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      McCormick and Casey Win Senate Primaries, Setting Up Battle in Pennsylvania

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      David McCormick won an unopposed Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, securing the party’s nomination two years after former President Donald J. Trump torpedoed his first Senate run by backing his primary rival, the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz.Mr. McCormick will face Senator Bob Casey in the November election. Mr. Casey, the Democratic incumbent, also won his uncontested primary on Tuesday, The A.P. reported. The Senate race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, represents the best chance yet for Republicans to unseat Mr. Casey, an 18-year incumbent who has previously sailed to re-election — he defeated his Republican opponent in 2018 by 13 points.“I’m honored to once again be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Casey said on social media. “There are 196 days until the general election, and we’re going to win.”Mr. McCormick, the former chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is part of a roster of wealthy Republican Senate candidates recruited to run in 2024. He and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, a former Trump administration official, reported assets in 2022 worth $116 million to $290 million.“Our movement is strong,” Mr. McCormick said on social media after his victory, adding, “I’m running to ensure the American Dream is alive for my kids and yours.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Three Takeaways From the Pennsylvania Primaries

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      With the 2024 primary season entering the homestretch — and the presidential matchup already set — hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians cast their ballots on Tuesday in Senate and House contests as well as for president and local races.President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, who had been heading toward a 2020 rematch for months before securing their parties’ nominations in March, scored overwhelming victories in their primaries, facing opponents who had long since dropped out of the race. But Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s former rival in the Republican primaries, still took more than 100,000 votes across the state.A long-awaited Senate matchup was officially set, as well, as David McCormick and Senator Bob Casey won their uncontested primaries.And Representative Summer Lee, a progressive first-term Democrat, fended off a moderate challenger who had opposed her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. While Mr. Biden has faced protest votes in a number of states, Ms. Lee’s race was one of the first down-ballot tests of where Democrats stand on the war.Here are three takeaways.A progressive Democrat fended off a challenge that focused on her criticism of Israel’s military campaign.Ms. Lee, a first-term progressive Democrat who represents a Pittsburgh-area district, was an early critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, where about 34,000 people have died since the war began six months ago. Ms. Lee’s stances against Israel’s military campaign drew a primary challenge from Bhavini Patel, a moderate Democrat who opposed Ms. Lee’s approach on the war.But Ms. Lee emerged victorious, suggesting that public sentiment on the war, particularly among Democrats, has shifted significantly against Israel in the six months since the war began.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden and Trump clinch Pennsylvania primaries shortly after polls close

