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      As Republicans Campaign on Crime, Racism Is a New Battlefront

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      As Republicans seize on crime as one of their leading issues in the final weeks of the midterm elections, they have deployed a series of attack lines, terms and imagery that have injected race into contests across the country.In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have labeled a Black candidate as “different” and “dangerous” and darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal.Nowhere have these tactics risen to overtake the debate in a major campaign, but a survey of competitive contests, particularly those involving Black candidates, shows they are so widespread as to have become an important weapon in the 2022 Republican arsenal.In Wisconsin, where Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, is the Democratic nominee for Senate, a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad targeting him ends by juxtaposing his face with those of three Democratic House members, all of them women of color, and the words “different” and “dangerous.”In a mailer sent to several state House districts in New Mexico, the state Republican Party darkened the hands of a barber shown giving a white child a haircut, next to the question, “Do you want a sex offender cutting your child’s hair?”And in North Carolina, an ad against Cheri Beasley, the Democratic candidate for Senate, who is Black, features the anguished brother of a white state trooper killed a quarter-century ago by a Black man whom Ms. Beasley, then a public defender, represented in court. The brother incredulously says that Ms. Beasley, pleading for the killer’s life, said “he was actually a good person.”Appeals to white fears and resentments are an old strategy in American elections, etched into the country’s political consciousness, with ads like George Bush’s ad using the Black convict Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and Jesse Helms’s 1990 commercial showing a white man’s hands to denounce his Black opponent’s support for “quotas.”If the intervening decades saw such tactics become harder to defend, the rise of Donald J. Trump shattered taboos, as he spoke of “rapist” immigrants and “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. But while Republicans quietly stood by advertising that Democrats called racist in 2018, this year, they have responded with defiance, saying they see nothing untoward in their imagery and nothing to apologize for.“This is stupid, but not surprising,” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Republican Senatorial Committee, whose ads in North Carolina and Wisconsin have prompted accusations of racism. “We’re using their own words and their own records. If they don’t like it, they should invent a time machine, go back in time and not embrace dumb-ass ideas that voters are rejecting.”Amid pandemic-era crime increases, legitimate policy differences have emerged between the two parties over gun violence, easing access to bail and funding police budgets.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Florida Governor’s Debate: Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger,  had a rowdy exchange on Oct. 24. Here are the main takeaways from their debate.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Last Dance?: As she races to raise money to hand on to her embattled House majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in no mood to contemplate a Democratic defeat, much less her legacy.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.But some of the Republican arguments could scarcely be called serious policy critiques.This month, a Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, said Democrats favored reparations “for the people that do the crime,” suggesting the movement to compensate the descendants of slavery was about paying criminals. And Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans, saying, “Joe Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.”Such language, as well as ads portraying chaos by depicting Black rioters and Hispanic immigrants illegally racing across the border, have prompted Democrats and their allies to accuse Republicans of resorting to racist fear tactics.“I think that white people should be speaking out. I think that Black people should be speaking out,” said Chris Larson, a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin who is white and has denounced Republican ads against Mr. Barnes. “I think that all people should be speaking out when there is vile racism at work.”When former President Donald J. Trump rallied for Representative Ted Budd in Wilmington, N.C., last month, he made a joke about “the N-word,” saying it meant “nuclear.”Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDemocrats themselves are dealing with intraparty racial strife in Los Angeles caused by a leaked recording in which Latino leaders are heard using racist terms and disparaging words toward their Black constituents.But it is Republicans’ nationwide focus on crime that is fueling many of the attacks that Democrats say cross a line into racism.The conservative group Club for Growth Action, backed by the billionaires Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Diane Hendricks and Jeff Yass, pointed with pride to the crime ads it has run against Ms. Beasley. “Democrats across the country are getting called out for their soft-on-crime policies,” said the group’s president, former Representative David McIntosh. “Now that their poor decisions have caught up with them, they’re relying on the liberal media to call criticisms of their politically inconvenient record racist, and it won’t work.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The 2022 midterms include the most diverse slate of Republican congressional candidates ever, competing against Democratic candidates who would add to the House’s representatives of color and improve on the Senate’s lack of diversity. But it is also the first cycle since Mr. Trump’s presidency, when he set a sharply different tone for his party on race.It was at a rally with Mr. Trump in Arizona this month that Mr. Tuberville and Ms. Greene made their incendiary comments. At another rally in Wilmington, N.C., late last month with a Senate Republican candidate, Representative Ted Budd, Mr. Trump told the audience that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had mentioned “the N-word. You know what the N-word is?” When the audience hooted, he corrected them, “No, no, no, it’s the nuclear word.”Representative Alma Adams, Democrat of North Carolina, who is Black, said, “Donald Trump is fueling this fire.”Still, a rise in violence recently has given openings to both parties.Cheri Beasley, a Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina, addressed supporters and patrons during a campaign stop in Charlotte last month.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIn North Florida, a flier distributed by a Democratic group depicts the face of a Black Republican, Corey Simon, who is challenging a white state senator, on what Republicans have called a shooting target and Democrats call a school easel, with bullets shown strewn underneath. The message was about gun control and school shootings, staples of Democratic campaigns, and identical mailers targeted two other Republican candidates, who are white and Latino.Republicans say their attacks are capturing voters’ anxieties, not feeding them. Defending Mr. Tuberville, a former football coach at Auburn University, Byron Donalds of Florida said crime had become a leading issue because of “soft-on-crime policies and progressive prosecutors in liberal cities.” Mr. Donalds, one of two Black Republicans in the House, added, “As a coach and mentor to countless Black men, Tommy Tuberville has done more to advance Black lives than most people, especially in the Democratic Party.”Ms. Greene and Mr. Tuberville did not respond to requests for comment.Then there is the Republican mailer in Wisconsin that clearly darkened the face of Mr. Barnes.