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    Kari Lake Won’t Pledge to Accept Election Results, and More News From the Sunday Shows

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    Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, refused on Sunday to commit to accepting the results of her election, using much of the same language that former President Donald J. Trump did when he was a candidate.“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”The host, Dana Bash, then asked, “If you lose, will you accept that?” Ms. Lake, who is running against Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, responded by repeating, “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result.”“The people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs,” she added, setting up a framework in which, if Ms. Hobbs were to win, Ms. Lake could present the result as evidence of election fraud. That is one of the arguments Mr. Trump made, suggesting that the 2020 election must have been fraudulent because the idea of President Biden receiving majority support was unbelievable.Four years earlier, in 2016, Mr. Trump told supporters, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win.”In the interview on Sunday, Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor, continued to embrace Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen and said, “The real issue, Dana, is that the people don’t trust our elections.”This is a common argument among Republicans, many of whom have stoked public distrust in elections and then used that distrust to justify restrictions on voting. Ms. Lake said the distrust dated back more than two decades, citing the 2000 presidential election dispute and Democrats’ claims of irregularities in 2004 and 2016, even though the Democratic candidates conceded and there were no extrajudicial efforts to overturn the results.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Here is what else happened on the Sunday morning talk shows.Lake and Hobbs discussed inflation.Before the exchange about elections, Ms. Lake talked about the topics that dominate campaigns when democracy is not at issue — as did Ms. Hobbs in a separate interview on CNN.Ms. Lake said she would address the impacts of inflation by eliminating Arizona’s taxes on rent and groceries and using the state’s general fund to replace lost revenue for local governments. Ms. Hobbs said she would provide child care assistance and a tax credit for career and technical education and try to increase housing construction to lower home prices.Ms. Hobbs also reiterated her support for abortion rights. When asked if she supported “any legal limits” on abortion, she did not endorse any, noting that abortions late in pregnancy were very rare and saying, “Politicians don’t belong in those decisions.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Ms. Lake, who has campaigned on promises of an immigration crackdown, was asked whether she believed the United States had a responsibility to accept asylum seekers fleeing political violence.“We have a great legal immigration system, a very generous legal immigration system. But we can’t afford to take on the world’s problems right now when so many Americans are struggling, so many Arizonans are struggling,” Ms. Lake said. She also said that many asylum applications were fraudulent.Evan McMullin said he wouldn’t join either party.Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, is posing an unexpectedly strong challenge to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, though Mr. Lee is still favored. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. McMullin said unequivocally that he would not caucus with either party, even if his affiliation made the difference between a Democratic or Republican majority.Mr. McMullin, who also ran for president as an independent in 2016, said that his campaign was building a “coalition” of support across party lines and that he had made a commitment to that coalition to “maintain my independence.”The host, Chuck Todd, pressed him multiple times, first asking whether that commitment would extend through all six years of a Senate term and then asking twice whether his thinking would change if party control were on the line. His responses were consistent.“I will not caucus with Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “I’m going to maintain my independence because I think our country needs that, and certainly our state needs that. I’ve made that commitment, and for party bosses and others in Washington, they’re going to have to figure out what this means for them.”He argued that having an independent senator would give Utah more influence.“With Senator Lee, we get none of that,” he said. “He sits on his hands until it’s time to vote no, and then he goes and complains about our country on cable news, and I’m just not going to do that.”Mr. McMullin said that he would not have voted for the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act “as written” but that he supported parts of it, including allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. He would not say whether he would support federal legislation on abortion, saying only that he opposed bans without exceptions for rape and incest and supported increasing access to contraception.The Colorado Senate candidates made their cases.Senator Michael Bennet and his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea, were interviewed back-to-back on CNN.The main topic was inflation, for which Mr. O’Dea blamed the $1.9 trillion pandemic stimulus package passed in March 2021 and the Biden administration’s energy policies. Mr. Bennet, a Democrat, blamed “broken global supply chains” and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (The causes of inflation — which is happening all over the world — are complex, and multiple factors are driving it.)Mr. Bennet said he believed the Inflation Reduction Act would live up to its name once its provisions kick in fully next year. He emphasized the billions of dollars it includes for clean energy development, arguing that the funding would allow the country to “increase our energy independence and our economic strength and reduce emissions” at the same time.Mr. O’Dea called for loosening the permitting process for new energy projects, naming natural gas alongside renewable energy but, notably, not mentioning oil or coal. “It’ll cause the price to come down, inflation will go away — that’s how you do it,” he said.Mr. O’Dea also said, as he has before, that he did not want Mr. Trump to run for president again and would “actively campaign against” him in a Republican primary; he named Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott as candidates he could support instead. He did not say what he would do in the general election if Mr. Trump won the primary.In case you missed it …Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Together, they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party and a potential threat to American democracy.In Oregon’s wild governor’s race, an independent candidate is siphoning Democratic votes and Phil Knight, the billionaire Nike co-founder, is pouring in money, giving an anti-abortion Republican a path to victory.A new breed of veterans is running for the House on the far right, challenging assumptions that adding veterans to Congress would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. More

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      Which Midterm Polls Should We Be Taking With a Grain of Salt?

