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      J.D. Vance’s First Attempt to Renew Ohio Crumbled Quickly

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      In 2017, the Republican candidate for Senate started a nonprofit group to tackle the social ills he had written about in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir. It fell apart within two years.J.D. Vance was not running for office. He said it irked him when people assumed that. Instead, in 2017, he said he had come back to Ohio to start a nonprofit organization.Mr. Vance gave that organization a lofty name — Our Ohio Renewal — and an even loftier mission: to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” He said it would dispense with empty talk and get to work fighting Ohio’s toughest problems: opioids, joblessness and broken families.“I actually care about solving some of these things,” Mr. Vance said.Within two years, it had fizzled.Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. (Mr. Vance also started a sister charity, which paid for a psychiatrist to spend a year in a small-town Ohio clinic. Then it shuttered, too.)Mr. Vance is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, running on a promise to tackle some of the same issues his defunct organization was supposed to have. On the campaign trail, he has said his group stalled because a key staff member was diagnosed with cancer.“I saw that Ohio lacked a focused effort on solving the opioid crisis, even while so many Ohioans’ lives were devastated by addiction, my own family and mother included,” Mr. Vance said in a written statement. “While the group only ended up lasting for a short period of time, I’m proud of the work we did.”But some of the nonprofit group’s own workers said they had drawn a different conclusion: They had been lured by the promise of helping Ohio, but instead had been used to help Mr. Vance start his career in politics.During its brief life, Mr. Vance’s organization paid a political consultant who also advised Mr. Vance about entering the 2018 Senate race. It paid an assistant who helped schedule Mr. Vance’s political speeches. And it paid for a survey of “Ohio citizens” that several of the staff members said they had never seen.The collapse of Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group was first reported last year in Insider. Now, Ohio Democrats use the group as an attack line. “J.D. Vance was in a position to really help people, but he only helped himself,” says an ad created by Mr. Vance’s opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan.The New York Times examined federal and state records and talked to most of the people connected to the tiny nonprofit organization. That included 10 people who served as employees, board members or outside advisers for Our Ohio Renewal.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Wisconsin Senate Race: Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate, is wobbling in his contest against Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent, as an onslaught of G.O.P. attack ads takes a toll.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.Mr. Vance started his group in November 2016, on the day after Donald J. Trump had won the presidency. At the time, Mr. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his troubled childhood in Ohio, was a surprise best seller. After Yale Law School and two years in Silicon Valley, Mr. Vance was returning to Ohio.A prayer in Norwalk, Ohio, in 2017 honoring those lost to opioid overdoses. Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesHe said his nonprofit group would seek to fix some of the social problems that he had described in his book.“I felt, you know, frankly a little bit of responsibility — now that I’ve been given this platform by the success of the book — to go and try to do at least a little something to help out,” Mr. Vance said in late 2016.His group was set up as a “social welfare organization” — called a 501(c)(4), after the relevant section of the federal tax code — that is allowed to do more political advocacy than a traditional charity. Politicians often treat these groups as a kind of incubator for their next campaigns, using them to attract donors, pay staff members and test out messages in between elections.Mr. Vance said his organization was not that. It was focused on something bigger. In its application for tax-exempt status, his group told the Internal Revenue Service it planned to increase its fund-raising to $500,000 a year by 2018 and to more than double its spending on personnel.In his statement to The Times, Mr. Vance said he had donated $80,000 of his own money to the nonprofit group, which was about a third of the $221,000 that it reported having raised over its lifetime. He declined to identify the group’s other donors.Mr. Vance said he did not take a salary. He did not have a formal leadership role but called himself “honorary chairman.”.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.“I won’t promise anything for now, besides this: I will work hard to find solutions to the opioid and joblessness problems, and when we identify workable solutions, we’ll do something about them,” he wrote to members of his advisory board in 2017. He signed off, “Looking forward to doing some good, JD.”Mr. Vance wanted to help grandparents, like his, who stepped in to raise children when parents were absent or unable. The task of figuring out how to do so fell to Jamil Jivani, a friend of Vance’s from Yale Law School who had been hired as the group’s director of law and policy. Mr. Jivani and two researchers paid by Ohio State University — where Mr. Vance was a “scholar in residence” in the political science department — spent months researching family law, looking for policies that could be changed.At the time, Mr. Vance was traveling for speeches, working for an investment firm and splitting his time between Ohio and Washington, where his wife and young son lived. Mr. Vance was largely absent from the nonprofit group’s offices, according to an employee at the organization, who asked not to be identified while describing the group’s inner workings. The person often studied in Mr. Vance’s spacious and frequently empty office on campus. “It was very quiet,” the person said.Another person who worked for the nonprofit group said that, in hindsight, it had seemed aimed at serving Mr. Vance’s ambition by giving him a presence in a state where he had not lived full-time for several years. The person said it had felt as if much of the job involved giving outsiders the impression that Mr. Vance was in