“If you can’t hear it when they pick up the bullhorn that used to be a dog whistle, you can see it with your own eyes,” said Mr. Larson, the Wisconsin state senator.The darkening of white hands in a stock photo of a barber on a Republican mailer in New Mexico prompted outrage there. The New Mexico Republican Party said that Democrats were trying to divert attention from their record on crime. A Republican leader in the state House of Representatives, Rod Montoya, told The Albuquerque Journal that the hands were darkened to make the fliers “gloomy.”Some liberal groups do seem intent on discerning racism in any message on crime. After Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who is white, ran an ad opening with a clip of Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, who is Black, calling for defunding the police, Iowa Democrats called it racist because Ms. Reynolds’s Democratic challenger, Deidre DeJear, is also Black, and, as she has said, bears a resemblance to Ms. Bush.Progressive groups say their concern is merited.“Crime in America has always, at least in modern times, been racially charged,” said Christopher Scott, chief political officer at the liberal group Democracy for America. “The ads aren’t getting to policy points. They are images playing on their base’s fears.”But the policy differences between the two parties are real. Democrats have pushed for cashless bail, saying the current system that requires money to free a defendant before trial is unfair to poor people. Republicans say cash bail is meant to get criminals off the streets. Democrats have expressed solidarity with racial justice protesters and helped bail out some who were arrested after demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd turned destructive. Republicans have said those actions condoned and encouraged lawlessness.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made explicit reference to “replacement theory,” the racist notion that nonwhite, undocumented immigrants are “replacing” white Americans.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesSkin color is beside the point, said Jonathan Felts, a spokesman for Mr. Budd’s campaign in North Carolina, as he defended the blitz of crime advertising against Ms. Beasley. One ad toggles between images of white children — victims of brutal crimes — and the face of Ms. Beasley, her expression haughty or bemused.“The images used in the ad match up to the victims of the criminals she went easy on,” Mr. Felts said. “Are you suggesting the ad makers should make up fake victims, or are you suggesting she shouldn’t be held accountable for her judicial and legal record?”In fact, the judicial and legal records portrayed in at least one of the ads have been determined to be distorted, at best. The first version of the Republican Senatorial Committee’s ad, which portrayed child crime victims from different races, was pulled down by North Carolina television stations in June after they agreed that some of the assertions were false. In a later version, the committee made slight word changes to satisfy the channels but added a more overt racial contrast.“All communities are concerned about public safety,” said State Representative Brandon Lofton, a Democratic Black lawmaker whose South Charlotte district is largely white. “There is a way to talk about it that is truthful” and does not cross racial lines, he said.The campaigns themselves have steered clear of charging racism.Dory MacMillan, a spokeswoman for Ms. Beasley, said, “Our race remains a dead heat, despite Congressman Budd and his allies’ spending millions of dollars to distort Cheri’s record of public service.”In Wisconsin, a spokeswoman for Mr. Barnes, Maddy McDaniel, similarly declined to go further than to say that “the G.O.P.’s fear-mongering playbook failed them last cycle, and it will fail again.”Mr. Barnes, for his part, seemed to make playful use of his portrayal in one of the Republican attack ads as “different” during his first debate with Senator Ron Johnson, the two-term incumbent. He was, indeed, different, Mr. Barnes said, “We don’t have enough working-class people in the United States Senate.” More

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      New York’s Governor’s Race Is Suddenly Too Close for Democrats’ Comfort

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      For months, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has trusted that the state’s strong Democratic majority would keep her in office largely on the strength of a simple message: Her Republican opponent was too close to Donald J. Trump and would roll back abortion rights.But just two weeks before Election Day, a rapidly tightening contest has Ms. Hochul racing to expand her closing argument as Democrats warily concede they may have misjudged powerful fears driving the electorate, particularly around crime.In just the last few days, Ms. Hochul stood with Mayor Eric Adams to announce a new flood of police officers into New York City subways; she visited five Harlem churches to assure stalwart Black voters she was “laser-focused” on safety; and she highlighted new statistics showing that authorities were seizing more guns under her watch.“We believe in justice, the justice that Jesus teaches us, but it’s also about safety,” Ms. Hochul said at one of her stops in Harlem. “We are laser-focused on keeping you, your children and your grandchildren safe.”Her campaign has begun recalibrating its paid message, too, shifting the focus of millions of dollars in ad spending to highlight the governor’s efforts to stoke the economy and improve public safety, notably including a package of modest changes to the state’s bail laws that has divided her party. The spots trumpeting her record will run alongside a new ad tying Mr. Zeldin to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Anxious Democrats are hopeful that the changes can stabilize the governor’s campaign after weeks of increasingly shaky polls that show Ms. Hochul’s lead dwindling to single digits over Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican.The narrowing margin tracks closely with recent surveys showing that fears about public safety and inflation have eclipsed abortion and the former president as make-or-break issues for voters, eroding Democrats’ support even in liberal enclaves like New York City and its suburbs, while rewarding candidates like Mr. Zeldin who have made crime the visceral centerpiece of their campaign.“Maybe it was the right thing to do at the time,” David A. Paterson, the former Democratic governor, said of the decision by Democrats to spend precious time and money messaging on abortion rights this summer.“But these times, meaning September and October,” he continued, “really call for more conversation about what we do with convicted felons, what we do with the judges’ capacity to assess dangerousness, and obviously what we do with a significant number of people with mental illness walking the streets right now.”Ms. Hochul has used appearances with Mayor Eric Adams of New York City to highlight anti-crime initiatives.Yuki Iwamura/Associated PressThose issues are all but certain to figure prominently in the first and only televised debate between Ms. Hochul, 64, and Mr. Zeldin, 42, on Tuesday night.Certainly, Ms. Hochul remains the favorite in the race, and her campaign has tried to calm jittery allies. She has a vast fund-raising advantage, passable approval ratings and a two-to-one registration advantage statewide for Democrats over Republicans. While several polls last week showed a tight race, a Siena College survey from that period showed the governor still up by 11 points.