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      Can this offbeat tattooed Democrat flip a Pennsylvania Senate seat?

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      Can this offbeat tattooed Democrat flip a Pennsylvania Senate seat?John Fetterman, a proponent of marijuana legalization and sentencing reform, is the frontrunner in his party’s primary John Fetterman isn’t like most politicians, and not just because of his tattoos, his goatee, his 6ft 8in frame and his penchant for sweatsuits.What really sets the frontrunner in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary apart is his demeanor. Fetterman is a bit awkward, the opposite of the stereotypical smooth-talking politician. He tends to stumble through debates, and in personal interactions he doesn’t always hold eye contact. On the campaign trail, it sometimes looks as though he just doesn’t want to be here. And maybe that’s part of the secret to his success.“It’s hard to brand him as a politician,” says Lara Putnam, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies grassroots politics, “because he literally shows up in shorts everywhere, year-round – with such commitment that it’s not a gimmick.”Now this least slick of politicians is poised to win the most heavily contested elections in America, and to test the strength of Democrats under Joe Biden in a crucial race. Pennsylvania is the swingiest of swing states, and, not incidentally, its Senate race this year will be the most expensive in the nation. It presents the Democratic party’s best chances to flip a seat away from Republican control, and could even decide the fate of the Democratic majority in the Senate.Yet Fetterman’s ideology is hard to peg. He’s an enthusiastic union supporter who says he would vote for Medicare for all, but does not support scrapping the electoral college or defunding the police. He’s a longtime proponent of legalizing marijuana, but he also cares passionately about the minutiae of prison policy. When asked about the precise targeting of a wealth tax proposal, he shrugged and said, “You know it when you see it.”“He doesn’t come across as a generic Democrat, in ways that may benefit him electorally and compensate for him not being a telegenic, charismatic gladhander,” says Putnam.In fact, Fetterman’s ability to find strength in not being a predictable politician reminds some observers of another successful outsider.“Donald Trump does things a lot of people find counterintuitive, but his finger is on the pulse of the Republican base,” says public affairs consultant and state political insider Larry Ceisler. “Maybe Fetterman has that ability.”Pennsylvania initially seemed tailor-made for a different candidate: Connor Lamb. A clean-cut former marine and congressman with a record of winning tough races in Trump-friendly areas, he seemed like the perfect man for the race. Instead, Lamb badly lags Fetterman in every poll and has raised only a third of the money. That’s not to say that Lamb and state representative Malcolm Kenyatta, the other competitive player in the primary, aren’t trying. In two bruising televised debates, they have jabbed at the frontrunner, probing his weak spots. Lamb claims Fetterman is too progressive for the state; Kenyatta attacks from the left. Fetterman simply stares forward and repeats his talking points.“This is 2022, you don’t have to be great on the debate stage. Maybe you don’t even have to be on the debate stage at all,” says Ceisler.From affluent childhood to steel-town mayorFetterman hails from York county, one of the most heavily Republican corners of Pennsylvania. His family was well-off – his father is an insurance executive – and quite conservative. According to his college roommate and football teammate, Fetterman was a conservative too.But as a volunteer with Big Brothers, Big Sisters he was exposed to an America far beyond the exurban gentry class. Instead of going into business, he attended Harvard’s Kennedy School for Government and got a job teaching in a GED program in the deeply depressed steel town of Braddock, a mostly Black community where from a peak of 21,000 the population has fallen to less than 2,000.His students persuaded him to run for mayor, and he won the 2005 election by one vote. Soon his gigantic stature and casually grizzled style attracted media attention – Levi’s even featured him in a series of advertisements set in Braddock, in exchange for a new playground and a $1m community center.“He was known as someone who was trying to advocate for a really hard-hit community and bring new jobs and opportunities to that region and to that city,” says Putnam. Although he couldn’t stop the population loss, a handful of new businesses opened in town, and he parlayed his civic fame to attract corporate donations.Above all, in a town scarred by violence, he says his greatest accomplishment is a stretch of five and a half years with no gun deaths. He championed community policing tactics and has never embraced the more aggressive leftwing critiques of law enforcement.“I’m the only Democrat or Republican [in the race] that’s actually been in charge of a police department,” he boasted at one debate. “I fought to increase their wages, I fought to shore up their benefits, and I fought to increase budgets consistently every year.”Gun violence is also at the root of the most uncomfortable criticisms of Fetterman. In the winter of 2013, he heard a burst of gunfire in his neighborhood and saw a man running in a ski mask and dark clothing. Fetterman grabbed a shotgun and drove his pickup truck in pursuit. He apprehended the man, who turned out to be an innocent Black jogger, until the police arrived.The story raised eyebrows, and in the Black Lives Matter era looks even worse. Fetterman says he never aimed the shotgun at the jogger and that he didn’t know the man was Black. (The runner, who is incarcerated for unrelated reasons, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Fetterman is lying but that he should be elected to the Senate anyway.)“For somebody who has cut an image as an incredibly tough guy, you’re so afraid of two little words: I’m sorry,” said Kenyatta, who is Black, at one of the debates. Fetterman noted that he won re-election in Braddock twice more after the incident, and Ceisler says polling found that the story did not hurt Fetterman’s standing among canvassed Black voters.“If they were counting on that story about the gun and the African American working against him, I don’t see it,” says Maurice Floyd, a Black political consultant in Philadelphia. “He’s got a lead like that and, what, you think there aren’t any African Americans in those polls?”Fetterman’s case for facing the Republicans in November is rooted in his non-Braddock campaigns. In 2016 he launched a quixotic bid for the US Senate, embraced Sanders’ socialist presidential campaign, and energetically stumped all over the state. He lost, but won a respectable 20% of the primary vote.Two years later Fetterman ran for lieutenant governor against the incumbent Democrat, a scandal-plagued politician from Philadelphia. This time Fetterman won a resounding victory.The position is mostly ceremonial, but he has used it aggressively, visiting every county in the state on a listening tour about legalizing marijuana.“John doesn’t wait for campaign season to show up,” says Joe Calvello, director of communications for Fetterman. “The first thing he did as lieutenant governor was to tour 67 counties to talk to people, to get out there, to hear people’s concerns, whether it’s about legalizing marijuana or forging new lives. He’s had these conversations for years.”Fetterman also powerfully exercises one of his only actual powers in this odd duck role. The lieutenant governor sits on the board of pardons, which can review contested prison sentences and put them before the governor. As Politico reported in 2021, the board had at that point recommended for leniency more than twice as many cases under Fetterman than in the previous 20 years combined.The 2018 race is also proof he can win a statewide election, something none of the other candidates can claim. His campaign believes his unusual political brand, idiosyncratic political ideology, and attention to rural areas and small towns will win voters who wouldn’t go for a cookie-cutter Democrat.