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      Fact-Checking the Misleading Claim About 87,000 Tax Agents

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      The claim, which has been debunked numerous times, has resurged ahead of the midterm elections. Here’s why it’s still wrong.As the midterm campaigns come to a close, Republican lawmakers are seizing on misleading claims warning that Democrats are recruiting an army of tax auditors, finding new resonance in an assertion debunked months ago.The assertion began to circulate when President Biden first outlined a wide-ranging social spending plan last fall. A whittled-down version of that plan, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was enacted this summer, fueling a new wave of attacks that have gained momentum as the elections neared.That law provides the Internal Revenue Service with nearly $80 billion in funding, including $45.6 billion for enforcement activities. But the suggestion that this would amount to 87,000 additional tax collectors scrutinizing the financial filings of middle-class Americans is wrong.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“When House Republicans earn the majority, we will STOP Biden’s army of 87,000 IRS agents hired to audit hardworking American families and small businesses.”— Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, in a tweet in November.“Senate Democrats could have secured the border to protect you and your family. They didn’t. Instead, they hired 87,000 IRS agents to audit you.”— Senate Republicans’ official Twitter account in November.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.“$80 Billion: Increased IRS Funding. 87,000: Full-Time IRS Agents Added Using $80 Billion in Funding. 710,000 New Audits on Taxpayers Making $75,000 or Less.”— a graphic Tiffany Smiley, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington, shared on Twitter in October.These claims are misleading. The 87,000 figure refers to a May 2021 estimate from the Treasury Department of the total number of employees — not just auditors — the I.R.S. proposes to hire over the next 10 years with funding requested by Mr. Biden. And while the I.R.S. plans to conduct more audits, wealthy Americans and businesses will bear the brunt of that scrutiny, not, as Republicans have suggested, working families.Among the I.R.S.’s work force of about 79,000 employees, 10,000 are actually agents. (Of those, 8,000 are revenue agents who audit tax filings and 2,000 are special agents who investigate potential tax crimes.) In fact, the two most common I.R.S. jobs have little to do with tax auditing or investigations: about 13,000 are customer service representatives who answer taxpayer phone calls and 10,000 are seasonal employees who file mail or transcribe data. Other jobs include lawyers, examiners, technicians and appeals officers.The additional funding for to the I.R.S. will allow the agency to modernize its infrastructure and replace an aging work force, and it is unclear just how many full-time employees or agents will be hired in the next decade, Treasury Department officials said. The majority of those new employees will replace the 52,000 expected to retire in the near future, the officials said, and many will focus on customer service and updating the agency’s technology infrastructure — not investigating the finances of ordinary Americans.In other words, the funding will enable the I.R.S. to increase its work force over the next 10 years to 113,000 employees. That is about the same number of workers it employed annually in the early 1990s.In a September speech, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, outlined some of that hiring — an additional 5,000 customer service representatives and fully staffing the agency’s taxpayer assistance centers — and committed to not raise audit rates for households making under $400,000 a year.Using historical audit rates, House Republicans estimated this summer that the additional funding will correspond to 710,000 new audits for taxpayers making $75,000 or less — as Ms. Smiley, the Republican candidate for Senate in Washington State, tweeted. But those calculations ignore the proportional effect on each income bracket.In the past decade, tax audit rates have fallen most starkly for higher income earners, which the I.R.S. attributes to diminished resources and therefore its inability to retain specialized auditors needed to examine the filings of the wealthy.Increasing funding for the I.R.S., the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in September 2021, would address those needs and result in increased audit rates for everyone, particularly for high-income earners.The I.R.S. examined 1.4 million individual income tax returns in 2010, about 1 percent of the total number filed. In 2018, the latest year with available data when Republicans started making these claims, audits decreased to 370,000, or about 0.2 percent.The budget office estimated increasing I.R.S. funding would return enforcement to its 2010 levels. Doing so would result in about 1.2 million more audits; of those, 583,000 would target people making less than $75,000.But that is because a vast majority of tax filers — about 70 percent — make under that threshold. Looking at what fraction of returns are examined by income group, rather than the sheer number, shows that wealthier taxpayers would have a better chance of being audited than lower-income earners under the law.Under 2010 levels of enforcement, about 0.5 percent of returns reporting between $1 and $75,000 in income would be audited, as would 1 percent of those with more than $75,000 in income. In comparison, those rates were 0.3 percent and 0.1 percent in 2018. For those making more than $10 million, more than 20 percent of returns would be examined under 2010 levels, compared with 5.3 percent in 2018.It is also worth noting that of those 710,000 additional audits cited by Republicans, about 127,000 would target those with “no positive income,” such as those who report negative business income or capital losses. Including these filers with lower-income taxpayers is also misleading, as they actually receive more audit scrutiny than any other income group outside of those making over $5 million annually.In a statement in support of the law released this summer, three former I.R.S. commissioners appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents disputed claims about increased scrutiny. The law would add “the capacity to enforce the tax laws against sophisticated taxpayers who today evade their tax obligations freely,” they said, “because they know that the I.R.S. lacks the tools it needs to pursue them.” More

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      In Georgia, Could a Football Win Help Walker Win as Well?

