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      The 2022 Race for the House, in Four Districts, and Four Polls

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      President Biden is unpopular everywhere. Economic concerns are mounting. Abortion rights are popular but social issues are more often secondary.A new series of House polls by The New York Times and Siena College across four archetypal swing districts offers fresh evidence that Republicans are poised to retake Congress this fall as the party dominated among voters who care most about the economy.Democrats continue to show resilience in places where abortion is still high on the minds of voters, and where popular incumbents are on the ballot. Indeed, the Democrats were still tied or ahead in all four districts — three of which were carried by Mr. Biden in 2020. But the party’s slim majority — control could flip if just five seats change hands — demands that it essentially run the table everywhere, at a moment when the economy has emerged as the driving issue in all but the country’s wealthier enclaves.The poll results in the four districts — an upscale suburb in Kansas, the old industrial heartland of Pennsylvania, a fast-growing part of Las Vegas and a sprawling district along New Mexico’s southern border — offer deeper insights beyond the traditional Republican and Democratic divide in the race for Congress. They show how the midterm races are being shaped by larger and at times surprising forces that reflect the country’s ethnic, economic and educational realignment.“The economy thing affects everyone while the social thing affects a minority,” said Victor Negron, a 30-year-old blackjack dealer who lives in Henderson, Nev., and who was planning to vote for the Republican vying to flip the seat from a Democratic incumbent. “If everyone’s doing good, then who cares what else everyone else is doing.”The Four Districts Polled More

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      No, That Democrat Didn’t Vote ‘100% of the Time’ With Nancy Pelosi

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      G.O.P. operatives, like a classic rock station playing “Stairway to Heaven,” believe that the hits work, and so they eagerly link vulnerable Democrats to the “radical San Francisco liberal.”It’s a phrase you’re hearing a lot in debates and Republican attack ads: that Democrat X voted “100 percent of the time” with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Whenever you hear a claim like that, be skeptical. It’s probably false.Some of these ads go even further. An ad for J.D. Vance in Ohio, for instance, claims his Senate opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, “votes with Biden, Pelosi 100 percent.” He repeated that statistic in a news release today.Ryan actually ran against Pelosi for House speaker in 2016, winning 63 votes. In 2018, he signed a letter calling for her ouster. He’s probably been her most vocal critic among elected Democrats, at some risk to his career in the House.Republicans have tried the same tactic against other Democratic rebels — notably Representative Abigail Spanberger, a lawmaker from Northern Virginia who is another of Pelosi’s in-house critics. “Abigail Spanberger votes 100 percent with Pelosi,” one G.O.P. ad says. “It is like having our very own Pelosi mini-me.”Pelosi has been a boogeywoman in Republican campaigns for more than a decade. Remember “Fire Pelosi” in 2010? The haircut thing during the pandemic? The ice cream freezer drawer? For G.O.P. operatives, linking vulnerable Democrats to Pelosi, or the “radical San Francisco liberal” in their words, is akin to a classic rock station that always plays “Stairway to Heaven” or “Free Bird” — they do it because they think it works.And has Ryan voted with Pelosi and Biden 100 percent of the time? Has Spanberger? Not really. Republicans have leveled the same cookie-cutter accusation at Cindy Axne, Angie Craig, Elaine Luria, Chris Pappas, Dean Phillips and Susan Wild — all of them known to be among the least partisan Democrats in the House.Let’s unpack where those statistics come from, and why they’re so misleading.There are two main sources that track congressional voting records: FiveThirtyEight, which rates lawmakers on how often they align with Biden, and ProPublica, which built an online tool that allows you to compare head-to-head voting records of any two members of Congress.ProPublica’s tool lists only “votes designated as major by ProPublica.” In the current Congress, there have been 123 such votes. And when you do a comparison between Pelosi and Ryan, it does return a result of 100 percent, along with the text: “They have disagreed on 0 votes out of 123 votes in the 117th Congress.”But that’s “really misleading,” according to John Lawrence, a former chief of staff to Pelosi and the author of a new book on her first tenure as speaker, “Arc of Power.”Not only, he said, does the tool cherry-pick votes, but it doesn’t capture how often Pelosi has had to deliver what Lawrence called “bad news” to the left wing of her caucus when the Senate balks. During the negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, for instance, Senator Joe Lieberman refused to support a public insurance option — so Pelosi had to twist the arms of disappointed progressives in the House to get them to support final passage.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Here are six more reasons that the 100 percent thing is bunk:First: Because she’s speaker, by House tradition, Pelosi usually doesn’t vote. So on a purely factual basis, it’s flat wrong.