“Democrats cannot be writing off any community – that’s why we’re going anywhere in anywhere and everywhere,” says Calvello. “We don’t believe we’re going to flip these counties blue, but you cut down the margins by showing up, being honest, talking to voters. That matters in a statewide race.”His detractors argue that the lieutenant governor’s race was a low-profile affair, won in an extremely Democratic year, and that Fetterman has never been under a harsh spotlight. “The choices he has made place him too far to the extreme to win at the statewide level in Pennsylvania,” said Lamb during a debate. “When he was running around the state in his gym shorts, making marijuana the number one issue, campaigning with Bernie Sanders, he lost a lot of swing voters already.”‘Every county, every vote’So far, these fears do not seem to have infected the larger Democratic electorate. Republicans are locked in an extremely competitive and crowded primary, with two millionaires recently moved in from out of state – celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz and hedge fund manager David McCormick – dealing each other expensive body blows. The Republican attack line on Fetterman is likely to be that he’s a false working-class hero who cries poor but comes from money. “The guy’s a show-off fake,” says Christopher Nicholas, a Republican political consultant who is not working on the Senate campaign. “He is an interesting MSNBC and social media novelty. He parlayed that into raising a bunch of money, but when you strip away all the technology it’s still a people business. And he can’t go to meetings and do small talk.”But in the debates Fetterman has already begun attacking McCormick: he couldn’t ask for a better foil than an exceedingly wealthy mogul who served in George W Bush’s treasury department and only just moved to Pennsylvania from Connecticut.Such a contest would be the supreme test of Fetterman’s theory of the electorate: that even in a year where all signs are against Democrats on the national level, a socially awkward, heavily tattooed man who is deeply committed to his state can break through.“We are able to bring out margins that we are going to need,” said Fetterman, making the pitch for himself at the second debate. “I’m the only candidate that has always embraced an every-county, every-vote philosophy. That’s how I believe we’re going to win in a tough cycle.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsPennsylvaniaUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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      For Many Pennsylvania Voters, Trumpism Is Bigger Than Trump

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      LAUGHLINTOWN, Pa. — Michael Testa, 51, an Army veteran and handyman, drives a minivan plastered with stickers reading “Trump Won.”He recently stood in the rain and mud for hours to attend Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally. He calls himself a “conspiracy realist” and said he’s one of millions who believe the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.But as he sat on his front porch in Laughlintown, a small borough of Westmoreland County outside Pittsburgh that was once home to the Mellon family fortune, he was undecided about which candidate to vote for on Tuesday in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate. He has misgivings about supporting Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor Mr. Trump has endorsed.“I’m not going to be somebody who does something just because one person says so, even if that person is Trump,” Mr. Testa said.Like other Republican primaries throughout the country, the Pennsylvania Senate race is testing just how strong Mr. Trump’s grip remains on the party. But unlike other primaries this year, the Senate contest in Pennsylvania has suddenly pivoted into something else — a case study of whether the movement Mr. Trump created remains within his control.In interviews with more than two dozen Republican voters in western Pennsylvania, many echoed Mr. Testa’s ambivalence and uncertainty about Dr. Oz — despite Mr. Trump’s backing, they view him with suspicion, call him “too Hollywood” and question his ties to the state. Those Republicans, including Mr. Testa, said they were instead voting for or considering voting for Kathy Barnette, the far-right author and conservative-media commentator who has surged in the polls on a shoestring budget.In a race that could determine control of the Senate, many Republicans in the state find themselves deeply devoted to Mr. Trump yet, at the same time, less swayed by his guidance. Trumpism, as Ms. Barnette herself has put it on the campaign trail, is bigger than Trump.Many voters said they were choosing who they believed would carry out Mr. Trump’s ideals, even if they and the former president disagreed on who could best accomplish that. And interviews showed how effectively Ms. Barnette, who has never held public office, had used her life story as a poor, Black child of the South to connect with white working-class voters in western Pennsylvania. At events and in her ads, Ms. Barnette often invokes the phrase “I am you.”Many voters who said they planned to vote for Ms. Barnette struggled to remember her name and said they were supporting “that Black woman.” Those who said they were voting for her said they were unaware of or unbothered by her history of homophobic and anti-Muslim views. But her strong anti-abortion beliefs — Ms. Barnette calls herself a “byproduct of rape”— have been a key part of her appeal to white conservatives.Dolores Mrozinski, left, and her daughter, Janey Mrozinski, are drawn to Ms. Barnette.Jeff Swensen for The New York Times“I like what she stands for,” said Dolores Mrozinski, 83, who first watched Ms. Barnette on the Christian Television Network and was immediately impressed. “She’s no-nonsense and the real thing.”Understand the Pennsylvania Primary ElectionThe crucial swing state will hold its primary on May 17, with key races for a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship.Hard-Liners Gain: Republican voters appear to be rallying behind far-right candidates in two pivotal races, worrying both parties about what that could mean in November.G.O.P. Senate Race: Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator, is making a surprise late surge against big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.Democratic Senate Race: Representative Conor Lamb had all the makings of a front-runner. It hasn’t worked out that way.Abortion Battleground: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where abortion access hangs in the balance with midterm elections this year.Electability Concerns: Starting with Pennsylvania, the coming weeks will offer a window into the mood of Democratic voters who are deeply worried about a challenging midterm campaign environment.Years ago, Ms. Mrozinski and her daughter, Janey Mrozinski, a 62-year-old physical therapist, watched Dr. Oz on television and even admired him. Now, the elder Ms. Mrozinski said, “he just doesn’t seem genuine.”