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      What to Watch in Tuesday’s Primary Elections

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      The marquee races on Tuesday are taking place in South Carolina, where two Republican House members are facing Trump-backed challengers, and in Nevada, where Republicans are aiming to sweep a host of Democratic-held seats in the November general election.Voters in Maine and North Dakota will also go to the polls, and in Texas, Republicans hope to grab the Rio Grande Valley seat of Representative Filemon Vela, a Democrat who resigned in March.The primary season has had more extensive Election Days, but Tuesday has plenty of drama. Here is what to watch.In South Carolina, a showdown with TrumpRepresentatives Tom Rice and Nancy Mace crossed former President Donald J. Trump in the opening days of 2021 as the cleanup crews were still clearing debris from the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Mr. Rice was perhaps the biggest surprise vote in favor of impeachment — as a conservative in a very conservative district, he was risking his political career.Ms. Mace voted against impeachment, but in her first speech in Congress that January, she said the House needed to “hold the president accountable” for the Capitol attack.So Mr. Trump backed two primary challengers: State Representative Russell Fry against Mr. Rice, and the conservative Katie Arrington against Ms. Mace.Representative Tom Rice speaking with supporters in Conway, S.C., last week.Madeline Gray for The New York TimesIn Ms. Mace’s case, the Trump world is divided. Mr. Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, and one of his chiefs of staff, Mick Mulvaney, both South Carolinians, are backing the incumbent freshman.That is, in part, because Ms. Arrington has a poor track record: In 2018, after beating then-Representative Mark Sanford in the Republican primary after he castigated Mr. Trump, she then lost in November to a Democrat, Joe Cunningham. (Mr. Cunningham, who was defeated by Ms. Mace in 2020, is hoping for a comeback this year with a long-shot bid to defeat the incumbent governor, Henry McMaster.)Republicans worry that an Arrington victory on Tuesday could jeopardize the seat, which stretches from Charleston down the affluent South Carolina coast.Mr. Rice’s path to victory on Tuesday will be considerably harder, but he remains defiant about his impeachment vote. “Defending the Constitution is a bedrock of the Republican platform. Defend the Constitution, and that’s what I did. That was the conservative vote,” he said in a June 5 interview on ABC’s “This Week,” adding, “There’s no question in my mind.”Battleground NevadaCalifornia may have a larger number of seats in play, but no state is as thoroughly up for grabs as Nevada. Three out of four of the state’s House seats are rated tossups — all three of which are now held by Democrats. Other tossup races include the Senate seat held by Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, and the governorship held by Steve Sisolak, also a Democrat. A Republican sweep would do real damage, not only to the Democrats’ narrow hold on Congress, but also to their chances in the 2024 presidential election if Nevada is close: It’s better to have the governor of a state on your side than on the other side.But first, Republican voters need to sort through a vast array of candidates vying for each position. Joe Lombardo, the sheriff of Las Vegas’s Clark County, is the favorite for the Republican nomination to challenge Mr. Sisolak. He has Mr. Trump’s endorsement and echoes Mr. Trump’s language in his pledge to “take our state back.”Eight candidates are vying to challenge Ms. Cortez Masto, but Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general who lost to Mr. Sisolak in 2018, is clearly favored.Adam Laxalt, a Republican Senate candidate, with supporters in Moapa Valley, Nev., last week.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesRepresentative Dina Titus, a Democrat, also has eight Republicans competing to challenge her, including a former House member, Cresent Hardy. But it’s Carolina Serrano, a Colombian American immigrant, who has the backing of Republican leaders and the Trump world alike, with endorsements from Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the party’s No. 3 House leader, as well as Mr. Laxalt and Richard Grenell, a pugilistic former national security official in the Trump administration.Five Republicans hope to challenge Representative Susie Lee, a Democrat. Among them, April Becker, a real estate lawyer, has raised the most money by far and has the backing of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, as well as Ms. Stefanik, Ms. Haley and Mr. Laxalt.The potential G.O.P. challengers to Representative Steven Horsford, a Democrat, are most clearly divided between the Trump fringe and the party’s mainstream. Sam Peters, an insurance agent, is backed by the far-right Arizona congressmen Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, who both have been tied to extremist groups, as well as the right-wing rocker Ted Nugent. Annie Black, an assemblywoman running in the primary against Mr. Peters, is more mainstream.A harbinger brewing in South TexasWhen Mr. Vela decided to resign from the House instead of serving out the rest of his term, he most likely did not know the stakes he was creating for the special election to fill his seat for the remaining months of this year.Republicans are trying to make a statement, pouring money into the traditionally Democratic Rio Grande Valley district to support Mayra Flores. She has raised 16 times the amount logged by her closest Democratic competitor, Dan Sanchez.A campaign sign for Mayra Flores in Brownsville during the Texas primary in March.Denise Cathey/The Brownsville Herald, via Associated PressA Flores victory would be proclaimed by Republicans as a sign of worse to come for Democrats in November.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Fealty to Trump Arises as Litmus Test in G.O.P. Debate for N.Y. Governor

