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      Previewing the Next NYT/Siena Poll

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      In our July survey, the president’s approval rating was 33 percent. A lot has changed in the last two months, so will it show up in this week’s survey?It’s a busy week in New York Times election-land — we’re wrapping up our second national poll of the cycle.The last interviews will be complete by the time you read this — the poll is still in the field as I write this — and it should be interesting to see how it contrasts (or doesn’t) with our last poll. In July, in our last survey, President Biden’s approval rating was 33 percent, one of his worst results of the cycle.But a lot has changed in the last few months. Gas prices have plummeted. Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda was suddenly revived. According to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats have gained around a net three percentage points in the generic ballot, while Mr. Biden’s approval rating has risen by five percentage points.This Times/Siena poll also has a twist: a Hispanic “oversample,” which is a fancy way of saying that we surveyed a lot more Hispanic voters than we normally do. We’ll have more on this in coming days.If you’re subscribed to this newsletter — and you should be! — we’ll send you an email with our findings as soon as we get them. We’re probably still a few days from publishing the results, so no need to refresh your inbox just yet.A good analogy to Roe?On Tuesday, I asked whether anyone had a good historical analogy for the way the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had shaken up this year’s midterm elections — an example in which the party out of power achieved the biggest policy success of a president’s first term.It’s not an exact analogy, but here’s a good answer from Matt Grossmann, a professor at Michigan State University who often has great insights into the dynamics of American electoral politics.His comparison: the backlash against the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998.No, it’s not exactly a policy triumph like the court’s overturning of Roe. But if we think of the impeachment through Congress as something like a legislative initiative, you can see the similarity: Republicans were making a major push to change the status quo in Washington, and a backlash against a Republican-favored initiative became a key point in the election.For Democrats, it’s a pretty favorable analogy: Democrats picked up five seats in 1998, making it the first time the president’s party gained House seats in a midterm since 1934.Is a good poll for Republicans in Wisconsin good news for polls?Yesterday, the venerable Marquette Law School poll found the incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson leading the Democrat Mandela Barnes by one percentage point among likely voters.Key Findings From the Times/Siena College PollCard 1 of 7The first poll of the midterm cycle. More

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      Searching for Common Ground in a Fractured Political Landscape

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      Astead Herndon, who hosts “The Run-Up” podcast, discussed his approach to the show and why voters’ voices matter.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In the first episode of “The Run-Up,” a podcast focused on the 2022 midterm elections, the host Astead Herndon calls a voter and asks how she’s feeling about the political climate.“I’m not expecting a whole lot from this conversation,” she says, “but I’ll give it a shot.” By later in the episode, she has opened up about her beliefs, and her doubts of whether her vote will actually matter.“The Run-Up” — which began in August 2016, three months before Donald J. Trump was elected president, and returned this month — can dig deep into the heart of the issues that shape American democracy. In early 2020, Mr. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times, traveled through Iowa to take the temperature of Democratic caucusgoers, sharing his findings as a guest on “The Field” podcast, an offshoot of “The Daily.” The experience helped him understand the power of audio in journalism. Now, through frank conversations with Times colleagues, political insiders and voters of different parties, Mr. Herndon will explore shifting politics and what they mean for the country.As “The Run-Up” kicks off and the midterms approach, Mr. Herndon spoke about the reboot of the podcast and how he’s tackling fraught topics. This interview has been edited.What’s your philosophy for this podcast?Sometimes, the way that political reporting talks to voters presumes that parties and insiders have all the knowledge, where I often think that what we have learned, particularly in this current political era, is that party insiders often have missed core things about the country and are surprised come Election Day.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.Good political journalism can do both at the same time: We both get a better understanding about how Washington and parties and candidates are coming to an election, and you also have a good understanding of where the country and constituents are.We’re trying to come from a place that does not lecture down to voters, but actually affirms how they feel through connecting dots.What’s the process for reaching out to voters for interviews on the podcast?I did not want to make a midterm show where only people who already understood the midterms’ importance would listen. I think that there are a lot of podcasts and a lot of political media that already exists for those people.We are trying to do something that is not just for those people, but that is for everyone else who doesn’t know if it matters. This is a podcast for everyone involved — we are not coming from a place that assumes language or assumes knowledge.That’s informed by my own experiences. I come from communities that were ignored by parties. I know what it’s like to live in places that feel neglected. And I know what it’s like when political media is not reflecting your concerns.What can listeners expect in future episodes?We want to deal with: How did we get here? How deep do these fractures go? And what is our commitment to democracy, really? Every one of the episodes will ask one of those questions.People deserve an answer about whether the system might hold, and what real cracks are there. I think that voters actually respond when political media is honest and transparent. When I am at a Trump rally versus when I am at a Bernie Sanders rally, that sentiment is universal — concern and anxiety about what democracy means, and whether it’s going to hold. They’re not coming from a universal agreement about the why, but it is a universal feeling that somebody is taking democracy from you.In that moment, to ask any question besides those core, fundamental ones is missing the point. The central question here has to be one that wrestles with democracy’s meaning and value for voters. