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What We Know Now About the Midterms: Election Deniers, Trump and More
As partisans and pundits digested the shock of the 2022 midterm elections on Wednesday, some new themes emerged. Finger-pointing among Republicans. Mixed results for election deniers. The return of choosy voters. And a more nuanced picture on the impact of abortion.Here are four fresh takeaways on the first full day of reckoning for both parties:Trump had a bad day.Many Republicans lit up cable news and conservative websites on Wednesday with withering criticism of the former president they once championed — and, in some cases, worked to elect or defended once in office.It was clear that many in the G.O.P. political class were angry about the outcome of an election they assumed would go much better for their side. It was far less clear whether their fury was shared by Republican voters — or the man in Mar-a-Lago, who congratulated himself from a “personal standpoint” as he grudgingly acknowledged a “somewhat disappointing” election in general.But Republican operatives, using words like “disaster” or “debacle” and making unflattering comparisons between former President Donald J. Trump and various circus acts, anvils, mental patients and even the Pied Piper of Hamelin, lashed the head of their party and openly wished for someone to seize his crown.Some Republican operatives even said they were reconsidering pursuing jobs with the third Trump presidential campaign, they reported — as others urged him to delay an announcement until after the runoff election for Senate in Georgia.Who Will Control Congress? Here’s When We’ll Know.Card 1 of 4Much remains uncertain. More
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In New Book, Pence Reflects on Trump and Jan. 6
“You’re too honest,” President Donald J. Trump said as he pressured his vice president to intervene to block Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.Former President Donald J. Trump told Mike Pence that he was “too honest” when he balked at the idea he could unilaterally sway the outcome of the 2020 election as Mr. Trump mounted an intense pressure campaign to bend Mr. Pence to his will, the former vice president writes in his upcoming memoir.In “So Help Me God,” to be published Tuesday, Mr. Pence offers not only his first extensive comments about his experiences with Mr. Trump after the election and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, but also his first lengthy reflections on the 2016 campaign and the four years that followed.Mr. Pence describes in detail Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure him into blocking congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory through the ceremonial role he would play on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump became preoccupied with the idea that Mr. Pence could do something, although Mr. Pence’s chief lawyer had concluded that there was no legal authority for him to act on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Pence describes escaping rioters at the Capitol on the day he presided over the certification of the 2020 election results.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHe writes that questions about whether there had been election fraud were swirling around Mr. Trump’s advisers early on. “Jared Kushner called me that day for advice,” he writes about the Saturday after Election Day. “He asked if I thought that fraud had taken place in the election.” Mr. Pence writes that he replied that there was likely some fraud in the election but he doubted it was why they lost.Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence writes, tried various means of pressuring him, including mentioning that Mr. Pence was trending on Twitter in connection with speculation about what he would do. “If you want to be popular,” Mr. Trump said, suggesting that he should not take part in the certification at all, “don’t do it.”By the first days of 2021, when Representative Louis Gohmert, Republican of Texas, sued to try to force Mr. Pence to declare the winner of the election, Mr. Trump was upset that his vice president opposed the suit.“You’re too honest,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Pence, who recounts Mr. Trump telling him that “hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts” and “people are gonna think you’re stupid.”Mr. Pence describes in the book how Mr. Trump worked with the conservative lawyer John Eastman to press him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He writes that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump twisted the knife again in a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Donald Trump announcing Mike Pence as his running mate in July 2016. “Seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me,” Mr. Pence says he told the president after the Jan. 6 riot.