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      If there was any question that the first debate among Republican contenders for governor of New York would be more combative than last week’s Democratic skirmish, it was put to rest quickly on Monday.In the opening moments, Representative Lee M. Zeldin attacked Harry Wilson, a corporate turnaround specialist, as a “Never Trumper” and Republican-in-name-only. Mr. Wilson soon returned fire, saying Mr. Zeldin’s campaign was “disintegrating” and suggesting that he had been approached about running alongside Mr. Zeldin and had turned him down.Mr. Zeldin, who was chosen as his party’s designee at a party convention this winter, scoffed, even as Mr. Wilson, who also worked in the Obama administration, tried to cut him off.“This guy doesn’t stop,” Mr. Zeldin said, adding, “You’re on the wrong debate stage, man,” suggesting that Mr. Wilson would be more at home with Democrats.The verbal scuffle continued, even as another candidate, Rob Astorino, looked on, and a fourth candidate, Andrew Giuliani, situated in a studio nearby, held a fixed smile.“You’re a child,” Mr. Wilson finally responded.The explosive exchange typified much of the back-and-forth as the candidates sought to prove and polish their conservative bona fides on topics ranging from gun control to abortion to their respect for former President Donald J. Trump.In doing so, they also sharply differentiated themselves from their Democratic counterparts, especially Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is considered a favorite as the June 28 primary for both parties nears.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent, will face off against Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi in a Democratic primary on June 28.The Mapmaker: A postdoctoral fellow and former bartender redrew New York’s congressional map, reshaping several House districts and scrambling the future of the state’s political establishment.Maloney vs. Nadler: The new congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.Questionable Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.The debate also took place against the backdrop of the public hearings by the House committee investigating the Capitol assault on Jan. 6, 2021, and the WCBS-TV moderators — Marcia Kramer and Maurice DuBois — asked early on about the candidates’ feelings about the hearings and about another possible Trump run for president.Mr. Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said he believed Mr. Trump was “a great president” who he hoped would run again.“I consider him a good friend,” said Mr. Giuliani, who worked for four years in the Trump White House, adding that he wanted to bring the same “kind of change” to New York that Mr. Trump had brought to America.Mr. Zeldin, once considered a moderate, has been a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump, voting in the House to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That effort was led — interestingly enough — by the older Mr. Giuliani. But Mr. Zeldin was slightly more circumspect in his feelings about Mr. Trump’s political prospects, saying, “If President Trump wants to run, he should run,” and adding that he believed the former president would be the next Republican nominee.Mr. Zeldin, a four-term congressman from Long Island, tried to reel off other issues he felt deserved federal attention, including illegal immigration, foreign policy and the supply chain. “That’s where Congress should be spending their time right now,” he said.Mr. Astorino, the former Westchester County executive who was the party’s unsuccessful nominee for governor in 2014, went the furthest in acknowledging the Capitol riots, calling Jan. 6 “a horrible day in our nation’s history,” and saying that Mr. Trump “bears some responsibility” for the mob attack. But he called the hearings “political theater.”Mr. Astorino generally avoided the verbal sparring going on between Mr. Zeldin and Mr. Wilson in the CBS studio, trying to convey a calmer presence.“This state is a mess,” he said, adding, “I ran in ’14 and everything has just gotten worse.”Social issues percolated throughout the evening, with the possible Supreme Court decision on the fate of Roe v. Wade expected this month. Perhaps cognizant of New York’s strong liberal bent — Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two-to-one in enrollment — none of the four on Monday called directly for Roe to be overturned, though several said there should be restrictions on who can perform abortions and when women can seek them.State Democrats pointed out on Monday night that Mr. Zeldin has previously voiced support for ending Roe and said in April that he would like to appoint “a health commissioner who respects life as opposed to what we’re used to.” On Monday, the candidate also outlined other proposals to limit access, including requiring parental consent, and said that New York’s strong protections for abortion are “going too far.”Mr. Wilson, the only candidate in the race who supports abortion rights, said he was “not running on a social agenda,” adding he would not try to change state law, while Mr. Astorino said that abortion remained a “really difficult choice” for women.