the state, said the person, who asked not to be identified for fear of antagonizing Mr. Vance and his supporters.In November 2017, the group’s research produced a result: an op-ed in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. In that piece, Mr. Vance urged the Ohio Legislature to adopt a bill that would help “kinship caregivers” like his grandparents.Mr. Vance’s group did not make much of an impact in the effort to pass the bill, said former State Representative Jeff Rezabek, a Republican who sponsored it. The legislation stalled that year, although similar legislation eventually passed later, after Mr. Vance’s group had become largely inactive.At the same time, in 2017 and early 2018, Mr. Vance was gradually starting to do the thing that he had said he wouldn’t: politics. He spoke at G.O.P. Lincoln Day dinners around Ohio. He publicly flirted with running for the Senate as a Republican in 2018 — even, reportedly, commissioning a poll to see if his attacks on Trump would hold him back.“J.D. is giving serious consideration toward this, because there are very serious people asking him to run,” Mr. Vance’s political adviser, Jai Chabria, told CNN in early 2018.Mr. Chabria’s firm Mercury L.L.C. was paid $63,425 by Our Ohio Renewal for “management services” in 2017. Although the group listed him in official documents as its executive director, Mr. Chabria says, he was only a consultant for the nonprofit. Mr. Jivani, the director of law and policy, actually ran the group.“Someone needed to get the paperwork started to launch it, but I was never tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the organization,” Mr. Chabria wrote in an email to The Times.He said the nonprofit group had never paid him to advise Mr. Vance personally during that time. He did that for free.Our Ohio Renewal also paid a salary to Mr. Vance’s personal assistant, who scheduled Mr. Vance’s appearances at events including Republican gatherings. Mr. Chabria defended that practice, saying that Mr. Vance had often mentioned Our Ohio Renewal at those talks.The assistant managed Mr. Vance’s calendar because he was a “central part” of the organization, Mr. Chabria wrote in an email, adding that Mr. Vance “was making regular public appearances in the media and at events to promote the activities of the group.”Tax-law experts said that was most likely permissible, given the looser rules around this type of nonprofit group.Also in 2017, Our Ohio Renewal said in annual filings that it had paid an unnamed pollster $45,000 for a survey “on social, cultural and general welfare needs of Ohio citizens.”That survey was one of the most expensive things Our Ohio Renewal ever paid for. But several employees said they had never seen it. “I don’t have any recollection of a survey and don’t have a copy of one,” Jennifer Best, who was both the group’s accountant and the treasurer of its board, said in an email message.Mr. Chabria saw the survey, but he said he no longer had a copy to share. He said it had tested messages about Our Ohio Renewal’s work and “did not ask questions on any potential candidacy” by Mr. Vance himself.In February 2018, Mr. Jivani — the director of law and policy who ran Our Ohio Renewal day to day — was diagnosed with cancer.Jamil Jivani at his family’s home in Toronto in 2018 after his cancer diagnosis.Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesAfter that, Our Ohio Renewal seemed to freeze.It stopped tweeting. Its website trumpeted the same “Latest News” — a story from January 2018 — for nearly two years and then shut off, according to archived versions of the page (Ohio Democrats have taken over the group’s old domain and are using it to mock Mr. Vance). The group’s financial activity slowed sharply, and its bank account ran down to zero, according to Ms. Best, the treasurer.Finally, she told the Internal Revenue Service that the group was finished at the end of 2020.Mr. Jivani, whose cancer is now in remission, blames the group’s demise on his own bad luck.“As much as I wanted to, I could not take care of the day-to-day needs of this organization to help it scale,” he said.Mr. Vance did not respond to questions about why he had let the organization collapse after Mr. Jivani’s diagnosis.Now, Mr. Vance is in a tight Senate race, with Mr. Chabria as his chief strategist. In his most recent financial disclosures, Mr. Vance listed himself as “honorary chairman” of Our Ohio Renewal, even though it no longer existed. Under the time frame, he wrote, “Jan 2017 to present.” More

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      J.R. Majewski’s Claims About His Military Record Unravel Further

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      The political tailspin of J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate in northern Ohio, appears to be worsening one week after the Air Force said it could not corroborate his repeated claims that he served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that the Air Force demoted Mr. Majewski in September 2001 for driving drunk at Kadena Air Base in Japan. Mr. Majewski’s campaign had previously told the news organization that involvement in a “brawl” was the reason he could not re-enlist in the Air Force after his initial four years. The A.P. cited military records it had obtained since its initial reporting last week on Mr. Majewski’s inconsistencies about his service, including where he served.A campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Majewski, 42, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday about his demotion. In a statement to The A.P., Mr. Majewski acknowledged that he was punished for drunken driving, though he did not address why his campaign previously said his demotion was the result of a fight.“This mistake is now more than 20 years old,” Mr. Majewski said in the statement. “I’m sure we’ve all done something as young adults that we look back on and wonder, ‘What was I thinking?’ And I’m sure our parents and grandparents share these sentiments.”The drip of revelations has sent Mr. Majewski, who has been heralded by former President Donald J. Trump, into damage-control mode.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Sensing a Shift: As November approaches, there are a few signs that the political winds may have begun to blow in a different direction — one that might help Republicans over the final stretch.Focusing on Crime: Across the country, Republicans are attacking Democrats as soft on crime to rally midterm voters. Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed example of this strategy.Arizona Senate Race: Blake Masters, a Republican, appears to be struggling to win over independent voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.On Sept. 22, not long after Mr. Majewski was accused of misrepresenting himself as a combat veteran, the National Republican Congressional Committee canceled television ads it had booked to support him in the final six weeks of the campaign, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks campaign advertising.The following day, Mr. Majewski insisted that he was staying in his race against longtime Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat. He said that records of his deployment to Afghanistan were “classified” and posted a photo on Twitter of an undated document that he claimed supported this contention, but military experts have pointed out to The A.P. that there are several other steps that Mr. Majewski could take to back up his claims, including having a supervisor or peer vouch for him.According to a record of punishment proceedings obtained by The A.P., Mr. Majewski was demoted from the rank of airman first class to basic airman after being stopped for drunken driving on Sept. 8, 2001, at the gate of the Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. It made no reference to a fight as contributing to Mr. Majewski’s demotion.Mr. Majewski’s disciplinary report was not immediately available on Thursday from the National Archives.Mr. Majewski was deployed for six months in 2002 to Qatar, the Persian Gulf nation that is now home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East, according to Air Force records The New York Times examined last week.The A.P. noted that he worked as a “passenger operations specialist” while he was in Qatar, helping to load and unload planes. In addition to Air Force records, the news organization used information that it had obtained through a public records request from the National Archives, which provided Mr. Majewski’s record to The Times on Wednesday. Those records made no mention of Afghanistan.The inconsistencies in Mr. Majewski’s public accounts of his military service brought renewed scrutiny to the candidate, who had already faced questions about his presence at the U.S. Capitol on the day of the Jan. 6 siege and sympathies for the QAnon conspiracy movement.The role detailed in Mr. Majewski’s military records contrasted sharply with his repeated claims on social media and right-wing podcasts that he was in Afghanistan.After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan last year, Mr. Majewski chided President Biden over the chaotic exit of forces there, saying in a tweet, “I’d gladly suit up and go back to Afghanistan tonight and give my best to save those Americans who were abandoned.”He also mentioned Afghanistan during a February 2021 appearance on a podcast platform that has drawn scrutiny for promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation.“I lost my grandmother when I was in Afghanistan, and I didn’t get to see her funeral,” he said. 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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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      JD Vance playing defense in unexpectedly close Ohio Senate race

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      JD Vance playing defense in unexpectedly close Ohio Senate race If Republicans cannot drag Vance across the finish line, it could spell doom for the party’s hopes of flipping the Senate JD Vance had some explaining to do. After winning a brutal, costly primary to secure the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Senate race, Vance had spent the summer making few appearances on the campaign trail and allowing his Democratic opponent, congressman Tim Ryan, to dominate the airwaves.Now polls showed Vance, a first-time candidate and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, running neck and neck with Ryan in a race that many Republicans had hoped would be an easy win.“We have a tough campaign,” Vance said at an event with supporters in Avon, Ohio, last weekend. “I know that a lot of people are frustrated you didn’t see a whole lot of my TV commercials over the summer. Hopefully that’s started to pick up in the last couple of weeks.”Vance’s struggle to establish a clear lead in Ohio mirrors Republican Senate candidates’ missteps in other battleground states that could determine control of the vital upper chamber. Like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, Vance was able to win the Republican nomination after receiving Donald Trump’s endorsement, but he has stumbled in his pivot to the general election.Republicans are now racing to avoid a Democratic victory in Ohio, often at the expense of investing in other close races. If Republicans cannot drag Vance across the finish line in Ohio, it could spell doom for the party’s hopes of flipping the Senate in the midterm elections this November.Although Trump won Ohio by eight points in 2020, recent polls show Vance and Ryan essentially tied. National Republican groups have picked up on the trouble in Ohio and have started devoting more resources to the race.The Senate Leadership Fund, a Super Pac aligned with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, announced last month that it would reserve $28m in TV and radio ads to boost Vance. As the SLF increased its financial support for Vance, the group also slashed roughly $8m of its ad reservations in Arizona, a shift that the Super Pac’s president partially attributed to “an unexpected expense in Ohio”. (The SLF announced Tuesday that it was pulling out of the Arizona Senate race entirely.)The SLF’s significant investment to support Vance underscores how Republicans are playing defense in an unexpectedly close race. Even if the SLF’s funding helps Vance hold on in Ohio, the victory would not bring his party closer to a Senate majority, as the seat is now held by a retiring Republican, Rob Portman.The reality is that Vance needs all the financial help he can get. At the end of the second quarter of 2022, Vance’s campaign reported having just $628,000 cash on hand, compared to $3.6m in Ryan’s bank account. Between April and June, Vance raised and spent $1m as he fought in the fiercely competitive Republican primary, while Ryan raised $8.6m and easily captured his party’s nomination.Ryan has used his cash advantage to launch a massive advertising blitz, running commercials that frame him as an independent-minded centrist and attack Vance as an out of touch elite with extreme views.In one of Ryan’s ads, an Ohio mother who lost her son, Joe, to opioid addiction criticizes Vance’s now defunct non-profit for enlisting the help of a doctor with ties to the pharmaceutical industry. “I don’t have words for how betrayed I felt,” the woman says in the ad. “JD Vance has chosen to help the drug companies rather than the people who are struggling like Joe.”In another memorable video, Ryan throws footballs at television screens showing the Republican ads attacking him. “They say you can know a person by their enemies,” Ryan says in the ad. “Well, here comes their bullshit ads.”Over the summer, Ryan’s ad campaign went largely unanswered by Vance’s team, allowing the Democrat to chip away at his opponent’s advantage in the Republican-leaning state.