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      David McCormick Joins Republican Senate Primary in Pennsylvania

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      A former Treasury official, Mr. McCormick has drawn comparisons to Glenn Youngkin, the financier recently elected governor of Virginia.David McCormick, the former chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, filed paperwork to run for the Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican on Wednesday, entering a crowded but unsettled field in what is likely to be one of the most hotly contested midterm elections.A former Treasury Department official and a former Army captain, Mr. McCormick, 56, joins a number of other major Republican and Democratic contenders vying to succeed Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, who is retiring. His official announcement is expected in the next day or two, according to a campaign adviser, Kristin Davison.Mr. McCormick’s filing came after the Pennsylvania Democratic Party asked federal election officials last week to investigate his spending large sums for television ads in the Pittsburgh region without declaring himself a candidate.The race is for the only open Senate seat in a state won by President Biden and is seen as a tossup, making it a critical battleground for control of the chamber, now divided 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris’s deciding vote giving Democrats a majority.The early jockeying in the Republican field has been characterized by most candidates’ efforts to win the support of grass-roots voters who backed former President Donald J. Trump. They include Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator who has fanned the false conspiracy that Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2020, and Carla Sands, a wealthy former ambassador to Denmark under Mr. Trump, who has promised to “stand up to woke culture, censorship, and critical race theory.” Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon and longtime television host, has framed his candidacy as a conservative response to the pandemic, criticizing mandates, shutdowns and actions by “elites” that restricted “our freedom.”Mr. McCormick has his own personal tie to Mr. Trump: His wife, Dina Powell McCormick, served on the National Security Council during the first year of the Trump Administration. The two were married in 2019. Hope Hicks, a former Trump aide, has been advising Mr. McCormick’s team, and other former Trump staffers, including Stephen Miller, are expected to do so, according to Politico.Five months ahead of the May primary, the field is wide open, especially since the withdrawal in November of Sean Parnell, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Parnell suspended his campaign after losing a custody fight with his estranged wife, who accused him of spousal and child abuse.In a sign of what is sure to be a highly competitive G.O.P. race with several wealthy contenders, Mr. McCormick drew attacks even before he joined the race. A super PAC supporting Dr. Oz unveiled a digital ad this week criticizing Mr. McCormick “as a friend of China with a long record of selling us out.” Bridgewater manages some $1.5 billion for Chinese investors, and its only other office outside of Connecticut is in Shanghai. And Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer who is also seeking the Senate nomination as a Republican, accused Mr. McCormick of sending Pennsylvania jobs to India in 2003.The McCormick campaign disputed the characterization made by Mr. Bartos, and, on China, pointed to his record while a senior trade official in the Commerce Department in the George W. Bush administration. “These attacks from the Oz camp are a desperate attempt of a candidate whose failure to launch has stalled his campaign,’’ said Jim Shultz, a former aide to Pennsylvania’s last Republican governor, Tom Corbett, and a supporter of Mr. McCormick.Democrats also face a crowded primary contest. Unlike the Republicans, the leading Democrats in the race have experience in elected office. One theme that could animate the general election, depending on who emerges as the G.O.P. nominee, is the issue of who is an authentic Pennsylvanian. Dr. Oz, Ms. Sands and now Mr. McCormick all have roots in the state, but lived elsewhere in recent years and returned to run for Senate.Ideologically, Republicans promoting Mr. McCormick’s bid have drawn comparisons between him and Glenn Youngkin, the former private equity executive who won the Virginia governor’s race in November by attracting the support of moderates as well as Trump devotees.Largely unknown outside the financial world, Mr. McCormick grew up in Bloomsburg, Pa., near Wilkes-Barre. He graduated from West Point and served five years in the Army, then earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Princeton.A McKinsey consultant for several years, Mr. McCormick later ran the Pittsburgh-based internet auction company FreeMarkets, then sold it to the larger tech company Ariba in 2004.He joined Bridgewater in 2009 and in 2017, he was named co-C.E.O. of the Westport, Conn.-based hedge fund, which manages $150 billion in assets. His name was repeatedly floated to be the Defense Department deputy during the Trump administration.In 2020, he became Bridgewater’s sole chief executive after his co-chief, Eileen Murray, left the firm. She later sued Bridgewater over a pay dispute that she said stemmed partly from gender discrimination. The suit was settled in 2020.On Jan. 3, Mr. McCormick announced his resignation from Bridgewater, calling his potential Senate run “a way of devoting the next chapter of my life to public service” in a farewell email to employees.Mr. McCormick bought a home recently in Pittsburgh’s East End to re-establish residency in the state, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. He had split his time between Connecticut and New York City in recent years, though since about 2010 he has owned the family Christmas tree farm where he was raised. More