“We could estimate with some confidence, but it’s not a great metric,” said Sarah Binder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University who studies Congress. But that’s a minor point.Second: Centrists like Ryan will sponsor or co-sign reams of legislation that never gets a vote because it doesn’t match the priorities of their more liberal Democratic colleagues. Along with Spanberger, for instance, he’s a co-sponsor of the Trust in Congress Act, a bill to bar lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks. Pelosi initially opposed it. Ryan also broke with Pelosi by opposing the USA Freedom Act of 2014, which would have cut off the National Security Agency’s collection of bulk telephone records.Third: The “100 percent” sound bites also don’t capture all the times Ryan, for one, voted with the man who hopes to replace Pelosi as speaker: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. ProPublica’s tool finds that, in the 116th Congress, Ryan and McCarthy voted together 256 times out of 744 total votes, including 11 “major votes.”Drew Hammill, a deputy chief of staff in Pelosi’s office, also noted that legislation on gun safety, infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing had passed with Republican votes.Fourth: Like a duck paddling beneath the surface of the water, there’s a lot that goes on in Congress that is not easy to see and is impossible to quantify: Lawmakers shape legislation through committee meetings, private exchanges or random hallway encounters with colleagues, public statements and amendments.As Lawrence pointed out, lawmakers will often withhold their vote in exchange for concessions that make a bill more palatable for their districts. Ryan, for instance, insisted on beefing up pro-union provisions in the CHIPS Act, the bipartisan semiconductor bill, and he got his way before voting yes.If you’re a Capitol Hill reporter or a whiz at using Congress.gov, the government’s extremely clunky vote-tracking tool, or the even more arcane Congressional Record, you can trace some of that. But a lot of the give-and-take is hard to capture with data.Fifth: Lawmakers on the left are just as likely to break with leadership as centrists are, if not more so. By ProPublica’s measure, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York voted with Pelosi 94 percent of the time — but nobody would describe her as more moderate than Ryan or Spanberger. Binder noted that, on paper, Ocasio-Cortez often votes with Republicans when she opposes the Democrats’ party line. So she shows up as a “moderate” in some indexes, as do Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.Sixth: The House and the Senate are different institutions, with different structures and traditions. The House, for instance, has a much more powerful Rules Committee, which enforces more party-line voting. As Binder pointed out, most votes are “procedural votes” that don’t tell us much about a lawmaker’s ideological predilections.In the Senate, where any senator can hold up a bill for pretty much any reason, there’s also the filibuster — which, for better or worse, promotes more collaboration across the aisle.So if you run two senators against one another in ProPublica’s app, you’ll find far more Democrats voting with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at rates in the 80s. But that doesn’t tell you all that much about whether, say, Senator Jon Tester of Montana is to the left of Representative Jared Golden of Maine. And the Senate tends to vote on lots of nominations, which clogs up the data.Representative Tim Ryan, campaigning at Ohio State University, lands in the middle of the pack among Democratic members of Congress in terms of voting against the majority.Gaelen Morse/Getty ImagesSo which metrics are more accurate?Political scientists prefer more sophisticated measures of ideology, but they don’t tend to be easy to use. There are two main ones: VoteView, which I wrote about earlier, and Congressional Quarterly’s “Party Unity” score.Party Unity scores are proprietary, but C.Q. occasionally releases rankings to the public. The publication’s list of the Democrats who voted most often against their own party’s majority makes intuitive sense. The top 10 of these “opposition Democrats” in 2020 all represented swing districts: They include Golden, Spanberger, Luria of Virginia, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Max Rose of New York, Joe Cunningham of North Carolina, Anthony Brindisi of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida.By VoteView’s more complex measure, Ryan scores a -0.402, which puts him around the middle of the Democratic pack. Spanberger scores a -0.176, implying that she is more conservative.For comparison’s sake, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, scores a -0.681, while Golden, the most conservative Democrat, is at -0.114. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who voted with Pelosi 99 percent of the time according to ProPublica’s online tool, is right up there with Golden at -0.15.But that’s not exactly the stuff attack ads are made of, let alone rebuttals. You probably won’t see Ryan out there promoting his VoteView rating of -0.402 on the hustings — it’s far easier for him to say, as he often does, “Well, I ran against Nancy Pelosi.”What to readMany American entrepreneurs have mixed politics and business. No one has fused the two quite like the election-denying chief executive of MyPillow, report Alexandra Berzon, Charles Homans and Ken Bensinger.As was the case in 2020, Republican votes are more likely to be counted and reported first in several battleground states, giving the party’s candidates deceptively large early leads. Nick Corasaniti reports on the “red mirage.”As Cheri Beasley and Val Demings run competitive Senate campaigns in North Carolina and Florida, some Black female Democrats say party leaders are leaving them to fend for themselves, writes Jonathan Weisman.A Tennessee man was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for dragging a police officer protecting the Capitol into an angry pro-Trump crowd that brutally assaulted the officer on Jan. 6, 2021. Alan Feuer has sentencing details.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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      OSCE Election Observers Warn of Republican Election Deniers