“I think we have to get back to a position of we’re here to help,” he said, mentioning prenatal care, and adding that many abortions are sought in “low-income” areas by women who “feel that there was no other option.”Mr. Giuliani said that he was “not afraid” to say he was anti-abortion, before co-opting the women’s rights motto — “My body, my choice” — to discuss his opposition to vaccination mandates. Indeed, Mr. Giuliani was forced to participate remotely because he has refused to get the coronavirus vaccine, something he has used as a talking point on the campaign trail to rail against government mandates concerning the disease.In recent weeks, Mr. Giuliani has insisted that he is the candidate to beat — citing a single online poll — even as he has campaigned with his father, who had been prominently featured, often in unflattering ways, during the House hearings.Still, with early voting beginning on Saturday, Mr. Zeldin has been considered the front-runner because of his party’s backing, his name recognition as a congressman and his robust fund-raising.The debate comes amid rising hopes for Republicans, who have not won a statewide race for 20 years and lost their last foothold of power in Albany — control of the State Senate — in the 2018 elections. Ms. Hochul has suffered from tepid poll numbers, particularly on issues like crime, on which Republicans have successfully attacked Democrats, including in last year’s elections.In the wake of a massacre last month at a supermarket in Buffalo and another looming Supreme Court decision that could strike down a state law that places strict limits on the carrying of handguns, candidates were asked about possible new policies to address gun violence.All four candidates voiced support for the Second Amendment, with Mr. Wilson, for one, suggesting that addressing mental health problems and policing violent extremism would do more than new restrictions on guns.Mr. Astorino said that the debate should not be over gun control but “criminal control,” making reference to new bail laws passed by Democrats in Albany in 2019. “Right now, it’s the criminals who get away with everything,” he said, contending that “law-abiding New Yorkers” are “being targeted all the time.”Mr. Giuliani agreed with Mr. Astorino that stronger policing could be part of the answer, adding that he’d like to return to some of the “broken windows” policing plans that his father embraced during his mayoralty. “We need to end this war on cops and allow proactive policing again,” he said.Mr. Giuliani groused somewhat about being forced to be remote — accusing CBS and other media outlets of “acting more like Pravda than anything else” — but he also noted the tension between Mr. Zeldin and Mr. Wilson.“Sounds like I’m missing some fireworks over there,” Mr. Giuliani said. 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      Young Kim of California Survives Her House Primary

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      Representative Young Kim of California, a Republican who is one of the first Korean American women in Congress, advanced to the general election in November after a hard-fought primary that became one of the most expensive races in the state.Ms. Kim was one of the top vote-getters in the June 7 House primary, according to The Associated Press. California’s primaries are open — all candidates, regardless of party, run on the same ballot and the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election.Ms. Kim will now face Asif Mahmood, a Democrat and a physician who is focusing on abortion access, in November in California’s 40th Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Orange and San Bernardino Counties.Ms. Kim currently represents another district, the 39th, where she captured her seat as a moderate Republican in 2020. The district was redrawn and now includes far more Republicans. Ms. Kim and other Republicans have been vying to reclaim Orange County, a decades-long Republican stronghold that shifted to the left during the Trump administration.In the final weeks of the campaign, Ms. Kim focused on her Republican opponent, Greg Raths, a councilman in Mission Viejo who is also a retired combat fighter pilot. Ms. Kim was backed by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the Republican leadership, which had called her race a “must win” for November. The super PAC and Ms. Kim’s campaign spent about $1.2 million on Republican television ads attacking Mr. Raths.One ad from Ms. Kim’s campaign accused Mr. Raths of raising taxes and saying he is “just like Biden and the liberals.” Mr. Raths, for his part, frequently reminded Republican voters that Ms. Kim had voted to censure former President Donald J. Trump and remove Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, from congressional committees.Mr. Mahmood, the Democrat, released an ad portraying Mr. Raths as too conservative on abortion, a move that some thought could raise the Republican’s profile and, in the state’s open-primary system, edge Ms. Kim out of the general election. More