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      Democrats Are Failing to Defend Democracy

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      When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government.The problem is that Democrats live within their own insular echo chamber. Within that bubble convenient falsehoods spread, go unchallenged and make it harder to focus on the real crisis. So let’s clear away some of these myths that are distorting Democratic behavior:The whole electoral system is in crisis. Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.These bills are hard to explain and hard to pass. By catering to D.C. interest groups, Democrats have spent a year distracting themselves from the emergency right in front of us.Voter suppression efforts are a major threat to democracy. Given the racial history of this country, efforts to limit voting, as some states have been implementing, are heinous. I get why Democrats want to repel them. But this, too, is not the major crisis facing us. That’s because tighter voting laws often don’t actually restrict voting all that much. Academics have studied this extensively. A recent well-researched study suggested that voter ID laws do not reduce turnout. States tighten or loosen their voting laws, often seemingly without a big effect on turnout. The general rule is that people who want to vote end up voting.Just as many efforts to limit the electorate don’t have much of an effect, the Democratic bills to make it easier to vote might not have much impact on turnout or on which party wins. As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote last April, “Expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting.”Higher turnout helps Democrats. This popular assumption is also false. Political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, authors of “The Turnout Myth,” looked at 70 years of election data and found “no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.”The best way to address the crisis is top down. Democrats have focused their energies in Washington, trying to pass these big bills. The bills would override state laws and dictate a lot of election procedures from the national level.Given how local Republicans are behaving, I understand why Democrats want to centralize things. But it’s a little weird to be arguing that in order to save democracy we have to take power away from local elected officials. Plus, if you tell local people they’re not fit to govern themselves, you’re going to further inflame the populist backlash.But the real problem is that Democrats are not focusing on crucial state and local arenas. The Times’s Charles Homans had a fascinating report from Pennsylvania, where Trump backers were running for local office, including judge of elections, while Democrats struggled to even find candidates. “I’m not sure what the Democratic Party was worried about, but it didn’t feel like they were worried about school board and judge of elections races — all of these little positions,” a failed Democratic candidate said.Democrats do not seem to be fighting hard in key local races. They do not seem to be rallying the masses so that state legislators pay a price if they support democracy-weakening legislation.Maybe some of the energy that has been spent over the past year analyzing and berating Joe Manchin could have been better spent grooming and supporting good state and local candidates. Maybe the best way to repulse a populist uprising is not by firing up all your allies in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.The crisis of democracy is right in front of us. We have a massive populist mob that thinks the country is now controlled by a coastal progressive oligarchy that looks down on them. We’re caught in cycles of polarization that threaten to turn America into Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We have Republican hacks taking power away from the brave state officials who stood up to Trumpian bullying after the 2020 election.Democrats have spent too much time on measures that they mistakenly think would give them an advantage. The right response would be: Do the unsexy work at the local level, where things are in flux. Pass the parts of the Freedom to Vote Act that are germane, like the protections for elections officials against partisan removal, and measures to limit purging voter rolls. Reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent Congress from derailing election certifications.When your house is on fire, drop what you were doing, and put it out. Maybe finally Democrats will do that.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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      ‘Magic’ Weight-Loss Pills and Covid Cures: Dr. Oz Under the Microscope