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      Attempts by candidates to discredit the integrity of the vote have “snowballed enormously” since the 2020 election, the head of the observation mission said.WASHINGTON — Election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe warned this week of “intensely divisive” rhetoric ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, noting that Republicans who have denied the 2020 election results are running for offices that directly oversee future contests.In a 16-page interim report released on Wednesday, the organization highlighted a number of concerns for the midterms, including threats of violence against election officials, widely circulated election misinformation, and potential voter suppression and voter intimidation. The group, an international security organization whose members include the United States, routinely monitors the elections of its member states at their invitation.The report noted that “a number of Republican candidates in key races” who could be in charge of overseeing future elections have “challenged or refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 results.” Attempts by candidates to discredit the integrity of the vote have “snowballed enormously” since the 2020 election, Tana de Zulueta, the head of the organization’s election observation mission for the U.S. midterms, said in an interview.The report offered further evidence of international concern about the state of democracy in the United States in the wake of President Donald J. Trump’s time in office and his attempts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.Despite the concern, the World Justice Project, an organization that tracks the rule of law internationally, said on Wednesday that the situation in the United States had actually improved slightly in 2022 after several years of decline. In newly released rankings, the group placed the United States at No. 26 out of 140 countries and jurisdictions.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: The debate performance by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is still recovering from a stroke, has thrust questions of health to the center of the pivotal race and raised Democratic anxieties.G.O.P. Inflation Plans: Republicans are riding a wave of anger over inflation as they seek to recapture Congress, but few economists expect their proposals to bring down rising prices.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.“The U.S. is not out of the woods by a long stretch,” Elizabeth Andersen, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. “Authoritarian trends have weakened both trust and accountability, and our democracy is not as healthy as it should be.”The report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E., made note of “intensely divisive and at times inflammatory rhetoric” in campaigns by Republicans and Democrats, including what it described as “allegations by some political leaders and candidates from both sides that their opponents were seeking to subvert democracy and were a threat to the United States.” As examples, the report pointed to remarks by Mr. Trump and President Biden about each other.The report also said that election monitors had observed language at rallies and on social networks that “sought to delegitimize the other party, was potentially defamatory and in several instances invoked racist, xenophobic, transphobic and homophobic tropes.” At one rally, for example, an incumbent Republican lawmaker “made inflammatory xenophobic remarks,” according to the report, which did not identify the lawmaker.Ms. de Zulueta said that the use of divisive language was not equal between the two parties and that reports by election observers about Democratic campaigns were “more low-key.”The report said that both Republicans and Democrats “campaigned on platforms of ensuring electoral integrity” but went about it in very different ways. “Republicans emphasized the perceived need to prevent the casting and counting of illegal votes,” the report said, “while Democrats focused on preventing what they see as the potential for rejection of legitimate votes.”.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 report added that those campaign messages from the two parties had “contributed to a diminishing trust in a fundamentally robust electoral process.”Ms. de Zulueta said the report was not meant to present the two parties’ election-related campaign messages as equally damaging, noting that it was Mr. Trump who transformed election denial into “a defining characteristic of his campaign” and of later Republican primaries. Instead, she added, the report sought to highlight that warnings by Democrats of potential election interference could also be damaging to the credibility of elections.“You have to be careful,” Ms. de Zulueta said. “You can actually by challenging — in some ways you can actually feed into this.”The O.S.C.E. has routinely monitored elections in the United States, but its efforts took on increased prominence when Mr. Trump refused to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. The election observation mission for that contest condemned Mr. Trump’s “baseless allegations” of fraud and expressed confidence that the vote was secure.For this year’s election, the organization will have far fewer election monitors than had been planned. A report from the group in June recommended a full election observation mission of about 500 observers “given the highly polarized environment” and “diminishing trust in the integrity of elections” in the United States. But the size of the mission was reduced to 57 people because of a shortage of available observers.Ms. de Zulueta said the downsizing would not significantly affect the mission’s work. A spokesman for the organization noted that its observation mission for the 2020 election had also been limited because of the coronavirus pandemic.The mission for the midterms will present its preliminary findings on Nov. 9, the day after Election Day, and a final report will be released about two months later. More

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      Is New York (of All Places) About to Go Red?