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe vice president also shares dramatic details about escaping the rioters who had entered the Capitol while he was presiding over the certification that day. He confirms that he refused to leave the building when his lead Secret Service agent, Tim Giebels, pushed for him to do so as protesters swarmed the building, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”“I told my detail that I wasn’t leaving my post,” Mr. Pence writes. “Mr. Giebels pleaded for us to leave. The rioters had reached our floor. I pointed my finger at his chest and said: ‘You’re not hearing me, Tim. I’m not leaving! I’m not giving those people the sight of a 16-car motorcade speeding away from the Capitol.’”When they went to an underground loading dock, Mr. Giebels tried getting Mr. Pence into a car just as a place to wait, but he declined.Mr. Pence also confirms that Mr. Trump never reached out to him to check on his safety. But when Mr. Kushner and Ivanka Trump asked Mr. Pence to meet with Mr. Trump five days after the riot, he agreed.“He looked tired, and his voice seemed more faint than usual,” Mr. Pence writes of Mr. Trump at that point.“‘How are you?’ he began. ‘How are Karen and Charlotte?’”Mr. Pence writes that he “replied tersely that we were fine” and told him that his wife and daughter had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “He responded with a hint of regret,” Mr. Pence recounts. “‘I just learned that.’ He then asked, ‘Were you scared?’”Mr. Pence replied that he was angry: “You and I had our differences that day, Mr. President, and seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me.”Mr. Trump began to protest that “people were angry, but his voice trailed off,” Mr. Pence writes, adding that he told Mr. Trump that he needed to let it go. “Yeah,” Mr. Trump replied quietly.As they talked, Mr. Pence writes, Mr. Trump said “with genuine sadness in his voice”: “What if we hadn’t had the rally? What if they hadn’t gone to the Capitol?” He added, “It’s too terrible to end like this.”Mr. Pence offers up views about key moments in the administration, such as relocating the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, as well as the controversy over Mr. Trump’s remarks regarding the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.He defended Mr. Trump, insisting that he thought the criticisms had been unfair. “Donald Trump is not antisemitic,” Mr. Pence insists. “He’s not a racist or a bigot. I would not have been his vice president if he was.”He also writes admiringly about Mr. Kushner and John Kelly, the second White House chief of staff, who he said brought a sense of order to the West Wing. However, he had much harsher words for Mark Meadows, the final chief of staff to Mr. Trump, who has been a focus of some of the investigations into what led to the Capitol riot.“In the waning days of the administration, one of his successors, Mark Meadows, a congressman from North Carolina, would fling the doors to the Oval Office wide open, allowing people in who should not even have set foot on the White House grounds, let alone have access to Trump,” Mr. Pence writes. More
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Oath Keepers Leader Points Finger at Colleagues in Sedition Trial
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia, testified that he did not order anyone to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that he had nothing to do with an armed force waiting nearby.WASHINGTON — At the height of the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, two dozen members of the Oath Keepers militia met outside the building with their leader, Stewart Rhodes.When some of them reported that they had just come back from inside the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes was outraged, he testified in court on Monday. Taking the stand at his own sedition trial, he said that those who had gone inside the building that day had done so of their own accord — and that he had never had a plan or had given any orders to go in.“When I heard that they went in,” he told jury, “I said, ‘That was stupid.’”Testifying for a second day at the trial in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Rhodes sought to wash his hands of much of what the Oath Keepers did on Jan. 6, laying the blame on several of his colleagues.He told the jury that one of his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, who went inside the Capitol with others in the group, had gone “off mission.”He also claimed — for the first time — that he had “nothing to do with” an armed “quick reaction force” made of up Oath Keepers that was staged in hotel rooms in Virginia, ostensibly to rush to the aid of compatriots if things at the Capitol went wrong.Mr. Rhodes has firmly denied there was a plan to break into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, as the government has claimed. He has also argued that the Oath Keepers went to Washington that day on what he claims was a peaceful mission: to serve as bodyguards for pro-Trump celebrities like Ali Alexander, a Stop the Steal organizer, and Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump.It is rare for a defendant, especially one of his prominence, to take the witness stand, but Mr. Rhodes, who holds a law degree from Yale, has been visibly confident in putting forward several intersecting arguments.He spent much of the afternoon sparring with a prosecutor, Kathryn Rakoczy. Ms. Rakoczy’s questions seemed designed to both poke holes in the details of his account and to chip away at his broader credibility.Ms. Rakoczy started, for example, by suggesting that Mr. Rhodes had soft-pedaled the nature of the Oath Keepers during his first turn on the witness stand on Friday. She pointed out that while telling the jury about some of the missions the group had been involved in over the years, he had failed to mention several in which his members used weapons to confront government forces and challenge their authority.