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      The celebrity physician, a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate, has a long history of dispensing dubious medical advice on his daytime show and on Fox News.A wealth of evidence now shows that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were not effective at treating Covid-19 and carried potential risks.But in the early months of the pandemic, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician with a daytime TV show, positioned himself as one of the chief promoters of the drugs on Fox News. In the same be-the-best-you tone that he used to promote miracle weight-loss cures on “The Dr. Oz Show,” he elevated limited studies that he said showed wondrous promise.His “jaw dropped,” he said, while reviewing one tiny study from France, calling it “a game changer.” In all, Dr. Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020.When a Veterans Affairs study showed that Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, that advocacy came to an abrupt halt.“We are better off waiting for the randomized trials” that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, had been asking for, Dr. Oz told Fox viewers.As Dr. Oz jumped last month into the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania, where his celebrity gives him an important advantage in a crucial race, he tied his candidacy to the politics of the pandemic. He appealed to conservatives’ anger at mandates and shutdowns, and at the “people in charge” who, he said, “took away our freedom.”But the entry into the race of the Cleveland-born heart surgeon, a son of Turkish immigrants who has been the host of “The Dr. Oz Show” since 2009, also brought renewed scrutiny to the blemishes on his record as one of America’s most famous doctors: his long history of dispensing dubious medical advice.In ebullient language, he has often made sweeping claims based on thin evidence, which in multiple cases, like that of hydroxychloroquine, unraveled when studies he relied on were shown to be flawed.Over the years, Dr. Oz, 61, has faced a bipartisan scolding before a Senate committee over claims he made about weight-loss pills, as well as the opposition of some of his physician peers, including a group of 10 doctors who sought his firing from Columbia University’s medical faculty in 2015, arguing that he had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” Dr. Oz questioned his critics’ motives and Columbia took no action, saying it did not regulate faculty members’ participation in public discourse.He has warned parents that apple juice contained unsafe levels of arsenic, advice that the Food and Drug Administration called “irresponsible and misleading.” In 2013, he warned women that carrying cellphones in their bras could cause breast cancer, a claim without scientific merit. In 2014, the British Medical Journal analyzed 80 recommendations on Dr. Oz’s show, and concluded that fewer than half were supported by evidence.Two researchers who worked on “The Dr. Oz Show” for a year during a break from medical school in the 2010s said in interviews that the show’s producers had originated most of its topics, often getting their ideas from the internet. But the researchers, whose job was to vet medical claims on the show, said that they had little power to push back, and that they regularly questioned the show’s ethics to one another and discussed quitting in protest.“Our jobs seemed to be endless fighting with producers and being overruled,” said one of the former researchers, both of whom are now physicians and insisted on anonymity because they said they feared that publicly criticizing him could jeopardize their careers.According to the former researchers, the show’s producers conjured an imaginary, typical viewer named “Shirley,” a woman whose children were grown and who had time to focus on herself. The standard advice for many ailments covered on the show — obesity, sluggishness, back pain — was exercise, the researchers said. But there was a quota on how often exercise could be mentioned.Shirley watched daytime TV and didn’t want to exercise, the researchers said they were told.Dr. Oz’s on-air medical advice on both his show and Fox News has taken on greater significance as he enters the political realm. His promotion of hydroxychloroquine grabbed President Donald J. Trump’s attention and contributed to early misinformation about the virus on the right.“Information can harm — that’s the key thing we need to appreciate here,” said Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “His track record is pretty concerning. What we’ve seen so far does not instill confidence that this will help reasonable politics.”Dr. Oz, kneeling, rose to fame as a medical expert on Oprah Winfrey’s show.Jemal Countess/ Getty ImagesDr. Oz declined to to be interviewed for this article. His campaign manager, Casey Contres, said in a statement that the doctor had always put patients first and fought the “established grain” in medicine.“Dr. Oz believes it was truly unfortunate that Covid-19 became political and an excuse for the government and many in the corporate media to control the means of communication to suspend debate,” Mr. Contres added. “From the start, therapeutics meant to help with Covid-19 were regularly discounted by the medical establishment, and many great ideas were squashed and discredited.”Over the years, when pressed about offering unproven medical advice, Dr. Oz said his goal was to “empower” Americans to take control of their health. Grilled by senators in 2014 about false claims he made for weight-loss products, he said, “My job on the show, I feel, is to be a cheerleader for the audience.”He also said it was his right to use unscientific language. “When I feel as a host of a show that I can’t use words that are flowery,” he told the senators, “I feel like I’ve been disenfranchised, like my power’s been taken away.”In using the politics of the pandemic to shape his campaign for an open seat — one pivotal to Senate control in the midterms — Dr. Oz may be in tune with primary voters in Pennsylvania. The race has drawn candidates echoing Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including Jeff Bartos, a developer, and Carla Sands, a former ambassador. David McCormick, a hedge-fund executive married to a former Trump administration official, is expected to join the field soon.The criticism Dr. Oz has received over