“He won the primary thanks to Trump’s help, and it just felt like he went into the witness protection program,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor for the Cook Political Report, said of Vance’s summer campaign schedule. “Vance took a hit in that really brutal primary, and you need to try to rehabilitate your image.”The Ohio Democratic party reveled in Vance’s absence from the campaign trail and the airwaves, sending out mocking statements each time he left the state to fundraise.“You have to kind of be here to rally people together, and he’s not been here. He’s literally been almost everywhere but here,” Elizabeth Walters, chair of the Ohio Democratic party, said earlier this month. “This has to be a tough moment for the party where your standard-bearer and your top candidate can’t be bothered to show up. I think that they’re going have a hard time in the fall of keeping their coalition together.”Even some of Vance’s supporters acknowledge that he has a lot of ground to make up in the race, with less than 50 days to go until election day. “What he has to get across is the record of his opponent, not what his opponent’s saying,” Tom Patton, a voter from Avon Lake, said as he left Vance’s event last weekend. “He has to do more.”Nicolette Allsop, a voter from South Amherst who attended the Vance event with her two sisters, begrudgingly agreed that Ryan has run “effective” ads in the race. Allsop’s sister, MaryJo Moluse of Avon, added that Ohio feels more competitive this year than it did in 2020. “I think it’s going to be a tough fight. I really do,” Maluse said.Vance and his allies appear to have woken up to that reality, as the candidate has ratcheted up his campaign appearances and his television ads in recent weeks. In one ad, Vance walks down a street in his home town and laments the country’s recent rise in violent crime, accusing Ryan of insufficiently supporting law enforcement officers.Mike Hartley, who previously served as a senior adviser to former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, pointed to the ad as an example of how Vance is successfully rebooting his campaign in the crucial, final stretch of the race.“That’s what he’s going to run on, and that’s what he should run on, and I think that’s just going to solidify his advantage,” Hartley said. “I think he’s done a good job of hitting his stride at the right time.”Vance has also kept up a busy schedule of campaign events this month, including an appearance at a rally with Trump last Saturday in Youngstown, which lies in Ryan’s congressional district. The region was once a Democratic stronghold, but it has moved to the right as white working-class voters have drifted toward the Republican party. Vance will need those voters to turn out in November to defeat Ryan, and he used the rally as an opportunity to criticize his opponent for allegedly misrepresenting his record.“There are two Tims out there,” Vance told thousands of rally goers. “There’s a DC Tim, who votes 100% of the time with Joe Biden, and then there’s campaign Tim, who pretends he’s a moderate … We need to kick DC Tim to the curb.”In his long and often meandering speech, Trump echoed that message, praising Vance as “an America First warrior” while attacking Ryan as a “far-left Democrat phony”. Trump also took a moment to dismiss a report that Republican Senate candidates are attempting to distance themselves from him, saying, “JD is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad.”“[Ryan] is lying to your faces, acting as though he’s my friend on policy, pretending to be a moderate so he can get elected and betray everything that you believe in,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “He is not a moderate. He is radical left.”That attack strategy appears to be resonating with some of Trump’s most loyal fans in Ohio, who helped Vance clinch the Republican nomination in May and could now prove instrumental in carrying him across the finish line in November.“I don’t really care for [Ryan],” Lori Ferguson, a voter from Cortland, said as she waited to enter the venue for Trump’s rally. “I think the way he’s talking now is simply trying to maybe make Republicans think that he’s on their side.”William Fair, a voter from Navarre who was ahead of Ferguson in line, admitted that he did not know much about Vance, but he said Trump’s endorsement was enough to secure his vote. “If Trump wants him, we’ll get him,” Fair said.Fair’s comments underscore the hefty challenge facing Ryan, despite his campaign’s effective ads and savvy messaging. For many voters, the “R” or “D” next to a politician’s name takes priority over any specific concerns about the individual candidate. That could put Ryan at a disadvantage, given that only one Democrat, Senator Sherrod Brown, has managed to win a non-juridical statewide office in Ohio since 2008.“We have increasingly seen, really over the past decade and a little more, that even Senate races have become almost parliamentary in nature – where you’re voting for the party and not necessarily the person,” Taylor said.Like all other Democrats, Ryan is also facing the national headwinds of record-high inflation and Biden’s underwater approval rating. Ryan recently told the New York Times that he would not campaign with Biden, reflecting the president’s unpopularity in Ohio.“[Ryan is] doing what he believes he needs to do to win, and I think they’re executing what I consider a good campaign,” Hartley said. “But I just don’t think it’s going to be enough … In my eyes, I think Tim Ryan has clearly peaked, and now JD Vance is going to seal the deal.”Even as national Republicans have swooped in to prop up Vance, Ryan has remained steadfast in his determination to snap Ohio Democrats’ losing streak.“He’s looking for a rescue squad,” Ryan said of Vance last Monday. “It’s not going to be enough to save him in Ohio because Ohio wants a fighter.”TopicsUS SenateOhioUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ohio G.O.P. Candidate Says He Served in Afghanistan, but Air Force Has No Record of It