“There is no question that the national environment has gotten tougher for Democrats in the last few weeks,” said Jefrey Pollock, Ms. Hochul’s pollster. “We are focused on making sure that every Democrat understands the stakes and votes. When Democrats vote in New York, we win.”But for Democrats who are not accustomed to close statewide races in New York, some level of panic appears to be setting in — that Mr. Zeldin could flip Black, Latino and Asian voters worried about public safety, but also that other rank-and-file Democratic voters may simply sit the race out because of apathy about Ms. Hochul and her low-key campaign.“It doesn’t feel like there’s a ton of groundswell from the bottom up,” Crystal Hudson, a left-leaning Brooklyn City Council member. “Perhaps Democrats are taking for granted that New York state is bluer than we think it might be.”In Manhattan, the borough president, Mark D. Levine, said he, too, had grown increasingly concerned in recent weeks that Democratic voters were missing the warning signs. On Sunday, he put together a rally with more than a dozen elected Democrats on the ultraliberal Upper West Side to “wake up Dems.” The event turned raucous when hecklers, some wearing Zeldin garb, tried to derail the speakers.“There hasn’t been a seriously competitive statewide election in 20 years and Democrats certainly in Manhattan and elsewhere have been taking November on autopilot,” Mr. Levine said afterward. “It’s not an exaggeration to say we can’t win statewide unless we get Democrats in Manhattan excited to vote.”The stakes have only grown in recent weeks amid a massive outside spending campaign by a handful of ultrawealthy conservative donors seeking to capitalize on the public safety debate to damage Ms. Hochul.Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir, put more than $9 million into a pair of pro-Zeldin super PACs at the start of September, almost single-handedly bankrolling statewide television ads that savage Ms. Hochul’s record on public safety. Just on Friday, one of the PACs reported new contributions totaling $750,000 — a sum that would take even Ms. Hochul, a prolific fund-raiser, days to raise from scores of donors — from a shell company that appears to be tied to Thomas Tisch, an investor from one of New York’s richest families.New York is not the only state dealing with increases in certain crimes since the onset of the pandemic, and the reality is more nuanced than Republicans would suggest. As Ms. Hochul likes to point out, the state remains safer than some far smaller, many run by Republicans.But a rash of highly visible, violent episodes on the subways and on well-to-do street corners around the state in recent months have left many New Yorkers with at least the perception that parts of the state are growing markedly less safe.In Ms. Hochul’s 14 months as governor, she has taken a nuanced approach to public safety issues. She has meaningfully tightened the state’s gun laws. She and Mr. Adams have pledged more money for mental health services for disturbed people who commit crimes. And she has initiated plans to put cameras in every subway car. Under pressure from Mr. Adams, a former police captain, Ms. Hochul used the state’s annual budget to strengthen bail restrictions and tighten rules for repeat offenders, over the objections of some more left-leaning colleagues.“He doesn’t own the crime issue,” Ms. Hochul said in an interview on Sunday about Mr. Zeldin. “Saying that more people should have guns on our streets and in our subways and in our churches as a strategy to deal with public safety — that’s absurd.”But until very recently, she had relatively little to say about it in the general election campaign, outside of criticizing Mr. Zeldin’s opposition to many gun control measures, and a single Spanish-language ad focused on Ms. Hochul’s gun policies.That omission has left some moderate Democrats fearing that the party has ceded the terms of the debate to Republicans like Mr. Zeldin, who have decried legislative attempts by the Democrats to make the system fairer as “pro-criminal” laws.After Ms. Hochul and Mr. Adams announced on Saturday that the state would pay for more police officers in the subways, Mr. Zeldin pilloried the plan as little more than a political gimmick.His own campaign platform calls for firing the Manhattan district attorney and declaring a state of emergency to temporarily repeal the state’s cashless bail laws, and other criminal justice laws enacted by the Democrat-run Legislature.“For Kathy Hochul, it wasn’t the nine subway deaths that drove her to action. It wasn’t a 25-year-high in subway crime. It wasn’t New Yorkers feeling unsafe on our streets, on our subways and in their homes,” he said on Sunday. “For Kathy Hochul, all it took for her to announce a half-ass, day-late, dollar-short plan was a bad poll.”Lee Zeldin, right, has received endorsements from numerous law enforcement unions, including the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesThe challenge for Ms. Hochul in shifting that narrative was on clear display on Sunday, as she shuttled up and down Harlem to speak at five different Black churches, usually a hotbed of Democratic support.At the first stop, Mount Neboh Baptist Church, the Rev. Johnnie Melvin Green Jr. gave a full-throated, personal endorsement of the governor from the pulpit, but he sounded alarmed about low turnout and the state of the race.Without naming Mr. Zeldin, the reverend warned that certain people had “hijacked” the public’s understanding of what was happening in the city, leading to “a race that shouldn’t be tight.”“I want to make something crystal clear because they aren’t going to explain it to you in the media,” he said, adding: “They want to make us afraid.”Jeffery C. Mays More

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      Fetterman-Oz Debate Tonight: What to Watch

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      The Pennsylvania Senate debate on Tuesday between Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, is likely to be among the most widely viewed of all midterm debates. It is a clash of two large personalities, who have by turns mocked and scathingly attacked one another, over matters trivial (fresh vegetables) and deeply serious (violent crime).Interest in the debate, for a contest that is critical to control of the Senate, is sky-high as polls show the race tightening two weeks before Election Day, and because of Mr. Fetterman’s recovery from a stroke two days before the May primary.The 60-minute debate will be broadcast at 8 p.m. Eastern time from a TV studio in Harrisburg, Pa. There will be no live audience. Here is what to watch for:How Fetterman soundsMr. Fetterman still has difficulty processing spoken words, and he will read the two moderators’ questions and Dr. Oz’s responses on large monitors with closed captions. The Fetterman campaign warns that the accommodation could slow down his responses, and it worries that Republicans will try to make snippets of the debate go viral with Mr. Fetterman’s pauses and dropped or slurred words. The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Florida Governor’s Debate: Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger,  had a rowdy exchange on Oct. 24. Here are the main takeaways from their debate.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Last Dance?: As she races to raise money to hand on to her embattled House majority, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in no mood to contemplate a Democratic defeat, much less her legacy.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.Major style differencesDon’t expect quick-witted repartee. The candidates have big differences in style. Dr. Oz spent 13 years as a TV host and has transitioned from an empathetic broadcast persona into a political candidate with sharp, succinct attack lines. Mr. Fetterman, even before his stroke, was a so-so debater with a meandering, regular-guy speaking style.Oz’s shift away from Fetterman’s healthA month ago, the Oz campaign was mockingly calling attention to Mr. Fetterman’s refusal to commit to a series of debates (a spokeswoman said he might not have had a stroke if he’d eaten his vegetables). But after the intense focus on the Democrat’s health appeared to produce a backlash, Dr. Oz’s camp now says it will stick to the candidates’ policy differences and to highlight what it calls Mr. Fetterman’s “extremism.