“I don’t even know if he really lives in Pennsylvania,” she said, referring to Dr. Oz’s long history, until recent years, of living and voting in New Jersey. “He seems more Hollywood than here and it doesn’t impress me.”Her daughter added, “He looks like he had a face lift.” On the other hand, David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who is also running in the primary, was simply, she said, “too much, too proud of himself.”In many ways, the vote for the Senate seat is as much a battle over the perception of authenticity as any ideological or policy debate. For months now, the leading candidates have each tried to align themselves closely with Mr. Trump and promote their conservative credentials. In the tight contest between the leading contenders — Dr. Oz, Ms. Barnette and Mr. McCormick — all three of them have tried hard to cast themselves as the true MAGA warrior.Some voters have clearly made up their minds about which one they believe is more authentic. But others are still deciding.One glance at John Artzberger’s auto body shop along Highway 8 in Butler County makes his political leanings clear: A “Let’s Go Brandon” flag flies from the shop’s marquee, and Trump paraphernalia covers a large wall near the entrance. When one customer asked him to place a Barnette lawn sign out front, he did not hesitate to agree. Still, the sign was just a sign — he said he was undecided and considering voting for either Ms. Barnette or Dr. Oz.John Artzberger, a body shop owner in Butler, Pa., said he was uncertain who would win his vote, Ms. Barnette or Dr. Oz.Jeff Swensen for The New York Times“She’s 100 percent on our side — close the border, pro-life,” Mr. Artzberger, 68, said of Ms. Barnette. “If she gets it, she’s going to be for the people.” Like many other Republicans in Butler County, Mr. Artzberger views Dr. Oz’s previous time in the spotlight with disdain.“But then again, Trump had been in the public eye, too, and he ended up being really with us,” he said. “I’ve changed, so maybe he changed, too.”In Laughlintown in Westmoreland County, it takes about 10 steps to travel from the front porch of Mr. Testa’s old Craftsman to the front doors of the small brick church next door. In that short distance lies a glimpse of the Republican Party’s identity crisis.Jonathan Huddleston, 48, the minister of Laughlintown Christian Church, calls himself a Never-Trump Republican but remains committed to the party to, in part, “help vote the wackos out.” He, too, is undecided — he is considering voting for Mr. McCormick, who tried but failed to win the Trump endorsement.Jonathan Huddleston, a minister in Laughlintown and a moderate Republican, is another undecided voter.Jeff Swensen for The New York Times“I want to support the Romneys of the world, the reasonable leaders, the ones who drew me to begin with,” Mr. Huddleston said. “Now I’m searching to find people like that. All of the other voices are drowning them out.”Some Republican voters said they had tried to tune out the deluge of attack ads on television from Mr. McCormick and Dr. Oz, who have each spent millions of dollars of their own wealth in the race. The backlash against the Oz and McCormick ads appeared to benefit Ms. Barnette, who has spent less than $200,000 in her campaign.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Fox News Hosts Splinter as Chaotic Pennsylvania Primaries Heat Up

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      Fox News is having another one of its moments.The network’s internal fissures were on public display this week as host after host, at times seemingly in dialogue with one another, either defended or threw rhetorical spitballs at different candidates in Pennsylvania’s ghost-pepper-hot Republican primary races.It was a reminder of how the battle for hearts and minds within the G.O.P. is playing out across the conservative news media, an ever-evolving ecosystem that has grown only more complex since Donald Trump’s famous glide down that golden escalator. And it was a sharp illustration of how Fox News grants extraordinary latitude to its biggest stars — with each prime-time show often operating as its own private fief.Thursday night alone was pretty wild, with Sean Hannity pumping up Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice for Senate, and talking down Kathy Barnette, a conservative media commentator whose late surge in the May 17 primary has alarmed Republican Party insiders and thrilled the rambunctious G.O.P. grass-roots in Pennsylvania.An hour later, Laura Ingraham was defending Barnette against what she called “smears.”To viewers, it presented the illusion of a real-time debate between warring factions of what remains the nation’s most powerful cable news channel. Fox News did not offer an on-the-record comment by publication time.“This is the closest thing to a head-to-head competition we’ve seen between two Fox hosts in quite some time,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a nonprofit group aligned with the Democratic Party that monitors conservative news outlets.“When you’re watching at home, it appears seamless,” said Greta Van Susteren, a former Fox News host, who said that Ingraham probably hadn’t watched Hannity while preparing for her show. “But when I was at Fox, we all had our own real estate, and nobody ever told me what to say or do.”And it’s not just Fox. Various lesser-known conservative media stars have joined the boisterous public discussion over whether Republican voters should tap Oz, widely seen within the party’s base as a faux Trumper — or Barnette, who comes off as very much the real thing.On the Full MAGA end of the right-wing media spectrum, the likes of Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon were giving softball interviews to Barnette, who rose to prominence largely outside of Fox News. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt, a syndicated radio host who once was considered more of an establishment figure but now supports Trump, was endorsing David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who has appeared to fade in the Senate primary as the other two leading contenders have risen.“It’s too delicious,” said Charlie Sykes, the never-Trump host of The Bulwark Podcast, who disdainfully refers to the conservative news media as the “entertainment wing of the Republican Party.”“The irony is that the entertainment wing will build someone up and then realize, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve grown a monster,’” Sykes said. “It’s like watching the Republican Party grow a baby crocodile in the bathtub and be shocked when it grows into a beast and starts devouring people.”An Inside Look at Fox NewsThe conservative cable news network is one of the most influential media outlets in the United States.Tucker Carlson: The star TV host stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, he transformed Fox News and became Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.What Trump Helped Build: Together, the channel and Donald Trump have redefined the limits of acceptable political discourse.How Russia Uses Fox News: The network has appeared in Russian media as a way to bolster the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine war.Leaving Fox News: After 18 years with the network, the anchor Chris Wallace, who left for the now shuttered streaming service CNN+, said working at Fox News had become “unsustainable.”‘Everything’s a little more fractured’The conservative news media has fragmented since the advent of Trump, with the dominant trend being a raucous battle for the former president’s ear and favor. But shrewd observers of the landscape say this year’s midterm elections have ushered in a fresh level of chaos.“There’s a new intensity around it, I think,” said Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review. “It just feels like everything’s a little more fractured.”John Fredericks, a Virginia-based radio host who supports Oz and plans to campaign for him next week, said in an interview that while Barnette was a “nice lady,” she would get “blown out in the fall.”Fredericks predicted that Oz would win comfortably on Tuesday despite Barnette’s sudden ascent in public polls, including in a Fox News survey published this week that turbocharged the conservative news media’s debate over the Pennsylvania primaries.Dr. Mehmet Oz has found himself in a close three-way race with Barnette and David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesInternal G.O.P. polling has found that undecided voters are tending to break for the Trump-backed candidate in the last five days or so before a primary election.Democrats have giddily circulated their own research indicating that Barnette is leading the field in the Senate race by about 10 percentage points, but that survey was conducted before Trump issued a statement reiterating his support for Oz and suggesting that Barnette’s past had not been thoroughly examined.Much of that scrutiny is taking place within the conservative media, fueled in some instances by allies of McCormick and Oz, who have been promoting hastily