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      Stella Tan and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAs Democratic Party leaders assessed their vulnerabilities in this year’s midterm elections, the one state they did not worry about was New York. That — it turns out — was a mistake.Despite being a blue state through and through, and a place President Donald J. Trump lost by 23 points two years ago, the red tide of this moment is lapping at New York’s shores.Why is New York up for grabs?On today’s episodeNicholas Fandos, a Metro reporter for The New York Times.A televised New York governor’s race debate this week. The race, among others in New York State, are closer than many Democrats expected.Pool photo by Mary AltafferBackground readingAhead of the midterms, New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country.Republicans are pressing their advantage deep into Democratic territory in the closing stretch of the 2022 campaign, competing for an abundance of House seats.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Sofia Milan, Ben Calhoun and Susan Lee.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello and Nell Gallogly. More

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      Biden Hopes to Amplify Contrast With Republicans on Economic Policy

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      WASHINGTON — President Biden will travel to Syracuse, N.Y., on Thursday to highlight investments in semiconductor manufacturing and make a last-ditch attempt to win over voters on inflation, the economic issue that is dragging on Democrats ahead of the midterm elections.At a time when polls show that voters disapprove of the president’s handling of rising prices and trust Republicans more on the issue, Mr. Biden will seek to frame the elections as a choice between his administration’s ongoing efforts to lower costs for families and Republican aspirations to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy — which could fuel even higher inflation — and other plans that Mr. Biden says would raise health care and electricity costs.Senior administration officials told reporters on Wednesday afternoon that Mr. Biden would use his trip to celebrate the chip maker Micron’s announcement this month that it would spend up to $100 billion to build a manufacturing complex in the Syracuse region over the next 20 years, creating up to 50,000 jobs in the process. Company officials said that investment was enabled by a bipartisan advanced manufacturing bill that Mr. Biden championed and signed into law earlier this year.The administration officials said the area exemplified a community benefiting from Mr. Biden’s economic policies, which have also included a bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed late this summer, which raises taxes on corporations, seeks to reduce prescription drug costs for seniors and invests hundreds of billions of dollars into new energy technologies to reduce the fossil fuel emissions driving climate change.They also said it was the right backdrop for Mr. Biden to amplify the contrast he has sought to draw with Republicans on inflation. Republican candidates have campaigned on rolling back some of the tax increases Mr. Biden imposed to fund his agenda, extending business and individual tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017 that are set to expire in the coming years, reducing federal regulations on energy development and other business and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.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.In a memo released by the White House on Thursday morning, officials sought to frame those Republican proposals as potential fuel for further inflation, posing a risk to families struggling with high prices. “Their economic plan will raise costs and make inflation worse,” administration officials wrote.The memo suggests that among his other attacks in Syracuse, Mr. Biden will hit Republicans for what he says is an effort to raise costs for student borrowers. Several Republican-led states have sued to stop his plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for qualifying individuals.Mr. Biden has struggled in recent weeks to persuade voters to view inflation as an issue that shows the contrasts between him and Republicans, rather than a referendum on his presidency and policies.Polls suggest the economy and rapid price growth, which touched a 40-year high this year, are top of mind for voters as they determine control of the House and Senate. Nearly half of all registered voters in a New York Times/Siena College poll this month named economic issues or inflation as the most important issue facing the country, dwarfing other issues in the survey, like abortion. Other polls have shown voters trust Republicans more than Mr. Biden and his party to handle inflation.Through the start of this month, Republican candidates had spent nearly $150 million on inflation-themed television ads across the country this election cycle, according to data from AdImpact. Those ads blame Democratic policies under Mr. Biden, including the $1.9 trillion economic relief package he signed in 2021, for inflation; economists generally agree that the spending helped fuel some price growth but disagree on how much.Mr. Biden previewed his renewed attacks on Republicans on Wednesday evening, in a trio of virtual fund-raisers for Democratic members of Congress. In each one, Mr. Biden focused almost exclusively on economic issues, championing the laws he has signed and warning that Republicans would seek to roll them back.The president criticized Republicans for promoting what he called “mega-MAGA trickle-down economics,” and he said the tax cuts Republicans support risk creating turmoil in financial markets. He drew a direct parallel between the Republican proposals and the tax cuts for high earners in Britain pushed by former Prime Minister Liz Truss, which prompted a harsh backlash in financial markets that led Ms. Truss to resign after a brief tenure.“You read about what happened in England recently, and the last prime minister, she wanted to cut taxes for the superwealthy — it caused economic chaos in the country,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, that’s what they did last time, and they want to do it again.” More