the years for spreading misinformation has done little to tarnish his celebrity, as measured by his long-running TV program, whose distributor announced that the show would end in January when its host departs.Still, misinformation about the coronavirus emanating from the Trump White House and conservative news sites helped politicize the nation’s response to the pandemic, with deadly consequences in many Republican areas of the country.Although Dr. Oz spoke strongly in favor of masks and vaccines on Fox, his championing of unproven treatments early on sharply contradicted infectious-disease experts like Dr. Fauci who urged caution.In Pennsylvania, as around the country, counties that voted by large margins for Mr. Trump in 2020 have had lower vaccination rates and higher death rates from Covid than counties that voted heavily for President Biden.Yet at one point early in the pandemic, he said that reopening schools was an “appetizing opportunity” that might cause the deaths of “only” 2 to 3 percent of the population. He later walked back the statement.“I can’t believe he took the same oath that I did when we graduated,” said Dr. Val Arkoosh, an anesthesiologist and county official in the Philadelphia suburbs who is running in the Democratic primary for Senate. “That oath is about first doing no harm and always putting your patients first. I just think he’s a quack, to be honest.”In reply to Dr. Arkoosh, Mr. Contres said that Dr. Oz had performed thousands of heart surgeries and had “helped countless patients live a better life.”Dr. Oz testifying before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection in 2014, when senators pressed him on claims he had made about weight-loss pills.Tom Williams/CQ Roll CallIn Dr. Oz’s 2014 appearance before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, Claire McCaskill, then a Democratic senator from Missouri, quoted a bit of his TV sales patter back to him: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type — it’s green coffee extract.”Dr. Oz admitted to the senators that his claims often “don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact.” A study he had cited about green-coffee bean extract was later retracted and described by federal regulators as “hopelessly flawed.” The supplier of the extract paid $3.5 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission.Dr. David Gorski, a surgery professor at Wayne State University and longtime critic of alternative medicine, said Dr. Oz’s emergence as a Fox News authority on the coronavirus was no surprise him.“He could have gone the route of trying to be more reasonable and careful, vetting information, trying to reassure people where the science was still unsettled,” Dr. Gorski said. “But of course, that wouldn’t be Dr. Oz’s brand.”Early in the pandemic, on March 20, 2020, Dr. Oz appeared on several Fox News shows trumpeting what he called “massive, massive news” — a small study by a divisive French researcher, Dr. Didier Raoult, who claimed a 100 percent cure rate after treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, or Z-Pak. At the time, with Covid-19 cases and deaths rising rapidly, hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment, was being studied in multiple countries and adopted by hospitals without much evidence. Mr. Trump hyped it repeatedly at White House news conferences as part of his effort to minimize the crisis. Dr. Oz communicated with Trump advisers about speeding the drug’s approval to treat Covid. On March 28, the F.D.A. authorized its emergency use. On Fox, Dr. Oz noted that the Raoult study, with just 36 participants, was not a clinical trial, but his enthusiasm overran his caution. The study was the “most impressive bit of news on this entire pandemic front,” he gushed. On April 1, as Dr. Oz called on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to lift restrictions on hydroxychloroquine, a public health expert, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University, cautioned Fox viewers that “the facts are just not in” on the drug.There was much confusion in the early days of the crisis about how the virus spread and how to slow it, with some expert views reversed by new information. The Raoult study quickly fell apart. Only six patients had received the two-drug combination, all with mild or early infections. One who was reported “virologically cured” on Day 6 was found to have the virus two days later. Six other patients treated only with hydroxychloroquine were omitted from the final results, including one who died and three others who were transferred to intensive care.On April 3, the board of the research journal that initially published the study said it did not meet the “expected standard.” In June 2020, the F.D.A. revoked emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. That November, the National Institutes of Health concluded that the drug held no benefit in treating Covid-19.By then, Dr. Oz’s once-daily appearances on Fox had tapered off. He was rarely seen on the network this year. But he returned to Sean Hannity’s show on Nov. 30 to announce his candidacy, seizing the opportunity to push back at critics of his medical career.“Doctors are about solutions,” he said. “But instead, people with good ideas are shamed, they’re silenced, they’re bullied, they’re canceled.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      America’s Anti-Democratic Movement