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, to discuss the state of polling and of Democratic anxiety about polls ahead of the midterms.Frank Bruni: Amy, Patrick, as if the people over at Politico knew that the three of us would be huddling to discuss polling, it just published a long article about the midterms with the gloomy, spooky headline “Pollsters Fear They’re Blowing It Again in 2022.”Do you two fear that pollsters are blowing it again in 2022?Patrick Ruffini: It’s certainly possible that they could. The best evidence we have so far that something might be afoot comes from The Times’s own Nate Cohn, who finds that some of the Democratic overperformances seem to be coming in states that saw large polling errors in 2016 and 2020.Amy Walter: I do worry that we are asking more from polling than it is able to provide. Many competitive Senate races are in states — like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that Joe Biden won by supernarrow margins in 2020. The reality is that they are going to be very close again. And so an error of just three to four points is the difference between Democratic and Republican control of the Senate.Ruffini: This also doesn’t mean we can predict that polls will miss in any given direction. But it does suggest taking polls in states like Ohio, which Donald Trump won comfortably but where the Republican J.D. Vance is tied or slightly behind, with a grain of salt.Bruni: So what would you say specifically to Democrats? Are they getting their hopes up — again — in a reckless fashion?Walter: Democrats are definitely suffering from political PTSD. After 2016 and 2020, I don’t think Democrats are getting their hopes up. In fact, the ones I talk with are hoping for the best but not expecting such.Ruffini: In any election, you have the polls themselves, and then you have the polls as filtered through the partisan media environment. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. On Twitter, there’s a huge incentive to hype individual polling results that are good for your side while ignoring the average. I don’t expect this to let up, because maintaining this hype is important for low-dollar fund-raising. But I do think this has led to a perhaps exaggerated sense of Democratic optimism.Bruni: Great point, Patrick — in these fractured and hyperpartisan times of information curation, polls aren’t so much sets of numbers as they are Rorschachs.But I want to pick up on something else that you said — “polls will miss in any given direction” — to ask why the worry seems only to be about overstatement of Democratic support and prospects. Is it possible that the error could be in the other direction and we are understating Republican problems and worries?Ruffini: In politics, we always tend to fight the last war. Historically, polling misses have been pretty random, happening about equally on both sides. But the last big example of them missing in a pro-Republican direction was 2012. The more recent examples stick in our minds, 2020 specifically, which was actually worse in percentage terms than 2016.Walter: Patrick’s point about the last war is so important. This is especially true when we are living in a time when we have little overlap with people from different political tribes. The two sides have very little appreciation for what motivates, interests or worries the other side, so the two sides over- or underestimate each other a lot.As our politics continue to break along educational attainment — those who have a college degree are increasingly more Democratic-leaning, those with less education increasingly more Republican-leaning — polls are likely to overstate the Democratic advantage, since we know that there’s a really clear connection between civic voting behavior and education levels.Ruffini: And we may be missing a certain kind of Trump voter, who may not be answering polls out of a distrust for the media, polling and institutions generally.Bruni: Regarding 2016 and 2020, Trump was on the ballot both of those years. He’s not — um, technically — this time around. So is there a greater possibility of accuracy, of a repeat of 2018, when polling came closer to the mark?Ruffini: The frustrating thing about all of this is that we just don’t have a very good sample size to answer this. In polls, that’s called an n size, like n = 1,000 registered voters. There have been n = 2 elections where Trump has been on the ballot and n = 1 midterm election in the Trump era. That’s not a lot.Bruni: We’ve mentioned 2016 and 2020 versus 2018. Are there reasons to believe that none of those points of reference are all that illuminating — that 2022 is entirely its own cat, with its own inimitable wrinkles? There are cats that have wrinkles, right? I’m a dog guy, but I feel certain that I’ve seen shar-pei-style cats in pictures.Walter: First, let’s be clear. Dogs are the best. So let’s change this to “Is this an entirely different breed?”I’m a big believer in the aphorism