assembled opposition research about Barnette in recent days.During Thursday night’s program, Hannity singled out Barnette’s history of offensive tweets, including Islamophobic and homophobic ones, and said she could not win a general election. Oz, who is of Turkish descent, is a nonpracticing Muslim.Hannity later wrote a series of tweets aimed directly at Barnette, beginning with: “As you know my staff has reached out to you repeatedly in the last 48 hours, it’s great to FINALLY get a response from you. Why have you been ignoring their calls and texts?”Articles in the conservative news media have zeroed in on aspects of Barnette’s biography. Salena Zito, a Pennsylvania-based columnist for The Washington Examiner, raised questions about Barnette’s military service record; The Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross wrote about how Barnette’s campaign manager hung up the phone on him when he grilled her on the subject.Mike Mikus, a veteran Democratic consultant based near Pittsburgh, said the ferment among conservative news outlets reflected the fact that to win a modern Republican primary, “you don’t need the traditional press.”For instance, the campaign of Doug Mastriano, a leading Republican contender for governor of Pennsylvania, rarely responds to queries from mainstream news organizations, and has barred journalists working for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the state’s most influential source of political news and commentary, from its events.“When an Inquirer reporter showed up at a campaign event in Lancaster County last month, two security guards asked him to leave,” the Inquirer reporters Juliana Feliciano Reyes and Andrew Seidman wrote in an article on May 4. “A printout of his photograph and those of other journalists was visible at the check-in desk.”A porous media-campaign barrierFox opinion hosts enjoy a high degree of autonomy, leading at times to a blurring of journalistic and campaign roles that would be anathema at many other outfits — including the network’s archrival, CNN, which fired Chris Cuomo last year as the scope of his entanglement with his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, became clear.Tucker Carlson of Fox News helped slingshot J.D. Vance into the G.O.P. nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio, for instance, helping him gain a following and honing his pitch to voters — and, perhaps most important, to Trump. According to a New York Times analysis of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” transcripts, Vance has appeared as Carlson’s guest on the program nine times so far this year. He appeared 13 times in 2021, five times in 2020 and six times in 2019.For his part, Hannity has appeared at Trump rallies and even offered his private advice to Trump while he was in office, according to a trove of text messages published by CNN. Oz appeared on Hannity’s prime-time Fox show 20 times in 2021 and 2022, according to Media Matters.In that sense, Hannity’s crossover into a campaign role is hardly a new phenomenon in the extended Trump universe, though rarely have the porous borders between the conservative entertainment wing and the official Republican Party collapsed in such a compressed time frame.But that broader pro-Trump media world now extends well beyond Fox, and the network is losing its monopoly on the Republican base, as the party’s panic over Barnette’s ascent dramatically shows.By lunchtime on Friday, Fredericks was hosting Trump himself for a radio interview, in which the former president reiterated his skepticism of Barnette and plugged his choice, Oz.Karen Yourish More

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      Kathy Barnette’s Star Rises in Pennsylvania Senate Race

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      Trump says she can’t win in November, but Kathy Barnette presses toward Tuesday’s voting. “They’re coming out with long knives at this point,” she said.SOUTHAMPTON, Pa. — Kathy Barnette’s opposition to abortion could not be more personal.Her mother was raped and gave birth to her at age 12. “It wasn’t a choice. It was a life. My life,” an emotional campaign video starts.Ms. Barnette — a hard-right conservative locked in a seven-way Republican primary for an open Pennsylvania Senate seat — is suddenly surging in the polls, statistically tied for first place with two ultrarich men. And one of them has the lone thing more valuable than money or name recognition in a G.O.P. primary: a Trump endorsement.As the election approaches on Tuesday, Ms. Barnette, 50, a Black mother of two who has never held office and whose life story has moved many white anti-abortion conservatives, poses a late threat to the two presumptive favorites, David McCormick, a retired hedge fund manager, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, a television celebrity endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Barnette, who has publicly espoused homophobic and anti-Muslim views, has been propelled mainly by her strong debate performances and her rags-to-riches story. Not even the news on Thursday that Mr. Trump had questioned elements of her past and declared that only Dr. Oz could defeat Democrats in November seemed to bother her.Hours after Mr. Trump’s statement, Ms. Barnette spoke at a Republican Party dinner.“They’re coming out with long knives at this point,” she told the audience in Southampton, about a half-hour drive north of Philadelphia. “Right? And I had the best day of my life today.”Later, talking to reporters who were mainly barred from the event, she said she interpreted Mr. Trump’s comments as “favorable.” The former president had said that she would “never be able to win” the general election in November, but that she had a “wonderful future” in the Republican Party.“We know that President Trump does not mince words,” she said. “I think that letter was favorable. And I look forward to working with the president.”In campaign videos and in front of voters, she explains that she spent at least part of her childhood living on a pig farm in southern Alabama, in the “one stop sign” town of Nichburg, in a house without insulation, running water or an indoor toilet.“But this country allowed me to be able to create a different narrative for myself,” she told Republicans at a campaign forum on Wednesday held by a group that is dissatisfied with Pennsylvania’s mainstream G.O.P. and hopes to elect a slate of more conservative candidates to the state committee.“But that country is about to come to a close,” she warned in a singsong stump speech that blended the confidence of the pulpit and the intimacy of the confessional. “So we need good people now to stand up and begin to fight for the greatest nation that has ever existed.”From Opinion: A Challenge to Roe v. WadeCommentary by Times Opinion writers and columnists on the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Gail Collins: The push to restrict women’s reproductive rights is about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure.Jamelle Bouie: The logic of the draft ruling is an argument that could sweep more than just abortion rights out of the circle of constitutional protection.Matthew Walther, Editor of a Catholic Literary Journal: Those who oppose abortion should not discount the possibility that its proscription will have some regrettable consequences. Even so, it will be worth it.Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan: If Roe falls, abortion will become a felony in Michigan. I have a moral obligation to stand up for the rights of the women of the state I represent.Her vision of what that might look like is unambiguous.She opposes gun control and abortion rights and proposes limiting the federal government’s involvement in the health care industry. She has ridiculed the Muslim faith in online posts and promotes Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In a 2010 essay, published online by the Canada Free Press, she argued that the gay rights movement — which she called “immoral and perverse” — sought “domination” and should be thwarted, citing the Bible as justification.