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that those things are being more defined right now.Astead interviews Bishop Theodore Myers, founding pastor of Temple of Faith Bible Way Church.Clare Toeniskoetter/The New York TimesI think we have a democracy that has frequently had crossroads moments that forced the country to decide what it really means by that word. I think this election is another one of those moments.How do you cut through the noise in political media and get to the core of an issue?In some ways, I disagree with the premise — there is a lot of political media and noise out there, but there’s not a lot out there that is framed from the basis of voters’ concerns being justified. There’s not actually a lot out there that deals with whether our commitment to democracy is real. The reason that a lot of politics journalism has skirted from these questions is because they’re hard questions that have messy and nonlinear answers. The power of this podcast and the power of audio is that you can deal with messy, nonlinear stuff in a better way. More

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      Britain 3, America 0

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      Perhaps you didn’t notice, but back in November, Kamala Harris made history by becoming the first woman to hold presidential power.OK, it was only for an hour and a half. But still.Joe Biden temporarily — very temporarily — transferred executive power to his vice president when he was preparing for a colonoscopy. That involved being under anesthesia, and you do not want the country being run by a guy whose brain is asleep, even if we experienced four years of that in the very recent past.But really, people. This should at least be a reminder of how far we haven’t come. Our country is 246 years old, and that translates into something like 2,160,000 hours. One and a half of which have been under a woman’s direction.It’s a little embarrassing when we hear the news from London that Liz Truss just became the new prime minister. She’s the third woman chosen to run the government in Britain. In the United States the number is:A. One — Hillary really won! Really, she won!B. Two — I am counting that day with Kamala Harris, plus I think we could throw in that time in Salem when the head witches took over.C. Gee, guess we’re still waiting.The country doesn’t even seem all that comfortable with women governors. Right now, only nine of our states are headed by a female executive, and four of the women first stepped into the job after the guy who was elected resigned, for reasons ranging from an ambassadorship to, well, Andrew Cuomo.We’re not doing terrific on the legislative side, either: A quarter of our senators are women, and about 28 percent of the members of the House are. After the midterms that could get worse. “It looks like under most likely scenarios we’ll have fewer women in the House and Senate next year,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who’s been a hurricane of fund-raising action for Democratic candidates, told me.Still, American voters find it much easier to imagine a female member of Congress than a female chief executive. “The stereotypes about women’s leadership are more in line with legislatures,” said Debbie Walsh of the Center for American Women in Politics. The problem, Walsh suggested, is that women are seen as good at getting along with other people but not necessarily at running things.In Britain, where the prime minister is typically the leader of the majority party, the getting-along part is perhaps more valued. The two previous women in the job, like Truss, were Tories: Margaret Thatcher for 11 years, beginning in 1979, and Theresa May, who led the government from 2016 to 2019.Thatcher was known as “the Iron Lady” and remembered, among other things, for the conflict in the Falkland Islands, a lesson to all other heads of state that the best possible way to win a war is in less than 10 weeks.We do not dwell on May’s regime much, but it did include a campaign against illegal immigrants with ads warning them to “go home or face arrest” and an image of handcuffs.She also once wore a T-shirt that read, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Hmmm.Of course, nobody wants to see just any woman running the United States. But there are plenty of female politicians with just as much leadership potential as any man. And the fight for equality has to go on until they have an equal shot at the presidency.Breathe deep and let’s see what’s happened in our history so far. And ignore the fact that there are chapters in even the most stirring story that aren’t inspiring. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was one of the first American women to be elected governor — in 1924 after her husband was impeached. She went on to make her mark by pardoning an average of 100 criminals a month during her first term, in what appeared to be a freedom-for-a-fee system.OK, back to the plus side: How about Margaret Chase Smith, who valiantly stood up to the crazed red-baiting of Joe McCarthy in the Senate when all her colleagues were quivering under their desks? In 1964 Smith held the very reasonable opinion that she’d make a better president than the likely Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. She also thought it was time to “break the barrier against women being seriously considered for the presidency.”Yeah, that was 58 years ago. Still waiting.Smith’s battle wasn’t a real test of how well a woman candidate could do, unless you presume said candidate could overcome minimal campaign funds, along with an unfortunate tendency to stress her recipe for blueberry muffins. But she’s definitely someone you’d like to think of as leading the way.And Hillary Clinton, who got the most votes in 2016, but was thwarted by our, um, unique Electoral College system, which presumes that every 193,000 people in Wyoming deserve the same clout as around 715,000 people in California.Gillibrand, who once made a brief try for the presidential nomination herself, is confident she’s going to see a woman in the White House during her lifetime. “There’d better be — I’m hoping in the next 10 years.”Me, too.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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      Sweden’s Far Right Just Made History. Is It the Country’s Future?

