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      The Republican primaries are a tug-of-war between rightwing and even-righter-wing | Lloyd Green

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      The Republican primaries are a tug-of-war between rightwing and even-righter-wingLloyd GreenTrump’s claim that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ is now entrenched as Republican Gospel, and the candidates he endorsed have – mostly – done well in the primaries Donald Trump’s sway over the Republican party continues. On Tuesday, Republicans again paid heed to the ex-president’s endorsements even as they declined to march in lockstep. Flecks of daylight emerged across the primary battlegrounds. Still, Trump has little to worry about. His fantastical claim that the 2020 election was stolen is firmly entrenched as Republican Gospel.Trump still won’t shut up. He’s doing Democrats running for office a huge favor | Robert ReichRead moreIn North Carolina, Representative Ted Budd received Trump’s seal of approval, and won the Republican nod for US senator with nearly 60% of the vote. Budd was a Trump loyalist when it counted most.In January 2021, the congressman sided with the majority of his House Republican colleagues. He voted to deprive Joe Biden of his win. Before Budd received Trump’s endorsement, he had been trailing – just like JD Vance in Ohio.Over in Pennsylvania, Trump is the reason that Mehmet Oz is still standing. Right now, “Dr Oz” holds a 0.2% lead over David McCormick, a hedge fund titan who Trump savaged as a China-loving globalist. Fewer than 2,700 votes separate the pair. Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator with a murky résumé and described by Trump as unelectable, has third place, all to herself.The race has not yet been called. A recount is almost certain. If Oz loses, he can blame Barnette, who exposed him as a latecomer to the Maga-verse. Once upon a time, the doctor was a Harvard-educated, pro-choice physician who served in Turkey’s army. America First, not so much.To be sure, Oz is an acquired taste who suffered from a popularity deficit heading into the primary. Among Republicans, his favorability stood underwater, 37%–48%.Significantly, Oz led among those who cast their ballots on primary day itself, as opposed to early voters. At the beginning of the evening, McCormick actually held a double-digit lead thanks to mail-in ballots, an advantage which evaporated as the night wore on.Beyond that, Oz showed particular strength in Trump’s Pennsylvania strongholds. To illustrate, he ran well in Luzerne county, a so-called “pivot county”. Nestled in the north-east part of the state, Luzerne went for Barack Obama by five points in 2012.Four years later, Luzerne delivered a nearly 20% margin to Trump, and with it the Keystone state. On Tuesday, Oz captured 41% of Luzerne’s Republican primary vote, and ran ahead of McCormick there by better than 10 points.The falcon heard the call of the falconer. Elsewhere, not so much. Oz failed to win the counties in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.Out west, in Idaho, Brad Little, the incumbent Republican governor, beat back a challenge from Janice McGeachin, Idaho’s Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor, and a favorite of the far right.On the issues, McGeachin managed to surpass Little’s hostility toward mask mandates. She also advocated increased in-state production of weapons and ammunition, and delivered a video address to the America First Political Action Conference.Some perspective is in order. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, organized the conference. McGeachin wore it as a badge of pride.Significantly, Idaho’s outcome stands as a harbinger for the upcoming Georgia governor’s race. Brian Kemp, the incumbent, faces a challenge from David Perdue, a former US senator who is Trump’s designated attack dog.Trump loathes Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. In 2020, the pair refused to “find” Trump votes after his defeat. Right now, Kemp is favored over Perdue, who lies about the outcome of November election and his own recent defeat. Meanwhile, a grand jury is examining Trump’s post-election conduct.And then there is Madison Cawthorn, North Carolina’s over-the-top congressman. He went down to defeat after videos of his alleged nude antics hit the internet. Republicans were unamused. By contrast, Cawthorn’s earlier visit to Hitler’s vacation home did not move the needle.In the hours and days ahead, expect Oz and McCormick to garner continued media attention. But come November, another contest in Pennsylvania will also grab its share of the spotlight – the race for governor.Douglas Mastriano is now the Republican gubernatorial candidate. Unlike Oz and McCormick, Mastriano truly believes the Maga message. It is a tenet of faith. As a candidate, he championed Christian nationalism, espoused election denialism and flipped the bird at efforts to curb Covid’s spread.A Pennsylvania state senator and a retired colonel, Mastriano has pledged to appoint a Maga secretary of state to oversee Pennsylvania’s election machinery. He also vowed that his secretary of state would “reset” the voter rolls.Fittingly, Mastriano attended the 6 January rally. He and his wife watched as a rioter stormed a police barricade. They did not enter the building, but the House select committee has subpoenaed him. The fact that Mastriano recently attended a Qanon rally did not deter the Republican Governors Association from eventually backing him.Mastriano makes some Pennsylvania Republicans nervous. They predict his presence may cost the Republican party control of the governor’s mansion and the Senate.Then again, inflation still rages, the possibility of a recession looms, the stock market wobbles. Populist rage propelled Trump to the White House. History can repeat itself. If empowered, Mastriano will do all that he can to make it happen.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York. He was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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      Is John Fetterman the Future of the Democratic Party?