that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.Ruffini: Right. Every election is different, and seeing each new election through the lens of the previous election is usually a bad analytical strategy.Walter: But there are important fundamentals that can’t be dismissed. Midterms are about the party in charge. It is hard to make a midterm election about the out-party — the party not in charge — especially when Democrats control not just the White House but the House and Senate as well.However, the combination of overturning Roe v. Wade plus the ubiquitous presence of Trump has indeed made the out-party — the G.O.P. — a key element of this election. To me, the question is whether that focus on the stuff the Republicans are doing and have done is enough to counter frustration with the Democrats.Ruffini: 2022 is unique in that it’s a midterm cycle where both sides have reasons to be energized — Republicans by running against an unpopular president in a time of high economic uncertainty and Democrats by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. It’s really unique in the sweep of midterm elections historically. To the extent there is still an energized Republican base, polls could miss if they aren’t capturing this new kind of non-college, low-turnout voter that Trump brought into the process.Bruni: Patrick, this one’s for you, as you’re the one among us who’s actually in the polling business. In the context of Amy’s terrific observation about education levels and the Democratic Party and who’s more readily responsive to pollsters, what are you and what is your firm doing to make sure you reach and sample enough Republican and Trump-inclined voters?Ruffini: That’s a great question. Nearly all of our polls are off the voter file, which means we have a much larger set of variables — like voting history and partisan primary participation — to weight on than you might typically see in a media poll (with the exception of the Times/Siena polls, which do a great job in this regard). We’ve developed targets for the right number of college or non-college voters among likely voters in each congressional district. We’re also making sure that our samples have the right proportions of people who have registered with either party or have participated in a specific party’s primary before.But none of this is a silver bullet. After 2016, pollsters figured out we needed to weight on education. In 2020 we weighted on education — and we got a worse polling error. All the correct weighting decisions won’t matter if the non-college or low-turnout voter you’re getting to take surveys isn’t representative of those people who will actually show up to vote.Bruni: Does the taking of polls and the reporting on polls and the consciousness of polls inevitably queer what would have happened in their absence? I will go to my grave believing that if so many voters hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton had victory in the bag, she would have won. Some 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the margin of her Electoral College loss — are easily accounted for by overconfident, complacent Clinton supporters.Walter: In 2016, there were two key groups of people that determined the election. Those who never liked Clinton and those who disliked Trump and Clinton equally. At the end, those who disliked both equally broke overwhelmingly for Trump. And, those Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t like her at all were never fully convinced that she was a worthy candidate.Ruffini: I don’t worry about this too much since the people most likely to be paying attention to the daily movement of the polls are people who are 100 percent sure to vote. It can also work in the other direction. If the polls are showing a race in a red or blue state is close, that can motivate a majority of the party’s voters to get out and vote, and that might be why close races in those states usually resolve to the state fundamentals.Bruni: Evaluate the news media in all of this, and be brutal if you like. For as long as I’ve been a reporter, I’ve listened to news leaders say our political coverage should be less attentive to polls. It remains plenty attentive to polls. Should we reform? Is there any hope of that? Does it matter?Ruffini: I don’t think there’s any hope of this getting better, and that’s not the media’s fault. It’s the fault of readers (sorry, readers!) who have an insatiable appetite for staring at the scoreboard.Walter: We do pay too much attention to polls, but polls are the tool we have to capture the opinions of an incredibly diverse society. A reporter could go knock on 3,000 doors and miss a lot because they weren’t able to get the kind of cross-section of voters a poll does.Ruffini: Where I do hope the media gets better is in conducting more polls the way campaigns conduct them, which are not mostly about who is winning but showing a candidate how to win.In those polls, we test the impact of messages on the electorate