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      The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats beat out more moderate right-wing parties in a country famed for liberal governance. It is the latest example of the right’s staying power across Europe.The final results of Sweden’s elections made history on Wednesday: The Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant far-right party with a recent history of overtly Nazi ideology, has won its best result ever. With 20.6 percent of the vote, it is in second place in Sweden’s multiparty system, beating out all of the more mainstream right-wing parties.There are two ways to think about this. The first is as something new and unusual: to focus on the party’s unprecedented success, and what it signals about a changing Sweden.But the other way to look at it is as the latest example of a pattern that has become typical across Europe: far-right parties’ winning substantial portions of the vote, if not actual power. (That is still likely to be the case in Sweden, where even though the bloc of right-wing parties together won a majority of parliament seats, the more mainstream of them are expected to form a government without the Sweden Democrats.)The NewThe Sweden Democrats won three percent more of the vote than their previous record of 17.5 percent in the 2018 election, continuing a trajectory of steady growth since it first entered parliament in 2010.This would grab attention in any country, but especially in Sweden, a country that is known for egalitarian social democracy.“Relative to other countries in Europe, when we look at cross-national surveys, Sweden always exhibits the highest or among the highest rates of tolerance for diversity — of, for instance, support for immigration, support for offering asylum,” said Jennifer Fitzgerald, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies the Swedish far right. “For years, when other countries were experiencing the growth of the far right, Sweden didn’t. And so I think maybe there was an expectation that there would be an exception there.”It is now clear that there isn’t.No single factor explains the rise of the far right in Sweden, said Sirus Hafstrom Dehdari, a political scientist at Stockholm University who studies the radical right and political identity.Police riot vans respond to the site of a far-right demonstration in Malmo, Sweden, in April.Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency, via ReutersThe 2008 financial crisis gave the party an early boost: Dehdari’s research found that each crisis-induced job loss translated into half a vote for the Sweden Democrats. Demographic change may be another factor: 20 years ago, about 10 percent of Sweden’s population was foreign-born. Now that number is more like 20 percent. More recently, heavy media coverage of an increase in gang-related killings, many of which occurred within immigrant communities, have connected immigration to crime in the public consciousness.But while there are many pathways to the far right, once there, its voters have appeared to be remarkably loyal, Dehdari said. People may have begun voting for the Sweden Democrats in the wake of the financial crisis, but they “didn’t go back to mainstream parties once they got a new job,” he said. A similar pattern may hold for more recent events too, such as the spike in crime, but it is too soon to say for sure.The PatternSweden is just the latest European democracy with a far right that is regularly able to command electoral support, joining a list that already included France, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Estonia, and others.“In many European countries, it seems like they get to 20 percent and then they hit the ceiling,” Dehdari said. “There needs to be some rather large change in society for them to grow a lot beyond 20 or 22 percent.”Twenty is a lot less than 50: such a party cannot expect to win an outright majority any time soon. But 20 percent is enough to be a major partner in a coalition — making the far right’s votes increasingly tempting for other parties seeking to form a government.So the most significant political question for Sweden is not how many votes the far right can get, but how the rest of the political system will respond to its growing popularity.So far, Sweden’s mainstream parties have maintained a so-called “cordon sanitaire,” agreeing among themselves that they will shut the far right out of governing coalitions and government posts. It is a strategy that has been used in other European countries, such as France, Germany, and Greece, to keep the far right out of power.But such pacts can be hard to maintain, particularly for mainstream right-wing parties, which often must choose between entering into agenda-diluting coalitions with center-left parties, or staying in the opposition because they refuse to join with the far right. Sometimes ambition beats out resolve: In Germany in 2020, two mainstream parties broke the cordon sanitaire to form a short-lived coalition with the far right in the state of Thuringia, prompting a political backlash and local government crisis.Counting the final ballots in Stockholm on Wednesday.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd even when mainstream parties do maintain the red line against far-right parties, that does not necessarily equal a blockade against far-right policies. In many countries, parties of the mainstream right have adopted hard-line positions on immigrants and refugees in an attempt to win votes back from insurgent far-right parties.That strategy has backfired in Sweden, however, Dehdari said, because validating far-right parties’ policies tends to reduce the stigma of voting for them. “Why don’t the voters go back?” he said. “Well, it’s because why vote for the copy when you can vote for the original?”In some other countries, including Italy, Austria and Sweden’s neighbor Finland, far-right parties have been allowed into governing coalitions. “Across countries where that boundary has been crossed and where far-right parties have become members of governing coalitions, it does seem to confer a certain level of legitimacy onto those parties,” Fitzgerald said.Counterintuitively, far-right parties themselves can sometimes pay a steep price for that kind of