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump both won their primaries in Pennsylvania shortly after polls closed.Pennsylvanians had gone to the polls on Tuesday to cast ballots in the state’s primary races – the results provide a window into where voters in the crucial battleground stand roughly six months out from the general election.Biden and Trump had already locked up their parties’ nominations, but Pennsylvania voters still had other options in the presidential primaries.With nearly 50% of the votes counted, Biden got 491,892 votes, or 94.4%, according to state election data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who dropped out of the race, got 29,333 votes, or 5.6%.Trump got 268,670 votes, or 79.4%, with 33% of the votes counted, while Nikki Haley, who dropped out the race, got 70,648 votes, or 20.6%, data shows.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, remained on the Pennsylvania ballot after dropping out of the race in March. Primary voting in the state is confined to registered Republicans, locking out the independent voters who favored her.Her results show that a number of Republicans continue to be unhappy with Trump, who is on trial on 34 criminal counts in New York.Biden faced challenges of his own in Pennsylvania, which he won in 2020 by about 80,000 votes, or 1.2 points. A group of progressive activists had run a campaign to encourage Democrats to write in “uncommitted” on Tuesday to protest against Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. The effort, based on the similar Listen to Michigan campaign, hopes to get at least 40,000 Democrats to write in “uncommitted”, but it may take weeks to get those ballots counted.On Tuesday, voters had the economy and foreign policy on their minds as they cast their ballots.Karen Lau, a 70-year-old retired educator in Kingston, said she would be voting for Trump. She said Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza was a top issue. “Biden’s destroying our country,” she said. “The hypocrisy with Israel of saying one thing and meaning another with Biden.”Even though Trump has been quiet on what exactly he would do in Israel, Lau said she was convinced he would handle it better. “He’s always been a supporter of Israel,” she said, citing the Abraham accords and Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. “I just have a lot more trust in what he will do.”Lau, who is Jewish, added that she was “very concerned” with pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. “The rise of antisemitism is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” she said.Richard K, a 69-year-old retired security guard in Kingston who declined to give his last name, also said he was unbothered that Trump was not that much younger than Biden.“Trump plays golf when he can, he has a lot more energy,” he said. “Biden walks like an old man.” He also dismissed the criminal cases against Trump, calling them “election interference”.“If he wasn’t ahead, they wouldn’t be going after him,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden and Trump recently held events in Pennsylvania before the primary, underscoring the state’s pivotal role in the election. At a campaign stop last week in Scranton, where Biden was born, the president used the setting to contrast his vision for the country’s future with Trump’s.“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago, I see it through the eyes of Scranton,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s Florida resort home. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values: these are the competing visions for our economy that raise fundamental questions of fairness at the heart of this campaign.”Farther down the ballot, Pennsylvanians will cast votes in congressional primaries that will help determine control of the Senate and the House in November. In the Senate race, incumbent Bob Casey ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, while Dave McCormick was the sole candidate in the Republican primary.McCormick ran for Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat in 2022, but he lost the primary to the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who was later defeated by the Democrat John Fetterman in the general election. The Pennsylvania Senate race will probably be one of the most expensive in the country, as Casey reported having nearly $12m in cash on hand earlier this month while McCormick’s campaign has more than $6m in the bank. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democrat”.Several House races will provide additional clues about Pennsylvania voters’ leanings ahead of the general election. In the Pittsburgh-based 12th district, the progressive congresswoman and “Squad” member Summer Lee faces a challenge from local council member Bhavini Patel, who has attacked the incumbent over her support for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Moderate Pac, a group that supports centrist Democrats and is largely funded by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has spent more than $600,000 supporting Patel, and the race will be closely scrutinized as an early test for progressives facing primary challenges this year.In south-eastern Pennsylvania, the Republican representative Brian Fitzpatrick won his primary after attracting a threat from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck, who criticized the incumbent for being too centrist. In 2022, Fitzpatrick won re-election by 10 points in a district that Biden carried by 4.6 points two years earlier, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Cook rates the first district as “likely Republican” in the general election. Fitzpatrick will face Democrat Ashley Ehasz, who ran uncontested in the Democratic primary, in November.Elsewhere in the state, Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican state representative, won the seventh-district GOP primary, vying for the chance to face off against the Democratic incumbent Susan Wild. The Lehigh Valley district is considered a “toss-up” in the general election, per Cook’s ratings.In the 10th district, based around the city of Harrisburg, Democrat Janelle Stelson won the crowded Democratic primary. The former news anchor will face the Republican incumbent and former House freedom caucus chair Scott Perry. Cook rates Perry’s race as “lean Republican” in the general election.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      in Elections

      Pennsylvania Holds Its Primaries Today. Here’s What to Watch.

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      Pennsylvanians are heading to the polls on Tuesday, with a handful of House primary races in the spotlight.The contest getting the most attention is the Democratic primary in the Pittsburgh-based 12th District, where Representative Summer Lee, who has been outspoken in support of a cease-fire in Gaza, is facing Bhavini Patel, who has attacked Ms. Lee as anti-Israel and outside the political mainstream.Ms. Lee, a first-term representative who is part of the progressive “Squad” and narrowly won her primary in 2022 over a more centrist candidate, was one of the first members of Congress to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and call for an immediate cease-fire. That angered some Jewish voters in her district, though national pro-Israel groups like AIPAC have not gotten involved in her race, as they have in others. Ms. Patel has been vastly outraised in the contest, and the once-expected ideological battle over Israel has fizzled in much of the district.On the other side of the aisle and the state — in the First District, in the suburbs north of Philadelphia — Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the most moderate Republicans in the House, is facing a primary challenge from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck.Mr. Fitzpatrick is one of a small number of Republicans representing districts that Joseph R. Biden Jr. carried in 2020. He won his last two general elections with relative ease. But if Republican voters nominate Mr. Houck — who was acquitted last year of charges that involved assaulting a Planned Parenthood volunteer outside an abortion clinic — it could make the district more competitive for Democrats, given the political potency of abortion.Two other primaries may also set up competitive general-election contests.In the Seventh District, three Republicans are vying to face Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat who won by just two points in 2022. And in the 10th District, six Democrats are running to face Representative Scott Perry, a Republican who was closely involved with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The presidential and Senate races are also on the ballot, but are not competitive. Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump clinched their respective nominations last month, and Senator Bob Casey and his Republican challenger, David McCormick, are running unopposed in their primaries.The polls are open until 8 p.m. Eastern time. More

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      in US Politics

      A progressive congresswoman made history in 2022. Can a billionaire stop her re-election?