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      Kari Lake, Glenn Youngkin and a Post-Trump Era

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      TUCSON, Ariz. — It can be hard to make sense of endings and beginnings in politics and history, but what if we’ve already reached the post-Trump era?Consider the case of Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s former private equity co-C.E.O. governor with a sunshine demeanor, and Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican nominee for governor, a wild proponent of Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him. Theoretically, a Youngkin-Lake event would be a clash of vibes, an effort to mainstream Ms. Lake. But Mr. Youngkin campaigned for her last week, across several events — a decision that drew anguish from a segment of conservatives and hard questions from reporters in televised settings. In real life, there was no clash. It wasn’t one of those awkward, painful episodes in which a more traditional Republican makes an explicit transaction with a party dominated by Mr. Trump. Everything was smooth and cohesive — a joint case about the Republican Party of today.Mr. Youngkin cheerily warned the crowd that everything — our American values and institutions — could fall apart just like that, bam. “You take your eye off the ball and you lose an election, because remember, elections have consequences, and the next thing you know, everything can change.” And Ms. Lake is smooth as hell, a real pro after decades on TV, fluidly moving from offhandedly claiming that Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and the founding fathers would have been America First Republicans to offering a self-deprecating joke to giving advice on persuading independent voters to telling a nighttime crowd to “vote these bastards out,” dialing it up or down, depending on the situation.Looking at this pair one way, you could see Donald Trump’s endless influence over the Republican Party. But if you zoomed out, neither of these people has that much to do with Mr. Trump personally. Neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake owes him an inarguable debt for name recognition, neither particularly mimics his mannerisms, neither cropped up in the background of surreal scenes at the White House, neither has lived some embarrassed, poisoned-in-real-time transition from Trump critic to supporter before a national audience. Really, neither Mr. Youngkin nor Ms. Lake had much to do with anything that happened nationally between June 2015 and January 2021.This observation — about their distance from a formative era of American life, and its centerpiece — felt very true in Arizona last week, and like a real break from other things in Republican politics. It also coexists with another possibility: that Mr. Trump could be fading politically at the same time that his core support is hardening. This dual reality would not necessarily diminish the force and reverb of his actions, but it might produce asymmetrical results. When people talk about a post-Trump era, there’s usually a subtext that it would involve a clean break and his permanent exit from political life. If we are entering a post-Trump period, though, rather than Mr. Trump being something to get past, he could remain a major factor in politics but no longer the sole reference point around which each development moves.So much in the political conversation still centers on the prospective choices of Mr. Trump and people’s responses to them, as if we were forever in the loop of the period when Mr. Trump’s prominence still felt surreal. But time has passed, and people’s lives have continued — and things have already changed. Arguably, you can see this in some conservatives’ intense focus on restricting trans health care or avoiding Covid recommendations, two issues that have outpaced Mr. Trump’s promotion of them, even if he opened the portal to their prominence.Consider Ms. Lake and Mr. Youngkin, there in the morning light of a Tucson sports bar. Their political careers would probably not exist without Mr. Trump, but their appeal to Republicans rests on a post-Trump political foundation.For a segment of Republicans — and particularly conservative writers and operatives — Mr. Youngkin reflects a fusionist dream, in which a Republican can win without entirely handing himself over to Mr. Trump while adopting MAGA’s aggressive education politics, including on gender identity. Ms. Lake has taken up Mr. Trump’s principal cause, that of the 2020 election result — and she continues to allege fraud — but sets that aside when she wants to, in favor of talking at her rallies last week about fentanyl, the intense anti-Covid-vax vibes she’s embraced, taxes or an idea to two-track high school so juniors have the option of switching into vocational training.You can see the possible fissures between Mr. Trump and Republican politics, in the efforts, too, of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. Like Mr. Youngkin, he has undertaken a similar pre-presidential-campaign