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that even when the Oath Keepers have undertaken nominally defensive operations — serving, say, as self-appointed protectors of residents and businesses during periods of unrest — local law enforcement leaders have expressed exasperation at their involvement.From well before the trial began, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes have claimed that the armed “quick reaction force” in Virginia would have been mobilized only if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to take up arms in support of Mr. Trump.Last week, Mr. Rhodes testified that he had established a similar force for a pro-Trump rally in Washington in November 2020, fearing that leftist activists were going to break into the White House and drag Mr. Trump into the streets. On Monday, he told the jury that as Jan. 6 approached, he no longer feared that the White House might be overrun and that an armed force was not needed.He then suggested that his compatriots could have set up the reaction force without his knowledge.But Ms. Rakoczy showed Mr. Rhodes a series of messages he exchanged with Mr. Meggs and others in the days leading up to Jan. 6 in which he seemed to be aware of the quick reaction force — or Q.R.F.“Ok We WILL have a QRF,” he wrote in one of the messages. “This situation calls for it.”Mr. Rhodes suggested that despite this apparent confirmation, his colleagues could have hashed out the details for the force without him — noting, as he often did during his day on the stand, that he did not like to micromanage as a leader.“Sir, the buck stops with you in this operation, right?” Ms. Rakoczy asked.“I’m responsible for everything that everyone did?” Mr. Rhodes responded.During more than three hours of questions, Ms. Rakoczy also sought to make another point: that Mr. Rhodes had planned to act on Jan. 6 even without the legal cover that would have been offered by Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.She showed Mr. Rhodes a message he had written saying that the Oath Keepers were going to “rise up in insurrection” against Joseph R. Biden Jr. even if Mr. Trump never summoned them. What Mr. Rhodes had really wanted, Ms. Rakoczy said, was for Mr. Trump to call up the Oath Keepers to “serve as his private bodyguards to stay in power.”Mr. Rhodes denied it.To prove the seditious conspiracy charges against Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Meggs and their co-defendants — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — prosecutors must persuade the jury that the Oath Keepers plotted to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of power from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Several government witnesses have already admitted under questioning from the defense that there was no explicit plan to storm the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.That left Ms. Rakoczy with the task of using circumstantial evidence to argue that Mr. Rhodes had encouraged his compatriots to go into the building.She pointed out that as rioters were storming toward the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes compared the attack to the country’s founders destroying the house of the governor of Massachusetts during the Revolutionary era. Mr. Rhodes acknowledged he had made that comparison, but claimed at the time that he did not know the extent of the violence at the Capitol.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that, according to phone records, Mr. Rhodes had a call with one of his top lieutenants, Michael Greene, and Mr. Meggs just minutes before Mr. Meggs went into the Capitol with other Oath Keepers in what prosecutors have described as a military “stack.”Mr. Rhodes admitted he was on the 90-second call but could not hear a thing that Mr. Meggs had said.“For 90 seconds you sat on that dead air?” Ms. Rakoczy asked, sounding incredulous.Mr. Rhodes said yes.Bringing her questions to a close, Ms. Rakoczy reminded Mr. Rhodes that even after Jan. 6, he continued his attempts to reach Mr. Trump and persuade him to invoke the Insurrection Act. She suggested that the storming of the Capitol was for him “just a battle in an ongoing war.”“You and the Oath Keepers were prepared to take steps to abolish this government?” she asked.“We were prepared to walk the founders’ path, yes,” Mr. Rhodes said. “If the government steps outside of the Constitution, it puts you in a bad place.” More
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Who Will Win the Battle for Congress? Four Scenarios.