“Make no mistake about it, homosexuality is a targeted group in the Bible, right along with cheats, drunkards, liars, foul-mouths, extortionists, robbers, and any other habitual sin,” she wrote.In an interview, she said she had no plan to move toward the center if she wins next week.Voters listen to Ms. Barnette at the Newtown forum.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesAnd to the line of people who hovered nearby at campaign events on Wednesday and Thursday hoping to snap a selfie with Ms. Barnette, her outspokenness and her life story were primary selling points.“She’s authentic,” said Dr. Anthony Mannarino, an eye surgeon who said his parents moved to the United States from Italy when he was 2, and neither of them had any formal education beyond the fifth grade.“It doesn’t look like she drove up from out of town to take a Senate seat,” Dr. Mannarino added, taking a swipe at Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick, both of whom moved back to Pennsylvania relatively recently from out of state. Ms. Barnette refers to them as carpetbaggers.“I want a regular person,” Dr. Mannarino said. “I want somebody who knows how much a hamburger costs and fills their own gas tank.”Ms. Barnette, the author of “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America,” left Alabama after graduating from college, and has been living in Pennsylvania for eight years, according to her campaign manager.She and her husband, Carl, own a four-bedroom home in Huntingdon Valley, a Philadelphia suburb, according to property records. For six years, she said, she home-schooled her son and daughter while appearing as a conservative commentator on “Fox & Friends.”“She’s a new face in government,” said Conrad J. Kraus, a real estate broker and builder who lives around the corner from Ms. Barnette and handed out fliers advertising a neighborhood open house for the candidate on Sunday. A Trump flag hangs on his tree. A doormat reading “Don’t Blame This Family. We Voted for Trump,” welcomes visitors.“A fresh face,” he said on Thursday, predicting a win. “I like that.”The Barnettes have also owned property in Texas, property records show, and her book biography on Amazon indicates that she has lived in Virginia.The State of Roe v. WadeCard 1 of 4What is Roe v. Wade? More

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      Conor Lamb Had All The Makings of a Front-Runner in Pennsylvania. So Why Is He Struggling?

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      Representative Conor Lamb was supposed to be a Democratic rising star — a Marine veteran, former prosecutor and Pennsylvania moderate who had won in Trump territory and swing suburbs alike. Scores of Democratic officials endorsed him in his run for Senate, eager to pick up a Republican-held open seat and have him roll into Washington next year to bridge the partisan chasm.It hasn’t quite worked out that way.Mr. Lamb now heads into the state’s Democratic primary on Tuesday on a much less competitive footing than he or his supporters had hoped. He trails by double digits in polling behind John Fetterman, the shorts-wearing lieutenant governor whose outsider image has resonated with the Democratic base.Two distinct forces appear to have worked against Mr. Lamb: his campaign’s strategic missteps and his misfortune to be running at a time when Democrats, much like Republicans, are rejecting their party’s centrists.The seeming meltdown for Mr. Lamb — whose initial victories in Western Pennsylvania had been a model for President Biden’s 2020 race — reflects a frustration among Democrats nationally with politicians who promise bipartisan accord, including Mr. Biden, and who have yielded meager results in Washington. It comes as the left sees a rising Republican extremism on voting rights and abortion. Some Democrats appear more eager to elect fighters than candidates who might be tempted, like party moderates, to block their priorities.“I look at him as another Joe Manchin,” said Elen Snyder, a Democrat and member of Newtown Township’s board of supervisors in Bucks County, referring to Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the Democrat who has stymied the White House on many issues. Her local Democratic committee interviewed Mr. Lamb but declined to endorse him.Mr. Lamb’s initial victories in Western Pennsylvania had been a model for President Biden’s 2020 race.Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesDemocratic strategists in Pennsylvania said the Lamb campaign’s missteps included running the race as if Mr. Lamb were the front-runner, failing to aggressively attack Mr. Fetterman and focusing almost exclusively on the message that Mr. Lamb was the most electable Democrat, when base voters appeared to want someone more partisan. And they said the campaign placed too much emphasis on winning endorsements from the Democratic establishment, when voters seemed to show that they did not really care.“He had rock star potential — their campaign flittered that away,” said Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic operative in Pennsylvania and a Lamb supporter. “They ran a campaign that said, ‘Let’s stay above the fray. Everyone’s going to love it.’ But they were behind from the day he got in the race and ran the wrong campaign to close the gap.”Several strategists said the Lamb campaign, with its aversion to going negative and emphasis on endorsements from Democrats statewide, seemed modeled on elections from decades past. One operative invoked Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee who projected reserve and lacked a killer instinct.Abby Nassif-Murphy, Mr. Lamb’s campaign manager, disputed such characterizations. She said Mr. Lamb entered the race as an underdog and grew support that was more substantial than “dubious polls” have suggested.Understand the Pennsylvania Primary ElectionThe crucial swing state will hold its primary on May 17, with key races for a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship.Hard-Liners Gain: Republican voters appear to be rallying behind far-right candidates in two pivotal races, worrying both parties about what that could mean in November.G.O.P. Senate Race: Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator, is making a surprise late surge against big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.Democratic Senate Race: Representative Conor Lamb had all the makings of a front-runner. It hasn’t worked out that way.Abortion Battleground: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where abortion access hangs in the balance with midterm elections this year.Electability Concerns: Starting with Pennsylvania, the coming weeks will offer a window into the mood of Democratic voters who are deeply worried about a challenging midterm campaign environment.“In nine months, he’s built a broad, diverse coalition of union workers, African Americans, women, men, progressives, moderates, religious leaders, teachers, firefighters, nurses, construction workers — people from all parts of Pennsylvania and all parts of the Democratic Party,” Ms. Nassif-Murphy said in a statement.Long a battleground represented by center-right or center-left statewide officials, Pennsylvania could host a matchup in the fall between far less consensus-minded candidates, especially since the leading Republicans have all professed loyalty to Donald Trump. Kathy Barnette, who has surged in the final days, has actively promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.Mr. Lamb, 37, a native of the Pittsburgh area, boasts of scores of endorsements, including from the mayors of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, officials in the all-important Philadelphia suburbs and members of the state legislature. He has the backing of the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, and of labor unions. Multiple Philadelphia officials endorsed him, even though a third candidate in the race, Malcolm Kenyatta, is from the city.Conor Lamb at an event earlier this month in Philadelphia hosted by the National Organization for Women, which endorsed him.Matt Rourke/Associated PressMr. Fetterman has made his lack of endorsements into a kind of badge of honor: He has long disdained glad-handing other elected officials and is an unpopular figure even in the statehouse, where he officially presides over the State Senate.Still, his progressive politics — he was an early backer of Bernie Sanders — and iconoclastic style have made him well-liked by the party base and created an online fund-raising juggernaut. Mr. Fetterman’s approval with Democrats in the state was 67 percent in a recent Franklin & Marshall College Poll, compared with 46 percent for Mr. Lamb.