access to government, Dehdari said. In Finland, the far-right party then called the True Finns underwent a bitter internal split after conflict with its coalition partners over its election of new, more extremist party leadership.In Sweden, as the final election results trickle in, the cordon sanitaire seems to be holding. But as right-wing parties try to put together a coalition with razor-thin margins, they will face decisions about whether to allow the Sweden Democrats to become part of the government’s voting coalition — even if the party does not formally become a coalition member with cabinet posts — or to keep them out entirely.But the bigger picture, Fitzgerald said, is not just about mainstream parties’ treatment of the far right, but the health of the political system as a whole. She noted that early reports suggest that voter turnout was unusually low in this election, a sign of broader voter dissatisfaction. (Something similar happened in France’s presidential election last April, which saw low turnout, as well as record numbers of abstentions and blank ballots.)“I was just thinking, ‘Amanda’s going to call and I’m going to tell her something really boring about turnout,’” she joked during our conversation. “But to me, that absolutely should be part of the story here.”Research, including her own, is clear on that point, she said: “Far-right parties do better when turnout is low.” Which means that the real question might not be what Sweden’s mainstream parties can do about the far right, but whether they can persuade their own voters to show up to stop them. More

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      Moore Concedes to Bolduc in New Hampshire Senate Race, Realizing G.O.P. Fears

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      Don Bolduc, a retired Army general and 2020 election denier, appears to have captured the Republican nomination for Senate in New Hampshire after his chief rival conceded early Wednesday.The Associated Press has not yet called the race. As of 10 a.m. Eastern, Mr. Bolduc held a lead of about 1,300 votes over Chuck Morse, the president of the State Senate.Mr. Morse was endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu and helped by $4.5 million from national Republicans, who were worried that a victory by Mr. Bolduc would forfeit what they saw as a winnable seat in the quest for Senate control this fall.Mr. Bolduc’s apparent victory will come as a relief to Democrats, who also assume he will be the weaker opponent against Senator Maggie Hassan, a first-term Democrat. She won in 2016 by about 1,000 votes in purple New Hampshire but has been saddled with low job approval numbers. Four states — New Hampshire, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — have vulnerable Democratic senators the party is aggressively defending to keep its hold on the Senate. Delaware and Rhode Island also held primaries on Tuesday — the final date of major primary elections this year, just eight weeks before the general election. In Rhode Island, Democrats chose Seth Magaziner, the state treasurer, to run for an open House seat that is viewed as a tossup in November. Delaware’s biggest race was for state auditor.But it was New Hampshire that held the focus nationally. Besides Mr. Bolduc, Republicans in the state also chose a hard-right nominee for the House, Karoline Leavitt, a former staff member in Donald J. Trump’s White House press office, who echoed the former president’s inflammatory language and provocations. She beat Matt Mowers, who had the backing of House Republican leaders, and will face Representative Chris Pappas, a two-term Democrat.Mr. Bolduc’s and Ms. Leavitt’s apparent success adds New Hampshire to the list of battleground states where Republicans this year chose candidates firmly in the Trumpian mold to compete in general elections that Republicans have historically won by reaching out to independents and conservative Democrats. Other examples include Massachusetts, Maryland, Arizona and Pennsylvania (in its governor’s race). It is both a clear sign of Mr. Trump’s iron grip on his party’s base and a major gamble on whether candidates with extreme views — principally, embracing Mr. Trump’s lie that he won in 2020 — can prevail in purple states. November will test if voter malaise about the economy and Democratic leadership in Washington is strong enough to blot out candidates’ hard-right views. Mr. Bolduc led wire-to-wire in polling during his race. He amassed grass-roots support by traveling widely for two years and holding town hall-style events, where attendees fumed over President Biden and Democratic governance in Washington.His supporters were less animated by bread-and-butter issues such as inflation — which is soon expected to affect the cost of the home heating oil that is widely used in New Hampshire — than by immigration, the 2020 election and cultural issues. “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Donald Trump won the election and, damn it, I stand by” it, Mr. Bolduc said at a debate last month. He has also said he was open to abolishing the F.B.I. after agents searched Mr. Trump’s residence in Florida seeking classified documents.Mr. Sununu, a moderate and popular Republican in the state, was outspoken in calling Mr. Bolduc a “conspiracy-theory extremist” whom most voters did not take seriously. Chuck Morse greeted supporters gathered in Salem, N.H., to watch the primary-night returns.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesMr. Morse, 61, the president of the State Senate, acknowledged that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in 2020 and said he would have certified the election if he had been in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. In debates, Mr. Morse rarely turned his fire on Mr. Bolduc, instead attacking Ms. Hassan. He highlighted how he had led the Legislature to override a budget that Ms. Hassan had vetoed as governor because it included business tax cuts. Ms. Hassan’s campaign has positioned her as breaking with her party on issues of concern to New Hampshirites — pushing for a federal gasoline tax holiday, for example — and standing up to “Big Pharma” to lower prescription drug costs..