune out,” Mr. Obama said. “But I’m here to tell you that tuning out is not an option.” His speech, a mix of his familiar applause lines and new warnings about threats to democratic norms, aimed to boost Democratic candidates in the state even as their party has suffered low approval ratings nationwide. He presented Democrats as the best alternative to Republican lawmakers, a group that he said is “not interested in actually solving problems.” Mr. Obama was especially pointed in his criticism of Herschel Walker, a former University of Georgia football star and the Republican challenger to the state’s senator, Raphael Warnock. Mr. Walker, Mr. Obama said, is “a celebrity who wants to be a politician.” Mr. Walker’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Obama’s remarks.Mr. Obama arrived as the campaign enters the final stretch and Democrats are desperate to fire up their base, especially Black voters who have struggled with inflation and rising crime but have been left cold by the Biden administration. His stop in College Park, outside Atlanta, was the first of five events he is planning in coming days. He is due in Michigan and Wisconsin on Saturday, then Nevada and Pennsylvania next week — all states with close Senate races. Mr. Obama, at times, acknowledged voters’ fatigue and hardly mentioned President Biden, his former vice president. “Joe is fighting for you every day. He’s got your back. He’s doing everything he can to put more money in your pockets,” he said. Georgia Democrats have pointed to sky-high early voting figures as a sign of strength heading into Election Day. Nearly 1.3 million voters have cast ballots in the state, with the strongest performances coming from older Black voters and those in the deep-blue metro Atlanta counties of Fulton and DeKalb, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.But all signs point to strong turnout on both sides, with Republican voters poised to pour into polling places on Election Day. Mr. Biden’s approval ratings remain low, standing last month at an abysmal 37 percent in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. And while key portions of the Democratic base have turned out en masse, Democrats will still need to outperform with voters under 30 and women in the Atlanta suburbs to find success in November.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.“I look at the early vote numbers in Georgia, and see them as certainly positive news for Democrats,” said Tom Bonier, chief executive of the Democratic polling firm TargetSmart, which is working for the Abrams campaign. “But I think it’s also something that shows the work that needs to be done.”Friday’s rally was billed as an event for Georgia’s entire Democratic ticket. But two of its candidates took center stage: Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor who is challenging Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, in a rematch, and Mr. Warnock. Ms. Abrams’ campaign has been particularly focused on winning over Black men, whose votes are also vital to Mr. Warnock if he is to defeat Mr. Walker. Black voters could also make the difference elsewhere, especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where lagging turnout from voters of color helped Donald J. Trump secure narrow victories.“I think we’re going to see Black voters step up to the plate,” said Quentin James, president and co-founder of The Collective, a political action committee devoted to electing Black Democrats. “But you can’t divorce that from the reality that the country hasn’t always stood up for Black voters.”At a Democratic event called Georgia Black Men Call to Action, audience members listened to a speech by Stacey Abrams.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesMr. Obama tried to cast the election as dire moment for the country, pointing to Republicans’ questioning of the results of the 2020 election. Democratic candidates, he said, are a bulwark against Republican candidates who are running on a platform of election denial. “If they win, there’s no telling what would happen,” he said. Jameelah Gray, 32, after voting early at Morehouse College in Atlanta. All signs point to strong turnout on both sides in Georgia.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesThe former president’s earlier forays into midterm battlegrounds were anything but resounding successes. In 2010, he crisscrossed the country trying to rally voters — especially young voters — by telling them that Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and Democrats had pulled it out. Unimpressed, the electorate responded with what he called a “shellacking,” handing Republicans a 68-seat gain in the House, the largest since 1948, along with seven seats in the Senate and six additional governorships.In 2014, Republicans netted nine Senate seats, cementing control of Congress for Mr. Obama’s final two years in office.Out of office, however, Mr. Obama is arguably a more popular Democratic figure than the current president — or any other Democratic leader, for that matter.“There’s nostalgia for the Obama era with a lot of swing voters,” said Tim Phillips, a Republican strategist and former president of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political organization funded by the Koch family. “I think he’s their best spokesperson.”For his part, Mr. Biden has been a low-key presence on the campaign trail, avoiding large rallies altogether. On Friday night, he spoke at a Democratic dinner in Pennsylvania, where he celebrated Democrats’ legislative wins and railed against both Republican policies and candidates. Mr. James argued that Mr. Biden’s scarcity on the campaign trail was not really about Black voters, saying Mr. Biden was even less popular with white voters. By contrast, he said, African Americans remained deeply connected to the first and only Black president, who drew the highest turnout of Black voters in history.