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Who’s the real Pennsylvanian?Mr. Fetterman will likely attack his opponent as a “Hollywood doctor” who owns several houses, only moved to the state in 2020 and has poured $23 million of his fortune into the race. Dr. Oz may come back with the defense that he earned his fortune, while Mr. Fetterman received an allowance from his family until he was nearly 50. (He collected only a token salary as mayor of Braddock, Pa., for 13 years.)Attacks over abortionPerhaps Mr. Fetterman’s strongest issue against Dr. Oz, and one crucial in the battle for suburban voters, is Dr. Oz’s right-wing tack on abortion since he entered politics. Look for Mr. Fetterman to call attention to a statement Dr. Oz made that life begins at conception and terminating a pregnancy any time is “still murder.” A focus on crimeThis is the issue that Dr. Oz has leaned into most aggressively, accusing Mr. Fetterman of coddling criminals because of his advocacy for clemency for long-incarcerated men convicted of murder. Dr. Oz calls him “the most pro-murderer candidate” in the country. Viewers may hear Dr. Oz name individuals and their crimes for whom Mr. Fetterman advocated clemency. The focus on crime, especially homicides and street violence in Philadelphia, is meant to stir fears by voters outside the city. How will Mr. Fetterman defend his leadership of the state pardons board and his support for criminal justice reform?Energy and frackingWestern Pennsylvania has major reserves of natural gas. Because Mr. Fetterman cultivates an appeal to blue-collar union voters, especially in the Pittsburgh region, Dr. Oz will most likely seek to undermine him by attacking his past opposition to fracking, which provides thousands of jobs. Mr. Fetterman supports fracking now, but as recently as 2018 he opposed it. More

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      A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming a Trump Enabler

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      ​​“What would you do for your relevance?” the political journalist Mark Leibovich asks in his new book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission.” “How badly did you want into the clubhouse, no matter how wretched it became inside?” For Leibovich, you can’t truly understand the current Republican Party without taking stock of the almost Shakespearean drama that unfolded during the Trump presidency — in which Republican after Republican bowed to the will of their ascendant party leader.Through his extensive — and often quite colorful — reporting with Trump’s inner circle of enablers, Leibovich tries to understand the motivations that fueled Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. But this conversation isn’t only important in retrospect. With the Republican Party poised to possibly recapture at least one house of Congress in November, many of Trump’s core enablers could soon hold considerable political power. Who are they? What do they believe? How will they act if given power?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]We discuss why the stakes in 2022 midterms feel higher than ever, why the Republican Party has changed so profoundly since the days of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, how the governing structure of the G.O.P. fell apart as Trump rose in influence, the many reasons politicians from Lindsey Graham to Elise Stefanik converted from Trump skeptics to staunch Trump defenders, the political motivations of Kevin McCarthy — who may become the next speaker of the House — and how he might wield power, how the persistence of Trumpism could profoundly alter American democracy, why Leibovich believes figures like J.D. Vance prostrated themselves to a man who insulted them, what options Democrats have for countering election denialism and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Ralph Answang“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld, Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Four Takeaways From the DeSantis-Crist Debate in Florida’s Governor Race

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis and Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger, debated for the only time in the Florida governor’s race on Monday, a rowdy exchange featuring a raucous crowd and a slew of culture war issues that have dominated the state’s political discourse.Mr. Crist, a former congressman and governor with plenty of debate experience, gave a polished performance as he went on the attack. But no single moment from Mr. Crist seemed like it would upend the dynamics of the contest. Public polls show Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, comfortably ahead in the race, a rarity for Florida, which until recently had some of the tightest contests in the nation.The debate, initially scheduled for Oct. 12, was postponed because of Hurricane Ian, a destructive Category 4 storm that struck Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, killing more than 100 people.The moderator, Liz Quirantes of WPEC, struggled to keep quiet the audience in Fort Pierce, which regularly applauded, cheered, jeered and interrupted the exchanges. Some of Ms. Quirantes’s questions, which she said came from viewers, appeared to be leading the candidates toward conservative points of view. WPEC is a CBS affiliate owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group.Here are four takeaways:The DeSantis White House speculation isn’t going away.Mr. Crist repeatedly cast Mr. DeSantis as more interested in running for president in 2024 than in governing Florida.“Governor DeSantis has taken his eye off the ball,” Mr. Crist said, accusing the governor of focusing on national issues and fund-raising outside the state. (Mr. DeSantis has far out-raised Mr. Crist.)Twice, Mr. Crist asked Mr. DeSantis point-blank if he would serve a full, four-year term if re-elected. Mr. DeSantis ignored the question as the moderator noted that the candidates had agreed not to ask each other questions.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.“The only worn-out old donkey I’m looking to put out to pasture is Charlie Crist,” Mr. DeSantis said.The governor frequently turned his attention to President Biden, the Democrat he would most likely challenge if he were to seek the presidency, and tried to tie him to Mr. Crist. Mr. Biden’s approval rating is underwater in Florida, though the president still plans to travel to the state to rally for Mr. Crist and other Democrats next week.“Charlie Crist has voted with Joe Biden 100 percent of the time to give us these inflationary policies and to drive up the costs of everything that we’re doing,” Mr. DeSantis said.The partisan crowd was raucous inside the debate on Monday night, as well as outside the theater beforehand.Marco Bello/ReutersThe death toll from Hurricane Ian became a sticking point.At least 114 people died because of Hurricane Ian in Florida, making it the deadliest storm in the state in almost 90 years. Many of the dead were older or vulnerable people who became trapped in their homes or cars and drowned. The New York Times found that Lee County, home to the hard-hit city of Fort Myers, did not follow its own plans for evacuating people ahead of the hurricane.Mr. Crist accused Mr. DeSantis of not using his bully pulpit to encourage people to get out before the storm made landfall — and noted that more than 82,000 Floridians have died during the coronavirus pandemic under Mr. DeSantis’s watch.