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      The US representative Summer Lee greeted a cheering crowd of a couple of hundred supporters at the Pittsburgh teachers’ union headquarters on Sunday, with two days left until her Democratic primary.Lee, who made history in 2022 when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania, predicted that voters would send a resounding message on Tuesday about the resilience of the progressive movement. To underscore that point, Lee was joined at the rally by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another member of the progressive “Squad” in the House.“Everybody in the country is waiting to see whether or not we can have a reflective democracy,” Lee said. “So we are going to fight in western Pennsylvania, and on Tuesday, we’re going send a message to every dark-money billionaire, whoever they are: that your influence is no longer welcome in our democracy.”The boisterous rally marked an impressive show of support for a politician who eked out the narrowest of primary victories two years ago, after facing an onslaught of negative advertising from pro-Israel groups. This time around, many progressives expected the same groups to target Lee again, given her consistent and vocal support for a ceasefire in Gaza.But those groups have chosen to stay out of Lee’s primary this year, a decision that the congresswoman’s allies credit to her popularity with constituents and the government funding she has brought to her western Pennsylvania district.Despite the pro-Israel lobby’s absence, at least one Super Pac, financially backed by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has gotten involved in Lee’s primary to support her opponent, the local council member Bhavini Patel. If Lee is successful on Tuesday, her victory could provide a roadmap for other progressive candidates who are bracing for a wave of pro-Israel money in their own primaries this cycle due to their criticism of the Israeli government and their outrage over the rising death toll in Gaza.“Pittsburgh is the first one up. Tuesday is the first of the rest of these races. So, Pittsburgh, what you’re doing on Tuesday is sending a message to the country,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Addressing mega-donors like Yass, she added: “Your money isn’t good here any more.”A notable absenceWhen Lee first ran for Congress in 2022, her record as a two-term state legislator did little to assuage the concerns of establishment Democrats. A number of local groups, including the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, lined up behind Lee’s opponent, the Pittsburgh attorney Steve Irwin.Most consequentially, United Democracy Project, a Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), entered the race to boost Irwin’s campaign. According to OpenSecrets, UDP spent a total of $3.3m against Lee and another $660,000 in support of Irwin, flooding the airwaves with ads accusing Lee of threatening Joe Biden’s policy agenda.Lee won her race by less than 1,000 votes, or 0.9 points, and her victory provided a shot in the arm for progressives’ fight against Aipac and its affiliates, which spent nearly $50m across the entire 2022 cycle to boost pro-Israel candidates.View image in fullscreenThis year, Aipac and its affiliates reportedly plan to spend twice as much money, $100m, across the election cycle. Progressive leaders expected that Lee’s primary would serve as an early test of messaging strategies for “Squad” members facing primary challenges and targeted by Aipac.Surprisingly, UDP and the group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), both of which spent heavily in Lee’s 2022 primary, appear to have opted out. According to reporting by the Intercept, Aipac contacted two prominent Pittsburgh Democrats to inquire if they would consider running against Lee. Both of them declined. (UDP did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.) Mark Mellman, the founder of DMFI, recently told Semafor that the group had determined Lee simply wasn’t as vulnerable as other “Squad” members this year and thus wasn’t worth the investment.Lee’s allies credit her electoral strength to the work she has done in Congress. As Lee’s campaign frequently touts in ads, she has helped bring more than $1.2bn to her district in the form of infrastructure projects, clean water initiatives and housing grants.“Summer is a very popular politician. She represents this district incredibly well,” said Jodi Hirsh, a 48-year-old Lee campaign volunteer and longtime Pittsburgh resident. “People who may be not up to speed on all the other socially progressive, social justice-oriented things that many of us care about do know that she’s helped them fundamentally from a constituent services perspective.”That work appears to have paid dividends with fellow Democratic leaders as well. In February, the Allegheny County Democratic Committee endorsed Lee for the first time, and she has received the backing of prominent liberal groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood Action Fund as well as an array of local labor unions.“That balance of being able to build a progressive vision while delivering every day for your constituents is the progressive movement through and through,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a progressive Pac.Lee’s supporters argue that her work for constituents and her progressive views on issues like abortion access, the climate crisis and economic inequality have played a larger role in the primary race than the war in Gaza. But when voters do bring up the war, they often voice agreement with Lee’s calls for a ceasefire, allies say.Polling does indeed suggest widespread support for the ceasefire campaign. According to an Economist/YouGov survey conducted this month, 65% of US adults – including 80% of Democrats – support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.