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      John Fetterman’s resounding victory in the Democratic Pennsylvania Senate primary was not surprising, but it was uncharacteristic.Pennsylvania Democrats do not ordinarily veer too far from the center lane, and they are cautious about whom they send forward from their primary elections to take on Republicans in general elections. They’re not gamblers, and given the state’s perennially up-for-grabs status and its unforgiving electoral math, you could argue they shouldn’t be.But on Tuesday, Democrats made Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, their nominee to compete for the seat being vacated by the retiring Republican Pat Toomey. (They did it despite Mr. Fetterman’s recent health scare; last week he suffered a stroke, but he said that he was on his way to “a full recovery.”)Conor Lamb, 37, a Pittsburgh-area congressman, would have been a more conventional choice. His House voting record tracks to the center, and he has been compared to the state’s three-term Democratic senator, Bob Casey, a moderate and the son of a former Pennsylvania governor.Mr. Fetterman, 52, offers something different, a new model for Pennsylvania. It is built on quirky personal and political appeal rather than the caution of a traditional Democrat in the Keystone State. With over 80 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Fetterman was more than doubling the total of Mr. Lamb, whose campaign, despite winning many more endorsements from party leaders, never gained momentum.For Democrats, the stakes are high: The outcome may well determine the balance of the evenly divided U.S. Senate, future votes to confirm Supreme Court nominees and much else in our bitterly divided nation.Nearly every story about Mr. Fetterman points out his 6-foot-8 frame, shaved head, tattoos and preferred attire — work clothes from Carhartt, a brand long favored by construction workers and miners and more recently by hip-hop artists. He sometimes attends public events in baggy gym shorts.It is all part of a style that has won him passionate followers among progressive Democrats. Mr. Fetterman has been a frequent presence on MSNBC and is a skilled social media practitioner, with over 400,000 Twitter followers. (His dogs, Levi and Artie, have their own Twitter account and more than 25,000 followers.) It can sometimes seem that he skirts the line between being a traditional candidate and an internet influencer.“Fetterman doesn’t have supporters so much as full-on fans,” The Philadelphia Inquirer noted during the campaign. “Fans who write songs about him, buy his merch and know his life story.”Mr. Fetterman has served as lieutenant governor since 2019 and, before that, for four terms was the mayor of Braddock, a town east of Pittsburgh with just over 1,700 residents. He vows to conduct a “67-county campaign” — the whole of Pennsylvania.Rebecca Katz, his senior political adviser, told me that she believes the campaign’s mantra of “every county, every vote” is being received with too much skepticism and said that people “haven’t seen what kind of map he can run on in Pennsylvania.”But he still must solve the math of an evenly divided state: A Democrat hoping to win in Pennsylvania has to thread an electoral needle.Mr. Fetterman will face either the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz or the financier David McCormick.In the fall, Mr. Fetterman will need to pile up huge winning margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and win by healthy margins in their suburbs and the state’s few other pockets of blue in order to withstand the lopsided totals that Republicans win nearly everywhere else.In less populous counties, as recently as 2008, Barack Obama took 40 percent of the vote or more, but as polarization has increased, Democrats have struggled to get even 25 percent.State Democrats hoped that Joe Biden, a Pennsylvania native and senator from neighboring Delaware — and a white septuagenarian running in a state that is whiter and older than the national average — could reverse that trend. But he did only marginally better than Hillary Clinton four years earlier, cutting the margins by a couple of percentage points but hardly reversing the trend of Democrats being routed in the smaller counties.That Mr. Biden