and show how their standing moved as a result. It’s possible to do this in a balanced way, and it would be illuminating for readers to see, starting with “Here’s where the race stands today, but here’s the impact of this Democratic attack or this Republican response,” etc.Bruni: Let’s finish with a lightning round. Please answer these quickly and in a sentence or less, starting with this: Which issue will ultimately have greater effect, even if just by a bit, in the outcome of the midterms — abortion or gas prices?Walter: Abortion. Only because gas prices are linked to overall economic worries.Ruffini: Gas prices, because they’re a microcosm about concerns about inflation. When we asked voters a head-to-head about what’s more important to their vote, reducing inflation comes out ahead of protecting abortion rights by 67 to 29 percent.Bruni: Which of the competitive Senate races will have an outcome that’s most tightly tethered to — and thus most indicative of — the country’s mood and leanings right now?Walter: Arizona and Georgia were the two closest races for Senate and president in 2020. They should both be indicative. But Georgia is much closer because the G.O.P. candidate, Herschel Walker, while he’s still got some problems, has much less baggage and much better name recognition than the G.O.P. candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.Ruffini: If Republicans are going to flip the Senate, Georgia is most likely to be the tipping-point state.Bruni: If there’s a Senate upset, which race is it? Who’s the unpredicted victor?Walter: For Republicans, it would be Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. They’ve argued that the incumbent, Senator Maggie Hassan, has low approval ratings and is very weak. It would be an upset because Bolduc is a flawed candidate with very little money or history of strong fund-raising.Ruffini: I’d agree about New Hampshire. The polling has shown a single-digit race. Republicans are also hoping they can execute a bit of a sneak attack in Colorado with Joe O’Dea, though the state fundamentals look more challenging.Bruni: You (hypothetically) have to place a bet with serious money on the line. Is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or “other”?Walter: It’s always a safer bet to pick “other.” One of the most difficult things to do in politics is what DeSantis is trying to do: not just to upend someone like Trump but to remain a front-runner for another year-plus.Ruffini: I’d place some money on DeSantis and some on “other.” DeSantis is in a strong position right now, relative to the other non-Trumps, but he hasn’t taken many punches. And Trump’s position is soft for a former president who’s supposedly loved by the base and who has remained in the fray. Time has not been his friend. About as many Republicans in the ABC/Washington Post poll this weekend said they didn’t want him to run as did.Bruni: Same deal with the Democratic presidential nominee — but don’t be safe. Live large. To the daredevil go the spoils. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or “other”?Walter: History tells us that Biden will run. If he doesn’t, history tells us that it will be Harris. But I feel very uncomfortable with either answer right now.Ruffini: “Other.” Our own polling shows Biden in a weaker position for renomination than Trump and Democrats less sure about who the alternative would be if he doesn’t run. I also think we’re underestimating the possibility that he doesn’t run at the age of 81.Bruni: OK, final question. Name a politician, on either side of the aisle, who has not yet been mentioned in our conversation but whose future is much brighter than most people realize.Walter: If you talk to Republicans, Representative Patrick McHenry is someone they see as perhaps the next leader for the party. There’s a lot of focus on Kevin McCarthy now, but many people see McHenry as a speaker in waiting.Ruffini: He’s stayed out of the presidential conversation (probably wisely until Trump has passed from the scene), but I think Dan Crenshaw remains an enormously compelling future leader for the G.O.P. Also in Texas, should we see Republicans capitalize on their gains with Hispanic voters and take at least one seat in the Rio Grande Valley, one of those candidates — Mayra Flores, Monica De La Cruz or Cassy Garcia — will easily be in the conversation for statewide office.Bruni: Thank you, both. I just took a poll, and 90 percent of respondents said they’d want to read your thoughts at twice this length. Then again, the margin of error was plus or minus 50 percent, and I’m not sure I sampled enough rural voters in the West.Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) is a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter and can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) is a co-founder of the Republican research firm Echelon Insights. Amy Walter (@amyewalter) is the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report.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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      The Wives of Republican Candidates Are Getting Personal