“Whether it comes to Covid or it comes to the hurricane, Ron ignored science,” Mr. Crist said.Mr. DeSantis countered that evacuations are mandated by county officials and not by the state. “Our message was, ‘Listen to your locals,’” he said. “It’s ultimately a local decision. But I stand by every one of our local counties.”Neither Mr. DeSantis nor Mr. Crist answered the question about whether there should be limits on construction along the Florida coast given the increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Mr. Crist blamed Mr. DeSantis for allowing the state’s property insurance market to fray; Mr. DeSantis countered that insurance rates had risen because of excessive lawsuits.DeSantis made false and misleading statements about abortion.It was clear from the start that Mr. Crist was eager to talk about abortion, one of Democrats’ preferred topics in an otherwise unfavorable election cycle. The first question was about housing policy, but he began by saying the election was “a stark contrast between somebody who believes in a woman’s right to choose” and Mr. DeSantis, who signed a 15-week abortion ban that, Mr. Crist emphasized, includes no exceptions for rape and incest.Later, asked whether abortion should be banned after a specific week in pregnancy, Mr. DeSantis made a number of false or misleading claims.He accused Mr. Crist of supporting abortion “up until the moment of birth.” That is a common Republican claim, but abortion until the moment of birth doesn’t exist, even in states without gestational limits. He also said Mr. Crist supported “dismemberment abortions,” a pejorative term for procedures performed later in pregnancy that, when they do happen, are often prompted by medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormalities. (More than 92 percent of abortions in the United States are performed much earlier, in the first trimester.)‘Culture war’ issues took up a lot of bandwidth.More than perhaps any other sitting governor, Mr. DeSantis has used issues like race and transgender rights to stir up his conservative base.That was on display in Monday’s debate, in which he gave a graphic and inaccurate description of gender-affirming care for transgender children, suggesting falsely that doctors were “mutilating” minors. In reality, gender-affirming care — which major medical associations, including pediatric associations, endorse — primarily involves social support, nonpermanent treatments like puberty blockers (which Mr. DeSantis also denounced), and hormonal treatments.Mr. Crist responded by bringing the topic, once again, back to abortion: “This reminds me of your position on a woman’s right to choose,” he said. “You think you know better than any physician or any doctor or any woman in a position to make decisions about their own personal health.”In a segment on education, Mr. DeSantis also repeated his frequent claims that Democrats like Mr. Crist want to teach white children to view themselves as oppressors because of their race. He acknowledged that it was important for history curriculums to include “all of American history,” including slavery and segregation, but said: “I’m proud of our history. I don’t want to teach kids to hate our country.”Mr. Crist scoffed at the idea that children were being taught to hate themselves or each other, saying, “I don’t know where you get that idea” — and then accusing Mr. DeSantis of focusing on the issue to avoid talking about abortion. More

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      Crime: Red Delusions About Purple Reality

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      During last week’s Oklahoma gubernatorial debate Joy Hofmeister, the surprisingly competitive Democratic candidate, addressed Kevin Stitt, the Republican incumbent, who — like many in his party — is running as a champion of law and order.“The fact is the rates of violent crime in Oklahoma are higher under your watch than New York and California,” she declared.Stitt responded by laughing, and turned to the audience: “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?”But Hofmeister was completely correct. In fact, when it comes to homicide, the most reliably measured form of violent crime, it isn’t even close: In 2020 Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s, and this ranking probably hasn’t changed.Was Stitt unaware of this fact? Or was he just counting on his audience’s ignorance? If it was the latter, he may, alas, have made the right call. Public perceptions about crime are often at odds with reality. And in this election year Republicans are trying to exploit one of the biggest misperceptions: that crime is a big-city, blue-state problem.Americans aren’t wrong to be concerned about crime. Nationwide, violent crime rose substantially in 2020; we don’t have complete data yet, but murders appear to have risen further in 2021, although they seem to be declining again.Nobody knows for sure what caused the surge — just as nobody knows for sure what caused the epic decline in crime from 1990 to the mid-2010s, about which more shortly. But given the timing, the social and psychological effects of the pandemic are the most likely culprit, with a possible secondary role for the damage to police-community relations caused by the murder of George Floyd.While the crime surge was real, however, the perception that it was all about big cities run by Democrats is false. This was a purple crime wave, with murder rates rising at roughly the same rate in Trump-voting red states and Biden-voting blue states. Homicides rose sharply in both urban and rural areas. And if we look at levels rather than rates of change, both homicides and violent crime as a whole are generally higher in red states.So why do so many people believe otherwise? Before we get to politically motivated disinformation, let’s talk about some other factors that might have skewed perceptions.One factor is visibility. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has pointed out, New York City is one of the safest places in America — but you’re more likely to see a crime, or know someone who has seen a crime, than elsewhere because the city has vastly higher population density than anyplace else, meaning that there are often many witnesses around when something bad happens.Another factor may be the human tendency to believe stories that confirm our preconceptions. Many people feel instinctively that getting tough on criminals is an effective anti-crime strategy, so they’re inclined to assume that places that are less tough — for example, those that don’t prosecute some nonviolent offenses — must suffer higher crime as a result. This doesn’t appear to be true, but you can see why people might believe it.Such misconceptions are made easier by the long-running disconnect between the reality of crime and public perceptions. Violent crime halved between 1991 and 2014, yet for almost that entire period a large majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.However, only a minority believed that it was rising in their own area. This tendency to believe that crime is terrible, but mostly someplace else, was confirmed by an August poll showing a huge gap between the number of Americans who consider violent crime a serious problem nationally and the much smaller number who see it as a serious problem where they live.Which brings us to the efforts by right-wing media and Republicans to weaponize crime as an issue in the midterms — efforts that one has to admit are proving effective, even though the breadth of the crime wave, more or less equally affecting red and blue states, rural and urban areas and so on suggests that it’s nobody’s fault.It’s possible that these efforts would have gained traction no matter what Democrats did. It’s also true, however, that too few Democrats have responded effectively.In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul was very late to the party, apparently realizing only a few days ago that crime was a major issue she needed to address. On the other hand, Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, has seemed to feed fear-mongering, declaring that he had “never seen crime at this level,” an assertion contradicted by his own Police Department’s data. Even after the 2020-21 surge, serious crime in New York remained far below its 1990 peak, and in fact was still lower than it was when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem as if it should be hard. Why not acknowledge the validity of concerns over the recent crime surge, while also pointing out that right-wingers who talk tough on crime don’t seem to be any good at actually keeping crime low?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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      How a Democrat in Suburban Minneapolis Made His District Blue