trip around the country to rally for midterm Republicans, even Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, who was in Washington on Jan. 6 and whom many national Republicans have avoided. Mr. DeSantis exists in a more transitional space between the initial Trump era and wanting to challenge him in 2024. But he has also isolated and advanced a strain of Trumpism: a kind of power politics that emphasizes public displays of, depending on your vantage point, accountability or retribution. In Pittsburgh at the event for Mr. Mastriano, after detailing various accomplishments and fights, Mr. DeSantis moved into a segment on restricting trans health care for minors and ideology. “We must fight the woke in our schools,” he said. “We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.”The Lake-Youngkin events involved a looser vibe — one featured vintage airplanes on display and Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” blasting. Both public events also involved Mr. Youngkin leading a crowd in reciting the opening of the Declaration of Independence — the kind of slightly sentimental thing that draws a certain kind of conservative to Mr. Youngkin, the type of conservative who flipped out when Mr. Youngkin announced he would campaign for Ms. Lake, who is maybe the most prominent stop-the-steal type on the ballot this year, running to oversee a battleground state.On the question of the 2020 election, there are a few ways to look at the Lake campaign. One is that it doesn’t matter what she believes, only what she says, because people straight up listen to what politicians say, without the metatextual strategic filter often applied by political operatives and the media. Over the past year, a lot of Republican discourse centered on ballot drop boxes, and now in Arizona, guys in tactical gear are reportedly staking them out.If Ms. Lake is elected, though, the belief question matters, given that she would help oversee a state’s next elections. Maybe she really does believe fraud corrupted the 2020 election. A third way to consider it is that she’s playing it up with laser focus on the Republican base. This seems to have been the opinion of Jan Brewer, a former Arizona governor and a proto-Trump politician herself. “I want to hear her tell me she did all this because she wanted to win and that it got a little bit out of control,” Ms. Brewer told The Times this summer.Mr. Trump has reportedly told donors that you can ask Ms. Lake about anything — the weather, the family — and she’ll work it back to the 2020 election: “Oh, the weather in Phoenix is OK, but you can never have great weather unless the election is fair.” You can even hear him tell Blake Masters a version of this line over the phone. Anecdotes like this capture Mr. Trump’s central destabilizing essence: compulsively advancing something wild or false even as he comments on those who go along with it. Then again: Ms. Lake told this exact anecdote herself, in public.In Scottsdale, after Mr. Youngkin and Ms. Lake’s last event of the day, a Swiss reporter brought up confidence in the voting process, citing local Republicans’ concerns that some candidates might not accept the results of the election. (“I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Ms. Lake recently said on TV.) “People in Switzerland also feel like,” the reporter said, “does democracy work if you don’t accept the outcome?”Ms. Lake responded by calling her opponent, the current secretary of state, incompetent and unprepared for the upcoming election. Then Mr. Youngkin, unprompted, jumped in to talk about his own record on election processes — arguing that it isn’t just Republicans who doubt elections, citing 2000 and 2016. “This is not a Republican problem; it’s an American challenge,” he announced, sitting next to someone who last year said the Arizona secretary of state “should be locked up.”Ms. Lake then pulled out a printed stack of news stories from over the years in which, e.g., Jimmy Carter suggested Mr. Trump was an illegitimate president and Russians tried to hack voting machines. One reporter shouted several times, “Governor, has any other president besides Donald Trump tried to overturn an election?” with Mr. Youngkin defaulting to the things he’d already said, avoiding mention of Mr. Trump. Multiple aides called the next question as the last, which Ms. Lake disregarded and continued calling on people until some staffer finally cranked up Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”In the cold light of politics, for Ms. Lake, in a country where a sizable chunk of voters say they would consider supporting a candidate who doesn’t believe Joe Biden won the election he won, transforming voter fraud concerns into an atmospheric, passive problem would be a way to crab-walk out of a year spent personally amping up the idea that the election was stolen. And for Mr. Youngkin, it’s a way to commit to the Republican Party such as it is, as though time had begun in 2021.Mr. Trump has become predictable in a certain way: You can usually anticipate what his reaction will be to things and what he’ll demand from people, no matter how staggering and corrosive. What happens if a party that orbited him starts to detach from him a little bit and becomes, therefore, even more unpredictable? It’s hard to truly know what will happen if Ms. Lake becomes governor of a large state and how she’d govern.And in politics more broadly, it might still come to pass that Mr. Trump rolls through a presidential primary and straight into 2024, ushering in an eternal Trump era. But you can also imagine, in a party that has reshaped itself to Mr. Trump, his own obsession with the past puts him at a disadvantage with people who, unlike him, can discard it when they want.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Pennsylvania Voters Absorb an Unusual Debate: ‘I Felt Sorry for Fetterman’