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      Ready or not, here come the political wives.It’s that time in the campaign cycle when many nominees, especially those running for statewide office, shift from stirring up their base to making themselves more palatable to the general electorate.This year, the Republican Party is under particular pressure to slap a friendly face on its nominees, with a special focus on wooing women. Abortion has exploded as the midterms’ X factor, thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling that women do not have a right to bodily autonomy coupled with a push by many conservative lawmakers to slash abortion access.This has ticked off an awful lot of women and is threatening earlier expectations of a G.O.P. electoral romp. Republicans are “getting killed among women,” Chuck Coughlin, a party strategist based in Arizona, recently lamented to Politico. Shifting polling data and surging voter registration among women in some states has a growing number of campaigns racing to moderate their nominees’ positions and soften their images.Cue the emergence of gauzy campaign ads starring the wives of Republican Senate hopefuls getting personal about their hubbies, several recently spotlighted by Politico.Take Ohio, where J.D. Vance’s first ad of the general election season features his wife, Usha, sharing tender bits about his youth: “His mom struggled with addiction. And his dad wasn’t there. But J.D. was lucky. He was raised by his loving grandmother.” And now, Ms. Vance swoons, “He’s an incredible father, and he’s my best friend.”Similarly, in Nevada, the introductory general election ad for Adam Laxalt shows the nominee and his wife, Jaime, snuggling on a sofa and relating the challenges of his childhood: raised by a single mother without a college education, didn’t know who his father was … “Adam’s early life wasn’t easy,” says Ms. Laxalt, who assures us, “Everything he had to overcome helped to make him a good man.”In Colorado, Joe O’Dea has an ad out featuring his wife, Celeste, listing Mr. O’Dea’s underdog bona fides: “Adopted at birth. Union carpenter. Left college early. Started a construction company from our basement. Joe’s a fighter. Always has been.”And in Arizona, Blake Masters’s first general election ad shows his wife, Catherine, waxing rhapsodic about his desire to put an ailing America back on track. “He’s in it because he loves his country so much, and he loves his state so much,” she insists. “He would make Arizona so proud.”Gag.Political candidates using their wives — and it is still wives way more often than husbands — as campaign props is nothing new. Their kids too. Clips of the Vance and Masters wee ones frolicking with their respective dads appear in the aforementioned ads, and an earlier spot by Team O’Dea features the nominee’s adult daughter Tayler painting her dad as a moderate on social issues, including asserting that “he will defend a woman’s right to choose.” (Mr. O’Dea supports abortion access up to 20 weeks, and beyond that in certain circumstances.)American voters tend to fetishize “authenticity” in their political candidates. And who better to give voters a sense of the real person behind the political mask than his family — most especially his devoted life partner? “I know a different side of him, and I just wanted to share that with people,” Ms. Vance explained in a recent interview the couple did with Newsmax. On some deep, even subconscious, level we are expected to absorb the message: If the candidate’s wife — and the mother of his children — thinks he’s a good guy, then it must be so.Spare me. The notion that there is some meaningful insight about a candidate to be had from his spouse praising him in ads or defending him in interviews or simply appearing at his campaign events is weak at best. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s wife, Casey, may genuinely believe he’s the cat’s pajamas; that doesn’t change the guy’s disturbing authoritarian Trumpiness. Just because Heidi Cruz sticks with him does not make Senator Ted Cruz any less of a smirking, self-righteous, sedulously opportunistic jerk. Melania Trump’s willingness to put up with Donald’s vileness tells us far more about her than him. And the less said about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s tortured codependence, the better.Let us set aside for the moment the enduring, and enduringly tiresome, political impulse to reduce even the most accomplished women to cheerleaders for their husbands’ domestic gifts. In the current political moment, this gimmick is not only trite but also distracting — and insulting to female voters.Mr. Masters may well be the World’s Greatest Dad. That does not change the fact that until recently he was proudly declaring his extreme anti-abortion positions, including