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      Jan. 6 Hearings Focus on Fox News Call That Made Trump’s Loss Clear

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      At Fox News, there was little drama over the decision to project Joseph R. Biden the winner of Arizona. But the relationship between Trump and the network was never the same.Shortly before 11:20 p.m. on Nov. 3, 2020, Bill Sammon, the managing editor for Fox News in Washington, picked up the phone in the room where he and others had been reviewing election returns. On the other end of the line was the control room.Mr. Sammon informed the producers and executives listening in that the network was calling Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declaring an end to one of the most contentious presidential elections in modern times. He clicked a box on his computer screen, and Arizona turned blue on the map that viewers saw at home.Inside Fox News, the moment unfolded with little drama despite its enormous implications. To the people in the room with Mr. Sammon, the result was clear. On the outside, it immediately provoked a fury with President Trump and his supporters, who maligned Fox News, the country’s most watched cable news channel and his longtime stalwart defender, as dishonest and disloyal.The relationship between the former president and the network would never be the same.The events of that night were the focus of a congressional hearing on Monday that peeled back the curtain on the decision-making process at Fox News. The hearing, part of the House investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, featured testimony from a former senior editor at Fox News who explained how there was never any doubt that his team was making the correct call on Arizona — even though most other news outlets would not call the state for days.“We already knew Trump’s chances were very small, and getting smaller based on what we had seen,” Chris Stirewalt, who was the politics editor for Fox News until he was fired two months after the election, told the House committee. Mr. Stirewalt described the cautious, analytical approach they took to determining that Mr. Trump could not come from behind and overtake Mr. Biden in Arizona.At Mr. Sammon’s insistence, he said, they took a vote of the people who worked on Fox News’ so-called decision desk. And only after the group agreed unanimously did Mr. Sammon issue it.“We looked around the room. Everybody says, ‘yea.’ And on we go,” Mr. Stirewalt testified before the committee, adding that they had already moved on to looking at calling other states by the time they heard of the backlash their decision created.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.The Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Mr. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Liz Cheney: The vice chairwoman of the House committee has been unrepentant in continuing to blame Mr. Trump for stoking the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Stirewalt’s testimony was part of the second televised hearing by the committee, which is aiming to refocus the country’s attention on the horrors of that day and to make a compelling case that Mr. Trump continued to lie about voter fraud and “stolen” votes despite being told by the family and aides closest to him that he had lost.On Monday, the hearing centered on people who said they did not believe that any hard evidence or data supported the former president’s contention that he must have won because the early vote returns showed him ahead on Election Day.At issue was what political observers have called the “Red Mirage.” On Election Day, Mr. Trump was widely expected to appear far ahead as polls closed across the country, because the first votes counted are primarily those from people who voted in person that day — the method favored by Republicans. But that, warned political experts, would probably be a “mirage.” Mr. Trump’s lead would shrink, they said, or perhaps evaporate entirely, as states tallied the mail-in ballots, which were favored by Democrats and take longer to count.For several weeks before the election, a group of advisers, including Stephen K. Bannon and Rudolph W. Giuliani, had encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on the night of the election, arguing that he could easily dismiss mail-in ballots as riddled with fraud regardless of whether he had any evidence for the claim.Fox’s Arizona call blew a hole in that strategy. A projected loss in traditionally red Arizona — which a Democratic presidential candidate had won only once since Harry Truman — coming from a presumably loyal outlet, augured a bad night.But Fox News had good reason to feel confident about a call no other news outlet was prepared to make at that point in the evening, with roughly one-fourth of the vote still uncounted in Arizona, Mr. Stirewalt said. Its decision desk used data that other networks did not have.After the 2016 election, Rupert Murdoch, who oversees Fox News as part of his larger conservative media empire, urged Fox to pull out of the consortium of news organizations that used polls to project results. Those polls had wrongly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory.That paved the way for Fox News and The Associated Press to go their own way in 2020, according to an account of the decision desk’s process that Mr. Stirewalt gave for the book “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” In the weeks leading up to the election, they surveyed 100,000 voters across the country who had cast ballots early, giving them a sense of how misleading the “mirage” might be. On the night of the election, the Fox News decision desk compared those surveys with another layer of data: actual precinct-level vote tallies that the A.P. was tracking.On Monday, Mr. Stirewalt testified that the joint A.P.