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Other candidates in the Republican primary included Kevin Smith, a former Londonderry town manager, and Bruce Fenton, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur whose libertarianism — he favored legalizing all drugs — enlivened debates but also drew boos. Mr. Bolduc’s poor fund-raising meant he wasn’t able to run a single ad on television. A super PAC with ties to national Republicans spent millions of dollars on ads opposing him and boosting Mr. Morse.A Democratic group also tried to shape the race: The Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, attacked Mr. Morse in ads as “sleazy” in an effort to drive voters toward Mr. Bolduc, gambling that he would be easier to defeat in November.For the general election, super PACs tied to Republican leaders in the Senate have reserved $29 million for ads in New Hampshire, which could boost Mr. Bolduc and tarnish Ms. Hassan. But it is unclear whether those commitments will hold with Mr. Bolduc on the ballot.Left on his own, Mr. Bolduc would enter the contest with Ms. Hassan at a severe disadvantage: He had just $84,000 in his campaign account as of late August, according to federal records. Ms. Hassan had $7.3 million. She has already spent millions on ads this year to boost her image, including one claiming that she is “ranked the most bipartisan senator,” but her approval has stalled in polls around 45 percent. Still, facing Mr. Bolduc would bump Ms. Hassan, 64, down Democrats’ list of the incumbents they most need to defend to keep control of the Senate and assure that President Biden is not hamstrung in the remainder of his term.With New Hampshire’s primary elections so late in the year, Mr. Bolduc has just eight weeks before the general election to move beyond appeals to the Republican base and reach out to independents and conservative Democrats, voters who traditionally add to the coalition that Republican candidates need to win statewide in New Hampshire.Mainstream Republicans in the state have been skeptical that Mr. Bolduc will be able to modulate his image after two years of appealing to the Trump-centric party base.One reason he led in polls from the outset is that he had a yearlong head start over his rivals. The race was effectively frozen as Mr. Sununu, a top recruiting target of national Republicans to face Ms. Hassan, weighed joining in. It was November by the time he decided to forgo a Senate bid and seek re-election as governor.One shoe that never dropped was an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Morse and his supporters waged a campaign to win the former president’s approval, including a visit by Mr. Morse to Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Sept. 2.Although the conversations were cordial, according to aides to both men, no endorsement ensued. After their meeting, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Morse and his team to have dinner at his club, but Mr. Trump did not join them.On the eve of the election, Mr. Sununu — whom Mr. Bolduc once accused of being “a Chinese communist sympathizer” — suggested that if Mr. Bolduc became the nominee, he would endorse him. More

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      How a Spreader of Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories Became a Star

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      In 2011, Catherine Engelbrecht appeared at a Tea Party Patriots convention in Phoenix to deliver a dire warning.While volunteering at her local polls in the Houston area two years earlier, she claimed, she witnessed voter fraud so rampant that it made her heart stop. People cast ballots without proof of registration or eligibility, she said. Corrupt election judges marked votes for their preferred candidates on the ballots of unwitting citizens, she added.Local authorities found no evidence of the election tampering she described, but Ms. Engelbrecht was undeterred. “Once you see something like that, you can’t forget it,” the suburban Texas mom turned election-fraud warrior told the audience of 2,000. “You certainly can’t abide by it.”Ms. Engelbrecht was ahead of her time. Many people point to the 2020 presidential election as the beginning of a misleading belief that widespread voter fraud exists. But more than a decade before Donald J. Trump popularized those claims, Ms. Engelbrecht had started planting seeds of doubt over the electoral process, becoming one of the earliest and most enthusiastic spreaders of ballot conspiracy theories.From those roots, she created a nonprofit advocacy group, True the Vote, to advance her contentions, for which she provided little proof. She went on to build a large network of supporters, forged alliances with prominent conservatives and positioned herself as the leading campaigner of cleaning up the voting system.Now Ms. Engelbrecht, 52, who is riding a wave of electoral skepticism fueled by Mr. Trump, has seized the moment. She has become a sought-after speaker at Republican organizations, regularly appears on right-wing media and was the star of the recent film “2,000 Mules,” which claimed mass voter fraud in the 2020 election and has been debunked.She has also been active in the far-right’s battle for November’s midterm elections, rallying election officials, law enforcement and lawmakers to tighten voter restrictions and investigate the 2020 results.Ms. Engelbrecht, center, has claimed that she witnessed rampant voter fraud, while providing little evidence.Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times“We’ve got to be ready,” Ms. Engelbrecht said in an interview last month with a conservative show, GraceTimeTV, which was posted on the video-sharing site Rumble. “There have been no substantive improvements to change anything that happened in 2020 to prevent it from happening in 2022.”Her journey into the limelight illustrates how deeply embedded the idea of voter fraud has become, aided by a highly partisan climate and social media. Even though such fraud is rare, Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly amplified Ms. Engelbrecht’s hashtag-friendly claims of “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules” on platforms such as Truth Social, Gab and Rumble.