support for a federal personhood law. (Post-primary, of course, his website has been scrubbed of this info, and he is fast moderating his rhetoric to meet the moment.)Mr. Vance may take out the trash without fail and read bedtime stories with exceptional panache. Or not. Either way, he has likened abortion to slavery and has pooh-poohed the need for exceptions in cases of rape or incest. (“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he has glibly declared.)Even candidates like Celeste O’Dea’s husband, who have staked out a more nuanced stance on abortion, are still running with the backing of a party looking to strip away women’s reproductive rights.Of course, some Republican political wives aren’t as interested in softening their boos’ positions as in giving them a feminine spin. At a rally last month in Pittsburgh, Rebecca Mastriano, whose husband, Doug, is running hard to the right in his quest to become Pennsylvania’s governor, had much to say about the G.O.P. and women’s rights. She started with abortion — “First, we believe in protecting the woman’s right to be born” — before wending her way through issues including a woman’s right to control her child’s education, to live in a safe community and to own a gun.For her big finish, she took a jab at trans issues, insisting that “a woman has the right to compete in sports not dominated by a man. And as Republicans we actually know how to define a woman, right?” She urged fellow travelers to boldly share this list of rights in the coming months, because “we’re not ashamed of what we believe in.”Maybe. But more and more, Republican nominees certainly seem, if not ashamed, then at least afraid of how their party’s beliefs might damage their election prospects. They are eager to change the subject and to convince women that they are not scary extremists — and several are looking to their wives for a big assist.Women who value the ability to control their own bodies should make clear at the polls that they are too smart to fall for this lazy whitewashing.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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      A Surprise Senate Race in Colorado: Michael Bennet and Joe O’Dea

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      GRANBY, Colo. — It was a bit tense for a groundbreaking ceremony.Against the striking backdrop of the enveloping Rocky Mountains, Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat seeking a third full term, symbolically shoveled dirt to start a $30 million Colorado River restoration project for which he had helped secure nearly half the funding.Watching from a respectable distance was Joe O’Dea, a Republican political novice who is trying to come out of nowhere to upset Mr. Bennet — and whose Denver construction company is coincidentally the lead contractor on the job. Their confluence on a recent Tuesday at the Windy Gap Reservoir in the heart of rugged Grand County had the crowd of environmentalists, government officials, ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts buzzing.Mr. Bennet eschewed a hard hat, aware of the risk of being photographed in ill-fitting headwear during a political campaign, à la Michael Dukakis. Mr. O’Dea donned a well-worn round-brimmed version and an orange construction vest. The two did not interact, but each had something to say about the other.Mr. Bennet noted his rival’s usual distaste for government spending, which the Republican has blamed for inflation.“I hear he hates federal spending, except for the $14 million that built this thing,” said the incumbent, who was a surprise appointee to a Senate vacancy in 2009 before winning election for the first time in a difficult environment the next year.Mr. O’Dea, standing near the heavy equipment his workers will employ to return a stretch of the imperiled river to its natural flow, was not impressed by the praise heaped upon Mr. Bennet by the assembled backers of the project.“That’s what politicians do,” Mr. O’Dea said, making clear that he did not consider himself part of that cohort. “I’m into building things, and we will do our job here.”Joe O’Dea, the Republican candidate, owns a construction company and is running as a political outsider.Rachel Woolf for The New York TimesColorado was not expected to be part of the Senate battleground landscape this year. While not yet in the solid blue column, the state has been trending Democratic, and Mr. Bennet seemed a good bet for another term as Republicans invested their resources in what they saw as riper opportunities elsewhere.Democrats sought to bolster Mr. Bennet’s chances through backdoor advertising on behalf of hard-right, MAGA-embracing candidates in the Republican primary who would most likely have been weaker adversaries with little chance of being embraced by the state’s unaffiliated voters, now the largest voting bloc in Colorado.