“Obama’s going to ramp up urgency,” he said, “not just for voting but for voting early. It will be a call to action.”The political environment for Democrats is far more uncertain than it was in either of the Obama midterms. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing, but Americans are confronting the worst inflation the nation has seen in 40 years, which is driving up interest rates and clawing back any sense of income gains as the pandemic recedes.On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s repeal of abortion rights and the looming presence of Mr. Trump are energizing the Democratic base in ways that Mr. Obama did not experience in his years in office.“Presidents look better in the rear-view mirror,” said Mo Elleithee, who was a senior official at the Democratic National Committee during the drubbing the party took in 2014.With little more than a week to go, Democrats are bracing for either a significant Republican wave that hands control of both the House and Senate to the Republican Party, or a split decision, with Democrats retaining control of a tightly divided Senate and Republicans squeaking out a narrow majority in the House.Developments in key races have only heightened Democratic anxieties. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s halting debate performance against Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, spotlighted the effect Mr. Fetterman’s stroke had had on his ability to communicate and frayed the nerves of Pennsylvania Democrats.The Republicans’ main super PAC resumed advertising on television in New Hampshire, convinced that the race between Senator Maggie Hassan and her Republican challenger, Don Bolduc, had tightened. And prognosticators moved the Arizona contest between Senator Mark Kelly and his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, back to a tossup.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, in Syracuse on Thursday, was recorded expressing his concerns to President Biden about where Democrats stood in Senate contests.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesPerhaps most exasperating to Democrats is the Senate race in Georgia, where a second woman this week accused Mr. Walker of having paid for her to have an abortion. Mr. Walker has denied both women’s claims.Caught on a hot microphone on Thursday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, was heard telling Mr. Biden, “The state where we’re going downhill is Georgia. It’s hard to believe that they will go for Herschel Walker.” On Friday night the Walker campaign pointed to remarks the candidate made earlier in the day where he said “Unlike Raphael Warnock I’m not a politician. I’m a warrior for God.”Jessica Taylor, the Senate analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said, “It really does feel like there is a lot of movement in these races.” She still rates control of the Senate a tossup, but, she added, “If this is a wave, you could see others swept away,” like Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado.On the other hand, recent polling has tantalized Democrats in Iowa, where Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican, is seeking another six-year term at age 89; in North Carolina, where the Democratic nominee for the Senate, Cheri Beasley, remains knotted with her Republican opponent, Ted Budd; and even in Utah, where Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from an independent, the former C.I.A. officer Evan McMullin.“This is the trickiest midterm environment I’ve seen in a long time,” said Steve Israel, a former House member from New York who once headed the House Democrats’ campaign arm.Maya King reported from Atlanta and Jonathan Weisman from Chicago. More
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The Run-Up: What Democrats and Republicans Got Wrong About Voters
Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt’s March 2013. The G.O.P., in tatters, issues a scathing report blaming its electoral failures on an out-of-touch leadership that ignores minorities at its own peril. Just three years later, Donald Trump proves his party dead wrong. Today, how certain assumptions took hold of both parties — and what they’re still getting wrong — heading into the midterm elections.Photo Illustration: The New York Times. Photo by David McNew/ Getty ImagesOn today’s episodeAdam Nagourney, a New York Times reporter covering West coast culture. He served as the paper’s chief national political correspondent for eight years.Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016. She was the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign.Jennifer Medina, a national politics reporter at The Times, covering political attitudes and power, with a focus on the West.About ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is back. The host, Astead Herndon, will grapple with the big ideas animating the 2022 midterm election cycle — and explore how we got to this fraught moment in American politics.Elections are about more than who wins and who loses. New episodes on Thursdays.“The Run-Up” is hosted by More
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Congress Is Paralyzed on Guns. Here’s Why Chris Murphy Is Still Hopeful.