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      ATHENS, Ga. — Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign has had several tailwinds working for it this year: President Biden’s unpopularity and steady inflation top the list.And the Georgia Bulldogs aren’t hurting his cause, either. Even serious political analysts acknowledge that the Bulldogs’ strong season — they are undefeated in the powerful S.E.C. so far — may be helping Mr. Walker in his Senate race against Senator Raphael Warnock, by lifting spirits and stirring up nostalgia just in time for the most famous Bulldog ever to ask for votes.The connection was undeniable on Saturday, when Mr. Walker was the biggest star not in uniform on the day of the biggest college football game of the year, where Georgia beat the University of Tennessee, 27-13. Tammy Mitchell remembers being about 10 years old when she saw Mr. Walker, then a powerful young running back, lead the University of Georgia Bulldogs to a national championship in 1980.On Saturday, she had both football and politics on her mind as she attended a rally for more than 100 Georgia Republicans and Walker supporters, decked out in red and black Bulldogs paraphernalia, some with their faces painted, as they held signs supporting Mr. Walker’s candidacy for the Senate.“It’s very surreal,” she said. “I never thought as a little girl that years later this would be happening or he would even be running for Senate.” Ms. Mitchell stood next to her husband in a line to meet and take photos with Mr. Walker. She was counting on a win for his team and for Republicans on Tuesday, saying the former could help the latter.“I think it’s a sign,” she said.Tammy and Harrison Mitchell at a rally for Mr. Walker in Athens on Saturday.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesMr. Walker with his teammates after they won the National Championship in 1981, defeating Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesPeople see signs where they want to, but on this Saturday political vapors as well as football emanated from Athens. And if it was a bit of a stretch to say that control of the Senate and one of the biggest prizes in the midterms could come down to whether Mr. Walker’s team won again, some saw a convergence of sorts in the football game and the statistically tied race between Mr. Walker and Mr. Warnock.Neil Malhotra, a professor of political economy at Stanford University, who has studied the ties between sports and politics, didn’t think the outcome of Saturday’s football game would mean more to voters than inflation and crime.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.But, he said, “emotional stuff” could be meaningful in such a tight race.“His whole candidacy seems to be specifically based on the fact that he’s a football star,” he said.Mr. Walker, whose campaign has had to navigate a slew of stumbles that had nothing to do with football, did not attend Saturday’s football game, according to his campaign aides. But he has made football — and his own legacy in the sport — a large part of his message on the stump. From his earliest events, many attendees have been die-hard conservatives or University of Georgia fans who remember when he led the team to victory. His stump speeches are a combination of loose political talking points and sports analogies. And at his Saturday rally, sporting a University of Georgia polo, Mr. Walker opened his stump speech with a nod to his alma mater before diving into a diatribe against Mr. Warnock — and making a prediction of his own.“Just like the Dawgs are going to win today, that’s what’s going to happen on Tuesday,” Mr. Walker said to cheers.The crowd at Saturday’s rally was thinner than at Mr. Walker’s prior events. Less than a half-mile away, ESPN’s College GameDay program hosted a live broadcast that attracted hundreds of fans.David Hancock, a 70-year-old Georgia fan, said he was in Athens for two reasons: to “see the Dawgs hopefully beat Tennessee and to see Herschel Walker’s speech.” Mr. Hancock said he planned to support the entire Republican ticket on Tuesday. He brushed off concerns that Mr. Walker’s lack of political experience could be detrimental to him if he won. Instead, he pointed to words from an advertisement that Vince Dooley, the former University of Georgia football coach, cut for Mr. Walker before he died in late October, underlining his former player’s approach to athletics.“He’s driven,” Mr. Hancock said. “If he falls down, he gets up and he goes forward. That’s what he’s done in this life.”Mr. Warnock made the best of things. In one ad for Mr. Warnock released during the game, three Georgia graduates conveyed their reverence for Mr. Walker’s accomplishments as a college football star, but said that was where it stopped. One was wearing a jersey with Mr. Walker’s No. 34, and another displayed a football autographed by him.“I’ve always thought Herschel Walker looked perfect up there,” said a man identified in the ad as Clay Bryant, a 1967 Georgia graduate, pointing to newspaper clippings of Mr. Walker on a wall in his home. “I think he looks good here,” another graduate said, gesturing to her jersey. “I think he looks great there,” the third one said, sitting next to the football and a copy of Sports Illustrated with Mr. Walker on the cover. “But Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate?” the three asked critically in unison.Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.Senator Lindsey Graham, left, campaigned with Herschel Walker in Cumming, Ga., in October.Nicole Craine for The New York Times More