“This is a race where the president, the party have just continued to move towards [Lee] over time,” said Nicholas Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families party. “All the polling shows that Summer’s position and the position of a lot of the [‘Squad’ members] is the position of Democratic party voters.”Despite polls consistently reflecting mounting criticism of Israel’s airstrike campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, Patel has continued to attack Lee over her views on the war. In a statement to the Guardian, Patel said Lee’s criticism of the Israeli government “hits at a deeper level” considering Pittsburgh’s dark history of antisemitic violence. In 2018, a gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in US history.“As fringe extremist Summer Lee has locked arms with people trying to weaken President Biden over the last few weeks, we have seen an outpouring of support from voters energized by the possibility of a pro-Biden Democrat representing them in Congress,” Patel said.Eva Borgwardt, a spokesperson for IfNotNow, traveled to Pittsburgh from New York to knock on doors for Lee’s campaign on Saturday. She firmly rejected Patel’s framing. (IfNotNow, a group of Jewish activists advocating for Palestinian rights, has also endorsed Lee.)“Summer’s vision of Jewish safety, I think, is the thing that we as a Jewish community need – especially right now,” Borgwardt said. “She’s resisting this false narrative of Palestinian and Jewish safety being pitted against each other.”That argument may be resonating with many Americans, but Patel has found at least one ardent proponent of her viewpoint: Jeffrey Yass.‘Kick some Yass’The ad opens with the ominous warning that “our rights are under attack”. The video then switches from images of the deadly January 6 insurrection to clips of Lee withholding applause during Biden’s State of the Union address last month.“We need a representative who will work with President Biden, and that’s Bhavini Patel,” the ad concludes. The narrator then notes that the group Moderate Pac is responsible for the ad.Moderate Pac’s stated aim is to “support Democratic policymakers who champion sensible fiscal and economic policies”, but recent FEC filings show its largest donor is Yass, who has given tens of millions to Republicans in recent years. According to OpenSecrets, Yass has already given more than $46m to conservative causes and candidates for 2024, making him the largest individual donor of this election cycle so far. (Previous reporting also suggested Yass was one of the major donors to a rightwing Israeli group that supported the proposal of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for judicial overhaul, but more recent accounts have cast doubt upon that connection.)View image in fullscreenYass has been named as a potential treasury secretary if Trump wins re-election, and the company that he co-founded was recently in the headlines for its involvement in a lucrative merger with the former president’s media company.“You couldn’t write it up in a movie to be more absurd than to have the man who bailed out Donald Trump’s social media company spending money to write ads about a Democratic member of Congress not being Democrat enough,” Andrabi said.Moderate Pac has now spent more than $600,000 on independent expenditures to promote Patel’s campaign, filings show.A constellation of progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Working Families party, have come to Lee’s assistance, pouring more than $700,000 into the race. And Lee herself has proven a much more successful fundraiser than Patel, as the incumbent has raised four times as much money as her challenger. According to FEC filings, Lee has raised $2.3m to Patel’s $602,000.Lee has even leaned into Yass’s involvement in the primary to motivate her donors. The subject line of one recent fundraising email read, “Are YOU ready to kick some YASS?” Hirsh said that Yass’s financial assistance had become a liability for Patel with Democratic primary voters.“Here’s someone parading around as a ‘good Democrat’, ‘a centrist Democrat’, ‘a moderate Democrat’, who is almost entirely funded by a Maga [“Make America great again”] Republican who supported an insurrection, who’s destroying our public schools, who does not believe in the right to abortion,” Hirsh said. “All of the things that we want our Democratic representatives to support, this person is opposed to. That does not belong in our Democratic primary.”For that reason, Andrabi believes that other progressive candidates can still learn many lessons from Lee’s campaign.“Aipac and DMFI aren’t in Summer’s race. But you know, choose your Super Pac funded by Republican billionaires. It’s the same model across the country,” he said. “What we’re seeing is Republican billionaires using Super Pacs as vehicles to spend in Democratic primaries against mostly Black and brown progressives.”If Lee wins on Tuesday, her ability to mobilize progressive voters in Pennsylvania could prove crucial in November, as Biden tries to win the battleground state against Trump.Andrabi said: “There’s no one who is a greater threat to Donald Trump and far-right extremism than a Black woman who not only stands up for progressive values but also expands the electorate and ensures that all marginalized people have a voice in a state like Pennsylvania.” More