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      It’s making progress.American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy.But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Trump tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name “Stop the Steal” — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage Trump supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained.“This is a five-alarm fire,” Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over the 2020 vote count there, told The Times. “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article about the movement, told Terry Gross of NPR last week, “This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, notes that the movement is bigger than Trump. “I think things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters,” she told Thomas Edsall of Times Opinion.Ballot counting in Wisconsin in November 2020.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn plain sightThe main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas. (One way Democrats can push back against the anti-democratic movement: Make a bigger effort to win working-class votes.) The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.“None of this is happening behind closed doors,” Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. “We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.”Here is an overview of recent developments:Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.”Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop Trump’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a Trump-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a Trump-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where Trump allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.What’s next?The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result.Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, has helped to start the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates — of either party — running against Trump-backed Republicans. It is active in congressional races but does not have enough resources to compete in the state contests that often determine election procedures, Taylor told The Times.Gellman, the Atlantic writer, argues that Democrats and independents — as well as journalists — can make a difference by paying more attention. “Grass-roots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions,” he said on NPR, “could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.”For more: Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, was involved in fighting the election outcome, according to the House Committee investigating the Capitol attack.THE LATEST NEWSThe VirusCovid has killed one in 100 Americans 65 or older.Weak health care infrastructure poses challenges for many of Africa’s vaccination programs.A sense of endlessness: Anxiety and depression are taking hold.Other Big StoriesSalvaging belongings from wreckage in Kentucky.William Widmer for The New York TimesTornadoes killed at least 90 people in the U.S. this weekend. Here’s where they struck.Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News after 18 years — and after raising questions about Tucker Carlson’s work — to join CNN.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called for legislation modeled on Texas’s abortion law to go after the gun industry.A litany of crises is confronting Los Angeles before next year’s mayoral election.OpinionsThe New York TimesThe climate crisis is reshaping the planet. Here’s what it looks like in 193 countries.Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss inflation and crime.MORNING READSAnd just like that: It’s Peloton vs. “Sex and the City.”The Media Equation: A climate-change comedy nails the media’s failures.Quiz time: The average score on our latest news quiz was 8.6. See how well you do.Advice from Wirecutter: Beware overpriced, mediocre wines.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries More

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      The Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Running as the Anti-Dr. Oz

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      In the closely watched Pennsylvania Senate race, Val Arkoosh, a doctor in the Democratic primary, sees openings to raise her profile.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Dr. Val Arkoosh is the Pennsylvania Senate candidate who is often an afterthought compared to the two front-running Democrats, John Fetterman and Conor Lamb.But a couple big recent developments — the chance of the Supreme Court sweeping away Roe v. Wade and the entry of Dr. Mehmet Oz into the race’s Republican primary — may give her underdog campaign new momentum.Dr. Arkoosh, a physician in obstetric anesthesiology and a top elected official in Montgomery County in the Philadelphia suburbs, is trying to pitch herself as a kind of anti-Dr. Oz.“It really does take a doctor to stand up to a doctor,” Dr. Arkoosh told me. “I don’t even know how he still has a license, with some of the stuff that comes out his mouth,” she said of his promotion of unproved Covid-19 treatments early in the pandemic.Dr. Oz, a celebrity doctor who, until recently, hosted “The Dr. Oz Show,” is well positioned, thanks to personal wealth and high name recognition, to become a front-runner in a G.O.P. field where no one has yet nailed down voters’ allegiance. The contest to fill Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat will be one of the hardest fought in the country in 2022, with majority control of the Senate at stake.Dr. Oz, who jumped into the race last week, is framing his candidacy as a conservative’s response to the pandemic, pushing back against mandates, shutdowns and limits to “freedom.” Dr. Arkoosh, on the other hand, helped lead an aggressive response to the pandemic as the leader of the Montgomery County board of commissioners. In an interview, she contrasted her efforts to ensure the safety of students in her county to Dr. Oz’s position on schools at the time: During the same month that she canceled graduation ceremonies last year, Dr. Oz urged on Fox News that schools should be open because it “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality” of the population. He later said he “misspoke.”In response to Dr. Arkoosh’s criticism, a spokeswoman for Dr. Oz’s campaign, Erin Perrine, pointed to his success as a heart surgeon and to his TV show and books, which she said “empowered millions to make better health care choices — even if it meant going against the medical establishment.”Dr. Arkoosh, 61, has struggled for attention from Democratic voters and donors in the shadow of the leaders of her primary: Mr. Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, and Mr. Lamb, a congressman. The two men are usually contrasted against one another as a progressive (Mr. Fetterman, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016) versus a moderate (Mr. Lamb, who won a congressional district that voted for President Donald J. Trump). Dr. Arkoosh is liberal on issues — she wants to ban fracking and to add a public option to the health care marketplace — but what sets her apart may be demographics. Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb are both from Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania. They each argue that they are best suited to make inroads with white blue-collar voters. Meanwhile, Dr. Arkoosh’s base, Montgomery County — the state’s third most populous and the second richest — is ground zero for the suburban shift to Democrats in recent years. In all, Philadelphia and its suburbs in southeast Pennsylvania contribute 50 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters.“In Montgomery County in 2020, we gave President Biden 66,000 more votes than we gave Hillary Clinton,” Dr. Arkoosh said. “It is where my base is, where my strength is.”Still, J. J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, said that Dr. Arkoosh’s campaign had been underwhelming so far and that she was little known outside Montgomery County.“It costs a lot of money to get known statewide in Pennsylvania, and she appears to be coming up short,” Mr. Balaban told me. “At the moment, she doesn’t have enough funds to win the Philly market, let alone the state.”As of October, Dr. Arkoosh had $1 million in her campaign account, which includes a $500,000 personal loan, and she trails Mr. Fetterman’s $4.2 million on hand and Mr. Lamb’s $2.1 million. Her endorsement by Emily’s List, the abortion rights group, did not seem to have boosted her fund-raising much through September.Even so, the rising prominence of abortion as a potential motivator of Democratic voters in the midterm elections plays to Dr. Arkoosh’s strengths as a doctor. Her specialty means she administers anesthesia to women giving birth and women having abortions.“As a physician who has sat at the bedside of women who have had to make some of the most difficult decisions of their lives,” she said, “there is no place for any politician in those decisions.”Arguments before the Supreme Court last week suggested the conservative majority was ready to reverse or severely limit Roe v. Wade in a ruling next year.“I think this is going to be a very big issue,” Dr. Arkoosh said. “And I think this is going to be an issue that gets women, and particularly suburban women, out in numbers.’’On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Dr. Oz Says He’s Running for Senate in Pennsylvania

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      Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running as a Republican for an open Senate seat, described his frustration with the “arrogant, closed-minded people in charge” who shut schools and businesses during the pandemic. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a celebrity physician known as the host of the “Dr. Oz Show,” announced on Tuesday that he would run for Senate in Pennsylvania, jumping into a crowded Republican primary for an open seat that is crucial to both parties’ quest for a Senate majority in 2022.Dr. Oz, a first-time candidate whose political views are little known, entered a G.O.P. field roiled by the recent withdrawal of a candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, in which most contenders are vying to show their loyalty to the Republican Party’s de facto leader.The Cleveland-born son of Turkish immigrants, Dr. Oz said he had been motivated to run because of the pandemic. In an online statement announcing his candidacy in The Washington Examiner, he criticized official responses to Covid-19 in terms embraced by conservatives.The pandemic, he wrote, has been mishandled by “elites” who stifled dissenting opinions, “mandated” policies and “closed our parks, shuttered our schools, shut down our businesses and took away our freedom.”Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, was under attack through much of 2020 by Republicans for orders closing businesses during the height of the pandemic.Dr. Oz, 61, is a heart surgeon who first came to the public’s attention as a regular guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” before starting his own long-running daytime show, where he dispenses medical advice on all subjects. He has also appeared regularly on Fox News discussing Covid-19, sometimes making controversial statements. In April 2020, citing a medical journal, he said that opening schools “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality” of the population. After a backlash, he took to Twitter to say he “misspoke.”The previous month, Dr. Oz promoted hydroxychloroquine to fight the coronavirus, even though researchers at the time warned that the drug was unproven.Dr. Oz first came to the public’s attention as a regular guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”George Burns/Harpo Productions, via Associated PressIn 2014, he was scolded before a Senate panel for using his TV show to promote foods and dietary supplements that falsely promised weight loss. Republicans in Pennsylvania expected that the entry of such a high-profile figure into the Senate race, one who is promising to spend large sums of his own fortune, would shake up a field without a front-runner. It follows the recent withdrawal of Sean Parnell, the Trump-endorsed candidate, who suspended his campaign after a judge gave primary custody of his children to his estranged wife, who had accused him of abuse.A number of Republican officials, whom Dr. Oz has been calling in recent weeks, said they thought voters would take the celebrity physician seriously.