-Fox News project worked remarkably well. “Let me tell you, our poll in Arizona was beautiful,” he said. “And it was doing just what we wanted it to do.”Some of Mr. Trump’s former aides testified that the Fox call shocked them but also undermined their confidence in his chances of victory. Jason Miller, a senior aide on the Trump campaign, said in video testimony played by the committee that he and others were “disappointed with Fox” for making the call but at the same time “concerned that maybe our data or our numbers weren’t accurate.”Mr. Miller had shared none of that concern on election night, when he tweeted that Fox was a “complete outlier” whose call should be ignored by other media. At Mr. Trump’s insistence, he and other aides immediately reached out to Fox executives, producers and on-air talent to demand an explanation. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, went straight to the top, calling Mr. Murdoch. The scene played out in part on the air as Fox talent commented about the complaints raining down on them from the Trump campaign.“Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said at one point, referring to Arnon Mishkin, the person on the decision desk who was responsible for analyzing the data and recommending when Fox issue its calls.On Monday, Mr. Stirewalt did not describe either Mr. Murdoch or Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corporation executive chairman, as being part of the decision desk’s process. And network executives have said the Murdochs were not involved.Though Fox News coverage is typically favorable to conservative, pro-Trump points of view, that deference has never been adopted by the decision desk, which is a separate part of the news-gathering operation overseen by Mr. Mishkin, a polling expert who is also a registered Democrat. In the days after the election, Mr. Mishkin was unwavering in his defense of the call as Fox anchors pressed him. Once, as the host Martha MacCallum peppered Mr. Mishkin with a series of “what if” scenarios that could bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of eking out a victory, Mr. Mishkin responded sarcastically, “What if frogs had wings?” (Mr. Mishkin remains a paid consultant for the network, not an employee, and will run the decision desk for the midterm elections in November.)The decision desk was created under the former Fox News chairman and founder Roger Ailes, who relished making controversy and drawing ratings more than he cared about toeing the line for the Republican Party. Its quick calls angered Republicans on more than one occasion, including in 2012, when it was the first to project that President Barack Obama would win Ohio and a second term, and in 2018 when it declared that Republicans would lose the House of Representatives even as votes were still being cast on the West Coast.Though Fox News and the Murdochs stood by the Arizona projection, they paid a price for it.As Mr. Trump’s rally goers took up a new chant, “Fox News sucks,” the former president urged his supporters on Twitter to switch to Fox’s smaller, right-wing competitors instead, Newsmax and One America News Network.With anchors who steadfastly refused to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s loss, Newsmax saw a ratings bump as Fox, the No. 1 cable news network for two decades, showed some rare — if short lived — slippage.Soon, various Fox opinion hosts were giving oxygen to false assertions that the election was stolen, several of which were methodically debunked at Monday’s hearings, including by one former Trump aide, who called them “nuts.”Mr. Stirewalt, who was among the Fox News journalists who defended the Arizona call, was notified of his firing on Jan. 19, 2021. 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      Two Targets of Trump’s Ire Take Different Paths in South Carolina

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      CHARLESTON, S.C. — At a campaign event the weekend before South Carolina’s primary election, Tom Rice, a conservative congressman now on the wrong side of former President Donald J. Trump, offered a confession.“I made my next election a little bit harder than the ones in the past,” he said on Friday, imploring his supporters — a group he called “reasonable, rational folks” and “good, solid mainstream Republicans” — to support him at the polls on Tuesday.Two days before and some 100 miles south, Representative Nancy Mace, another Palmetto State Republican who drew the former president’s ire, recognized her position while knocking doors on a sweltering morning.