Ryan CarlJust about anything is still possible in this year’s midterm elections.Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a fairly close race for the House to something like a Republican rout is well within the range of realistic possibilities on Tuesday.Why such a wide range? With so many races on edge, it wouldn’t take much for the final outcome to feel very good, or very bad, for either party.In the Senate, the races likeliest to decide control remain exceptionally close, with the poll averages showing essentially a dead-heat in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and even New Hampshire. With just a few lucky breaks, either party could win control.There’s a similar story in the House. While Republicans are plainly favored to win the chamber, dozens of races are tossups. It wouldn’t take much for Democrats to keep the race fairly close, perhaps delaying a call on House control for many hours or perhaps even days. On the other hand, it wouldn’t take much for Republicans to pick up dozens of seats, leaving the impression that 2022 was something like a wave election.There is also the possibility of more surprising outcomes: a true Republican landslide or a Democratic hold on Congress. The polls have been wrong before. The voters, after all, have the final say.Here’s an overview of what might still happen — how it might happen, why so much remains possible, and what signs to look for on election night.Scenario 1: The clear Republican winWith five critical Senate races and dozens of House races looking like tossups, even some random breaks could give Republicans something that feels like a rout: control of the Senate and a big gain in the House.The election could still be fairly close. It might still take days to resolve. But it wouldn’t take much for the final scoreboard to look more like a rout than a close and competitive race.In almost every critical race, the final Times/Siena polls suggested that voters preferred Republican control of Congress and disapproved of President Biden’s performance, but Democrats often had the advantage of incumbency or Republicans had the disadvantage of an unpopular candidate.But Republicans could quickly have a great night if even a small share of voters swallows their doubts about unpopular nominees or discards their warm feelings about longtime Democratic incumbents.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.Another factor, as always, is turnout, especially in the House races in states with less competitive races at the top of the ticket. It might be enough for Republicans to scratch out a few extra wins.It might take a long time before a clear Republican success becomes a certainty. It might take days before critical races in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada are resolved. Georgia might take until December, if no candidate clears the 50 percent necessary to avoid a runoff.But on Tuesday night, the signs of a clear Republican win might still start to pile up. Republicans would quickly register comfortable wins in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. New Hampshire might be close, even if the Democrats pull it out. Wisconsin would be in the Republican column by bedtime. A series of crucial House districts in the Southeast, like North Carolina’s 13th and Virginia’s Second, might swing into the Republican column. The odds of Democrats holding on in the pivotal but slower-counting states would start to look pretty bleak.Scenario 2: The feels-like-a-win for DemocratsDemocrats cling to a five-seat majority in the House, but if they get a few breaks, the night still might leave them with a lot to feel good about — even if the scoreboard still shows the Republicans gaining seats and taking the House. It might even feel like a Democratic win, given how the polls have trended toward Republicans in recent weeks.This feels-like-a-win mainly comes down to holding control of the Senate. To hold the chamber, the party will probably need to win three of the four most critical races: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.Democrats would start to feel a lot better if they could add a few more feel-good wins to the ledger, like beating “stop the steal” Republican candidates for governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona, or a victory for abortion rights in Michigan. It might just be enough for Democrats to take a glass-half-full perspective on the 2022 election, provided the party also holds down its House losses and can save face by avoiding embarrassingly close races in blue states and districts, like for governor of New York or for the Senate from Washington.The Democratic path to an acceptable night counts on voters who will back the candidate they know and like most, even if they don’t love the idea of having Democrats control the Senate. Staving off embarrassment will also require Democrats to turn out in states far removed from the national spotlight — the states where the Senate isn’t at stake, where abortion is not on the ballot, and where no stop-the-steal candidate has a realistic chance of winning statewide.It will take a long time before it becomes clear that Democrats are on track for a feels-like-a-win. There’s a distinct chance that none of the key Senate races will be called on election night. Democrats will start to feel optimistic on Tuesday night if they can stay close in states like Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina, and hold the key East Coast House races.They might even get outright excited if Mark Kelly opens up a wide lead in Arizona’s increasingly Democratic early mail vote.Scenario 3: The Republican landslideIf the polls underestimate the Republicans again, the result of this year’s midterms won’t just feel like a Republican landslide — it will be a Republican landslide.A “red wave” election would not be a surprise; nor would it be hard to explain. President Biden’s approval ratings are stuck in the low 40s, a figure as low or lower than Donald J. Trump’s approval ratings in 2018, Bill Clinton’s in 1994 and Barack Obama’s in 2010. In each case, the party out of power gained 40 or more House seats and won the House national