could not do better outside the cities and close-in suburbs has made many Democrats pessimistic about what’s possible in those areas. Mr. Fetterman’s background, his attention to the state’s rural communities and his manner — the work clothes, a straightforward speaking style — could make some difference. In the winning Fetterman model, he narrows the massive margins that have been run up by Republicans.His positions do not differ that much from more traditional Democrats’, but some of his central concerns do set him apart. A signature issue has been the legalization of marijuana — “legal weed,” as he calls it. He has flown a flag displaying cannabis leaves from the official lieutenant governor’s office, alongside a rainbow-colored L.G.B.T.Q. banner.The advocacy of legal marijuana may be the rare issue that draws support from unpredictable corners and crosses all kinds of lines — including urban and rural.The lieutenant governor in Pennsylvania has few defined duties, but as chairman of the Board of Pardons, Mr. Fetterman modernized an outdated system and granted clemency in cases where it was long overdue.Mr. Fetterman’s one glaring departure from progressive causes, and a nod to Pennsylvania realpolitik, is that he does not support a ban on fracking, the environmentally questionable hydraulic extraction of natural gas. Tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians have benefited financially from it by selling drilling rights on their land, working in the industry or both.Mr. Fetterman’s most worrisome vulnerability is his appeal to his party’s most dependable voting bloc: Black voters in Philadelphia and the state’s other urban centers, the places where any Democrat running statewide must mine the largest trove of votes. Only about 10 percent of the state’s voters are Black, but they are an essential component of the margins that the party runs up in the cities.Mr. Fetterman’s challenge stems in large part from a 2013 incident in Braddock, when he used his shotgun to stop a Black jogger and detained him until police arrived. Mr. Fetterman, who was mayor at the time, told police he had heard gunshots in the area and suspected the jogger. Police searched the man down and released him after they found no weapon.The incident has come up during the campaign, and Mr. Fetterman’s responses have been awkward, at best.“He has said he did not actually point the gun, but what difference does that make?” said Mark Kelly Tyler, the pastor of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the nation’s oldest A.M.E. churches. “Even if he admitted that it was from his implicit bias and says that he has learned from it, that would actually be better. It would be accepted.”Mr. Tyler said that if Mr. Fetterman does not do a better job of explaining it, the incident will be “weaponized on Black talk radio and elsewhere” and used by his opponent in the fall to depress turnout.Mr. Fetterman won by huge margins all across Pennsylvania, with one notable exception: Philadelphia. There, it was a close race against a third Democratic primary candidate, Malcolm Kenyatta, a city resident and the first Black openly gay L.G.B.T.Q. member of the state legislature.With the primary complete, everything is reset. In a big state with six television markets, the candidates will likely combine to spend $200 million or more — much of it, undoubtedly, in an attempt to label each other as too extreme for middle-of-the-road Pennsylvania.Mr. Fetterman’s progressive politics and persona appeal to younger people. They lean to the left and are always potentially influential in any election. But they are also traditionally the least reliable voters, especially in nonpresidential years.In Pennsylvania and all other battleground states, it always comes down to the math. The state’s graying electorate does not always like new things or ideas.Mr. Fetterman is ultimately going to have to go where the votes are. And if he has a problem with Black voters, he will have to solve it.Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town and the Magic of Theater,” which is set in his hometown, Levittown, Pa.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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      John Fetterman: The left-leaning Pennsylvania politician in gym clothes.