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      Pensylvania Democrats Worry About Threats in the County Where Trump Will Rally

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      Democratic officials in Westmoreland County, Pa., where former President Donald J. Trump is speaking on Saturday, said they had seen an uptick in disturbing incidents targeting Democrats in the past year.Westmoreland County, the populous area east of Pittsburgh, was once a Democratic-leaning enclave, but it has turned decisively red in recent years.“We are targets here,” Michelle McFall, the chairwoman of the county Democrats, said at a rally of supporters in October. She cited three incidents:In late summer, someone “tore down and destroyed” a 4-foot-by-8-foot sign for Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, within a day of its installation.In September, a man in a rainbow clown wig was arrested at a Dairy Queen in the county carrying a loaded handgun. He told police he wanted to “kill all Democrats,’’ according to news accounts.And on Election Day in 2021, a Democratic county committee member speaking in support of a write-in candidate outside a polling location in Alverton was attacked by a Trump supporter, who was charged with assault.To Ms. McFall, the episodes suggest a pattern of “how dangerous it is” to be a Democrat in Westmoreland County.But to Bill Bretz, the chairman of the county Republican Party, the incidents are unrelated and do not point to a pattern of violence or potential violence against Democrats.“I can’t count the number of signs we’ve had to replace — small, large, they get damaged or stolen,” Mr. Bretz said. “I don’t attribute that to any particular party.”He said Democrats were trying to deflect from their political difficulties in the midterms by promoting a “narrative of somehow being in a position where there’s some aggression from the Republican conservative people.”Lisa Gephart, the Democratic committee member who Ms. McFall said was physically attacked last year, said in an interview that she was 54 at the time and that her assailant was 34.She said the two had traded insults about President Biden and Mr. Trump before the man threw her against her car. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital and later required shoulder surgery, she said. The man she named as her attacker, Zachary A. Lambing, was charged with assault, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and harassment, according to court records. A criminal case remains active. Mr. Lambing said in response to a text message that the accusations against him were false. He said Ms. Gephart was “‘attacking’ me with her words” before the incident. Ms. McFall, the Democratic chairwoman, said that while she had no evidence of a statewide pattern of attacks on Democrats, she had recently compared notes with leaders of other rural counties at a statewide Democratic meeting. “Anecdotally, no one seemed to have stories or evidence of patterns of attack like we have in Westmoreland,” Ms. McFall said.Meanwhile, in Fayette County, just south of Westmoreland, a Democratic candidate running for a state House seat, Richard Ringer, told PennLive.com that he was knocked unconscious in his backyard on Monday by an unknown attacker. He told the outlet that his home had been the target of two recent acts of vandalism: A brick was thrown through a window, and graffiti that appeared to be related to the election was spray-painted on his garage door. More

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      In 2022, Reality Has a Conservative Bias

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      “Reality,” Stephen Colbert remarked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.” That was back when he played a caricature of a conservative instead of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the point of his current late-night role, at least), and the line rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade where reality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Party’s theories of the world.In that period, the years from the invasion of Iraq through the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the conceit that the Iraq war would disarm a dictator (the armaments in question mostly did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East (it did, but not for the better). It staked its domestic policy on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the strength of the George W. Bush-era economy right up to the point when the worst financial crisis since the 1920s hit.Then in Obama’s first term, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and easy money would lead to runaway inflation or debt crisis (they did not), that Obamacare would wreck the health care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an appropriate prescription in a slowly recovering economy (it was a good long-term goal but not an ideal 2010 priority). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically were not.I was a participant in some of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. So I have experience from which to observe that the Democrats in 2022 find themselves struggling because reality has finally changed sides, and now has a conservative bias.What has reality delivered? To a Democratic Party that convinced itself there were few near-term limits on how much stimulus could be pumped into the economy, it has delivered the worst inflation since the 1980s.To a Democratic Party that spent the Trump era talking itself into a belief that immigration enforcement is presumptively immoral and that a de facto amnesty doesn’t have real downsides, it has delivered the southern border’s highest-recorded rate of illegal crossings.And to a Democratic Party whose 2020 platform promised to “end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons while continuing to reduce crime rates,” it has delivered a multiyear spike in homicide rates that’s erased at least 20 years of gains.The key thing to stress about all of these developments is that they don’t prove that liberals are simply “wrong about crime” or “wrong about inflation,” any more than the events of 2003-12 simply proved that conservatives are “wrong about foreign policy” or “wrong about entitlements.”Rather, ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.Thus in the current situation, the fact that right now America is suffering a serious crime wave doesn’t prove that Democrats (and many Republicans) were wrong about criminal justice reform 10 or 15 years ago. It just suggests that there’s a point at which de-carceration or decriminalization may need a tough-on-crime corrective.Likewise Democrats weren’t wrong about the risks of inflation being low in the Obama era or in the recent past. It’s just that except for a few Cassandras like Larry Summers they were wrong to imagine that those risks could be forever minimized, that there was no upper bound on Covid-era spending. In the same way today’s inflation doesn’t retrospectively vindicate the Obama era’s deficit hawks — but it does suggest that some of their proposals might be worth revisiting.So the question for the aftermath of Tuesday’s election isn’t whether Democrats will abandon their ideology but whether that ideology can adapt itself to what reality is saying.And whether for Joe Biden or for his possible successors, a recent model is available: Just after the era when Colbert’s quip had bite, a leader emerged who persuaded the G.O.P. to abandon its fixation on deficits and just run the economy hot, who endorsed universal health insurance and pledged to protect entitlements, and who acknowledged that the Iraq war had been a grave mistake and promised a less utopian, more realistic foreign policy.That’s right: It was Donald Trump who closed the gap — in rhetoric, if not always in his eventual policymaking — between the Republican Party and reality. Now the Democrats, facing a cold rendezvous with reality’s conservative bias, need leaders who can do the same.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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      I Write About Post-Roe America Every Day. It’s Worse Than You Think.

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      Despite Republican‌ assurances that their draconian abortion bans wouldn’t hurt women, a flood of heart-wrenching accounts from across the country prove otherwise. Yet even with that outpouring of stories, plus polls showing broad opposition to the bans and an increase in women registering to vote, it’s still unclear if the issue will be the deciding factor for voters in the midterm elections on Tuesday.It should be.This past summer, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. W‌ade, I started publishing a daily newsletter tracking abortion news, ‌following everything from state bans to stories of women denied vital health care. After months of writing about abortion, it’s clear that stripping this right from half of Americans has had a swift, damaging and pervasive impact.What happens in the midterms won’t be about Republicans or Democrats, but whether people cast a vote for the continuation of suffering, or attempt to end the anguish that banning abortion has caused.This isn’t hyperbole. Laws that privilege fetuses over those who carry them haven’t just relegated women to second-class citizenship, they have also led to the denial of lifesaving care in case after case. In‌ affidavits, Ohio health care providers reported having to comfort a sobbing cancer patient who was refused an abortion, and seeing at least three patients who threatened to commit suicide after being denied abortions.In August, a woman in Texas who was denied an abortion for an unviable pregnancy ended up in the intensive care unit with sepsis. Another Texas woman, pregnant and in failing health, was recently told she shouldn’t come back unless she had a condition as severe as liver failure or stroke. A woman in Wisconsin was left bleeding for more than 10 days after an incomplete miscarriage just days after the Supreme Court’s decision; a doctor ‌in Texas was told not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.And then there are the stories of women forced to endure doomed pregnancies. Nancy Davis, a mother of three in Louisiana, ‌was denied an abortion even though her fetus was missing part of its head. Chelsea Stovall in Arkansas, who was 19 weeks pregnant when she found out that her daughter wouldn’t survive, was also refused treatment. After traveling 400 miles to get an abortion, she told a local reporter, “I should be able to say goodbye to her where I want to.”Those are just the adults. ‌This summer, Republicans insisted the story of a raped and pregnant 10-year-old in Ohio‌ was a hoax, and later tried to paint the girl’s experience as a tragic anomaly. In fact dozens of girls in Ohio 14 years old and under had abortions in 2021. In neighboring Kentucky, more than a dozen children aged 14 or younger had