popular vote by around seven percentage points or more. With Republicans making steady gains in the polls, it does not take any great imagination to see them stretching out a more decisive lead.It’s tempting to think a decisive Republican victory isn’t possible in such a polarized country, especially because Democrats have won the national vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. But just last November, Republicans won the Virginia governor’s race by two percentage points — exactly the kind of showing that would be equivalent to a red wave nationwide.The red wave doesn’t necessarily require the surveys to be systematically biased in the same ways they were two years ago, though that very well might happen. It may require only that undecided voters decide, as they often have, to use their vote as a check on the party of the president, regardless of their feelings about individual Democratic incumbents. Or maybe it would just take an unexpectedly strong Republican turnout on Election Day, while young, Black and Hispanic voters stay home in greater numbers than they did in 2018.On Tuesday night, if Republicans are headed for a landslide, the signs would be obvious from the start. Not only would Senator Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis cruise to victory in Florida, where votes are counted quickly, but safe Democratic House incumbents in South Florida — even the well-known former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — might find themselves in surprisingly close races. Farther north, Republicans would easily flip the key tossup districts in Virginia and North Carolina, but also advance even further into blue territory — flipping Virginia’s Seventh, held by Abigail Spanberger, while endangering the next tier of safer Democratic incumbents, like Jennifer Wexton. The Senate races in North Carolina and Ohio would not be close.It might still be a long time until we see a call in the Senate, but in this scenario Herschel Walker would have a chance to clear the 50 percent necessary to win outright and avoid a runoff in Georgia. A Republican win in the Senate race in New Hampshire would seal the deal.Scenario 4: A Democratic surpriseA surprising Democratic night — a hold in the House and the Senate — is unlikely. With polls trending toward Republicans, the outcome feels even harder to imagine than the word “unlikely” suggests.But it does remain within the realm of possibility: Democrats are still within striking distance of a good night. Unlike in previous cycles, they remain competitive in enough races to win control of the House. And not only do Democrats remain competitive in the race for the Senate, but they also have upside potential for a good night: Upsets remain possible in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina, even if Republicans are plainly favored.By any historical perspective, it would be hard to explain if the Democrats managed to hold both chambers of Congress. No president with an approval rating under 50 percent has seen his party gain House seats in a midterm election, dating to the dawn of modern polling. But this is not exactly an ordinary moment in American history. Partisan polarization is extreme. Many Democratic voters perceive that democracy is under threat. Others are furious about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In another midterm election, these voters might have stayed home. This cycle, they may well vote. And a critical sliver of voters dissatisfied with Mr. Biden and Democrats might feel they have no choice but to vote against Republicans.Democratic strength among highly educated voters would most likely be a critical part of any upset. Not only are these voters well represented in key battleground districts, but they’re also likelier to make up a larger share of the electorate in a low-turnout midterm election. It’s a tendency that might cut against the usual pattern for the president’s party to suffer from low turnout. At the same time, Democrats would need relatively disaffected elements of their party’s base — Black, Hispanic and young voters — to come home down the stretch.The possibility of the polls erring in this way might also seem hard to imagine. After all, polls have underestimated Republicans in recent cycles. But historically, there isn’t much of a relationship between polling error in one election and the next. The pollsters who did poorly either adjust or drop out. The pollsters who did well one year feel emboldened the next. And that does seem to be happening this cycle.The traditional pollsters who underestimated Republicans the most in 2020 have significantly reduced their polling this cycle or stopped altogether. Other pollsters are doing everything they can to ensure a more Republican-leaning sample, including by means that would have been scorned a few years ago. And then there’s the flood of state polls by Republican firms, showing eye-popping results like a Republican lead for New York governor.All of this may add up to far more accurate polling averages than in 2020. But if pollsters overcorrect — or if the balance of pollsters has shifted too far toward the Republican-leaning outfits — there would be a chance that the polls underestimate Democrats.Indeed, many traditional polls still show signs of Democratic strength. To take one recent example: Marist College released polls showing Democrats ahead in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and leading among registered voters in Georgia. Siena College showed Democrats faring quite well in several critical House races in New York State that one might have thought were leaning toward Republicans in this national environment.On Tuesday night, if Democrats are on track to greatly exceed expectations, the signs would show up pretty early. The Senate races in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio will all largely be decided on election night. If Democrats remain highly competitive in all three or even win one, it will be a clear sign that this isn’t the simple Republican win that analysts long expected. More
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Republicans Have Made It Very Clear What They Want to Do if They Win Congress