The Democrat from Connecticut, who has spent his decade in the Senate trying and failing to enact gun safety bills, says his party should make the issue the core of its 2022 midterm message.WASHINGTON — It did not take long after the racist gun massacre in Buffalo for a familiar sense of resignation to set in on Capitol Hill about the chance that Congress would be able to muster the will to act on meaningful legislation to combat gun violence in America.In emotional remarks at the scene of the mass shooting on Tuesday, President Biden made no direct call for Congress to take such action. Afterward, he told reporters that he intended to do so, but was frank about his belief that persuading lawmakers to move would be “very difficult.”Around the same time, top Democrats on Capitol Hill were publicly conceding that their paper-thin majority in the Senate meant there was little they would be able to do to prevent the next tragedy.“We’re kind of stuck where we are, for the time being,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, playing down the chance that even a modest bill to strengthen background checks for gun purchases could overcome a Republican blockade.Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, shares his colleagues’ skepticism that any legislation can move. But he is also concerned that Democrats may squander a chance to turn the issue of gun safety into a rallying cry for the midterm elections.For a decade, the issue of gun violence has defined Mr. Murphy’s career; the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., took place a month after he won his seat.Mr. Murphy spoke to The New York Times from a Senate cloakroom about the chances for legislative action on guns, what Mr. Biden should do and why he thinks Democrats will lose control of Congress if they don’t make combating gun violence the core of their 2022 appeal to voters.The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when 20 young children and six adults were killed, did Democrats and President Barack Obama miss the opportunity to pass meaningful gun safety legislation?There was this popular meme in 2013, which said that if the killing of 20 children didn’t result in any action, nothing will. That’s fundamentally the wrong way to look at how Washington works. There are few epiphanies here. It’s all about political power, and political muscle, and we’re in the process of building our own.The National Rifle Association and the gun lobby was ready for us, and for those parents, in 2013. The anti-gun-violence movement was essentially nonexistent, and the N.R.A. was at its peak power.From Opinion: The Buffalo ShootingCommentary from Times Opinion on the massacre at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.The Times Editorial Board: The mass shooting in Buffalo was an extreme expression of a political worldview that has become increasingly central to the G.O.P.’s identity.Jamelle Bouie: G.O.P. politicians and conservative media personalities did not create the idea of the “great replacement,” but they have adopted it.Paul Krugman: There is a direct line from Republicans’ embrace of crank economics, to Jan. 6, to Buffalo.Sway: In the latest episode of her podcast, Kara Swisher hosts a discussion on the role of internet platforms like 4chan, Facebook and Twitch in the attack.We needed time to build up a movement that is stronger than the gun lobby.My worry is that a lot of my colleagues still believe in the mythology of 1994, when everyone thought Democrats lost Congress over the assault weapons ban. That’s not true — that’s not why Congress flipped. Ever since then, Democrats are under the illusion that it’s a losing issue for us.It’s one of the most important wedge issues, and if we don’t talk about it, then we’re going to lose.Many are urging Senator Chuck Schumer and Mr. Durbin to bring up a bill to expand background checks. Even if it couldn’t pass, it would force Republicans to defend their opposition to a policy that polls show has broad support. Should they?There are times when show votes help define the parties. I’m not confident this is one of those moments, given the fact that it’s already pretty clear which side Republicans fall on and which side Democrats fall on.My main recommendation is for Democrats to go out and run on this issue, proudly and strongly. My worry is we would have a vote on the Senate floor, but then Democrats would not be willing to go out and talk about that vote in campaigns.The only way we actually change the dynamic on this issue is to make Republicans show we believe this is a winning electoral issue. That’s what we did in 2018. My worry is, we don’t feel the same confidence in this issue as a winning electoral issue in 2022.I don’t know why we don’t learn a lesson from 2018, that when we run strongly on the issue of guns, universal background checks, banning assault weapons, we turn out voters that otherwise would stay home in the midterms. I’ve talked to Senator Schumer about bringing a vote to the Senate floor. I’m not interested in taking a vote on the Senate floor if we don’t talk about it.If legislation can’t pass, what executive actions are you pushing the administration to take?There is still a ton of harmful gray area around the question of who needs to be a licensed gun dealer. There are a lot of folks peddling guns online and at gun shows who are truly in the business of selling guns, and should be required to do background checks. President Obama put out helpful, but not binding, guidance. The administration could put some real meat on the existing statute and define what it means to be in the business of selling guns.Have you pitched that to them?I have. There has been significant interest from the White House in pursuing that line of policy. I don’t know that they have made a commitment or issued any directive to the Justice Department.Do you support eliminating the filibuster in order to pass gun reforms?One hundred percent. The reason we can’t get this done is the rules of the Senate, not because the American people haven’t made a choice.Guns were one of the most important issues for voters in 2018; it ranked second behind health care. When voters came to the polls in 2018 and elected a Democratic majority in the House, it was with the explicit purpose of getting gun legislation passed. The