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      LEMOYNE, Pa. — Two professors walked separately out of a grocery store just outside Pennsylvania’s capital city on Wednesday. Each had different political leanings and different preferences in the state’s Senate race.But they agreed on one thing: The extraordinary debate the day before between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat and stroke survivor, and Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee and celebrity doctor, was a painful ordeal.“I felt sorry for Fetterman,” said Deb Donahue, 68, an adjunct professor and an Oz supporter from Camp Hill, Pa. “I think he really struggled a little bit.”Across the grocery-store parking lot, the other professor, now retired, Mary Boyer, said she could not bring herself to watch the debate. But Ms. Boyer, 72, a Fetterman supporter from Lewisberry, Pa., said she had read about his difficulties articulating his message at times onstage.“I didn’t want to have to watch him suffering,” she said, even as she emphasized that she saw Mr. Fetterman as a strong candidate and a good fit for the state.Mary Boyer, a Fetterman supporter, did not watch the debate. She still thinks he’s a strong candidate.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesIn more than a dozen interviews across Pennsylvania on Wednesday, voters’ reactions to the debate overwhelmingly centered on Mr. Fetterman’s often halting performance, prompting a range of responses from both Democrats and Republicans — alarm, protectiveness, empathy, disappointment, embarrassment, admiration, worry about the political implications.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.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.The biggest open question, though, was whether his clash with Dr. Oz — who set off his own backlash by suggesting that state laws on abortion should be decided by “women, doctors, local political leaders” — changed any minds in one of the most consequential Senate contests on the map.“I don’t think Fetterman won over any undecided votes — I think it’s going to leave a lot of people with a tough decision about perceived competency,” said Damian Brennan, 51, a Fetterman backer from Pittsburgh. “We’re kind of fans of his, and we were a bit concerned.”Dr. Oz convinced at least one: Tom Linus, 50, an engineer from Washington Crossing, Pa., said the debate had cemented his decision to vote for the Republican. But he suggested he was more swayed by Dr. Oz’s remarks than by Mr. Fetterman’s performance.“I was kind of borderline before, but I think Oz won me over,” Mr. Linus said. “He was really much more into the details than I was expecting him to be.”Mr. Fetterman, who had a stroke in May, is dealing with lingering auditory processing issues, his campaign says, a challenge that led him to use closed captions in a fast-moving debate against an opponent who has years of television experience. His answers were sometimes notably brief, and at times he trailed off or jumbled words.His team, which had sought to lower expectations before the event, announced on Wednesday that it had raised $2 million since the debate. This month, his campaign released a note from Mr. Fetterman’s primary care physician saying that he could “work full duty in public office.”Cheryl Smith, a pathologist from Philadelphia, said she was confident that Mr. Fetterman would make a full recovery from his stroke.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times“John is ready to fight for every vote these next two weeks and win this race,” said Joe Calvello, a spokesman for Mr. Fetterman. The campaign also turned Dr. Oz’s abortion comments into an ad.Mr. Fetterman, who has won statewide office, has a strong political persona in Pennsylvania as a shorts-wearing former mayor of Braddock, a struggling old steel town he worked to help revitalize. Some voters said they simply did not expect him to be a strong debater, health challenges aside.“This is a setting that I think he wouldn’t have presented himself well even before the stroke, because he’s not a natural debater,” said Amie Gillingham, 51, of Greensburg, Pa. “If you’re judging on the style of the debate, Oz was the clear winner because he’s a polished public speaker, and that is not Fetterman.”Ms. Gillingham said the debate format seemed to work against Mr. Fetterman, but she added that was not a reason to vote against him.“If he’s willing to put himself out there, warts and all, I have so much respect for that,” she said. “To say that he’s an idiot who isn’t capable of being a senator simply because he’s struggling under this specific debate format is disingenuous and ableist in the extreme.”Cheryl Smith, 75, a pathologist from Philadelphia, expressed confidence in Mr. Fetterman’s ability to do the job.“They are going against Fetterman because of his speech problems right now, but hopefully that will clear up,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. As long as your mind is working well, you know what’s going on.”For several Democrats, their reaction to the debate was rooted in how they believed other voters might perceive Mr. Fetterman’s performance. The debate came after weeks of polling showing a tight race, and while surveys differ, Dr. Oz has undeniably gained ground this fall.Larry Kirk, 81, of Berks County, Pa., is a Democrat and will be voting for Mr. Fetterman in November. But he thought Dr. Oz had outperformed Mr. Fetterman onstage.Tom Linus of Washington Crossing, Pa., said Mehmet Oz’s performance in the debate had won him over.