“The first thing I asked was, ‘Why are you running? Is this a vanity play?’” said Sam DeMarco III, the Republican chairman of Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. But he said he was impressed with Dr. Oz’s seriousness in response to his questions. “My most important goal is to keep this seat in Republican hands come 2022, and I believe Dr. Oz’s entry into the race gives us a significant opportunity to do that,” Mr. DeMarco said.For Democrats, Pennsylvania represents perhaps their best chance to add a Senate seat to their column, since it is the only open seat next year in a state that President Biden carried in 2020. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican, is not seeking re-election. While the Democratic field has several seasoned candidates, including Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Representative Conor Lamb, the Republicans in the race are less experienced and, with the exception of Dr. Oz, less well known. Most have leaned into their connections to Mr. Trump to win favor with a party base that fervidly supports the former president, including his false claims that he won the state last year. Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer, has called for a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election in the state. Kathy Barnette, a former financial executive, has pushed claims of voter fraud on Newsmax and OAN. David McCormick, the chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, a giant hedge fund company, has been exploring getting into the race as well. Dr. Oz, who hosted Mr. Trump on his TV show in 2016 and was later named by him to a White House advisory council on sports and nutrition, is not known for denying the 2020 election results. He once described himself as a “moderate Republican” and said a political inspiration was Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and a Trump critic. But in his statement announcing his run on Tuesday, Dr. Oz positioned himself more aggressively as a foe of elites and as someone who has “fought the establishment” throughout his career.“Elites with yards told those without yards to stay inside, where the virus was more likely to spread,” he wrote of the response to the pandemic, adding, “We must confront those who want to change the very soul of America and reimagine it with their toxic ideology.”A surgeon at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, his biographical entry there lists his Emmy Awards ahead of his publications. Dr. Oz earned medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. His principal residence, however, has long been in Bergen County in New Jersey, where he voted. He has also become a registered Pennsylvania voter, listing an address that is a home owned by his mother-in-law in Montgomery County, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Although rivals will surely accuse him of carpetbagging, one local Republican official said the issue may not play strongly with voters. “Being a newcomer, I don’t think that’s a drawback,” said Pat Poprik, the Republican chairwoman of Bucks County, the state’s fourth largest. “Issues are what voters are looking for.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz set to run for US Senate as Republican

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      Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz set to run for US Senate as RepublicanOz, upbraided in 2015 over promotion of ‘quack treatments’ for financial gain, planning to run for Pat Toomey’s Pennsylvania seat Dr Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon best known as the host of TV’s Dr Oz Show, is planning to run for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat as a Republican, according to two people familiar with his plans.Top doctors urge Columbia to sever ties with Dr Oz over ‘quack treatments’Read moreShould Oz run, he would bring unrivaled name recognition and wealth to a race expected to be among the nation’s most competitive and could determine control of the Senate next year.Oz became a household name after gaining fame as a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show.He has also experienced controversy, notably when in 2015 a group of prominent American physicians called on Columbia University medical school to sever its links with Oz for “an egregious lack of integrity” over the promotion of “quack treatments” not supported by scientific evidence, “in the interest of personal financial gain”.Subjected to a grilling by senators, Oz offered to “drain the swamp” of marketers he said were illegally using his words and name.In 2016, Oz hosted Donald Trump on his TV show as the businessman ran for the White House.Oz was later appointed to a White House Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, alongside appointees including the New England Patriots coach, Bill Belichick, bodybuilder and former Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno, New York Yankees legend Mariano Rivera and the football star