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      Dean Phillips, a congressman in suburban Minneapolis, has made his seat safely Democratic thanks in part to his unconventional style and in part to the shifting political landscape.BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — It’s a little after 2 p.m., and beads of sweat are forming on the brow of Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota. He’s wielding a two-foot crowbar to yank up rotten floorboards in the kitchen of a century-old home along Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis, and working fast.“How can you not love this?” Phillips, now upstairs, exclaims as he prepares to saw a hole in the wall of the house’s newly redesigned master bedroom. Despite his staff’s efforts to warn him, he steps on a nail. It’s a short one, thankfully, that doesn’t pierce the sole of his sneaker, and he gets right back to it.Welcome to “On the Job With Dean” — unconventional politicking for an unconventional politician, a suburban Democratic lawmaker whose fortunes say a lot about American politics in 2022. On this particular autumn day, Phillips is moonlighting with a demolition crew for a local contractor, part of a series of odd jobs he takes on, he told me, to feel grounded.In an age when political outsiders are often held up as breaths of fresh air and career politicians are widely reviled, Phillips, a 53-year-old liquor and ice cream entrepreneur whose grandmother was “Dear Abby” and whose mother was a clothier for Prince, labors hard not to look like a traditional pol. Campaign rallies are not his thing. On any given day, you might find him mixing drinks at an ax-throwing bar inside the Mall of America, dipping “witches’ fingers” at a candy factory or driving a 20-ton snowplow through a serpentine training course.In 2018, he flipped this district, a mostly upper-middle-class area of single-family homes and shopping malls that hugs the western border of Minneapolis, to Democratic control for the first time since 1960. His Republican opponent, Erik Paulsen, had won the district by 14 percentage points just two years earlier.Phillips working in a house in Minneapolis during one of his “On the Job With Dean” outings, in which he takes on various types of odd jobs so that, he says, he feels grounded in his district.Blake Hounshell/The New York TimesPhillips ran a nostalgia-infused campaign calling for civility and “conversation,” while ruthlessly defining Paulsen as a no-show with a memorable, documentary-style ad featuring a man dressed in a Bigfoot suit.“I thought I was good at hiding,” Bigfoot muses. “Then Erik Paulsen comes along.”Phillips won by 12 points in 2018, then again by the same margin in 2020. Since then, Republicans have essentially given up on the seat — a silent tribute due in part to his astute political instincts, in part to widespread aversion to Donald Trump in Minnesota and in part to the deeper demographic shifts that presaged Phillips’s 2018 win.“It was a Mitt Romney district,” said Abou Amara, a Democratic strategist in Minneapolis. “Most of those Republicans aren’t coming back.”A tale of two suburbsRepublican operatives are focusing instead on winning back what is proving to be more fertile territory this year: the nearby Second Congressional District, held by Representative Angie Craig.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.Also a former business executive, Craig holds positions that are almost identical to Phillips’s. But she is much more conventional in style, which might help explain her plight.While Phillips seems almost driven to prove that “No Labels”-style centrism does not have to be boring and poll-tested, Craig appears determined to hunker down and play by the old rules. That caution has made her more vulnerable to the gale-force national winds bearing down on generic Democrats in swing districts across the country.But the deeper differences between their two districts are more important, which says a lot about how America’s two major political parties see their shifting fortunes in suburbia in these midterms — often, but wrongly, described as an undifferentiated campaign battleground.On the surface, the two districts look similar, with income levels that are roughly the same. But Craig’s, which stretches to the Wisconsin border, is larger and less dense. It includes more blue-collar and rural voters, and has long been the more culturally conservative of the two.The biggest gap may be in education levels: Nearly 52 percent of residents in Phillips’s district have at least a college degree, while only 42 percent of those in Craig’s do, a figure more comparable to other swing districts nationally. Phillips’s district is slightly more diverse, too: Nearly 13 percent of residents there were born abroad, versus just over 9 percent in Craig’s district.Those subtle distinctions are enough to give Republicans an opening. So while both seats have swung toward Democrats in the Trump era, Craig’s race has become one of the most hotly contested and most expensive campaigns in the country, with more than $10 million pouring in from outside Republican groups. By contrast, Phillips and his opponent have spent about $200,000 combined — essentially nothing.This year, in a freakish reprise of what happened in 2020, one of Craig’s opponents, the candidate of the Legal Marijuana Now party, died in early October. So not only must she contend with a Republican adversary, Tyler Kistner, who is well-funded and has decent name recognition after coming up just 2.2 percentage points short of Craig in 2020, but the deceased marijuana candidate also remains on the ballot and threatens to siphon votes from her left.Phillips’s “Government Repair Truck” offers “coffee and conversation” to would-be constituents.Blake Hounshell/The New York TimesCan Democrats rebrand?An heir to a local liquor company who co-founded the gelato business Talenti, then sold it to Unilever in 2014 for a tidy profit, Phillips approaches politics like a branding exercise. And in his mind, Democrats have a branding problem.From Talenti, he learned to appreciate the power of nostalgia for a simpler time in America, he told me — but not, he stressed, of the exclusionary Make America Great Again variety.In 2018, he began traveling around the district in a vintage 1960s delivery van called the “Government Repair Truck,” offering “coffee and conversation” to would-be constituents. It became a campaign signature, and “everyone’s invited” became his tagline and unofficial motto. (There was also, briefly, the barely seaworthy “Government Repair Pontoon Boat.” And soon, the “Government Repair Ice Shed” will be hauled onto the frozen surface of Lake Minnetonka for ice fishing.)When Phillips was growing up, his stepfather made him work in the warehouse of their alcohol business, and he learned the art of retail politics, he said, while going on sales calls to liquor stores.“My dad always said that selling starts with listening,” Phillips told me as we ate French fries and Juicy Lucy cheeseburgers, a Minneapolis delicacy that, judging from his slim frame, he rarely eats. On sales calls, he made sure to ask what varieties of liquor were hot and adjust his pitch accordingly.