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      in US Politics

      He voted Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020. He’s the kind of voter candidates are desperate to swing

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      For the past 35 years, Scott Richardson and his wife, Theresa, have run a small, cheerful restaurant and catering business outside Philadelphia. Occasionally Yours has long been a community meeting spot in the town of Swarthmore. More recently, it has taken on another, unexpected, role – on the stage of national politics.Richardson is an independent-minded small business owner in a key swing state – exactly the kind of person US presidential candidates are desperate to woo. In 2016, when Pennsylvania went Republican for the first time since 1988, he voted for Donald Trump. Then, in 2020, dismayed by Trump’s Covid response, he switched to Joe Biden, in no uncertain terms. Richardson’s vote tracked how the state went in both elections.This year, polls show Biden and Trump evenly matched in Pennsylvania, with approval ratings for both men at historic lows. And Richardson himself isn’t ecstatic about the options.“I just don’t understand how in a country of 300 and whatever we are, 50, 60 million people, that these are the two gentlemen that we have to choose from,” he says. “I just don’t understand how we can be in this position, but we are.”But he is clear on one thing: he’s sticking with Biden.“In 2016, I voted for Trump because I was ready to have it mixed up – you know, just turn things upside down,” he says. But “my definition of turning things upside down and what actually happened are two completely different scenarios.” Trump, he says, was “inept” when it came to handling the pandemic, doing far too little to confront it even when it was clear it was coming. In Richardson’s view, Biden got handed a “crappy, crappy economy” and has slowly been getting the US back on its feet.In July 2020, Richardson told the Washington Post it was now his “life’s mission” to swing voters from Trump to Biden. A month later, he was on stage, virtually, at the Democratic national convention, describing what his business had endured during Covid. “We’ve literally had to reinvent our business several times since the beginning of the year,” he told Eva Longoria, the host on that August evening. “To be honest with you, I’m just frustrated.” He wished Americans could just unite “on this one issue” and forge ahead. Once again, plenty of Richardson’s fellow Pennsylvanians seemed to share his view: the state went blue.As their 2024 rematch approaches, Biden and Trump are dueling for Pennsylvania for a second time. The result, as ever, could hinge on perceptions of the economy. And while some key figures look good for Biden – unemployment below 4%, the stock market breaking records, the rate of inflation way down from its 2022 peak – for many Americans, those numbers haven’t translated into a sense of financial wellbeing.Richardson has never been wedded to a particular party: he grew up in a deeply Republican area of upstate New York, spent years as an independent, registered Republican to support Bob Dole in the 90s, then switched to Democratic to back Barack Obama. Now both parties are vying for people like him.When it comes to the economy, “I don’t believe in fast change,” he says. The economy “couldn’t get much worse than when [Biden] took over”. But now he’s seeing “slow growth, consistent employment numbers”.He has seen inflation gradually decline at the smaller suppliers he uses. “Lettuce was $3 for a nice beautiful head, and then during the inflation it maybe went for $4.50. And now it’s like $3.25.” That doesn’t mean things are easy, especially for people with low incomes: “I mean, you’re going into the grocery store, it used to cost you $100. Now it costs you $150.”Still, Occasionally Yours is thriving. As the world reopened, customers returned to the restaurant, and demand for catering grew. “People got really, really anxious to have parties,” he says. Sales last year were “through the roof better” – up more than 20%, he says.Richardson acknowledges that his own experience isn’t necessarily representative; different industries experience different headwinds. “But it seems to me that people are still spending money.”He credits much of his own business’s recent success not to the economy but to its capacity for change. Over the years, Occasionally Yours has seen a succession of redesigns and menu updates. “People say ‘if you build it, they will come’,” he says. “My experience is if you put an avocado on it, they will come.”He thinks some of his pro-Trump friends with small businesses are misdirecting their anger at Biden, when their real enemy might be big-box stores. “Maybe you’re blaming factors on politics that maybe aren’t as big a factor in your life,” he says, “but the news tells you that they are.”There are some areas, he says, where politics can have a big impact. Richardson has been most impressed by the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden pushed.“I’ve been to Florida, up into New England and over into Ohio and across the north – there is not one state, one county, anywhere I traveled that doesn’t have a damn bridge torn apart, or something being fixed,” he says. “It’s something that, in my opinion, our country needed for many, many years and now it’s actually getting done – and those are great-paying friggin’ jobs.” He has questions about how the country will pay for it, but “a country, you know – you need to invest in it in order for it to get better”.View image in fullscreenRichardson has also benefited from a rare experience: he’s met the president in person. In June 2020, he got a call from the then candidate’s team asking if he’d like to join a roundtable for small business owners. He agreed – not because he was a particular fan, but because “who the hell wouldn’t? What an opportunity.”His first words to Biden were “I voted for Trump in 2016”. “And I believe what [Biden] said to me was, ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’”At the meeting, Richardson was touched by Biden’s reaction to a woman’s story of grief at losing someone to Covid. Biden told the woman: “I can tell you from personal experience: there will be a time in your life when the thought of your loved one will bring a smile to your face instead of a tear to your eye.” He’d heard Biden say it before, “but when you’re right there listening to him and how sincere he was … from that point on I was voting on the character of the man,” Richardson says. “I’ve met other politicians and, to me, they were phoney as hell.”That roundtable led to his appearance at the DNC, filmed from the restaurant. “I mean, I was nervous nervous, heart racing, I’m gonna have a panic attack type of thing.” Afterward, there was some political backlash: the restaurant got a few one-star reviews from strangers, and Richardson received a few profanity-laced phone calls. Still, “it was something that I’ll never forget, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”Now, after 35 years of working every weekend, Richardson is ready to pass the baton: three and a half decades to the day after the Richardsons signed the lease to open their restaurant, a new business is taking over the location. The Richardsons are retiring.In the meantime, he’s hoping not to see the dawn of a new Trump era – in addition to the former president’s handling of the economy and Covid, Richardson is disgusted by his business practices. “He played all these games for so many years. And because of his ego, he gets drawn into being president, which is the maximum ego trip. It exposed all his private matters … I think it’s gonna come back to haunt him.” More