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsEvidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is the latest example.Sensing a Shift: Democrats, once beaten down by the prospect of a brutal midterm election, are daring to dream that they can maintain control of Congress, but a daunting map may still cost them the House.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are signaling concern that the midterm sweep they anticipated is complicated by attention on former President Donald J. Trump’s legal exposure.Campaign Ads: In what critics say is a dangerous gamble, Democrats are elevating far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries, believing they’ll be easier to defeat in November. We analyzed the ads they’re using to do it.But Mr. O’Dea won the primary anyway, and while Mr. Bennet remains the favorite, the Cook Political Report recently shifted the contest from “Likely Democrat” to “Lean Democrat.” The Republican is threatening to make a race of it if he can increase his fund-raising and land his message that he is not a typical partisan politician.“As far as I’m concerned, any politician who votes for the party line is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Mr. O’Dea said after exchanging the orange vest for a sport coat for a speech before the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs. “The national parties have become vehicles to perpetuate power and promote discord. And I’m tired of it.”Mr. O’Dea has been a welcome relief for Senate Republicans who have seen their once-strong chances of retaking the Senate shrink with a field of problematic arch-conservatives struggling in what should a favorable midterm year. Mr. O’Dea has been willing to say that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election and that President Donald J. Trump did not and should not run again. In this cycle, that is enough to qualify a Republican as moderate.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who hopes to become the majority leader next year, has said he is “all in” on Mr. O’Dea. To Democrats, that is a big liability. They frame Mr. O’Dea as another potential foot soldier for Mr. McConnell and a conservative agenda, particularly on abortion rights, which have become a major issue in this race as well as other Senate contests across the country after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. More

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      Donald Trump’s Death Grip Has Upended the G.O.P. Senate Map

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      As today’s politicians go, Senator Michael Bennet is kind of boring. Ideologically moderate. Dispositionally low-key. Scandal-free. A sensible technocrat rather than a charismatic ideologue. Heck, when Mr. Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, ran for president in 2020, he joked that a perk of electing him would be that people could simply forget about him for days on end.It is a tribute to the weirdness of this political season, then, that Mr. Bennet’s re-election race is shaping up to be one of the midterms’ more interesting and illuminating contests. It isn’t considered a first-tier nail-biter like Georgia’s or Nevada’s, but it promises to be a more serious fight than many had anticipated in largely blue Colorado.Like Democratic candidates everywhere, Mr. Bennet had already been bracing for electoral headwinds having little to do with his job performance. Among the big-picture fundamentals working against his party are inflation, pandemic fatigue, President Biden’s unpopularity and a thermostatic electorate that, even in less surly times, tends to punish a first-term president’s team in the midterms.More recently, though, Mr. Bennet’s fortunes have been threatened because of trouble brewing on the Republican side. Specifically, this November’s Senate election map has grown more pear-shaped for the G.O.P. A mix of broad political developments (more on those in a minute) and weak nominees in key battlegrounds is making Republican leaders twitchy — they need a net gain of one seat to control the Senate — prompting them to look around for other places where they could flip Democratic-held seats. Colorado is one of those places. And so Mr. Bennet finds himself navigating the unpredictable crosscurrents roiling the national scene and making this election cycle unsettling for both parties.Things weren’t supposed to be this complicated. Cruising into the summer, Republicans were feeling feisty, their heads filled with visions of total congressional domination. But then the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade, firing up many, many women voters. Gas prices started creeping down. Congressional Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act (which is more about tackling climate change and the price of prescription drugs than reducing inflation, but why quibble?). The next thing you know, Democratic voters are feeling more motivated to go to the polls, shrinking the so-called enthusiasm gap between the parties.Now layer onto this a