abortions last year; two 9-year-olds needed abortions in the past few years. These are victimized children who will now be forced to carry pregnancies, perilous for their small bodies, or leave their home state for care.In other words: real people, across the country, are enduring real suffering. All of which was predictable and preventable.In response to the onslaught of post-Roe horror stories, Republican legislators and abortion opponents have claimed that physicians are misreading the laws and failing their patients as a result. It’s a clever move, attacking those who make them look the worst: doctors who see the devastating impact of abortion bans up close, every day. But conservatives have been planning for the end of Roe for decades, and their laws were written with careful consideration.It isn’t just obstetricians and fertility doctors who fear prosecution, but many types of physicians. At an annual meeting of pulmonologists, a special session was held on how to avoid breaking the law while caring for lung disease patients they may have to advise on ending dangerous pregnancies. Instead of being able to singularly focus on helping sick people get well, these doctors have to worry that doing their job could get them arrested.The impact of abortion bans goes far beyond horrific individual stories; they’ve had a cascading effect into countless areas of Americans’ lives. I spoke to a young woman struggling with infertility in Tennessee, for example, whose state representative told her that I.V.F. doctors could be prosecuted under the abortion ban there for discarding unused embryos (a common part of the I.V.F. process). “We just want to be parents,” she told me.Abortion bans have also put birth control access in danger. For years, conservative legislators and organizations laid the groundwork to falsely characterize some forms of contraception as abortifacients. This distortion has already started to hurt women in states with abortion bans: Because of the law’s ambiguity in Missouri, a chain of hospitals there briefly stopped providing emergency contraception, with a spokesperson explaining, “We simply cannot put our clinicians in a position that might result in criminal prosecution.”At the University of Idaho, the legal counsel advised it against providing students with birth control in light of the state’s abortion ban. Staff members could give out condoms, the guidance said, but only to prevent sexually transmitted infections, not “for purposes of birth control.” Employees were told that even speaking in support of abortion could put them in danger of being arrested and banned from future state employment.Republicans’ abortion laws have even led to a crisis in care in states where abortion is legal. Doctors are so overwhelmed with patients from other states that some clinics have weekslong waiting lists, which, along with the logistical hurdles out-of-state patients face, has led to later abortions — which Republicans claim to oppose. ‌Writing about abortion every day feels like drowning, but what keeps me up at night is knowing that, by and large, we are hearing only from the women who felt comfortable enough going to the media. For every one story shared, there are hundreds or thousands more that we will never know about.Doctors who might otherwise speak up are also being silenced, warned by their employers’ PR and legal teams not to share stories of how abortion bans have affected their work and are hurting women.As Americans head into midterm elections, they need to consider not what Republicans say about abortion — but what they do, and what their laws have already done.Conservatives have claimed that they are not interested in targeting individual women. But in the past year, a teenager in Nebraska who authorities say had an illegal abortion is awaiting trial for concealing a death, and an Alabama county jail reportedly kept pregnant women in detention in an effort to “protect” their unborn fetuses from possible drug exposure.Republicans said women’s lives and health would be protected. They very clearly haven’t been. They said they’d make allowances for sexual assault victims, but states with rape and incest exceptions have language so narrow and vague that they’re near impossible to use.They said that women’s lives wouldn’t meaningfully change — but women are suffering, every single day.Republicans running for office have tried to sidestep the issue, dismissing it as unimportant or deleting any mention of abortion from their websites, knowing how unpopular bans have become.Voters should remember that none of this is accidental. All of this is misery, and hurt is by design. This alone should motivate voters to protect abortion rights.Jessica Valenti is the author of “Sex Object” and publishes a newsletter in which she writes about abortion every day.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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      The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin

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      Whether for her pathbreaking role as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket or for rapping “Baby Got Back” on the Masked Singer, Sarah Palin has, since her debut on the national scene in 2008, made an art of attracting the spotlight.But fame — even in America — can get you only so far, and Ms. Palin’s campaign this year for Alaska’s only House seat has exposed the limits of her celebrity. Her fund-raising has lagged. Her campaign schedule has been unusually light for a candidate heading into a competitive election. And she announced recently that she’d received “crappy advice” from advisers and was no longer trying to raise money. In an unexpectedly close ranked-choice race, she has had to endure the indignity of encouraging voters to support her Republican opponent, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Democrat, Mary Peltola, from running away with the seat.Ms. Palin may be about to fade once again from national politics, but the “mama grizzly” brand she invented is here to stay. Already, a group of female leaders is embracing and iterating on Ms. Palin’s trademark mom-knows-best Republicanism. Some are politicians, railing against the powers-that-be; others are activists, speaking out against school closures and vaccine mandates. As these new mama bears enter the political sphere, they are transforming American discourse, harnessing motherhood itself as a political asset, just as Ms. Palin did before them. Even if she loses her battle to make it to Washington next week, in a broader cultural sense, Ms. Palin has already won the war. And a new generation of GOP women stand poised to carry her complex legacy forward.When John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate in 2008, she was in her 40s and had only served less than two years as governor. Her many doubters noted, correctly, that she wasn’t ready for the job of vice president. But their criticisms were often shot through with a condescension and sexism that had less to do with Ms. Palin’s experience than with her looks, clothes and identity as a mother of five.Few female politicians before her had emphasized their lives as mothers to the extent she did. She held her baby onstage right after accepting the nomination, deliberately presenting herself as a down-to-earth “hockey mom” and later on as a protective “mama grizzly.” Ms. Palin’s folksy demeanor was often ridiculed as a gimmick and Ms. Palin herself as an ignoramus. But the course of political events soon proved that she was on to something. The Tea Party wave during Barack Obama’s first term swept Palin imitators like Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell to national prominence, women who were likely to be found in jeans at the gun range, when they weren’t giving a speech in stilettos. Rather than leaving family life at home the way men always had, which a previous generation of women had seen as a necessity to succeed professionally, this new generation saw how womanhood and motherhood added significantly to their brand. By signaling their tenacity in the domestic sphere, they implied their toughness in the political arena. And they increased their populist appeal.Among those who noticed their potential was Donald Trump’s future adviser, Steve Bannon, who made a 2010 documentary called “Fire from the Heartland” glorifying Mrs. Bachmann and other Tea Party women, as well as a 2011 documentary about Ms. Palin herself called “The Undefeated,” framing her femininity and Everywoman image as an unsung asset for the GOP.Of course, Mr. Bannon and the right as a whole eventually found a different champion, and while Mr. Trump left little room for also-rans like Ms. Palin, his time in office helped her particular strain of conservatism mutate and spread — giving rise to a new, Trumpier version of Ms. Palin’s mama grizzly.This new generation’s pugnaciousness makes Ms. Palin’s “Going Rogue” days look subdued. Conservative moms from all over the country have turned local school board meetings into contentious showdowns over policy and curriculum, organized by groups like Moms for Liberty who say they are “on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” “We do NOT co-parent with the government,” reads the back of one of the T-shirts for sale in the moms’ online merch store.Shades of Ms. Palin can be seen in Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose gun-toting photo-ops recall Ms. Palin’s rural, hunting-and-fishing image. But Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor running for governor in Arizona, is perhaps the paradigmatic New Mama Bear. One moment, she’s literally vacuuming a red carpet for Mr. Trump; the next, she’s calling her Democratic opponent a coward and the media the “right hand of the Devil.” Ms. Lake shares Ms. Palin’s instinct for the spotlight and feel for optics, as well as her affection for copacetic mama bears (Ms. Lake has often used the term). But while Ms. Palin lost control of her image to a skeptical, often condescending news media (remember the infamous Katie Couric interview in which the candidate couldn’t name any newspapers she read?), the steely, intense Ms. Lake has made a sport of antagonizing the reporters on her trail and excelled at turning the exchanges into content. The rise of the New Mama Bear might not have been possible without the fragmentation of a media now more drawn than ever toward controversy and the outrageous.Ms. Lake, who has a knack for generating outrage, stands a very good chance of winning. And she is far from the only one. In the heated conservative debate over schools, the new mama bears have been racking up some important wins, crashing school meetings to protest critical race theory and banning books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes or other content they deem inappropriate from school libraries. Moms for Liberty has claimed huge growth in membership over the past year and made itself a key player in the education battles that have marked this midterm cycle. Top Republicans have embraced the school controversies, showing just how potent this new paradigm has become on a national scale. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who gave the keynote speech at Moms for Liberty’s “Joyful Warriors” conference this summer, endorsed several of their school board candidates, and they went on to win their primaries. The effect could be that the new mama bears see their trademark political issues high on the agenda for the 2024 Republican primary.It’s ironic that Ms. Palin, the mother of mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly borne of her own trailblazing prime. But that’s often how it goes in politics, where an innovation’s impact is obvious only in hindsight — once someone else has perfected it.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a reporter who has covered politics for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.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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      The Marjorie Taylor Greene-ing of America

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      WASHINGTON — Are we ready for our new Republican overlords?Are we ready for an empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene?Are we ready for a pumped-up, pistol-packing Lauren Boebert?“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority.In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican candidate for the House, wants community panels to decide whether rape victims are able to get abortions or not. He’s building on Dr. Oz’s dictum that local politicians should help make that call. Even Oprah turned on her creation, Dr. Odd.J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, before saluting him to gain public office, could join the Senate in January. Talk about American Elegy.Even though he wrote in his best seller that Yale Law School was his “dream school,” he now trashes the very system that birthed him. Last year, he gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy”: His mother-in-law is a provost at the University of California San Diego.It’s disturbing to think of Vance side by side with Herschel Walker. Walker was backed by Mitch McConnell, who countenanced an obviously troubled and flawed individual even if it meant degrading the once illustrious Senate chamber.Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage.Democrats are partly to blame. They haven’t explained how they plan to get a grip on the things people are worried about: crime and inflation. Voters weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from Biden, who felt morally obligated to talk about the threat to democracy, even though that’s not what people are voting on.As it turns out, a woman’s right to control her body has been overshadowed by uneasiness over safety and economic security.To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.”Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.Heaven help us.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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      They Are Betting $100 Million on Pluralism. Will It Work?

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      In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight polarization by funding face-to-face interactions among Americans across political, racial and religious divides.Fixing what is broken in American democracy requires more than changing voter ID laws or the shape of our congressional districts, they argued. It requires forging deep personal connections that will change hearts and minds and ultimately American culture itself.Their experiment rests on a basic idea: Far too many Americans lack the skills, the opportunity and even the inclination to work together across lines of difference toward a common goal. Part of the solution, these donors believe, is embracing a very old idea that has fallen out of fashion: pluralism.The term “cultural pluralism” was coined in the early 1900s by Horace Kallen, a Jewish philosopher who proposed it in the midst of a huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. He argued that rather than try to stamp out their Polishness, Italianness or Jewishness, as many white Anglo-Saxon Protestants wanted, America should be a “nation of nationalities” where people learn to work together across lines of difference. The freedom to be different but still participate in political life as a vital part of the whole was key to the country’s genius, he argued. Mr. Kallen thought of the American people not as a melting pot, where everyone turns into the same bland stew, but as an orchestra, where distinct sounds join harmoniously.That notion fuels the New Pluralists, too. Although it’s hard to find two people who describe the project the same way, respecting difference, not papering it over, is seen as central.In his era, Mr. Kallen drew fierce criticism from those who accused him of promoting a Balkanization of the country. A scathing review of his book in The New York Times in 1924 declared that the nation faced a stark choice: “Is it to remain one in spirit, tradition and language, or is it to become a hodgepodge boardinghouse for alien groups?” It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the rise of the idea of multiculturalism, that his ideas were widely embraced.Today the New Pluralists project is grappling with a similar set of challenges as the ones Mr. Kallen wrote about over a century ago. An influx of immigrants is once again challenging prevailing notions of who