“Fetterman astutely ran a campaign focused on Democratic voters more than Democratic elites,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in the state.Mr. Fetterman has stayed ahead in the fund-raising race by soliciting small online donations.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMelinda Wedde, a 37-year-old yoga teacher who is a volunteer door-knocker for the Lamb campaign in the Pittsburgh suburbs, said it was too early to count him out. “He’s out there talking to voters every single day,” Ms. Wedde said. “I think a lot of people are still waiting to make decisions.”One advantage for Mr. Lamb in winning the endorsements from Democratic officials is that when he visited a town or city far from home, local officials often pulled in a crowd to hear him.“People can say ‘establishment officials’ all they want, but these people are the trusted people in their communities, who people elected, and they have to have some sort of favorability amongst the masses,’’ said State Representative Ryan Bizzarro, a Lamb supporter who escorted him on a trip to Erie County on Tuesday.Still, Mr. Lamb’s electability argument, the core of his pitch to party leaders, seems to have left many rank-and-file voters unmoved. And his central-casting image may be working against him.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Trump Criticizes Kathy Barnette as She Surges in Pennsylvania’s G.O.P. Senate Primary

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      A late surge from Kathy Barnette in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary is officially on former President Trump’s radar.Mr. Trump criticized Ms. Barnette, a conservative author and political commentator, on Thursday and said she was unvetted and unelectable. “Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the general election against the radical left Democrats,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.Ms. Barnett’s momentum in the polls has jeopardized Mr. Trump’s second attempt to influence the primary race, which comes to a close on Tuesday. He endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, a longtime television host, after his first choice for the seat, Sean Parnell, suspended his campaign in November amid a court battle over the custody of his children.Ms. Barnette’s sudden rise comes as Dr. Oz has been locked in a contentious primary fight with David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive with deep ties to Mr. Trump’s political orbit. A Fox News Poll on Tuesday showed her at 19 percent, behind Mr. McCormick at 20 percent and Dr. Oz at 22 percent.Her climb has surprised many watching the Pennsylvania race — including Mr. Trump, who never seriously considered supporting her before he announced his endorsement of Dr. Oz less than five weeks ago, according to two people familiar with the decision who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.But Ms. Barnette’s candidacy is being taken seriously by the Club for Growth, which endorsed her on Wednesday and announced a $2 million TV ad buy to support her. Her opponents, meanwhile, are scrambling to dig up dirt, like a 2016 tweet in which she claimed then-President Barack Obama was a Muslim. (Mr. Trump repeatedly raised doubts about Mr. Obama’s faith and questioned whether he was a Muslim.)Another sign of the staying power of Ms. Barnette’s surge: Mr. Trump’s criticism of her record allowed for the possibility that she may win. That contrasts sharply with how he has repeatedly attacked Mr. McCormick.“She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted,” Mr. Trump said in his statement, “but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party — and I will be behind her all the way.” More

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      Hard-Liners Gain in Pennsylvania G.O.P. Races, Worrying Both Parties

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      Doug Mastriano and Kathy Barnette are amplifying Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie in two key races. Republicans fear they could lose in November. Democrats fear they could win.ERIE, Pa. — Republican voters in Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most hotly contested political battlegrounds, appear to be rallying behind two hard-right candidates for governor and the Senate who are capturing grass-roots anger, railing against the party’s old guard and amplifying Donald Trump’s stolen-election myth.With less than a week until the state’s primary election on Tuesday, polls show that State Senator Doug Mastriano — one of the state’s central figures in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — has emerged as the clear front-runner in the G.O.P. race for governor. The candidate for Senate, Kathy Barnette, an underfunded conservative commentator who has never held public office, has made a surprise late surge in the contest that had been dominated by two big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.Mr. Mastriano has made claims of election fraud a central plank of his bid to lead a state that could be decisive in the 2024 presidential race. Ms. Barnette has a history of incendiary remarks, including repeatedly calling former President Barack Obama an adherent of Islam, which she said should be banned, and derisively writing about “the homosexual agenda.” Both candidates have endorsed each other, forging an important alliance.Now, Republicans are concerned about losing both races in November if primary voters embrace such out-of-the-mainstream candidates.Several Republican rivals to Mr. Mastriano have been gathering on private conference calls in recent days in a last-minute attempt to stop him. All agree that he would be a drag on the party, though Mr. Mastriano has yet to sustain any serious coordinated attacks. Two rivals, State Senator Jake Corman and former Representative Lou Barletta, have set a joint event on Thursday, suggesting that the field might soon consolidate, at least slightly.Democrats harbor their own fear: that the bleak 2022 political environment could nonetheless sweep into power Republicans who, in a less hostile climate, might seem unelectable.Kathy Barnette, a Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, at a candidate forum in Newtown, Pa., on Wednesday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times“Like a lot of Democrats, I’m schizophrenic on this — rooting for the crazy person because it gives us the best chance to win. But at the same time it could give us a crazy senator or a crazy governor, or both,” said Mike Mikus, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist.For years, Pennsylvania has been one of the nation’s quintessential swing states, in which the clearest path to power was through the middle ground between the Democratic and Republican parties. This year’s open seats are because Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, is retiring and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, is term-limited.