What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 election, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming.That is not to say there aren’t bills House Republicans would like to pass. There are. The closest thing to an agenda that congressional Republicans have released is the House Republican Study Committee’s 122-page budget. The study committee is meant to be something akin to an internal think tank for House Republicans. It counts well over half of House Republicans as members, and includes Representatives Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik and Gary Palmer — all the leaders save for Kevin McCarthy.After spending some time with the document, what I’d say is that it lacks even the pretense of prioritization, preferring instead the comforts of quantity. It lists bill after bill that House Republicans would like to pass. Legislation that would upend the structure and powers of the government, like the bill sponsored by Representative Byron Donalds that seeks to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gets exactly the same treatment as Representative Bob Good’s bill to force schools to release their correspondence with teachers’ unions about when to reopen, or Representative Michael Cloud’s resolution disapproving of vaccinating 11-year-olds in Washington, D.C. There are plans to privatize much of Medicare and repeal much of Obamacare and to raise the Social Security age and no fewer than eight bills attacking Critical Race Theory.But even if Republicans win the House and Senate, they cannot pass this agenda. It would fall to President Biden’s veto. What Republicans could do is trigger crises they hope would give them leverage to force Biden to accept this agenda or perhaps force him out of office. And even where Republican leadership does not actually believe that crisis would win them the day, they may have to trigger it anyway to prove their commitment to the cause or to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.Start with the debt ceiling. U.S. Treasuries are the bedrock asset of the global financial system. They are the safest of safe investments, the security that countries and funds buy when they must be absolutely sure that their money is safe. Much else in the financial system is priced on this assumption of American reliability: Lenders begin with the “riskless rate of return” — that is, the interest rate on U.S. treasuries — and then add their premiums atop that. If the U.S. government defaults on its own debt, it would trigger financial chaos. (I guess that’s one way to deal with inflation: Crash the global economy!)Republicans have been perfectly clear, though: They see the debt limit as leverage in negotiations with Biden. “We’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader and potential Speaker of the House, told Punchbowl News. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?”McCarthy may sound measured, but that he would open the door to this tactic at all either shows his weakness or his recklessness. A hostage is leverage only if you’re willing to shoot. And there will be plenty of voices demanding that Republicans pull the trigger or at least prove their willingness to do so.One of those voices will be Trump’s. “It’s crazy what’s happening with this debt ceiling,” the former president recently told a conservative radio host. “Mitch McConnell keeps allowing it to happen. I mean, they ought to impeach Mitch McConnell if he allows that.”To put it gently, the record of Republican Party leaders resisting the demands of their party’s hard-liners, even when they think those demands are mad, is not inspiring. McConnell and the former Republican Speaker John Boehner didn’t have enough command of their members to reject Ted Cruz’s doomed 2013 shutdown over the Affordable Care Act, which both of them thought to be lunacy. And Cruz’s influence with the Republican base and the G.O.P.’s congressional caucus in 2013 was nothing compared with the power Trump now wields.That’s not the only looming crisis. At this point, much is known about the myriad attempts Trump and his backers made to subvert the result of the 2020 election. The country’s saving grace was that there was little preparation behind that effort, and Republicans in key positions — to say nothing of Democrats — proved hostile to the project. But as The Times reported in October, more than 370 Republicans running for office in 2022 have said they doubt the results of the last election, and “hundreds of these candidates are favored to win their races.”The 2022 election is very likely to sweep into power hundreds of Republicans committed to making sure that the 2024 election goes their way, no matter how the vote tally turns out. Hardly anything has been done to fortify the system against chicanery since Jan. 6. What if congressional Republicans refuse to certify the results in key states, as a majority of House Republicans did in 2020? What if, when Trump calls Republican Secretaries of State or governors or board of elections supervisors in 2024, demanding they find the votes he wishes he had or disqualify the votes his opponent does have, they try harder to comply? The possibilities for crisis abound.Here, too, Republican officeholders who don’t fully buy into Trumpist conspiracy theories may find themselves rationalizing compliance. This is a movie we have already watched. Most of the House Republicans who voted against certification of the 2020 election knew Trump’s claims were absurd. But they chose to hide behind Representative Mike Johnson’s bizarre, evasive rationale for voting as Trump demanded they vote without needing to embrace the things he said. Johnson’s solution was to suggest that pandemic-era changes to voting procedures were unconstitutional, thus rendering the results uncertifiable. It was nonsense, and worse than that, it was cowardice. But it’s a reminder that the problem is not merely the Republican officeholders who would force an electoral crisis. The enabling threat is the much larger mass of their colleagues who have already proven they will do nothing to object.Not all crises begin with a