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.A Fierce Primary Season Ends: Democrats are entering the final sprint to November with more optimism, especially in the Senate. But Republicans are confident they can gain a House majority.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.Misleading memes about ballot boxes have soared. The term “ballot mules,” which refers to individuals paid to transport absentee ballots to ballot boxes, has surfaced 326,000 times on Twitter since January, up from 329 times between November 2020 and this January, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.In some places, suspicions of vote tampering have led people to set up stakeouts to prevent illegal stuffing of ballot boxes. Officials overseeing elections are ramping up security at polling places.Voting rights groups said they were increasingly concerned by Ms. Engelbrecht.She has “taken the power of rhetoric to a new place,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s having a real impact on the way lawmakers and states are governing elections and on the concerns we have on what may happen in the upcoming elections.”Some of Ms. Engelbrecht’s former allies have cut ties with her. Rick Wilson, a Republican operative and Trump critic, ran public relations for Ms. Engelbrecht in 2014 but quit after a few months. He said she had declined to turn over data to back her voting fraud claims.“She never had the juice in terms of evidence,” Mr. Wilson said. “But now that doesn’t matter. She’s having her uplift moment.”Cleta Mitchell, Ms. Engelbrecht’s former attorney and now a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and John Fund, a conservative journalist, told Republican donors in August 2020 that they could no longer support Ms. Engelbrecht. They said that her early questions on voting were important but that they were confounded by her recent activities, according to a video of the donor meeting obtained by The New York Times. They did not elaborate on why.“Catherine started out and was terrific,” said Ms. Mitchell, who herself claims the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. “But she got off on other things. I don’t really know what she’s doing now.”Mr. Fund added, “I would not give her a penny.”Others said the questions that Ms. Engelbrecht raised in “2,000 Mules” about the abuse of ballot drop boxes had moved them. In July, Richard Mack, the founder of a national sheriff’s organization, appeared with her in Las Vegas to announce a partnership to scrutinize voting during the midterms.“The most important right the American people have is to choose our own public officials,” said Mr. Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Ariz. “Anybody trying to steal that right needs to be prosecuted and arrested.”Richard Mack, the founder of a national sheriff’s organization, has announced a partnership with Ms. Engelbrecht.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesMs. Engelbrecht, who has said she carries a Bible and a pocket Constitution as reminders of her cause, has scoffed at critics and said the only misinformation was coming from the political left. She said she had evidence of voting fraud in 2020 and had shared some of it with law enforcement.“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through this exercise and how my words get twisted and turned,” she said in a phone interview.Ms. Engelbrecht has said she was just a P.T.A. volunteer and small-business owner with no interest in politics until the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Concerned about the country’s direction, she volunteered at the polls. Her critique of the voting system caught the attention of the Tea Party, which disdains government bureaucracy.In 2009, Ms. Engelbrecht created the nonprofit King Street Patriots, named after the site of the 1770 Boston Massacre, which fueled colonial tensions that would erupt again with the Tea Party uprising three years later. She also formed True the Vote. The idea behind the nonprofits was to promote “freedom, capitalism, American exceptionalism,” according to a tax filing, and to train poll watchers.Conservatives embraced Ms. Engelbrecht. Mr. Fund, who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, helped her obtain grants. Steve Bannon, then chief executive of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News, and Andrew Breitbart, the publication’s founder, spoke at her conferences.True the Vote’s volunteers scrutinized registration rolls, watched polling stations and wrote highly speculative reports. In 2010, a volunteer in San Diego reported seeing a bus offloading people at a polling station “who did not appear to be from this country.”Civil rights groups described the activities as voter suppression. In 2010, Ms. Engelbrecht told supporters that Houston Votes, a nonprofit that registered voters in diverse communities of Harris County, Texas, was connected to the “New Black Panthers.” She showed a video of an unrelated New Black Panther member in Philadelphia who called for the extermination of white people. Houston Votes was subsequently investigated by state officials, and law enforcement raided its office.“It was a lie and racist to the core,” said Fred Lewis, head of Houston Votes, who sued True the Vote for defamation. He said he had dropped the suit after reaching “an understanding” that True the Vote would stop making accusations. Ms. Engelbrecht said she didn’t recall such an agreement.“It was a lie and racist to the core,” Fred Lewis, head of Houston Votes, said of Ms. Engelbrecht’s comments of the group.