“I accept everything. I take responsibility. I don’t back down,” she said, confident that voters in her Lowcountry district would be sympathetic. “They know that ‘hey, even if I disagree with her, at least she’s going to tell me where she is,’” she added.Ms. Mace and Mr. Rice are the former president’s two targets for revenge on Tuesday. After a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they were among those who blamed the president for the attack. Ms. Mace, just days into her first term, said that Mr. Trump’s false rhetoric about the presidential election being “stolen” had stoked the riot and threatened her life. Mr. Rice, whose district borders Ms. Mace’s to the north, immediately condemned Mr. Trump and joined nine other Republicans (but not Ms. Mace) in later voting for his impeachment.Now, in the face of primary challenges backed by the former president, the two have taken starkly different approaches to political survival. Ms. Mace has taken the teeth out of her criticisms of Mr. Trump, seeking instead to discuss her conservative voting record and libertarian streak in policy discussions. Mr. Rice, instead, has dug in, defending his impeachment vote and further excoriating Mr. Trump in the process.Should they fend off their primary challengers on Tuesday, Ms. Mace and Mr. Rice will join a growing list of incumbents who have endured the wrath of the G.O.P.’s Trump wing without ending their political careers. Yet their conflicting strategies — a reflection of both their political instincts and the differing politics of their districts — will offer a look at just how far a candidate can go in their defiance of Mr. Trump.Representative Tom Rice at a campaign event in Conway, S.C., last week.Madeline Gray for The New York TimesIn the eyes of her supporters, Ms. Mace’s past comments are less concrete than a vote to impeach. She has aimed to improve her relationship with pro-Trump portions of the G.O.P., spending nearly every day of the past several weeks on the campaign trail to remind voters of her Republican bona fides, not her unfiltered criticism of Mr. Trump.“Everyone knows I was unhappy that day,” she said of Jan. 6. “The entire world knows. All my constituents know.” Her district, which stretches from the left-leaning corners of Charleston to Hilton Head’s conservative country clubs, has an electorate that includes far-right Republicans and liberal Democrats. Ms. Mace has marketed herself not only as a conservative candidate but also one who can defend the politically diverse district against a Democratic rival in November.“It is and always will be a swing district,” she said. “I’m a conservative, but I also understand I don’t represent only conservatives.”That is not a positive message for all in the Lowcountry, however.Ted Huffman, owner of Bluffton BBQ, a restaurant nestled in the heart of Bluffton’s touristy town center, said he was supporting Katie Arrington, the Trump-backed former state representative taking on Ms. Mace. What counted against Ms. Mace was not her feud with Mr. Trump but her relative absence in the restaurant’s part of the district, Mr. Huffman said.“Katie Arrington, she’s been here,” Mr. Huffman said, recalling the few times Ms. Arrington visited Bluffton BBQ. “I’ve never seen Nancy Mace.”During a Summerville event with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, Ms. Mace gave a stump speech that ran down a list of right-wing talking points: high inflation driven by President Biden’s economic agenda, an influx of immigrants at the Southern border, support for military veterans. She did not mention Mr. Trump.Ms. Mace predicts a decisive primary win against Ms. Arrington, who has placed her Trump endorsement at the center of her campaign message. A victory in the face of that, Ms. Mace said, would prove “the weakness of any endorsement.”“Typically I don’t put too much weight into endorsements because they don’t matter,” she said. “It’s really the candidate. It’s the person people are voting for — that’s what matters.”Speaking from her front porch in Moncks Corner, S.C., Deidre Stechmeyer, a 42-year-old stay-at-home mother, said she was not closely following Ms. Mace’s race. But when asked about the congresswoman’s comments condemning the Jan. 6 riot, she shifted.“That’s something that I agree with her on,” she said, adding that she supported Ms. Mace’s decision to certify the Electoral College vote — a move that some in the G.O.P. have pointed to as a definitive betrayal of Mr. Trump. “There was just so much conflict and uncertainty. I feel like it should’ve been certified.”Mr. Rice’s impeachment vote, on the other hand, presents a more identifiable turnabout.It’s part of the reason Ms. Mace has a comfortable lead in her race, according to recent polls, while Mr. Rice faces far more primary challengers and is most likely headed to a runoff with a Trump-endorsed state representative, Russell Fry, after Tuesday.Mr. Fry’s campaign has centered Mr. Rice’s impeachment vote in its message, turning the vote into a referendum on Mr. Rice’s five terms in Congress.“It’s about more than Donald Trump. It’s about an incumbent congressman losing the trust of a very conservative district,” said Matt Moore, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party and an adviser to Mr. Fry’s campaign.Still, Mr. Rice is betting on his hyper-conservative economic record and once-unapologetic support of the former president to win him a sixth term in one of South Carolina’s most pro-Trump congressional districts.A supporter of former President Donald Trump at a campaign event for Representative Nancy Mace on Sunday.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesIn an interview, Mr. Rice noted the Republican Party’s shift toward pushing social issues over policy — something he said had been driven in part by the former president’s wing of the party, which helped redefine it.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Trump Is Still a Threat