political showdown. Some could come from a virus mutating toward greater lethality. Some could come from a planet warming outsides the narrow band that has fostered human civilization. Some could come from the expansionary ambitions of dictators and autocrats. The past few years have brought vivid examples of all three. But particularly over the past year, the Republican Party has shown itself to be somewhere between dismissive of — and hostile toward — the preparations and responses these possible crises demand.Last week, I criticized the Biden administration for failing to find a party-line path to financing pandemic preparedness. But such a path was only necessary because the Republican Party has swung so hard against efforts to prepare for the next pandemic. The Republican Study Committee’s budget is a vivid example of where the party has gone on Covid. It is not that Republicans are pro-Covid. But the party’s energy is very much anti-anti-Covid. It includes policy after policy attacking vaccine mandates, emergency powers and vaccinations for children. But in its 100-plus pages I could find nothing proposing ways to make sure we are better prepared for the next viral threat.It is easy to imagine what such policies might be: The government was slow to authorize certain new treatments and tests, cumbersome in its efforts to dole out money for research, and not nearly as innovative as it could have been in deploying technology to monitor new and emerging diseases. This is a libertarian, not a liberal, critique of government. But the study committee’s budget offers no discussion of how deregulation might foster a better response next time.And it’s not just Covid. Republicans have long been skeptical of efforts to prepare for climate change. The study committee’s budget is thick with plans to goose fossil fuel extraction and bar federal dollars from supporting the Paris Climate Accords. Republicans have been, shall we say, divided in their affections for Vladimir Putin, but at least in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many backed efforts to support Ukraine. But McCarthy has suggested that Republicans will cut aid to Ukraine if they win in November, and he’s far from alone in wanting to see the United States back off from the conflict.I’ll say this for Republicans. They have not hidden their intentions, nor their tactics. They have made clear what they intend to do if they win. Biden ran — and won — in 2020 promising a return to normalcy. Republicans are running in 2022 promising a return to calamity.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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GOP Begins Ballot Watching Push Ahead of Election Day
Tedium and suspicion mix as skeptical observers monitor the largely monotonous work at a sprawling elections office near Las Vegas.NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — The questions began soon after the doors opened to the public at a sprawling elections office inside a warehouse, and they kept coming until the sky was dark and a cold wind was blowing outside. Hundreds of thousands of ballots for Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, are processed, sorted and counted here, against a backdrop of mountains and desert.Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun.The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.The activity has not produced reports of major disruptions or problems. But on Thursday, local officials were taking no chances at the vote counting center in Clark County: For almost every observer, the elections office had an “ambassador” to escort and observe the observers. Suspicions ran high.“What are those boxes for?” an older woman in a red coat inquired, pointing to a couple of empty bins. She was sitting behind a glass barrier encircling a cavernous vote tabulation area that had been transformed into a large fishbowl. A county official assured her that he would check; he later said they were used to store damaged ballots. Then she asked why county workers were allowed to bring in bags, fretting that they could be used to smuggle ballots, and was told they were most likely used by the staff to carry in their lunches.Another observer wanted to know what was written on some blue sticky notes that were too far away to read. (They are used to alphabetize unopened ballots.) And a third, a 61-year-old dental hygienist named Caryl Tunison, asked, “Why do you not have cameras in every area here?” while she paused from writing in a notebook on her lap. She was sitting face to face with a young woman about three yards away, a county worker who sat on the other side of a glass partition and was placing envelopes in a bin.In a statement, the county elections department said that it “goes above and beyond what the law requires for observation.”“We recognize the value of helping observers understand the process and responding to their questions, and work to provide answers to their wide variety of questions every day,” the statement read.Sealed ballot boxes stored in cages at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesMonitoring elections has long been part of the voting process. But this year, the Republican National Committee has worked alongside outside groups like the Election Integrity Network to seek out activists who believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and elections in general being corrupted. The Election Integrity Network is a group led by Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, and organized by Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.A number of Republican candidates around the country have stated that they may not accept election results if they lose, heightening concerns among many elections experts. But election officials say that they, too, are far better organized this time around. That high level of organization — and the scrutiny from election denial activists — was evident on a recent visit here.