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      PITTSBURGH — John Fetterman, the liberal lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania who won his state’s Democratic nomination for Senate on Tuesday, seemed to be cruising into what is shaping up as one of the most closely watched general elections in the country this fall. Then a stroke upended his plans.Mr. Fetterman, the 6-foot-8, hoodie-wearing former mayor of Braddock, Pa., was not a favorite of the party establishment, but he electrified some progressive voters and a broader slice of the Democratic electorate that embraced his blunt-spoken, accessible style and welcomed his pledges to fight aggressively for party priorities in Washington.“I’m just doing my thing,” he said in an interview last week. “I’m just a dude that shows up and just talks about what I believe in, you know?”After canceling campaign events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Fetterman, 52, announced that he had had a stroke, was recovering and had not suffered any cognitive damage.He was still in the hospital on Tuesday, when his campaign announced that he would undergo “a standard procedure to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator,” adding, “It should be a short procedure that will help protect his heart and address the underlying cause of his stroke.”It was unclear when he would be able to resume campaigning.The health scare carried ramifications far beyond Pennsylvania. Democrats hold a majority in the Senate only by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. The party’s vulnerability had already been highlighted when Senator Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico suffered a stroke in January.It also seemed jarring given Mr. Fetterman’s vigorous public image; he often was dressed as if he’d just left the gym.“He may not look like a Senate candidate for New York or California, but he’s just fine for Pennsylvania,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of the state. “He’s a very believable candidate for the working class.”Mr. Fetterman, who holds a degree from the Harvard Kennedy School, served for 13 years as the mayor of Braddock, where he attracted attention for his efforts to revitalize a struggling steel town — and scrutiny over a 2013 episode in which he brandished a shotgun to stop an unarmed Black jogger, telling the police he had heard gunshots.He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2016 but gained an enthusiastic following, and went on to defeat an incumbent to win his party’s nomination for lieutenant governor in 2018. In that role, he maintained an active presence around the state, building name recognition that played an important role in his primary victory.“He spent a lot of time in communities throughout the state,” said Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who did not take sides in the primary. “That’s something he’s been able to build on.”Mr. Fetterman also made a name for himself in national progressive circles, receiving the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2018 after he backed Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential primary bid. And he gained fresh prominence with a broader range of voters as a cable-television fixture when Pennsylvania’s 2020 votes were being counted.Several months later, he entered the Senate primary, the first major Democratic candidate to jump into the race, and cemented an overwhelming fund-raising advantage over his nearest rivals.Mr. Fetterman campaigned on issues like raising the minimum wage, promoting criminal justice reform and supporting voting rights, abortion rights and protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people.But he attracted just as much attention for his style, and some saw him as skilled at connecting with blue-collar voters. He favored basketball shorts and sweatshirts over button-downs and khakis and spent significant time campaigning in rural, working-class counties that had overwhelmingly voted for former President Donald J. Trump, hoping to improve Democratic margins in those areas.Mr. Fetterman has repeatedly described himself as a progressive in the past, but in the Senate race he did not seek the left-wing mantle. He rejected a suggestion last week that he would join the “Squad,” a group of left-wing members of Congress, should he win.Republicans and some Democrats, however, believe that he may be vulnerable to criticism that he is too far to the left for one of the most closely divided states in the nation, and especially for its more centrist suburbs, which have been vital to recent Democratic gains in the state.“It’s good that Fetterman is going to these areas where Democrats have done poorly in these Republican counties, but I think his bigger challenge is going to be these suburban communities,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who said he had voted for President Biden.Mr. Dent warned that Mr. Fetterman is seen by some as a “Bernie Sanders Democrat.”The lieutenant governor lives in Braddock with his three children and his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the second lady of Pennsylvania, who has embraced the acronym “SLOP” and who, like Mr. Fetterman, has an active social media presence.She insisted that he get checked out after feeling unwell on Friday, the Fettermans said.His campaign said Monday that Mr. Fetterman had been “again evaluated by the neurologist who once again reiterated that John will make a full recovery.” More

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      Pennsylvania and North Carolina primaries test Trump’s hold on Republican party