“Pennsylvania is not real good about that extreme on either side,” said Rob Gleason, a former Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, who was one of Mr. Trump’s chief supporters in the state in 2016 but now worries about Mr. Mastriano in 2022. “No matter what you say, it’s kind of a down-the-middle type of a state.”In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state, the position that oversees state elections, meaning whoever wins the governorship will be overseeing the administration of one of the most coveted swing states in the 2024 presidential race.State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania governor, met with environmental advocates in Philadelphia last month.Matt Rourke/Associated PressFor months, the Senate race has been seen chiefly as a heavyweight bout between Dr. Oz, the television personality, and Mr. McCormick, the former chief executive of the world’s largest hedge fund. They and their allies have combined to spend nearly $40 million on television ads. Ms. Barnette, who ran for the House in 2020 in a Philadelphia suburb and lost by nearly 20 percentage points, had rated somewhere between afterthought and asterisk in the race until recently. But a Fox News poll on Tuesday showed the race a virtual three-way tie.To date, Ms. Barnette’s growth has been almost entirely organic, fueled by her sharp debate performances, conservative media appearances and compelling life story, which she told in her book, “Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America.”A “byproduct of a rape,” as she describes herself, when her mother was only 11, Ms. Barnette talks about growing up “on a pig farm” in Alabama without running water and how her success represents the kind of American dream story that is now at risk.In the final week, Ms. Barnette is receiving some crucial institutional backing: the endorsement of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List on Tuesday and a $2 million television advertising blitz funded by the Club for Growth, which is broadcasting her up-from-the-bootstraps message statewide.The Club for Growth, one of the biggest spenders in Republican politics, has feuded recently with Mr. Trump after running ads attacking J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, even after Mr. Trump endorsed him. Mr. Vance won that primary, and Mr. Trump has endorsed Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.Kathy Barnette, second from left, and Mehmet Oz, third from left, with other Republican candidates for Senate last month at a forum in Camp Hill, Pa.Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn some ways, Ms. Barnette’s candidacy is a test of whether the movement that elected Mr. Trump has taken on a life of its own. “MAGA does not belong to President Trump,” Ms. Barnette said in one April debate.Both Dr. Oz and Mr. McCormick have wooed Mr. Trump’s supporters, though it has been an awkward fit. Dr. Oz was booed at a Trump rally, Mr. McCormick was rejected by Mr. Trump, and both have faced questions of carpetbagging in a state where they did not recently live full time.Ms. Barnette has offered herself as an authentic and unfiltered version of what the Republican base wants. “Listen, this time, you do not have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils,” she said at another debate.She has also made plain that there will be no pivot to the middle if she makes it to the fall campaign.“There’s been a longstanding tradition that we want to get as moderate of a Republican coming out of the primary — someone palatable — for the general,” she said in an interview on Wednesday night at a candidate forum in eastern Pennsylvania. “In doing this, how has that worked out for them? It hasn’t really worked out very well.”In the governor’s race, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, began running television ads last week featuring a narrator touting Mr. Mastriano’s conservative credentials: “If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.” Mr. Trump has not endorsed in that contest.On Tuesday, Mr. Mastriano campaigned in Erie, Pa., with Jenna Ellis, the former co-counsel for the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.“Doug Mastriano, I like to say, is the Donald Trump of Pennsylvania,” Ms. Ellis said.Mr. Mastriano was a key figure in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the results in Pennsylvania, a state he lost by 81,000 votes. As a freshman state senator, he held a hearing in November 2020 featuring Ms. Ellis and the Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, visited the White House shortly afterward and remained in close contact with the Trump team. State Senator Doug Mastriano speaking to Trump supporters outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg a few days after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the presidential election in 2020.Julio Cortez/Associated PressHe posted an event on Facebook offering bus rides to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and his campaign reported spending at least $3,000 chartering buses. But he has claimed that he left before the protest turned violent. In Erie, Mr. Mastriano, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, defended the rally.“It’s like, God have mercy on your soul if you dare to go and exercise your First Amendment freedom to go to D.C. on Jan. 6?” Mr. Mastriano said. “You did nothing wrong.”Among those quietly vying to coalesce Republicans around an alternative to Mr. Mastriano is Andy Reilly, one of Pennsylvania’s three Republican National Committee members. Mr. Reilly, who has not endorsed in the race, said the Shapiro campaign’s ads had “raised concerns” and sparked discussions.“The fact that the Democrats are running pro-Mastriano ads tells us that they believe he would be the weakest candidate,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime Pennsylvania Republican operative who is running for governor and polling in the low single digits.Interviewed while stumping at a bakery in Erie, Mr. Barletta, a former congressman who beat a Democratic incumbent in 2010, called himself the strongest Mastriano alternative.Lou Barletta, a candidate for governor, with his wife and granddaughter last month in Hazleton, Pa.John Haeger/Standard-Speaker, via Associated Press“It’s been myself and Doug Mastriano” at the top of every poll, Mr. Barletta said. “Now people have to make a decision, and a lot of those undecideds need to look at who do they think has a better chance to beat Josh Shapiro.”Bill McSwain, who served as the U.S. attorney for eastern Pennsylvania during the Trump administration, is also running and has spent as much on television as the rest of the field combined, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. But he is also the only candidate in the race to be attacked by Mr. Trump. “Do not vote for Bill McSwain, a coward, who let our Country down,” Mr. Trump said last month in a statement attacking Mr. McSwain for not sufficiently pressing Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania.Mr. Gleason, the former party chairman, is backing Mr. McSwain anyway, fearful that Mr. Mastriano would lose a general election. “He would be toxic,” he said.Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said he was approached on the House floor this week by colleagues from other states excited that Republicans could pick two such far-right nominees. But he said that he still remembers 2010, when seemingly unelectable Tea Party Republicans won, and then 2016, when Mr. Trump carried Pennsylvania and the presidency.“I should be happy that Republicans seem to be on the way to blowing both of these races,” Mr. Boyle said. But, he added, “I am very nervous that, lo and behold, two Republican extremists would be elected governor and senator.”For her part, Ms. Barnette, appearing this week on the podcast of Stephen Bannon, the former Trump adviser, dismissed Republican concerns that she was “too MAGA” to win in November.“Do these people have a crystal ball?” she asked. “Are they Jesus incarnate? How do they know?”Tracey Tully More

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      John Eastman Pressed Pennsylvania Legislator to Throw Out Biden Votes