same voters came back and elected a Democratic president. It’s simply the rules of the Senate that stopped the will of the American people from becoming law.Is there anything happening in terms of discussions with Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, about trying to revive their bill to tighten background checks?There’s nothing new happening now. Manchin-Toomey doesn’t have 60 votes. I spent much of the last two years trying to find a piece of Manchin-Toomey that could get 60 votes. Ultimately, we couldn’t find a landing place. I’ll continue to try any creative avenue to find an expansion of background checks.Does a weakened National Rifle Association create any opening for Republicans to move off their opposition to gun safety measures?This N.R.A. stamp of approval still really matters to them. Inside a Republican Party that has become bereft of big ideas, they’ve only got one left, which is the destruction of government. Nothing signals that more than the endorsement of the organization that supports people arming themselves against the government. In this era of anti-government fervor, it’s more important than ever.Eventually, we have to figure out a way for Republicans to show how much they hate government other than the N.R.A. endorsement. Maybe I should be rooting for the Club for Growth to be a more effective voice within the Republican Party.Can guns really be a winning issue for Democrats in a year when Republicans are attacking your party over inflation, rising gas prices and not meeting the basic needs of American families?I think voters are emotionally moved by the slaughter of innocents. And I think they find it a little weird when Democrats who claim to care about this don’t actually talk about it.We live in an era where authenticity is the coin of the realm. You just have to show voters who you are. I don’t think there’s any more potent means by which to translate who you are, and what you care about, than this issue. I think when you leave this out when you list your priorities as a candidate, it causes voters to scratch their heads a bit.What grade would you give the Biden administration on this issue?The administration could have moved faster on executive actions and the appointment of a new A.T.F. director. I want them to keep going. There’s still more regulatory and executive action that this administration can take and more things the team can do to use the bully pulpit to make sure this is an election issue.Would you give the administration a grade?No.A number of gun violence prevention organizations have called on Mr. Biden to open a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Do you think that would make a difference?I do. It’s become clear to me we need a specific, driving focus on gun violence. The president is clearly personally committed to this issue, but he’s stretched thin due to myriad international and domestic crises. He would be best served by a high-level senior official who wakes up every day and coordinates the issue.After another mass shooting like the one in Buffalo, do you find yourself becoming resigned to the idea that nothing can be done on gun violence?I’ve studied enough great social change movements to know they often take decades to succeed. It was a full 10 years from the shooting of James Brady to the passage of the Brady handgun bill. I think I am part of one of these great social change movements, and I’m confident that you have to put up with a lot of failures before you’re met with success.I also don’t think democracy can allow for 80 percent of the American people to not get their way, forever. Eventually we will be able to break through. We just have not been able to find that pathway yet.This is an exhausting issue to work on, but I have this very deep sense that I will see my time in public service as a failure if I don’t meet the expectations of those parents in Sandy Hook, and Hartford and Bridgeport. And fear is a powerful motivator. More
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How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland
LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”To state the obvious: This is not what political speech in Nebraska used to sound like.Mr. Herbster is challenging the allegations of eight women that he groped them.Mary Anne AndreiFor half a century, from 1959 to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, my home state, the state near the geographical middle of the country, prided itself on being politically centrist as well. Over that span, it elected four Democrats and three Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We had six Republican governors and five Democratic. The congressional delegations were predominately Republican, but Omaha and Lincoln elected Democrats as their mayors more often than not. The Nebraska Legislature remains officially nonpartisan, and as the country’s only unicameral legislature, it forced lawmakers for many years to engage in a politics of pragmatism.Now, Nebraska is so unfailingly Republican that the party’s primaries most often determine the outcomes of statewide races. How did the state become so right wing and devoted to Mr. Trump?Part of the answer is that Nebraska’s Democrats of a generation ago were never very liberal. They were usually socially moderate, pro-business, pro-military white guys, making them all but indistinguishable from old-line, Chamber of Commerce Republicans from the coasts. Senator Edward Zorinsky aggressively advocated military aid for Nicaragua during the Carter years. Senator Bob Kerrey voted for NAFTA. Senator Ben Nelson cast his vote in favor of Obamacare only after Senator Harry Reid promised him tens of millions in federal funding for Nebraska that came to be known as the Cornhusker Kickback.But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were middle of the road. Even our Republican senators were sometimes so moderate that you could barely distinguish them from centrist Democrats. Chuck Hagel, for example, was a two-term Republican senator during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies but later was Mr. Obama’s secretary of defense. Likewise, our Republican governors were fiscally and socially conservative, but they generally avoided the culture wars.Mr. Herbster told the crowd in Wahoo that