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      Pennsylvania and North Carolina primaries test Trump’s hold on Republican partyVoters nominated Maga-bona fide Doug Mastriano as the GOP candidate in Pennsylvania’s governor race, but were divided in North Carolina Pennsylvania Republicans on Tuesday nominated Donald Trump’s choice for governor, an election denier who was outside the Capitol on 6 January, but were divided over his candidate for Senate in a consequential round of primary contests that also saw the ousting of Madison Cawthorn, the scandal-plagued first-term congressman, in North Carolina. Voters in five states went to the polls on Tuesday to pick the candidates at the center of some of this year’s most contentious battles for control of Congress, statehouses and governor’s offices. From Oregon to North Carolina, Idaho to Kentucky and Pennsylvania, the array of nominating contests tested both Trump’s grip on the Republican party and Joe Biden’s leadership of the Democratic party.In Pennsylvania – a perennial swing state and one of the fiercest electoral battlegrounds – Doug Mastriano, a far-right state senator who was a key figure in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state, will face Democrat Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, in a highly anticipated contest for governor.Madison Cawthorn, pro-Trump firebrand who faced political stumbles, concedes in House raceRead moreThe Associated Press declared Mastriano, a retired Army colonel, the winner in a crowded field of Republican candidates. Shapiro ran unopposed. Despite his Maga bona fides, Trump only endorsed Mastriano in the final days of the campaign after he had consistently led in the polls. But his candidacy has worried party leaders concerned that he is too extreme to appeal to swing voters in the state.In North Carolina, Cawthorn failed to win re-election amid multiple scandals, losing his seat to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator and business owner. It was a stunning fall for the 26-year-old congressman, once seen as a rising star in the Republican party.But his rabble-rousing antics angered many of his colleagues, some of whom turned sharply against him in the race after he claimed without evidence that Washington figures he “looked up to” had invited him to orgies and used cocaine. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy rebuked Cawthorn publicly over the remark.John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, handily won the state’s Democratic primary for Senate that was complicated when a stroke took Fetterman off the campaign trail in the final weekend before the election. His victory sets the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the cycle – and one of the best opportunities for Democrats to pick up a seat in a year when the political headwinds are blowing against them.Fetterman, a plain-spoken Harvard graduate known for wearing gym shorts and championing marijuana legalization, beat congressman Conor Lamb, a moderate who aligned himself closely with Biden and state representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a leftwing state legislator. Fetterman is expected to make a full recovery from his stroke, but was not able to attend his election night party because he was still in the hospital.In a statement, Joe Biden said electing Fetterman, a liberal Democrat, would be a “big step forward for Pennsylvania’s working people”. Calling him a “strong nominee” who could unite Democrats and win a general election, the president lashed out at his prospective Republican opponent, warning that whoever emerged as the nominee was guaranteed to be “too dangerous, too craven, and too extreme” for the US Senate.As of late Tuesday, Fetterman’s opponent was not yet known. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician known as Dr Oz, was trailing Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, but the race remained too close to call. Conservative commentator Kathy Barnette, who enjoyed an 11th hour surge as Oz and McCormick lobbed brutal attacks on one another, finished in a distant third.“Unfortunately we’re not going to have a resolution tonight,” McCormick said during a speech at his election night party on Tuesday, citing “tens of thousands” of outstanding ballots left to count. On the Republican side, Oz struggled to unite the conservative base behind him. Hounded as a “Hollywood liberal,” Oz embraced Trump’s false claim of voter fraud and was rewarded with the former president’s seal of approval. But when they appeared together a rally, boos could be heard whenever Trump mentioned Oz.Conservatives in the state also appeared tepid about McCormick, the husband of former Trump administration official Dina Powell. During the campaign, he and Oz unloaded their personal war chests, leveling such a ferocious campaign against one another that exasperated voters said they began looking at Barnette.Several states over, in North Carolina, the Trump-backed congressman Ted Budd bested ex-governor Pat McCrory and a dozen other candidates to clinch the Republican nomination for Senate. Budd had struggled to gain traction early in the race until a surprise endorsement from the former president elevated his candidacy. He also received a major boost from the Club for Growth, an influential anti-tax group that poured money into the race on his behalf.Budd will face Democrat Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice for the North Carolina state supreme court, who easily won her party’s 10-way primary to replace retiring Republican senator Richard Burr. Beasley faces an uphill climb in the state, where Republicans have dominated the Senate race. If victorious, the trailblazing former public defender would make history as the southern state’s first Black senator.In a setback for progressives, state senator Valerie Foushee defeated Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman ever elected to public office in North Carolina, in the hotly contested primary to replace retiring the congressman David Price in North Carolina’s 4th congressional District, a safe Democratic seat.Foushee was one of the many candidates who benefited from the support of a Super Pac affiliated with American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group,which poured money into primary races with the goal of countering the rise of progressive Democrats sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.The group also targeted Summer Lee in the final weeks of her bid to capture the party’s nomination in the solidly Democratic Pennsylvania district.But as of late Tuesday evening, Lee, a progressive representative, appears to have overcome the flood of money spent against her to defeat Steve Irwin in the race to replace congressman Mike Doyle, who is retiring at the end of next year. Lee’s victory would be a major win for the progressive movement in the safely Democratic seat. If elected, she would be the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress.In deeply conservative Idaho, the sitting governor, Brad Little, defeated his far-right lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, a Trump-endorsed candidate who twice attempted a power grab to ban coronavirus mask and vaccine mandates when Little was out of state on business. Little overturned the orders when he returned.Republican Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz calls far-right rival’s comments on