Herschel Walker.Walker is now a Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate in Georgia.Oz may also have to explain why he isn’t running in New Jersey, where he has lived for two decades before voting in Pennsylvania elections this year by an absentee ballot registered to his in-laws’ address in suburban Philadelphia.Oz’s longtime home is above the Hudson river in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, where he films his TV show and practices medicine.If he runs he will enter a Republican field resetting with an influx of candidates, after Sean Parnell, the candidate endorsed by Trump, dropped out, denying allegations of domestic abuse.Oz, 61, has told associates and Republicans in Pennsylvania of his plans, according to the people who spoke to the AP. One was told directly while the other was briefed on a separate conversation. Both spoke on condition of anonymity. Publicly, Oz has only said through a spokesperson that he has received encouragement to run.The announcement could come on Tuesday night on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, which Hannity previewed by saying Oz “has a huge announcement. Hint: think midterm election.”Pennsylvania put Joe Biden over the top in last year’s presidential election. His one-point victory put the swing state back in Democratic hands after Trump won it even more narrowly in 2016.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsPennsylvanianewsReuse this content More

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      Sean Parnell Suspends G.O.P. Senate Bid in Pennsylvania

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      Mr. Parnell, who was endorsed by Donald Trump in one of the highest-profile 2022 Senate races, had been accused by his estranged wife of spousal and child abuse.Sean Parnell, a leading Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, suspended his campaign on Monday after a judge ruled that his estranged wife should get primary custody of their three children in a case in which she accused him of spousal and child abuse.Mr. Parnell, who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, said he was “devastated” by the decision and planned to appeal.“There is nothing more important to me than my children, and while I plan to ask the court to reconsider, I can’t continue with a Senate campaign,” he said in a statement. “My focus right now is 100 percent on my children, and I want them to know I do not have any other priorities and will never stop fighting for them.”Mr. Parnell’s wife, Laurie Snell, testified in court this month that Mr. Parnell had repeatedly abused her and their children, choking her and hitting one of their children so hard that he left a welt on the child’s back. In a ruling last week that was made public on Monday, a Butler County judge wrote that he had found Ms. Snell to be “the more credible witness” and that he believed Mr. Parnell had committed “some acts of abuse in the past.”The Pennsylvania seat, currently held by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, is widely considered one of the most competitive Senate races in 2022. Several Democrats have announced their plans to run for the seat, including Conor Lamb, a congressman from outside Pittsburgh, and John Fetterman, the current lieutenant governor.Mr. Parnell, a former Army Ranger who received the Purple Heart after serving in Afghanistan, had been seen as a top Republican candidate, particularly after Mr. Trump endorsed him in September.But Mr. Parnell’s family history illustrated the concerns among some Republican leaders about the candidates that Mr. Trump has been supporting in G.O.P. primaries for close midterm races.Mr. Parnell narrowly lost a congressional bid in 2020, and one of his Republican rivals in the Senate race, Jeff Bartos, had attacked him over temporary protective orders he received in 2017 and 2018.Yet some Senate candidates backed by Mr. Trump have remained viable despite questions about their pasts: In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the former football star, is seen as a leading contender to challenge Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, despite facing repeated accusations of threatening his ex-wife.In the testimony by Mr. Parnell’s wife this month, she said that he once punched a closet door so hard that it hit the face of one of their children and left a bruise. At the time, Ms. Snell testified, Mr. Parnell told his child, “It was your fault and get out of here.” At another point, Mr. Parnell forced his wife out of their vehicle and left her on the side of the road, telling her to “go get an abortion,” she said in court.Mr. Parnell has denied all the allegations. He testified that he had “never raised a hand in anger towards my wife or any of our three children.”The judge granted Ms. Snell primary physical and sole legal custody of the children, who are between 8 and 12 years old, allowing Mr. Parnell to take them three weekends a month.“She described many incidents,” Judge James G. Arner wrote in his ruling. “She provided factual details of each incident, including when they happened and what happened. She testified in a convincing manner.”Mr. Parnell, on the other hand, was “somewhat evasive” and “less believable,” the judge ruled.“He was dressed very casually for his appearances in court, in blue jeans and untucked plaid shirts, which did not show respect for the seriousness of the occasion,” Judge Arner wrote. “While testifying he looked mainly in the direction of his attorneys and toward members of the news media in the back of the courtroom, rather than at me.”The judge also wrote that Mr. Parnell’s frequent travel had been a factor in the ruling.Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More