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      Donald Trump is a cancer on this country.Not only because of the way that he has behaved in it and at its helm, but because of the way that he has fundamentally changed it.On Thursday night, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection held the first of what will be a series of public hearings. The hearing was methodical and, at times, sensational. It underscored and buttressed the alarming, central thesis: Trump, as president of the United States, took aim at the democratic process of the United States by inciting a riot at the Capitol, among other things.Throw any adjective at it — brazen, shocking, outrageous, unprecedented — they are all insufficient to capture the enormity of what he did. A president with an autocratic fetish — one who assumed office with a welcome assist from the autocratic ruler of Russia — nearly hobbled the government of the most powerful country on the planet.Yet, with all of this, a poll published in February by the Pew Research Center found that fewer Americans believed that Trump bore responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot than they did in its immediate aftermath. Nearly six in 10 Republicans believed that he bore no responsibility at all for the rioting, compared to 46 percent the year before, and in June 2021, 66 percent of Republicans said that Trump “definitely” or “probably” won the 2020 election.The committee’s hearing may put a dent in those numbers, but if history is our guide, his cult will remain unflappable and intact.This is the legacy of Trump: the alteration of our political reality.As was made clear during Thursday’s hearing, multiple people told Trump that he had lost the election and that there was no widespread fraud. It appears that he wasn’t laboring under a delusion when he attempted to steal the election; he was raging his own lie about that election.Lying was a life skill for Donald Trump. But, before entering politics, he mostly used it as a tool to inflate his assets and his ego and to sell gold-plated aspiration to new-money social climbers. His entire brand was packaging garish people’s interpretations of glamour.In that world, he regularly skirted the rules. But when he entered politics, he found rules that were in some cases even more fungible than those covering finance. Many of the constraints on the president were customs and traditions. There were rules that no one had ever pushed to enforce, because previous presidents conformed to them.In some ways, the only thing constraining Trump as president was the unwillingness of other officials — many of whom he could appoint or replace at will — to break the rules.He was like a pirate landing among an Indigenous population. Instead of appreciating the elegance of the culture and history of its rites, he focused on its weaknesses, scheming ways to exploit it, and if need be, destroy it.Donald Trump didn’t create the modern American right, but he arrived in a moment when it was thirsty for unapologetic white nationalism, when it was terrified of white replacement and when it had flung open its arms in its willingness to embrace fiction.He quickly understood that these impulses, which establishment Republicans had told their base to suppress and only whisper, were the things the base wanted to hear shouted, things the base wanted to cheer.Now, millions of Americans have fallen for a lie and follow a liar.This means that our politics still exist in Trump’s shadow. Republican politicians, afraid to buck him and afraid of the mob he controls, toe the line for him and parrot his lies. The conservative media echo chamber, hermetically sealed and resistant to reality, ensures that Trump propaganda is repeated until it is accepted without examination.The Democrats also exist in Trump’s shadow. A large part of the reason Joe Biden was selected as the Democratic nominee was not because he had the most exciting set of policies, but because Democrats desperately wanted to beat Trump, and saw Biden as the safest bet to do so.Now that he has been elected, many factions of his winning coalition feel like constituencies held hostage. Any critique of Biden, even mild and legitimate, must be tempered so as not to give ammunition to the Mar-a-Lago Menace who looks poised to attempt another run for the White House.If he does, this country could well tear itself apart. And I make that statement with absolutely no hyperbolic intent. Indeed, it is not clear to me that this country can survive him calling the shots from the sidelines now.The political system has proved too compromised by Trump’s own influence to hold Trump accountable in a way that ends this nightmare. Now, the legal system is all we have left, and Trump has been harder to pinch than flesh slathered in tanning oil.We must now wait to see if the committee has the goods not to change the minds of voters, which feels increasingly like a lost cause, but to change the minds — or quicken the spirits — of prosecutors at the Department of Justice.Trump has changed America, but we can still prevent him from destroying it.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Rudy Giuliani Draws Fans to His Son Andrew’s Campaign Events