Islam ‘reprehensible’Read moreAnd in Oregon, congressman Kurt Schrader, a moderate Democrat known for breaking with his party, was hoping to fend off a strong progressive challenge in a race seen as a test of the president’s appeal among the party’s base.And in an expensive fight for Oregon’s newly created sixth congressional district, Democratic state representative Andrea Salinas was leading a sprawling primary that included a political novice backed by a cryptocurrency billionaire. If elected, Salinas will be the state’s first Latina in Congress.The seven-term incumbent was a top target for progressives after joining Republicans in opposition to Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief package, among other policy positions. Nevertheless, Schrader was the first candidate Biden endorsed this cycle.In Kentucky, the state’s highest ranking Democrat, Morgan McGarvey, won the party primary for an open congressional seat to replace the retiring congressman John Yarmuth, who endorsed him. He beat state representative Attica Scott, who drew national attention when she sued Louisville police officers after being arrested during the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020, a disappointment for movement activists hoping to translate the grassroots energy into political gains.Charles Booker, a Black former state lawmaker who emerged as a powerful voice against racial justice in the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020, won the Democratic Senate primary in the state. The progressive faces long odds in his bid to unseat Republican senator Rand Paul in November.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsDemocratsPennsylvaniaNorth CarolinaIdahoOregonnewsReuse this content More

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      Three Questions About Today’s Consequential Primaries

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      How will progressive Democrats fare against moderate rivals? What signals will North Carolina Republicans send? And in Pennsylvania, will Kathy Barnette concede a loss?PHILADELPHIA — Tonight’s big races in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are sending tremors across the Republican Party, as its MAGA wing vies for dominance with other flavors of Trumpism.Democrats have held quieter primaries, but their party’s center-left establishment has battled progressive uprisings in places like the Raleigh-Durham region and Pittsburgh.New York Times reporters have fanned out across the states, and polls close in Pennsylvania at 8 p.m. Eastern and in North Carolina at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. Follow our live coverage of developments here, and view the results as they come in here. For now, we’ve got some questions about the wider implications of today’s races:Will Kathy Barnette claim the election was stolen if she loses?Barnette, a conservative commentator, has rocketed toward the top of polls in the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania.She rose to prominence for embracing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — including ones about her own failed race that year for a House seat in the Philadelphia suburbs, which she lost by nearly 20 percentage points to Representative Madeleine Dean, the Democratic incumbent. Barnette refused to concede, despite no evidence of problems with the election.The campaigns for Barnette’s top rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick, projected confidence in conversations with senior campaign aides and surrogates today, but both are bracing for the possibility that Barnette will make similar claims if tonight’s results are especially close or uncertain.“We’re focused on running our race and we’re confident that Kathy will have a good night,” said Ryan Rhodes, a spokesman for the Barnette campaign.The McCormick campaign, which has the largest legal and communications infrastructure of all its rivals, has deployed 500 poll monitors to watch for any irregularities.Barnette’s late surge has frazzled and dismayed Republicans in Pennsylvania and beyond. They fear that her biography has not been subject to serious scrutiny, and many G.O.P. operatives in Washington would prefer Oz or McCormick, who are widely deemed better candidates for the general election.Republican strategists are weighing how to respond if the results tonight are close. Some counties are not expected to begin counting mail-in ballots until tomorrow.“If Kathy alleges fraud, I hope it will be for good reason,” said Josh Novotney, a Philadelphia-based lobbyist for SBL Strategies. “If not, it will hurt our party.”“A candidate crying election fraud against a Trump-backed candidate will probably have to be put in Webster’s as the new definition of irony,” he added.How does the progressive movement fare? Not every Democratic primary today falls neatly into the bucket of progressives versus the establishment. But there are few exceptions.One House primary in Oregon stands out because it’s not for an open seat. The incumbent, Representative Kurt Schrader, a leading moderate, has support from House Democrats’ campaign arm and an endorsement from President Biden.In Congress, progressive leaders haven’t flocked to support his challenger, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. But she has received the backing of one prominent Democrat — Senator Elizabeth Warren — as well as support from smaller left-leaning groups and several county Democratic Party organizations in Oregon that would normally be expected to back the incumbent or remain neutral.The clearest example of a left-versus-center showdown might be in Pittsburgh, where Representative Mike Doyle, a Democrat, is retiring. The top contenders to replace him are Summer Lee, a state legislator backed by progressives including Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders, and Steve Irwin, a Democrat supported by Doyle.Summer Lee, a progressive House candidate in Pennsylvania, with Mayor Ed Gainey of Pittsburgh today.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images“It’ll be a real bellwether for where the progressive movement is today,” said Aren Platt, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania.The United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, aired an ad that questioned Lee’s loyalty to Biden and the Democratic Party. The progressive group Justice Democrats has also been on air questioning whether Irwin is a “real Democrat” by trying to tie him to Republicans.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More