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      J.R. Majewski, a Republican House candidate in northern Ohio, has frequently promoted himself as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force has no record that he served there, unraveling a central narrative of his political ascension that has been heralded by former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Majewski, 42, was deployed for six months in 2002 to Qatar, the Persian Gulf nation that is now home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East, according to Air Force records obtained by The New York Times.The Associated Press reported earlier about Mr. Majewski’s misrepresentations of his military service, noting that he worked as a “passenger operations specialist” while he was in Qatar, helping to load and unload planes. In addition to Air Force records, it used information that it had obtained through a public records request from the National Archives but that was not immediately available on Thursday.J.R. Majewski, a House candidate, at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump in Youngstown, Ohio. He says he served in Afghanistan, but military records do not support the claim.Gaelen Morse/ReutersMelissa Pelletier, a campaign spokeswoman for Mr. Majewski, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a statement to The A.P., Mr. Majewski did not directly address the inconsistencies, saying that his accomplishments were under attack.“I am proud to have served my country,” Mr. Majewski said in the statement.The inconsistencies in Mr. Majewski’s public accounts of his military service brought renewed scrutiny to a candidate who had already been facing questions about his presence at the U.S. Capitol on the day of the Jan. 6 siege and sympathies for the QAnon conspiracy movement.The fallout from the revelations appeared to be swift and significant, with the National Republican Congressional Committee on Thursday canceling television ads it had booked for the final six weeks of the campaign in support of Mr. Majewski, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks campaign advertising. The decision was also reported by Medium Buying, a political advertising news site.A spokesman for the N.R.C.C. did not immediately respond to several requests for comment on Thursday.In response to questions from The Times, Rose M. Riley, an Air Force spokeswoman, said on Thursday that there was no way for the military branch to verify whether Mr. Majewski served in Afghanistan during his time in Qatar. Air Force records showed that Mr. Majewski received no commendations or medals that would typically have been associated with combat service in Afghanistan, though she acknowledged that the list “may be incomplete or not up to date because some require action on the member’s part to submit or validate.”The role detailed in Mr. Majewski’s military records contrasted sharply with his repeated claims on social media and right-wing podcasts that he was deployed to Afghanistan.More on U.S. Armed ForcesA Culture of Brutality: The Navy SEALs’ punishing selection course has come under new scrutiny after a sailor’s death exposed illicit drug use and other problems.Sexual Abuse: Pentagon officials acknowledged that they had failed to adequately supervise the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, after dozens of military veterans who taught in U.S. high schools were accused of sexually abusing their students.Civilian Harm: Following reports of civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes, the Pentagon announced changes aimed at reducing risks to noncombatants in its military operations.Space Force: The fledgling military branch, which has frequently been the butt of jokes, dropped an official song extolling the force’s celestial mission. Some public reactions were scathing.In the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan last year, Mr. Majewski chided President Biden over the chaotic exit of forces there, saying in a tweet, “I’d gladly suit up and go back to Afghanistan tonight and give my best to save those Americans who were abandoned.”He also mentioned Afghanistan during a February 2021 appearance on a podcast platform that has drawn scrutiny for promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation.“I lost my grandmother when I was in Afghanistan, and I didn’t get to see her funeral,” he said. More revelations were detailed by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group..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.The head of a prominent veterans’ advocacy group criticized Mr. Majewski in an interview on Wednesday, saying that his embellishment of his military record dishonored veterans who did experience combat.“To me, that’s stolen valor,” said Don Christensen, a retired Air Force colonel and president of Protect Our Defenders. “I have so much respect for the people who were actually getting shot at, suffering from I.E.D.s, being wounded and killed. I just think you owe them that you’re going to be honest in what you say and that you’re not going to try to equate your service to their service.”Mr. Christensen, 61, served for 23 years in the Air Force in a noncombat role. He said there was a clear distinction between Qatar and Afghanistan or Iraq.“Qatar, for most of people who were in Iraq and Afghanistan, is where you went for R&R,” he said, noting that the military kept a “morale tent” in Qatar for service members to call family members.“They were saying, oh, my God, this is so incredible — the internet, someplace to eat,” Mr. Christensen said of service members returning from combat to Qatar.In May, Mr. Majewski emerged as the surprise winner of a Republican House primary election in northern Ohio, where redistricting has emboldened the party as it tries to flip the seat held by longtime Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, in November.Ms. Kaptur, a member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Majewski had misled voters.“The truth matters,” Ms. Kaptur said. “The idea that anyone, much less a candidate for the United States Congress, would mislead voters about their service in combat is an affront to every man and woman who has proudly worn the uniform of our great country.”Mr. Majewski first gained attention in Ohio in 2020 by turning his lawn into a 19,000-square-foot “Trump 2020” sign.During his primary campaign earlier this year, he ran an ad showing himself carrying an assault-style rifle and saying: “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory. And if I’ve got to kick down doors, well, that’s just what patriots do.”Days after Mr. Majewski defeated two other Republicans in the primary, Mr. Trump praised him during a rally in Pennsylvania.A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Majewski’s military record.Mr. Trump has zeroed in on military records to attack a sitting member of Congress: Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. He frequently highlights Mr. Blumenthal’s first campaign for the Senate in 2010, when he was accused of misrepresenting his military service during the Vietnam War.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. He said at the time that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized.Alyce McFadden More