“On the Job With Dean” is just one of several branded “series,” as his team calls them, in Phillips’s political arsenal.There’s also “Surprise and Delight,” where Phillips drops off doughnuts and hoovers up scraps of intel from police and fire units, such as the latest local trends in recruitment of new officers and firefighters, car theft and ambulance calls; “Civics 101,” in which he delivers a guest lecture on democracy at high schools; and “Common Ground,” a two-hour event moderated by a licensed marriage counselor and featuring four liberals and four conservatives who are paired together, then told to come up with solutions to thorny public policy problems.Phillips seems to recognize, however, that merely changing the packaging of run-of-the-mill Democratic positions is not enough. He co-sponsored a bill this year to fund the police, and his House office in Washington made sure I knew about it. This summer, he became the first Democrat in Congress to call for President Biden not to run in 2024, a position he took, he told me, because it’s “what I believe.”Some in the Minnesota Democratic Party are urging Phillips to run for Senate, in the much-rumored event that one of the state’s two incumbent Democrats retires soon. As many as 10 candidates are likely to run, local Democrats said, given how rarely those seats open up.At our lunch, Phillips confessed his worry that running for Senate would pull him away from the kind of local engagement “I find joy in most.” It would also force him to raise millions of dollars, a task he abhors, and to travel constantly. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a close Phillips ally, once promised to visit all of Minnesota’s 87 counties every year, an exhausting vow that has become the new statewide campaign standard. But Phillips didn’t rule it out entirely.For the moment, he is running for a House leadership position — co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a sleepy group whose influence is hard to identify, positive or otherwise. He is campaigning for the job in typical Phillips fashion, most recently by handing out custom-branded packets of wildflower seeds on the House floor that say “Let’s Grow!” on the packaging.Earlier, as we pulled up to the snowplow course, Phillips showed me a years-old photograph of him sitting at the desk of Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, for whom he interned in 1989. It took him years to screw up the courage to tell Leahy, who is now retiring, that he had sneaked into the senator’s office while he was out of town.“That’s the first time I sat in a place of power,” he recalled. “And I liked the feeling.”What to readDemocratic candidates are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that both acknowledges voters’ troubles while making the case that the party in power, not Republicans, holds the solutions, Jonathan Weisman and Neil Vigdor report.“Most political races are about authenticity on some level: who tries too hard, who doesn’t try hard enough, who can read the electorate without staring,” Matt Flegenheimer writes. Tim Ryan, he says, “has made Ohio perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground by taking this premise to its logical extreme.”John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, faces twin challenges in his debate on Tuesday night against Mehmet Oz: making the case for his policies while convincing voters he is healthy enough to serve, write Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Trip Gabriel.For the first time in 70 years, America’s largest majority Black city may not send a Black representative to Washington. Clyde McGrady reports from Detroit.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Fearing a New Shellacking, Democrats Rush for Economic Message

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      Democratic candidates, facing what increasingly looks like a reckoning in two weeks, are struggling to find a closing message on the economy that acknowledges the deep uncertainty troubling the electorate while making the case that they, not the Republicans, hold the solutions.For some time, the party’s candidates and strategists have debated whether to hit inflation head on or to heed warnings that any shift toward an economic message would be ending the campaign on the strongest possible Republican ground. Since midsummer, when the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, Democrats had hoped that preserving the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion and castigating Republican extremism could get them past the worst inflation in 40 years.That is looking increasingly like wishful thinking.On Monday, Democrats unveiled new messages that appeared to switch tacks, incorporating achievements of the past two years with expressions of sympathy on the economy and dire warnings for what Republicans might bring.Former Representative Steve Israel, who headed the House Democrats’ campaign arm in a strong cycle of 2012 and weak one in 2014, said the dispute over how to address voters’ economic distress was essentially being resolved in favor of trying to accomplish a political feat that he said would be the trickiest he has ever seen: Democrats would continue to hammer Republicans on abortion and their ties to former President Donald J. Trump to boost turnout among their core supporters, while simultaneously trying to win over undecided voters whose biggest concerns are inflation and crime.“There was a narrative at one point that this was a Roe v. Wade election,” said Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, whose district, newly drawn to lean Republican, has made him one of the most endangered Democratic incumbents in the House. “I never thought it was going to be that simple.”On Friday, four veteran Democratic strategists published a piece in The American Prospect, the liberal magazine, that pleaded with Democrats to find a new message that acknowledges the pain of rising prices and answers voter concerns. To do that, they argued, candidates need to convey their legislative successes while setting up culprits other than themselves: Republicans who voted against popular measures like capping the price of insulin, and wealthy corporations that are jacking up prices and reaping more profits.Voters “want to know you understand what is going on in their lives,” the strategists wrote. “They want to know you are helping with their No. 1 problem and have a plan. They want to know the difference between Democrats and Republicans when they cast their votes.” The piece was written by Patrick Gaspard, president of the liberal Center for American Politics; Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake, veteran Democratic pollsters; and Mike Lux, a senior White House aide under President Bill Clinton.Ms. Lake, in an interview on Saturday, said Democratic strategists were “extremely concerned” that the wave of support the party saw over the summer was evaporating at the worst possible time. But she insisted there was time, with barely two weeks to go, to correct course.“A lot of candidates aren’t really clear about what the economic message is,” she said. “What we need to do is set up a more vivid contrast. People are getting more pessimistic about the economy.”To some Democrats, liberals and moderates alike, the reluctance of frontline candidates to talk up the party’s achievements has been maddening. Faiz Shakir, a longtime political adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive mainstay from Vermont, called a campaign built around abortion and former President Donald J. Trump “political malpractice.”Representative Nancy Pelosi during a news conference on the Inflation Reduction Act.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesIn two years, the party has passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, a generous tax credit for parents that brought child poverty to historic lows, legislation that made good on the popular, longstanding promise to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, and the biggest investment in clean energy in history — all achievements that could be framed as helping people cope with rising prices.An ad launched on Monday by a Democratic super PAC in the Minnesota district of moderate Representative Angie Craig makes that point. And Mr. Sanders pressed it on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying Republicans have said little about what they would do, and what they have said — like forcing cuts to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security and extending Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — would be unpopular, make the problem worse, or both.