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesHer profile rose. In 2012, Politico named her one of the 50 political figures to watch. In 2014, she became a right-wing hero after revelations that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofits, including True the Vote.Around that time, Ms. Engelbrecht began working with Gregg Phillips, a former Texas public official also focused on voting fraud. They remained largely outside the mainstream, known mostly in far-right circles, until the 2020 election.After Mr. Trump’s defeat, they mobilized. Ms. Engelbrecht campaigned to raise $7 million to investigate the election’s results in dozens of counties in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, according to a lawsuit by a donor.The donor was Fred Eshelman, a North Carolina-based drug company founder, who gave True the Vote $2.5 million in late 2020. Within 12 days, he asked for a refund and sued in federal court. His lawyer said that True the Vote hadn’t provided evidence for its election fraud claims and that much of Mr. Eshelman’s money had gone to businesses connected with Ms. Engelbrecht.Mr. Eshelman, who withdrew the suit and then filed another that was dismissed in April 2021, did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Engelbrecht has denied his claims.In mid-2021, “2,000 Mules” was hatched after Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips met with Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur and filmmaker. They told him that they could detect cases of ballot box stuffing based on two terabytes of cellphone geolocation data that they had bought and matched with video surveillance footage of ballot drop boxes.Salem Media Group, the conservative media conglomerate, and Mr. D’Souza agreed to create and fund a film. The “2,000 Mules” title was meant to evoke the image of cartels that pay people to carry illegal drugs into the United States.In May, Mr. Trump hosted the film’s premiere at Mar-a-Lago, bringing attention to Ms. Engelbrecht. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, said after seeing the film that it raised “significant questions” about the 2020 election results; 17 state legislators in Michigan also called for an investigation into election results there based on the film’s accusations.In Arizona, the attorney general’s office asked True the Vote between April and June for data about some of the claims in “2,000 Mules.” The contentions related to Maricopa and Yuma Counties, where Ms. Engelbrecht said people had illegally submitted ballots and had used “stash houses” to store fraudulent ballots.According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, a True the Vote official said Mr. Phillips had turned over a hard drive with the data. The attorney general’s office said early this month that it hadn’t received it.Last month, Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips hosted an invitation-only gathering of about 150 supporters in Queen Creek, Ariz., which was streamed online. For weeks beforehand, they promised to reveal the addresses of ballot “stash houses” and footage of voter fraud.Ms. Engelbrecht did not divulge the data at the event. Instead, she implored the audience to look to the midterm elections, which she warned were the next great threat to voter integrity.“The past is prologue,” she said. Alexandra Berzon More

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      Zeldin Uses Adams as a Surprising Weapon in N.Y. Governor’s Race

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      Lee Zeldin and other Republicans are trying to attract swing voters by aligning themselves with Mayor Adams, a Democrat, over his law-and-order platform.In his uphill battle to become New York’s next governor, Representative Lee M. Zeldin, the Trump-supporting conservative Republican from Long Island, has turned to an unlikely weapon: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City.In recent weeks, and despite Mr. Adams’s protestations, Mr. Zeldin has repeatedly aligned himself with Mr. Adams, a first-term Democrat, over the issue of the state’s 2019 bail reform law, which both men have argued is deeply flawed and needs to be overhauled.It is a message that some other Republicans have also begun sounding, echoing the law-and-order credo that helped Mr. Adams get elected last year and the litany that Republicans have been reciting in races across the country. Their goal appears to be to focus swing voters on crime and public safety rather than divisive social issues, like abortion, that often lead those voters to favor Democrats.Marc Molinaro, a Republican running for Congress in the newly redrawn 19th Congressional District, which now stretches from the northern Hudson Valley to the Southern Tier, said he sometimes invokes Mr. Adams’s call to tighten bail restrictions.“I will say it in town hall meetings, sort of to emphasize the logic of the reforms that we want to see, I point to Mayor Adams,” said Mr. Molinaro, who serves as the Dutchess County executive.The Republican minority leaders in the State Legislature have also cited Mr. Adams, and Nick Langworthy, the state Republican Party chair, suggested other Republicans would be wise to employ the tactic.“I do think that Mayor Adams’s position could be used” more broadly, he said. “Not because he’s collaborating, but because common sense should unite people of all party affiliations.”With less than two months until Election Day, Mr. Zeldin is generally considered an underdog against Gov. Kathy Hochul, with polls generally showing him consistently behind the incumbent. Mr. Zeldin is also badly trailing Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, in the fund-raising race, and has recently leaned on Mr. Trump for help.Mr. Zeldin’s embrace of Mr. Adams is particularly striking given Mr. Adams’s endorsement of Ms. Hochul and the outsize role that the mayor’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, played as a boogeyman for conservative campaigns across New York State during his eight years in office. Republicans frequently deployed Mr. de Blasio as an example of liberalism run amok, often tying him to candidates with little or no actual connection to the former mayor.“I believe the story that will be written in 2023 is how well a Governor Zeldin is working with Mayor Adams to save this city and to save the state,” Mr. Zeldin said in a recent interview. History is against him: Mr. Zeldin, a four-term congressman who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, is seeking to become only the second Republican to be elected governor of New York in the last 50 years.But he believes he has a path to defeating Ms. Hochul, if he can capture about 30 percent of the New York City voters, something he thinks he is capable of doing despite daunting odds. The city is overwhelmingly Democratic, with Republicans and Conservative Party members making up about 10 percent of the city’s more than five million registered voters. Voters who decline to state their affiliation — generally considered independents — make up approximately 20 percent.William F.B. O’Reilly, a Republican consultant who worked with Rob Astorino, one of Mr. Zeldin’s vanquished primary opponents, said that by parroting Mayor Adams’s rhetoric on crime, Mr. Zeldin and Republicans elsewhere can heighten their appeal to independents and some middle-of-the-road Democrats.