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      Trump embraces QAnon at rally by playing music similar to its anthem

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      Trump embraces QAnon at rally by playing music similar to its anthemEx-president’s team insists it is a royalty-free tune but to many it is nearly identical to the extremist conspiracy group’s adopted song Donald Trump made one of his highest-profile embraces to date of the extremist conspiracy group QAnon at a political rally in Ohio on Saturday, making the apparently deliberate choice to play music that is virtually indistinguishable from the cult organization’s adopted anthem.Dozens of the former president’s supporters in Youngstown engaged in raised-arm salutes as Trump delivered a fiery address to the background of a song his team insisted was a royalty-free tune from the internet, but to many ears it was nearly identical to the 2020 instrumental track Wwg1wga.Wwg1wga’s title reflects the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all”, adopted by members of the antisemitic group who have convinced themselves that Trump is a messianic figure who is single-handedly battling the dark, pedophilic forces of satanism and who will return to the White House in glory having vanquished his enemies.It was arguably the most visible display to date of Trump’s growing alignment to the far-right group, whose principles were championed by many in the violent mob of his supporters who overran the Capitol during the 6 January insurrection.A joint report by the FBI and the homeland security department last year warned that QAnon members posed a significant threat of more violence, particularly because of growing disillusionment in unfulfilled predictions that Joe Biden would be removed from office.Political observers were quick to react. The liberal commentator Keith Olbermann posted a tweet with side-by-side photographs of Trump’s supporters saluting him in Ohio and followers of Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally in the 1930s.“We must face the reality. We must use the real words. After Saturday’s rally, the modified Sieg Heil, the music, the QAnon madness … Trump IS America’s Hitler,” he wrote in another post.University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that the development was “extremely disturbing”.“What it means is that the former president is willing to court not just supporters of his, but those who support violence for his goals, number one of which is being restored to the White House,” he said.“If it’s just a political threat, well, then we can have elections. But once it’s not just denying an election, but using violence as the response to an election denial, now we’re in a new game.”QAnon adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.Trump has previously embraced the group and its baseless theories, having frequently retweeted posts that related to or supported QAnon while he was president, and before he was permanently removed from the social media platform Twitter.The trend has continued since he left office in January 2021 and set up his own failing network Truth Social.He posted an image of himself last week wearing a Q pin on his lapel, according to the New York Times, under the phrase, “The storm is coming.” Followers believe the storm is a maelstrom that will culminate in Trump’s restoration to the presidency after his political enemies have been conquered and then executed on live television.The Guardian’s 2020 explainer on QAnon also details the antisemitic pillars on which the cult is built. The idea of the all-powerful, world-ruling cabal comes straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document purporting to expose a Jewish plot to control the world that was used throughout the 20th century to justify antisemitism.In Youngstown, Ohio, at a rally ostensibly supporting the Republican Senate candidate JD Vance, but which looked more like a campaign event for the White House run in 2024 that Trump has repeatedly teased, supporters saluted the former president as they appeared to recognize the track being played.They raised their arms and pointed a finger into the air, signifying the “one” denoted in the Wwg1wga title.Trump had used the music last month in a post to Truth Social as a background to clips of him decrying the state of the nation under the Biden administration.Media Matters, a left-leaning online platform, said at the time it analyzed the video using Google Assistant and Apple’s Shazam, with both indicating the song featured was Wwg1wga by the artist Richard Feelgood on Spotify.According to the Times, after the Ohio rally, Trump’s spokesperson, Taylor Budowich, was incredulous that anybody could think it was QAnon’s adopted anthem being broadcast and insisted the music was a song called Mirrors by the American composer Will Van De Crommert.“The fake news, in a pathetic attempt to create controversy and divide America, is brewing up another conspiracy about a royalty-free song from a popular audio library platform,” he said.Two separate linguistic studies have determined that Paul Furber, a South African software developer, was behind Q’s early posts, before Ron Watkins took over the account in 2018.Watkins’s father, Jim Watkins, owns the 8kun site – previously called 8chan – where Q posted, and Ron Watkins is a former administrator of the platform.Ron Watkins ran for a congressional seat in Arizona earlier this year but finished last in a seven-candidate Republican primary, drawing fewer than 3,000 of the nearly 80,000 votes cast.TopicsDonald TrumpQAnonUS politicsOhionewsReuse this content More

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      Rally With Trump? Some G.O.P. Candidates Aren’t Thrilled About It.