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times“I think it will have a negative impact on Fetterman because he didn’t really answer the accusations very well,” Mr. Kirk said. “And for people who are merely going to listen and not really think it through for themselves or check the research, unfortunately, I think Fetterman might have lost a few independent votes.”Megan Crossman of South Philadelphia said she was mostly worried that other voters would conclude that Mr. Fetterman is not up to the job.“I’m a physician, so that doesn’t necessarily mean his cognitive skills are off, it’s just his ability to get the words out,” she said. “But it does make me concerned about what voters who are less familiar might think.”Russell Greer, 75, of Butler, Pa., said he was a Republican who intended to vote for Mr. Fetterman. He said he didn’t think Dr. Oz — whose longtime principal residence was in New Jersey — had lived in Pennsylvania long enough to understand the state or its people, and he has followed Mr. Fetterman’s career.But the debate, he said, was hard to watch.“I think he was forced into that debate to quell different opinions, and I think he didn’t,” Mr. Greer said. “I think it made it worse.”He said he watched Mr. Fetterman and Dr. Oz debate for about 15 minutes. Then he turned it off.Jon Hurdle More

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      What the Pennsylvania Media Is Saying About the Senate Debate

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      Pennsylvania voters are navigating through a vortex of headlines, commentary and opinion page takeaways about Tuesday night’s Senate debate between the celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Republican, and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat who is recovering from a stroke that he had in May.Mr. Fetterman lumbered through the hourlong encounter with his rival, a performance that dominated the news media’s coverage of the debate in a race that could determine control of the divided Senate.Here is what pundits in Pennsylvania are saying:Sharp critiques from The Philadelphia Inquirer’s opinion staffA panel of columnists and other contributors was less than charitable in its reviews of both candidates, giving Mr. Fetterman an average score of 4.3 out of 10 and Dr. Oz a score of 4.1.Here’s some of what the panelists said:“The only good thing you can say about Fetterman’s performance is that he didn’t put on airs. He is authentically inarticulate.” — Jonathan Zimmerman“Rather than counter his reputation as a snake-oil salesman, Oz leaned into it for most of the debate, with slick answers that were as empty as the diet pills that he once promoted (despite his ridiculous dodging answer) on TV.” — Will Bunch“Fetterman’s stumbling and verbal gaffes made the debate a complete cringefest from beginning to end.” — Jenice Armstrong“For all his years on TV, Oz came across as a fast-talking used car salesman.” — Paul DaviesPundits online and on the radio: ‘Painful’ vs. ‘slippery’Michael Smerconish, a Philadelphia lawyer-turned-political commentator for CNN and SiriusXM, on Wednesday panned Mr. Fetterman’s long-awaited return to the debate stage and called it “painful.”“Fetterman didn’t want to debate,” Mr. Smerconish said on his radio show. “Now we know why. He wanted to run out the clock.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.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.Mr. Smerconish said that he felt sorry for Mr. Fetterman and that Dr. Oz’s demeanor gave him pause.“Oz was slippery,” he said.Dom Giordano, a conservative talk radio host in Philadelphia, was even more blunt about how Mr. Fetterman handled the debate.“Can any reasonable person say Fetterman is capable?” Mr. Giordano wrote on Tuesday night on Twitter.Still, Marty Griffin, a Pittsburgh-area talk radio host, wondered how much the debate would sway voters.“Does Fetterman’s condition matter?” Mr. Griffin said on Tuesday night on Twitter. “I’d say no! Voters will vote in their lanes!”The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review took both candidates to taskCalling the debate “chaotic” in a headline, the newspaper focused on Mr. Fetterman’s verbal delivery and Dr. Oz’s attacking style in its coverage. It called out Mr. Fetterman’s dodge of “questions about past statements made in opposition to fracking” and wrote that he “appeared to hit a stride and speak better when his answers were longer.”As for Oz: “He spoke frantically, but cohesively, and consistently brought his answers back to attacking Fetterman.”‘Fetterman struggles’: Penn Live/The Patriot-NewsThat’s how the headline from The Patriot News characterized his performance. The newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, where Tuesday night’s debate was held, wrote:“In what was considered a pivotal moment for the heated contest, Fetterman’s consistently stilted speech and jumbled sentences in the rapid-fire debate format are likely to fuel more questions about his health following a May 13 stroke.”The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found the debate heavier on attacks than substantive policyNeither candidate alleviated the newspaper’s lingering questions — for Mr. Fetterman, concerns about his health, and for Dr. Oz, his promotion of certain medical treatments and products that critics say are risky and unproven.Sound bites aplenty, but skimpy on specifics, The Pennsylvania Capital-Star saysThe nonpartisan news nonprofit described the tone of the debate as nasty and reported that former President Donald J. Trump and President Biden loomed substantially over the clash. More