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.A G.O.P. Advantage: Republicans appear to be gaining an edge in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains why the mood of the electorate has shifted.Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan, the Democrat who is challenging J.D. Vance, has turned the state into perhaps the country’s unlikeliest Senate battleground.Losing Faith in the System: As democracy erodes in Wisconsin, many of the state’s citizens feel powerless. But Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.Secretary of State Races: Facing G.O.P. candidates who spread lies about the 2020 election, Democrats are outspending them 57-to-1 on TV ads for their secretary of state candidates. It still may not be enough.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” Mr. Sanders said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.”But for the party in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, finding an effective message will be difficult, if not impossible. Republicans are evincing no fears of any Democratic shifts.“Democrats are out of time and out of solutions when it comes to fixing the rising costs they handed voters — now they’re going to pay the price at the ballot box,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans.In the 2010 midterms, then-President Barack Obama barnstormed the country with a message that Republicans had driven the country’s economy into a ditch, and Democrats had pulled the car out. Then voters delivered what Mr. Obama himself called a “shellacking,” giving Republicans 63 total seats in the House and seven in the Senate, the largest shift since 1948.David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief political adviser, recalled telling the president-elect in 2008 that Democrats would face a reckoning in 2010 after two successive wave elections and the most dire financial crisis since the Depression. After Democrats passed a huge economic stimulus bill, other economic measures like legislation to help consumers trade in their “clunker” cars for more efficient models, and a landmark regulation of Wall Street, they could say they had made progress on the economy.“But people didn’t feel the car was out of the ditch yet,” Mr. Axelrod said, “and they were looking to the guy who was in there now.”The lesson of 2010 was not to avoid the subject but to acknowledge the pain and set up a choice. Two years later, with the economic shock of the financial crisis still lingering, the Obama campaign made fighting for the middle class the central message of a re-election bid against a Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who was painted as the essence of the out-of-touch plutocrat.“It was never going to work to not talk about the economy,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s sort of like, ‘How was the play otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln?’”If voter anguish in 2022 is similar to 2010, the economic issues are different. Unemployment is at record lows in several states. The issue is more a shortage of workers than a shortage of jobs. Wage growth is robust. But inflation — which lends itself to an attendant fear of the future and pervasive sense of falling behind — is a particularly destabilizing force. It helped topple Liz Truss, the British prime minister, after only six chaotic weeks, and helped usher in an Italian government that descends from Mussolini’s fascism.Ms. Truss’s support collapsed after her conservative economic plan of tax cuts skewed to the rich sent financial markets in a tailspin. The British pound also sank to near record lows against the dollar, and economists warned of still worse inflation. Representative Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from California, said Democrats needed to harness that experience to point out that Republican leaders have a similar economic plan if they take control of Congress.“The Republicans are running on an explicit promise of extending Trump’s tax cuts,” he said. “We have to frame the election as a choice on the economy.”Mr. Khanna was campaigning for Democrats in South Carolina on Saturday. He said the party’s candidates needed to answer the inflation question by hammering home the argument that Republican fiscal policies translate to tax cuts for the wealthy and sending jobs overseas.“We’ve got to do a better job having a clear economic message,” Mr. Khanna said. “I don’t think we can say, ‘Woe is me. Gas prices are going up.’”But Republicans, out of power, with no responsibility for much of the legislation of the Biden era, have a ready answer, which they have used with success: All those “achievements” created the inflation problem, by stoking consumer demand at a time when supply could not keep up. The U.S. economy was not prepared for a rapid shift from fossil fuels, their argument goes, so Democratic efforts to address climate change sent gas prices soaring. And Democratic promises for still more government assistance will only keep prices rising.Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican in an unexpectedly competitive re-election fight, has taken to quoting the Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Milton Friedman on inflation repeatedly: “Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don’t produce it. Foreign sheikhs don’t produce it. Oil imports don’t produce it. What produces it is too much government spending.”That may be oversimplified in today’s strange economy. Some price increases were triggered by supply chains snarled by the pandemic that created pent-up consumer demand after periods of confinement and shuttered factories and shipping industries that were slow to return to peak production. Tight energy supplies and ensuing gas price increases are far more attributable to the war in Ukraine than any domestic energy legislation. Inflation is a global problem that is worse in Europe and Britain than in the United States.A gas station in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.Aimee Dilger/ReutersBut most economists do believe some Democratic bills — especially the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — exacerbated the problem. The $1,400 checks that most American households received in 2021 have been forgotten. Their contribution to an overheated consumer economy has not.The latest Republican attack ads hit inflation and economic uncertainty hard and lay the blame on Democratic malfeasance, not the complexities of international commerce and conflict.“Democrats spent two years completely ignoring the country’s single-most pressing issue because they have nothing to say. They know their policies made inflation worse and they own this economic tsunami,” said Dan Conston, head of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a powerful super PAC aligned with the House Republican leadership.Mr. Axelrod said the Democrats’ secret weapon could be their opponents. For all the campaign ads harping on economic issues, many Republican candidates are using extreme language to spotlight more contentious issues: national abortion legislation, denying the validity of the 2020 election, and impeaching President Biden. Given some of the loudest voices in the G.O.P. seem uninterested in economic struggles, voters may not see the opposition party as a credible alternative.But, Ms. Lake said, the Democrats need to make that case.“There’s time; there’s money,” she said. “We’re going to be spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising in the next two weeks, and there’s vulnerability on the Republican side, but only if we articulate the contrast.” More