that era is over. “This isn’t the good-old Dave Heineman days. This isn’t the good-old Charles Thone days. This isn’t the good-old Exon days,” he said, invoking the names of three centrist Nebraska governors, including J. James Exon, a Democrat who won over many Republicans by opposing tax increases and gay rights during the Carter administration.For half a century, Nebraska was politically centrist. According to Mr. Herbster, that era is over.Mary Anne AndreiIn Nebraska — as in the rest of the country — the polarization seemed to hasten about the time that Mr. Obama won the presidency. To be sure, much of the hardening against the Democratic Party specifically and ideals of tolerance and diversity more generally can be attributed to an unholy stew of angry commentary on Fox News, algorithmic political siloing on Facebook and the subsuming of Nebraska’s independent newspapers and television stations by Lee Enterprises and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.First, now cash-poor, the committee began to spend more selectively. In Nebraska, the monthly allotment went from $25,000 to $2,500. That 90 percent cut in party funding, Ms. Kleeb said, meant that Republican talking points often went unchallenged. “You’re not doing any organizing,” she said, “not because you don’t want to, not because you don’t know how to organize or create good messages, but because you don’t have the money to do it.”Second, Democrats were forced to push hard for bipartisan support on key issues, which often further muddled their messaging. Left-leaning state senators in Nebraska, for example, joined with conservative senators to ban the death penalty in 2015. (A subsequent ballot measure restored it.) In 2016 and 2017, the progressive environmentalist and pro-small-farm group Nebraska Communities United fought against the construction of a massive poultry-processing plant on the flood plain of the Lower Platte River by partnering with a local group that was afraid the plant would be staffed by Black Muslim immigrants from Somalia. Ms. Kleeb herself, when she was the director of Bold Nebraska, one of those progressive groups, helped to block the Keystone XL pipeline not by talking about its climate impact but by joining with conservative ranchers who were outraged that the power of eminent domain had been granted to a foreign corporation. The problem with that strategy over time, Ms. Kleeb acknowledges now, is that voters often walked away confused. “They don’t even know where the Democratic Party stands,” she said.Without a Democratic counterbalance, Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska, so candidates are pulled further and further to the right in order to appease and appeal to an increasingly radical and angry base. In this year’s governor’s race, for example, Mr. Herbster’s top competitor, Jim Pillen, would seem to check all of the appropriate boxes for a Republican nominee in Nebraska. He’s endorsed by the current governor, Pete Ricketts. He is one of the largest hog producers in the country. He even played football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers during the glory years under Tom Osborne, who later represented Nebraska’s Third Congressional District.But as Mr. Herbster’s poll numbers have surged, Mr. Pillen has veered to the right, attacking “liberal professor groups” (though he is a member and former chair of the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents) and running TV ads with an endorsement from the comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Last week, he posted on Twitter that he was the “only candidate to take action against CRT,” the “only candidate willing to fight the radical transgender agenda” and the “only candidate willing to call abortion what it is — murder.” (A third major candidate, Brett Lindstrom, has struck a less strident tone but holds many of the same beliefs.)Donald Trump praised Mr. Herbster at a rally in Greenwood, Neb., on May 1.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesThe crowd where Mr. Trump spoke.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesEven with that hard-line rhetoric, it will be hard for Mr. Pillen to beat Mr. Herbster’s direct endorsement from Mr. Trump. Thursday night, after the tables and chairs had been put away at the Starlite Event Center, the Herbster campaign hosted a call-in “telerally” with Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Trump praised the businessman as “a die-hard MAGA champ” and guaranteed that Mr. Herbster would “never bend to the RINOs” — Republicans in name only — like “Little Ben Sasse,” Nebraska’s junior senator, and Representative Don Bacon, whom Mr. Trump derided as “another beauty.” During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Sasse voted with him 85 percent of the time. Mr. Bacon voted with him 89 percent of the time. But Mr. Trump has considered both to be insufficiently loyal to him personally, and their political futures may be in jeopardy as a result. If so, they will be replaced by politicians who are more brazen in their contempt for the Democratic Party and for democratic ideals. That’s why the outcome of Nebraska’s Republican governor’s primary is almost immaterial.Yes, whoever emerges with the nomination will most likely become the next governor. And it would appear that Mr. Herbster retains the inside track, thanks to Mr. Trump — just as the former president has buoyed Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker to the top of their primary Senate races in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lifted J.D. Vance from a packed Republican field in the Senate primary in Ohio. But it doesn’t matter whether these candidates actually win or not, because their conspiratorial and inflammatory rhetoric has overtaken the discourse, pushing all Republican candidates further and further toward the fringe. Regardless of how the final balloting turns out in Nebraska on Tuesday, the real victor will be Donald Trump.Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesTed Genoways (@TedGenoways) is the author, most recently, of “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm.” Starting this fall, he will be a president’s professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.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