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      Whether he is invited or not, the former president keeps holding rallies in battleground states. It reflects an awkward dance as Republican candidates try to win over general-election voters.Former President Donald J. Trump is preparing to swoop into Ohio on Saturday to rally Republicans behind J.D. Vance in a key Senate race. Two weeks earlier, he did the same for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.Neither candidate invited him.Instead, aides to the former president simply informed the Senate campaigns that he was coming. Never mind that Mr. Trump, while viewed heroically by many Republicans, remains widely disliked among crucial swing voters.The question of how to handle Mr. Trump has so bedeviled some Republican candidates for Senate that they have held private meetings about the best way to field the inevitable calls from his team, according to strategists familiar with the discussions.This awkward state of affairs reflects the contortions many Republican candidates are going through as they leave primary season behind and pivot to the general election, when Democrats are trying to bind them to the former president.In New Hampshire, Don Bolduc won the Republican Senate nomination on Tuesday after a primary campaign in which he unequivocally repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud. Just two days later, he reversed himself, telling Fox News, “I want to be definitive on this: The election was not stolen.”Two days after Don Bolduc, left, won the Republican primary for Senate in New Hampshire, he reversed his position that the 2020 election was marred by fraud. John Tully for The New York TimesSome of Mr. Trump’s chosen candidates, after pasting his likeness across campaign literature and trumpeting his seal of approval in television ads during the primaries, are now distancing themselves, backtracking from his positions or scrubbing their websites of his name.The moves reflect a complicated political calculus for Republican campaigns, which want to exploit the energy Mr. Trump elicits among his supporters — some of whom rarely show up to the polls unless it is to vote for him — without riling up the independent voters needed to win elections in battleground states.In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican House candidate who won his primary in May after proudly highlighting support from Mr. Trump, has deleted the former president’s name and image from his campaign site. A campaign official described the move as part of an overhaul of the website to prioritize issues that are important to general-election voters.But Mr. Trump’s endorsement remains prominent on Mr. Hines’s social media accounts. Reached by phone, the 27-year-old candidate said he planned to attend a Trump rally in the state next week and then cut short the call.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.In Wisconsin, Tim Michels, the Republican nominee for governor, erased from his campaign home page the fact that Mr. Trump had endorsed him — but then restored it after the change was reported, saying it had been a mistake.“The optimal scenario for Republicans is for Trump to remain at arm’s length — supportive, but not in ways that overshadow the candidate or the contrast,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and a former top aide at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Mr. Donovan, as well as consultants and staff members working for Trump-backed Senate candidates, said the former president could be most helpful, if he chose, by providing support from his powerful fund-raising machine.“A big part of the problem is that these nominees emerged from messy fields where the party has been slow to unify,” Mr. Donovan said. “But to fix what ails, what these G.O.P. candidates need isn’t a Trump rally, it’s a MAGA money bomb.”Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the former president’s “name and likeness was responsible for the unprecedented success of the G.O.P.’s small-dollar fund-raising programs,” and that he continued to “fuel and define the success of the Republican Party.”Mr. Budowich added, “His rallies, which serve as the most powerful political weapon in American politics, bring out new voters and invaluable media attention.”But linking arms with the former president could create problems for candidates in close races.Even though he has been out of office for nearly 20 months, Mr. Trump has remained a constant presence in news headlines because of mounting criminal and congressional investigations into his role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his refusal to hand over sensitive government documents that he took to his Florida home, and whether he and his family fraudulently inflated the value of their business assets..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;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.On Thursday, when asked about the possibility of his being indicted in the document inquiry, Mr. Trump told a conservative radio host that there would be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”Polls suggest these controversies could be taking a toll. Among independent voters, 60 percent said they had an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump, compared with 37 percent who had a favorable view, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released this week. President Biden was also underwater among these key voters, but by a far smaller margin of eight percentage points.Asked whether Mr. Trump had “committed any serious federal crimes,” 62 percent of independent voters said they believed he had, and 53 percent said he had threatened American democracy with his actions after the 2020 election.Republican candidates appear to be aware of such sentiments, backing away from Mr. Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election. While he has said that election fraud is the most important issue in the midterms, polls show that voters are far more worried about economic issues and abortion rights.Three days after Mr. Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz, the Republican Senate nominee, told reporters that he would have defied the former president and voted to certify the 2020 presidential election.Dr. Oz, a former TV personality, leaned on Mr. Trump’s endorsement to win a bitter primary. Since then, he has removed prominent mentions of the endorsement from his campaign website and has swapped out Trump-themed branding from his social media.Republican campaigns said that they would not reject Mr. Trump’s help out of hand, but that accepting it created a whole set of other problems: Where, for instance, could a rally be held to energize the conservative base, while minimizing the damage among independents?When Mr. Trump’s team called to say that the former president wanted to come back to Pennsylvania for a rally this month, Mr. Oz’s campaign guided him to Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County. The county was one of three that voted twice for Barack Obama and flipped to Mr. Trump in 2016. It was also the only one of those three counties that backed Mr. Trump again in 2020. The other two — Erie and Northampton — supported Mr. Biden.Mr. Trump’s rally in Ohio on Saturday will be his third visit to the state since leaving office — more than any other state so far. He twice won Ohio, a longtime presidential battleground, by eight percentage points.This year, his endorsement of Mr. Vance’s Senate bid has been widely viewed as the clearest example of his enduring political influence. Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, was trailing in the polls before Mr. Trump backed him with just over two weeks left in the race. Mr. Vance won the crowded primary by nearly 10 points.For the rally on Saturday, Mr. Vance’s team directed the former president to Youngstown, a blue-collar area that had been a Democratic stronghold until Mr. Trump ran for president. The rally, at the 6,000-seat Covelli Centre, is also squarely in the congressional district represented by Tim Ryan, the Democrat running against Mr. Vance.The event is scheduled to start at the same time as kickoff for an Ohio State University football game. Buckeyes games regularly draw huge statewide audiences, and the matchup on Saturday is against the University of Toledo, an in-state team.The timing was not viewed as ideal by either Mr. Vance’s campaign or Mr. Trump’s team, and Mr. Trump was ultimately consulted on the decision, according to people familiar with the discussions. In the end, the two sides determined that it was more important to hold the rally on a Saturday night, when Mr. Trump has the easiest chance of drawing a strong crowd.Representative Tim Ryan at a tailgate party before Ohio State’s first game of the season this month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesOhio politicians have long tried to avoid competing for attention with Ohio State football games. In an interview, Mr. Ryan said holding a rally at the same time suggested that Mr. Vance — an Ohio State graduate — was out of touch with the “cultural things” important to Ohioans.“It just says a lot,” Mr. Ryan said. “These little things just sometimes reveal a lot more about a candidate than it appears.”In a statement, Mr. Vance called his rival “a radical liberal” and said, “The only person out of touch with Ohio is Tim Ryan.”Mr. Ryan is also involved in a similar dance around the leadership of his party, given that Mr. Biden is himself struggling with low approval ratings.Asked if he would campaign with the president this fall — even if it were not during a Buckeyes game — Mr. Ryan said: “No. Uh-uh.” More

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      The Vance-Ryan Senate Race In Ohio Appears Closer Than Once Expected

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      Less than two months before Election Day, the Ohio Senate race appears tighter than many once expected in a state that former President Donald J. Trump won by eight percentage points in 2020 — even as there are clear reminders of the limitations Democrats face there.From mid-May until the beginning of August, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, the Democratic nominee, had the airwaves to himself, according to AdImpact, the media tracking firm. He has also had a significant cash advantage over his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, who won a brutal primary with assistance from Mr. Trump, who endorsed him and is set to campaign with him in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday.Mr. Ryan, who had an easier primary season, used those advantages in an effort to define himself early as an independent-minded “fighter” for Ohio, highlighting his differences with the national Democratic Party at every turn.He and other Democrats have also moved to brand Mr. Vance as an inauthentic San Francisco transplant.Mr. Vance, the author of the book “Hillbilly Elegy” who once identified as a “Never Trump guy,” grew up in Middletown, Ohio, but later worked as a venture capitalist in San Francisco.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.“J.D. was born and raised in Ohio,” Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for the Vance campaign, said in a statement as he sought to tie Mr. Ryan to Washington Democrats.For all of Mr. Vance’s structural challenges over the summer, much of the available polling suggests a very close race in a state that shifted to the right in the Trump era, and Democrats are bracing for a challenging fall in key races across the country.Mr. Vance is now on the airwaves, assisted by significant outside spending. He, like other Republican candidates, is seeking to go on offense by emphasizing the issue of crime.And while Democrats see openings to paint Mr. Vance as extreme on the issue of abortion, they continue to face a difficult national environment defined by concerns about inflation and by President Biden’s approval numbers, which have improved but are still underwater.“He claims to be an independent voice, but in D.C., he votes with Biden and Pelosi 100 percent of the time,” Mr. Schroeder said in a statement about Mr. Ryan — a reflection of how Republicans are seeking to nationalize the race..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.Mr. Ryan’s campaign argued that he had spent far more time campaigning in Ohio in recent months than Mr. Vance had.“This race is one of the most competitive in the country because Tim Ryan has outworked and outcampaigned” Mr. Vance, said Izzi Levy, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan. She accused Mr. Vance of spending “the four months since his primary hiding from Ohioans and traveling far from Ohio.”Some Republicans, too, have voiced concerns over what they saw as a limited campaigning effort from their nominee for much of the summer.J.D. Vance, the author of the book “Hillbilly Elegy,” grew up in Ohio and later worked as a venture capitalist in San Francisco.Emil Lippe for The New York Times“From that point as he won in May, he seemed to be running a stealth campaign, kind of like a former presidential candidate in 2020 was doing,” said David G. Arredondo, the executive committee chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party, referring to Mr. Biden’s limited in-person campaigning in the last presidential election at the height of the pandemic, which some mocked as a “basement strategy.” But Mr. Arredondo said he understood the approach.“Whether J.D. was in the basement or hanging out with his family, who knows, but I was not concerned,” he said, emphasizing that the campaign has accelerated in recent weeks, just as voters traditionally tune in — Mr. Vance is expected in Lorain County on Saturday. “And it was hard for me to convince my fellow Republicans, don’t worry, don’t worry, he’s going to be OK.”“Their sentiment is now changing,” he added.His campaign event on Saturday evening with Mr. Trump is at the same time as a football game between Ohio State and the University of Toledo, a point the Ohio Democratic Party has used to cast Mr. Vance as an out-of-stater: “Having a campaign event on a fall Saturday night is a cardinal sin in Ohio,” a statement from the party read. More