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.Many of the observers are people like Ms. Tunison, who believes the 2020 election was stolen and who said she was encouraged in her newfound activism by her pastor. She repeated a conspiracy theory, which circulated on social media after the 2020 election, that several swing states simultaneously halted counting to thwart Donald Trump. “Who was able to call all the counties and get them to stop counting all at once?” she asked.“I just think the whole system is kind of messed up,” she added in an interview as she was leaving. “We could do much better. I think the whole system should be scrapped and started over with something that’s actually secure.”And what would it be replaced with? “I’m not exactly sure, but I know that it should be mechanical,” she said, with “no internet access to any machine.” But she also said maybe tabulation could be done with “something like the blockchain,” referring to the same technology that is at the heart of Bitcoin.Baseless theories about foreign plots to hack voting machines have ricocheted around the right-wing media for two years and have been pushed by well-funded Trump allies, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.In fact, there is no evidence of widespread fraud or malfeasance in elections. And while there is a criminal investigation underway of election tampering in Georgia, it is examining the conduct of Mr. Trump and his circle of advisers.Still, a number of Republican lawyers have primed poll monitors to search for irregularities that could be used to bring legal challenges to the results later on.That would repeat a strategy used in some states in 2020, but many involved say they are better organized this election cycle. Even as the monitoring was taking place on Thursday in Clark County, a local judge rejected a bid by the R.N.C. to have more representation on panels that verify ballot signatures.At the Clark County office, ballots come in from polling places and drop boxes and are brought to a loading dock in the back of the warehouse. Then they are moved through a series of stations where observers from the public can view how they are handled.The number of observers fluctuated throughout the day and into the night. There was a woman in a leather hat complaining that she had been treated rudely by a county worker, a man watching while he twiddled a Rubik’s Cube.A young man from the R.N.C., who declined to comment, monitored late into the evening, while toting around a book by Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager, called “The Changing World Order,” which ponders the rise of China and the twilight of America.Placards throughout the office inform the observers of state law and guidelines. They are prohibited, the placards say, from “talking to workers within the central counting” area or from “advocating for or against a candidate.”Much of the work is monotonous. In one area, stacks of ballots that had been through a sorting machine were hand counted for verification purposes. Watching the workers count the ballots was a tedious business. One observer, whose hair was pulled back in a pink scrunchie, paused from her own note taking to lean over and whisper to a reporter who was taking his own notes. She offered the friendly admonition of an armchair editor: “It’s going to be a boring article.”Unopened mail-in ballots being sorted at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesIn another room, a group of seven observers watched as ballots were fed through the ballot sorting machine. Those that looked good were put into green bins set out on a long table in the middle of the room. Ballots with signatures that could not be verified using county records were sorted into red bins for further review. The sound of the thrumming machine was not unlike a train going over tracks.“I was being lulled to sleep,” said Matt Robison, a 60-year-old service technician for a propane company who came with his wife of 39 years, Sandra. They had not come on behalf of any particular group, but because of their own concerns about the last election.“These people have a job to do, and it looks like they’re doing their job,” said Mr. Robison. “If there’s ballots being shredded or anything like that, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to see that. But I personally feel like there had been — I don’t know about necessarily in Nevada — but there had been election tampering in 2020. But the thing is I think that what we’re able to witness here shows people doing their jobs.”Election officials have long hoped that letting skeptics into the process would convince them to reject the conspiracy theories. That seemed a tall order in Clark County.Mr. Robison described himself as uncomfortable with “woke ideologies” and as a fan of “2000 Mules,” the film promoting conspiracy theories that have been discredited by experts, media outlets and government agencies.“You know, Dinesh D’Souza’s film?” he said, referring to the film’s director, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud. The film’s two star experts, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, were recently jailed for contempt of court.Still, he was cautious about what he thought about the 2020 election. “Unless I can see it, unless I actually witness something, then I can’t confirm,” he said, adding that if he “put my right hand in the air and swear solemnly to tell the truth and the whole truth,” the “truth would be I don’t know.”His wife, a gun training instructor, is more strident in her views and has come more often to observe. Her husband said, jokingly, that “she’s addicted.”Ms. Robison expressed dissatisfaction with the county and the observation process and wanted to see the ballots being unloaded in the back of the building — “the entire chain of custody,” as she put it.The county elections department said in its statement that its “observation plan was reviewed by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and upheld by the court before the primary election” and that “this included identifying the areas where observation would be provided.”For Trump supporters like Ms. Robison, the 2020 election was a catalyst.“There’s no question in my mind and a lot of other people’s minds that 46 should not be in the White House,” she said, referring to President Biden. “It was a stolen election.” More