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      in Elections

      Good Economy, Negative Vibes: The Story Continues

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      When it comes to economic news, we’ve had so much winning that we’ve gotten tired of winning, or at any rate blasé about it. Last week, we got another terrific employment report — job growth for 39 straight months — and it feels as if hardly anyone noticed. In particular, it’s not clear whether the good news will dent the still widespread but false narrative that President Biden is presiding over a bad economy.Start with the facts: Job creation under Biden has been truly amazing, especially when you recall all those confident but wrong predictions of recession. Four years ago, the economy was body-slammed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but we have more than recovered. Four years after the start of 2007-9 recession, total employment was still down by more than five million; now it’s up by almost six million. The unemployment rate has been below 4 percent for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s.Inflation did surge in 2021-22, although this surge has mostly subsided. But most workers’ earnings are up in real terms. Over the past four years, wages of nonsupervisory workers, who account for more than 80 percent of private employment, are up by about 24 percent, while consumer prices are up less, around 20 percent.Why, then, are so many Americans still telling pollsters that the economy is in bad shape?More often than not, anyone who argues that we’re in a “vibecession,” in which public perceptions are at odds with economic reality, gets tagged as an elitist, out of touch with people’s real-life experience. And there’s a whole genre of commentary to the effect that if you squint at the data hard enough, it shows that the economy really is bad, after all.But such commentary is an attempt to explain something that isn’t happening. Without question, there are Americans who are hurting financially — sadly, this is always true to some extent, especially given the weakness of America’s social safety net. But in general, Americans are relatively optimistic about their own finances.I wrote recently about a couple of Quinnipiac swing-state polls that asked registered voters about both the economy and their personal finances. In both Michigan and Pennsylvania — states crucial to the outcome of this year’s presidential election — more than 60 percent of respondents rated the economy as not so good or bad; a similar percentage said that their own situation is excellent or good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Fix the Damn Roads’: How Democrats in Purple and Red States Win

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      When Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.In less than two weeks, the road reopened.Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024 could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More