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      The lawyer argued that mail ballots in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election could be culled in a way that would reverse President Donald J. Trump’s defeat in an electorally critical state.WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of other ideas promoted by the conservative lawyer John Eastman to keep President Donald J. Trump in the White House after his election loss in 2020, a newly revealed strategy he proposed to take votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Pennsylvania stands out as especially brazen.Mr. Eastman pressed a Pennsylvania state lawmaker in December 2020 to carry out a plan to strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic, according to emails from Mr. Eastman released under a public records request by the University of Colorado Boulder, which employed him at the time.The emails were the latest evidence of just how far Mr. Trump and his allies were willing to go in the weeks after Election Day to keep him in power — complete with anti-democratic plans to install fake pro-Trump electors and reject the votes of Biden supporters. Mr. Eastman would go on to champion the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally block congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory, an idea Mr. Pence rejected even as Mr. Trump was promoting the protests that turned into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.On Dec. 4, 2020, using his university email account, Mr. Eastman wrote to State Representative Russell H. Diamond, Republican of Pennsylvania, with plans for the legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors.He suggested that a mathematical equation could be applied to the vote tallies to reject mail-in ballots for candidates at “a prorated amount.”Mr. Eastman said he was basing his recommendations on his belief that the Trump legal team had presented “ample evidence of sufficient anomalies and illegal votes to have turned the election from Trump to Biden” at public hearings around the country, including in Pennsylvania. But he admitted that he had not actually watched the hearings.“Having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “That would help provide some cover.”He also encouraged Mr. Diamond to have the legislature make a specific determination that “the slate of electors certified by the governor,” and chosen by the voters, was “null and void.”In one email, Mr. Diamond responded that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had not presented strong evidence of fraud at the Pennsylvania hearing.“Honestly, the Trump legal team was not exactly stellar at PA’s hearing, failed to provide the affidavits of their witnesses and made a glaring error by purporting that more ballots had been returned than mailed out,” he wrote.On Dec. 13, the day before all 50 states were set to cast their votes in the Electoral College, Mr. Eastman again urged Mr. Diamond to keep up with the plot to create an alternate slate of electors in Pennsylvania.“The electors absolutely need to meet,” Mr. Eastman wrote to the lawmaker. “Then, if the legislature gets some spine, AND (politically) proofs of fraud and/or illegal votes sufficient to have altered the results of the election is forthcoming, those electoral votes will be available to be certified by the legislature.”In one email, Mr. Diamond introduced Mr. Eastman to the Republican House majority leader in the state, crediting Mr. Eastman with “opening my eyes to our ability to exercise our plenary authority to decertify presidential electors (without ANY ‘evidence’ of retail ‘voter fraud’).”A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In a brief interview on Tuesday, Mr. Diamond said he first learned about Mr. Eastman and his theories about the power of state lawmakers to shape elections when the lawyer testified in front of the Georgia legislature in early December 2020.Mr. Diamond added that when he started to correspond with Mr. Eastman about election results in Pennsylvania, he thought that Mr. Eastman was merely a law professor and did not realize that he was associated with the Trump campaign. Mr. Diamond said he never pursued the idea of disqualifying mail ballots containing votes for Mr. Biden, though Pennsylvania Republicans tried multiple avenues to fight the election results, including filing a lawsuit, appealing to members of Congress and conducting a forensic investigation.The university released more than 700 of Mr. Eastman’s emails and other documents to The New York Times in response to a public information request. The documents were released earlier to the Colorado Ethics Institute, and were reported earlier by The Denver Post and Politico.The Colorado Ethics Institute, a nonprofit that tries to hold public officials accountable to ethics and transparency rules, provided the emails on April 19 to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Curtis Hubbard, a spokesman for the nonprofit, called for a “thorough audit” of Mr. Eastman’s tenure at the university to “determine the school’s connection — wittingly or unwittingly — to one of the darkest days in the history of this country.”A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.Justice Department officials have said they are investigating some of the schemes that Mr. Eastman supported to overturn the election — chief among them, a plan to use so-called alternate slates of electors in key swing states that were won by Mr. Biden. But Mr. Diamond said he had not been contacted by anyone from the Justice Department.The records show the university paid for Mr. Eastman’s trip the weekend after the election to an academic conference in Philadelphia, where he told The Times that his role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power began. At the time of the trip, Mr. Trump’s closest aides, including Corey Lewandowski, were at a nearby hotel putting together a legal brief to challenge the results in Pennsylvania. One of Mr. Trump’s aides reached out to Mr. Eastman to see whether he could go to the hotel to help Mr. Trump’s team.In the beginning of December, Mr. Trump called to see whether Mr. Eastman could help bring legal action directly before the Supreme Court. In the days that followed, Mr. Eastman filed two briefs with the court on Mr. Trump’s behalf, but those efforts quickly failed.The emails also paint a portrait of Mr. Eastman as a visiting professor in Colorado who was respected as a conservative thinker — winning praise from conservative students, including one who thanked him for “having the courage to stand up for your beliefs” and complained of being harassed by liberal professors “for being a white male” — until he fell into disrepute at the university as his efforts to overturn the election became known.After more than 200 professors and students signed a petition against him for questioning the results of the election on Twitter, he wrote: “Oh, brother. These people are indefatigable.”And he complained in emails that he was overworked, as he rushed to challenge the election on behalf of Mr. Trump and teach his classes over Zoom.For a while, he retained the support of his supervisors, including one who cheered him on when Mr. Eastman told him he was doing legal work for Mr. Trump.But after Mr. Eastman spoke at the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 that preceded the riot at the Capitol, baselessly claiming that Democrats had placed ballots in “a secret folder” inside voting machines in a bid to rig the results, he became a lightning rod for criticism.That same afternoon, a former colleague at the university wrote him to say that he had engaged in “seditious actions” during his speech. Within hours Mr. Eastman fired back, calling the accusation “defamatory.”As the days went on, Mr. Eastman defended himself against a blizzard of attacks from those who called him “a traitor” or worse.He often disavowed the violence that erupted at the Capitol and sometimes blamed it on the leftist activists known as antifa.Citing low enrollment, the university canceled Mr. Eastman’s spring courses and his contract expired with the college.In the months since, more information has emerged about Mr. Eastman’s central role in trying to overturn the election, including writing a memo laying out steps he argued Mr. Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power.In March, a federal judge ruled in a civil case that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had most likely committed felonies as they pushed to overturn the election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.The actions taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman, the judge found, amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.” More