G.O.P. roster of not-so-sparkling Senate nominees — for which Republicans overwhelmingly have a certain ex-president to thank.In some cases, Donald Trump’s death grip on his party hurt efforts to recruit broadly appealing candidates. The most notable failures were in New Hampshire and Arizona, where the states’ Republican governors declined to debase themselves in the manner required to woo the Trump-addled base in Senate runs.Worse, the primary process — in which Mr. Trump meddled heavily — served up multiple nominees of questionable experience, appeal or basic competence.Take Blake Masters, Mr. Trump’s man in Arizona. A darling of the hard right, Mr. Masters has a tendency to do things like blame Black people for America’s gun violence and accuse Democrats of trying to change “the demographics of our country” by flooding it with immigrants. (For a really wild ride, check out his online musings circa 2007.) Playing footsie with racists and replacement-theory nutters may delight many in the MAGAverse, but it feels a little edgy for a purple state like Arizona.In Pennsylvania, the Trump-approved Dr. Oz is getting pantsed pretty much every week for being a rich, out-of-touch celebrity carpetbagger. (Crudité, anyone?) In Ohio, J.D. Vance has so far run such a nothingburger of a campaign that one could be excused for forgetting that he is the nominee. And, lordy, what is there to say about Herschel Walker in Georgia? Come for the abuse allegations and incoherent babbling. Stay for the candidate’s fountain of fabrications about his academic achievements and business record.Recent polling shows Dr. Oz, Mr. Masters and Mr. Walker trailing their Democratic opponents. A couple of public polls show Mr. Vance with a strikingly narrow lead in solidly red Ohio, while FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has him one point behind. Also lagging is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who lost his soul — and his grip on reality — to Trumpism and has spent the past couple of years as the Senate’s foremost conspiracymonger.Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sounds less smug than usual, recently noting that flipping the chamber could prove challenging, in part, because of “candidate quality.”It’s hard to think of a defeated president who has taken a more aggressive role in undermining his party’s electoral edge. Well played, sir.In the midst of this Trump-fueled chaos, Colorado has caught Republicans’ eye. In a departure from the cycle’s norm, Republicans there chose a Senate nominee who isn’t a MAGA wing nut: Joe O’Dea, a self-made construction magnate. By the standards of today’s G.O.P., his politics are moderate, and he has little patience for Mr. Trump’s shenanigans. Mr. O’Dea has rejected the election-denial insanity and said he hopes Mr. Trump does not run again in 2024. Mr. O’Dea is pitching himself as a political outsider above rank partisanship.This is precisely the kind of challenger that Democrats did not want to be facing — and fought to avoid. As they did in multiple states, Democrats tried to manipulate Colorado’s Republican primary, in this case spending millions to paint Mr. O’Dea as a wishy-washy RINO. The presumed aim was to drive conservative voters into the arms of a more MAGAfied candidate who, Democrats figured, would be easier to beat in a general election.Whatever your views on the overall strategy, it flopped in Colorado. And Mr. Bennet is now saddled with a Republican opponent whom members of his own party worked to brand as a reasonable moderate.Eager to redefine Mr. O’Dea, Team Bennet is turning to the hot topic of abortion, hitting the Republican as an enemy of reproductive rights. This brings its own challenges, since Mr. O’Dea says he supports abortion access up to 20 weeks and beyond that under extenuating circumstances. Team Bennet is stressing that Mr. O’Dea would have voted to confirm the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe and is clearly looking for the post-Roe energy to drive voters away from the G.O.P. in general.Suddenly, even the most cautious Democrats are aspiring culture warriors.Election Day is still a political eternity away, and it’s tough to know how seriously Republicans will wind up playing in Colorado. Last month at a Washington, D.C., fund-raiser for Mr. O’Dea, Mr. McConnell pledged to go “all in” on the Colorado race. In early August the National Republican Senatorial Committee threw a bit of money into advertising there — a modest quarter million but enough to serve as a warning shot. In mid-August the race got shifted from “likely Democrat” to “leans Democrat” by the handicappers at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.Colorado is still Colorado. And Mr. O’Dea is still the underdog. But Mr. Bennet and his party have been put on notice not to take this race for granted. In this highly fluid political moment, not even solid, inoffensive incumbents are safe.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