“By aligning himself with a prominent Democrat, it suggests that he’s part of the middle,” Mr. O’Reilly said, noting that Mr. Adams’s race could also be a factor. “He’s Black, he’s a Democrat, he’s a former police officer, and I think he’s generally considered a centrist. So the closer that Zeldin can get to him the better.”Ms. Hochul’s camp scoffs at the notion that Mr. Zeldin — who opposes abortion rights, supports nearly unfettered gun rights and has been close with former President Donald J. Trump — can somehow present himself as a moderate.Mayor Eric Adams, right, largely based his campaign on a law-and-order platform.Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times“This is another pathetic attempt from Lee Zeldin to distract voters from his extreme MAGA positions,” said Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for the Hochul campaign. “Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams have made progress on countless issues and shared Democratic priorities, from reducing gun violence to expanding child care to getting our economy back on track.” Likewise, Mr. Adams has resoundingly and repeatedly rejected any suggestion that he and Mr. Zeldin have anything in common, saying that Mr. Zeldin is a threat to public safety, not an asset. Mr. Zeldin has criticized the state’s strict gun laws and hailed a recent Supreme Court decision allowing easier use of concealed weapons.“In spite of what people are attempting to say — Lee Zeldin and I are aligned at the hip — we must have a broken hip because he clearly doesn’t get it,” Mr. Adams said in August. “He has voted against all of the responsible gun laws in Congress.”Still, the implied association between the mayor and the Republican nominee has dismayed his fellow Democrats, particularly those whose political beliefs are to the left of his.“It’s not surprising that Zeldin wants to latch on to the Democratic mayor of the state’s largest city,” said State Senator Michael Gianaris, the Queens Democrat who serves as deputy majority leader in Albany’s upper chamber. “What is surprising is the mayor is giving him the fuel to do so.”Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat, said that it was “inevitable” that Republicans would pick up the similarities between their rhetoric and Mr. Adams’s in an election year, even if the mayor disapproves of Mr. Zeldin.“As a Democrat, this isn’t where you want to be, especially with other gender and racial justice issues that he’s clearly not aligned with Lee Zeldin on, ” Mr. Kim said. “So it’s unfortunate that he’s giving him cover around bail when there’s other big things that Democrats want to home in on.”The disdain expressed by Mr. Gianaris and Mr. Kim is part of a larger schism in the state Democratic Party between progressives and more centrist leaders like Mr. Adams, a former police captain who was elected in part by promising robust law enforcement in a city suffering from a rise in some forms of violent crime.Mr. Zeldin has made repeated references to Mr. Adams’s stance on bail in campaign events and news releases, echoing the mayor’s call for a special legislative session devoted to the issue.In 2019, the state changed its bail law to prevent those charged with relatively minor crimes from being held on bail. Proponents of the new law argue that the issuance of bail disproportionately affects poorer people, keeping them in jail because they cannot afford to post bail.The law, which took effect the following year, has since been amended twice amid widespread opposition from law enforcement officials, who claim it has led to increased crime. No data has emerged indicating that to be the case.Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who helped craft the bail reform legislation, says it is particularly rich for Mr. Zeldin to use bail reform to paint himself a law-and-order candidate, in light of his fealty to Mr. Trump.“Lee Zeldin and those around him in my mind have zero credibility on public safety,” Mr. Myrie said. “This is the same candidate who, after the former president stole nuclear secrets from the White House, instead of distancing himself from that, has only drawn closer to him.”Mr. Myrie, who is Black, also noted a racial dynamic inherent to the debate. Both Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who is a constant Zeldin target, and Mr. Adams are Black. Mr. Zeldin and Mr. Trump are white.“I truly believe that deep down, race is driving this conversation,” he said. “That’s why to me it’s very insidious sometimes what we hear emanating from the mayor’s office or from various other city agencies, because they — they being the Republicans — are not good faith actors when it comes to this, and you have put Black men in the line of fire because of the nature and the temperature of the rhetoric around public safety.”In an interview, Mr. Zeldin said that bail wasn’t the only issue on which he agreed with Mr. Adams, noting his support for mayoral control of schools, something that Albany lawmakers agreed to in June, but only after extracting concessions on reducing class sizes.“I thought it was absurd,” said Mr. Zeldin, of the Legislature’s negotiating tactics. “He had just got into office. The correct policy is just to extend mayoral control. So just do it.”Mr. Zeldin says that he and Mr. Adams became acquainted, from opposite sides of the aisle, when both were state senators in Albany, sometimes sharing lunch amid colleagues in a conference room adjacent to the Senate floor.While in Albany in 2013, Mr. Adams also served as a chairman of the Senate Committee on Aging, the only mainstream Democrat to hold a chairmanship in that period from the chamber’s Republican leaders. Mr. Zeldin, who also served on the committee, recalled that the two “got along well, and we stayed in touch afterward.”“It’s not like he’s calling me up to be the best man at his wedding, or vice versa,” Mr. Zeldin added. “But the goal here, the objective, the motive is to work together.”Jonah Bromwich contributed reporting. More