Americans are and what it takes to make a country harmonious and whole. At the same time, the country does indeed feel Balkanized along a host of fault lines: rural versus urban, young versus old, religious versus secular and, of course, red versus blue.But the critiques that pluralism faces today are different. Far from being considered too radical, pluralism might not sound radical enough in an era of insurrection and potential coups. To some activists, pluralism sounds like both-sides-ism or a call to meet in the mushy middle. And yet pluralism feels more crucial than ever. Our multiracial democracy can’t survive without it.I discovered the New Pluralists this summer after I attended an online workshop on depolarizing hosted by one of its grantees, a group called Braver Angels. I found the group online because, at a time when so much attention is paid to toxic politics, I wanted to know more about groups that stood for just the opposite.Co-founded by Bill Doherty, a Minneapolis-based marriage counselor, Braver Angels is an organization with grass-roots chapters across the country that teach conservatives and liberals to debunk lazy stereotypes and clarify disagreements without yelling. In the workshop I attended, reds and blues wrestled with how they typecast the other side. Nearly all the participants were white and looked to be over the age of 40. And they were, by definition, open to reaching across the partisan divide. In other words, they were low-hanging fruit. I came away feeling more hopeful about the country nonetheless.I realized then that there was a whole ecosystem of groups, created during the Trump years, that is dedicated to bridging divides: the People’s Supper, which helps communities host potluck dinners and other events that promote racial and political reconciliation; the One Small Step project at StoryCorps, which brings together strangers for recorded conversations about their lives; More in Common, which surveys public opinion and put out an influential paper about the country’s “exhausted majority.” The New Pluralists help fund them all.The idea for the New Pluralists came about in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the New York-based executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a foundation started by a Wisconsin-bred hedge fund manager, said it kept getting calls from people who were alarmed by the level of polarization and thought they could help fix it. One call came from Melissa Weintraub, a longtime conflict resolution practitioner who had worked with Israelis and Palestinians.“You know that tool kit I use in the Middle East? I want to bring that to Wisconsin and Iowa,” Ms. Rothberg recalled Ms. Weintraub saying.Right then and there, Ms. Rothberg told me, “we set up a rapid response organizing around bridging divides.” The Einhorn Collaborative gave away $6 million in one-off funds but wanted to do something bigger. In 2019, Ms. Rothberg invited other donors involved in similar work to a meeting in New York to see if they could pool their money to fund these projects on a larger scale. She purposefully invited donors from across the political spectrum. Stand Together Trust, formerly the Charles Koch Institute, which funds social ventures to solve common problems, agreed to join. But that made some social justice funders on the left balk because they didn’t want to be in the same room, Fay Twersky, who attended that meeting as a representative of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told me.In the end, about a dozen donors stuck with it. They landed on the name the New Pluralists, partly because pluralism felt neutral in an era when so many words have taken on a partisan flavor. This past summer, they brought together a group of grantees for a retreat in Atlanta in an attempt to foster relationships among them. They included the civil rights thinker john powell of the Othering & Belonging Institute and Rachel Peric of Welcoming America. They are called field builders in the New Pluralists’ overly cerebral parlance. The big idea here is to turn pluralism into a coherent field — like public health — with clearly defined norms and practices that can be replicated, measured and improved.Lennon Flowers, a co-founder of the People’s Supper, told me that the gathering felt like a salve. She said the money and credibility her organization gets from the New Pluralists filter down to the local partners, showing that “this work matters and this proves we’re not alone.”But a big question remains: Can a group of wealthy donors change American culture from above? How exactly does that work? If you are trying to change a law, you hire a lobbyist. To change American culture, whom do you hire?Nevertheless, the group is doubling down on its vision. Over the summer, it put out a request for grant proposals from grass-roots groups engaged in this work. Eight hundred applications poured in — too many to fund. That’s when the New Pluralists began an effort to challenge donors to devote $1 billion over the next decade to pluralism, an initiative it announced at a White House unity summit in September.“The need is so great, and the opportunity is so great that we need more of philanthropy to take this seriously,” the New Pluralists’ executive director, Uma Viswanathan, told me.Even the most fervent of the New Pluralists admit that they aren’t sure they will succeed. But I hope they do. After all, orchestras don’t sound good by accident. People have to practice.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