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      Andrew Giuliani’s bid to win the Republican primary for governor of New York has not drawn many donors, but it has drawn fans of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor.HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. — On a blazing Saturday afternoon in eastern Long Island, after hours of sun-baked stump speeches by candidates of little renown, it was finally Giuliani time.As the strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” filled the air, the crowd of about 200 Republican voters swooned to the sounds of an extended harangue against government mandates, socialism and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Dozens of admirers crowded nearby, shooting video or hoping to get a selfie. After the speech was over, well-wishers lined up for a chance at an autograph and a red hat bearing the surname of the man who seemed to be the featured attraction: Rudolph W. Giuliani.Standing beside him was his son Andrew, the actual candidate in what is increasingly resembling a tandem campaign for governor of New York.With just over two weeks to go before the Republican primary on June 28, Andrew Giuliani’s unlikely campaign has remained visible and viable in no small part because of his famous last name and the continued prominence of, and appearances by, his father, formerly the mayor of New York City and a personal lawyer of former President Donald J. Trump.The elder Mr. Giuliani, 78, has regularly campaigned with his son since he began running for office last year, often serving as both his warm-up act and sidekick at the Israel Day Parade and at Memorial Day marches and news conferences outside City Hall.His efforts have been welcomed by the younger Mr. Giuliani, 36, who is running a shoestring campaign, driving up and down the state in a collection of donated vans and trucks emblazoned with his face, in hopes of upsetting the party’s anointed nominee, Representative Lee M. Zeldin of Long Island.Regardless of who wins the nomination, making it to the governor’s mansion will be an uphill battle for Republicans, who haven’t won statewide office in two decades. Their likely Democratic opponent is Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has more than $18 million in her campaign coffers, in a state in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.“I feel honored that he would take his time to help us get over the finish line,” Andrew Giuliani said about his father, after posing for dozens of photographs alongside him. “I feel very, very blessed.”At their joint appearances, the elder Mr. Giuliani often attracts more attention than his son.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesPolitical families are, of course, not uncommon in New York, where the former governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, was a son of another former governor, Mario M. Cuomo. Families like the Addabbos, the Weprins and the Diazes have all spawned father-son pairs who became lawmakers.Nor is it really that surprising that Andrew Giuliani, who famously mugged for the camera during his father’s first inauguration in 1994, would lean on him for support: He is making his first run for public office and has a limited record to fall back on.His primary political experience is the four years he spent in the Trump White House, serving as a special assistant to the president and working in the Office of Public Liaison — hardly classic preparation for Albany.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent, will face off against Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi in a Democratic primary on June 28.The Mapmaker: A postdoctoral fellow and former bartender redrew New York’s congressional map, reshaping several House districts and scrambling the future of the state’s political establishment.Maloney vs. Nadler: The new congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.Questionable Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.Mr. Zeldin, a four-term congressman, remains far better financed, with more than $3.1 million in campaign funds as of late last month; Mr. Giuliani had about a tenth of that, according to campaign disclosure statements.Two other candidates — Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive, and Harry Wilson, a corporate turnaround expert — also have more to spend than Mr. Giuliani.And although Mr. Giuliani has a direct connection to Mr. Trump, getting his endorsement is far from assured. Mr. Zeldin is an avid Trump supporter who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in key swing states, an effort, ironically, that Rudolph Giuliani led.A 2008 presidential candidate who was once hailed as America’s Mayor, the elder Mr. Giuliani saw his law license suspended and his public persona tarnished, at least in some circles, as a result of his work for Mr. Trump. Those activities, in service of a false narrative of a stolen election, were given a fresh airing last week during a prime-time hearing by the House committee investigating the Capitol assault on Jan. 6, 2021.In a recent interview on Newsmax, the right-wing network where he has appeared as a political analyst, Andrew Giuliani said that while Mr. Trump was “kind of like an uncle to me,” he did not expect an endorsement, and that he thought the former president was “probably going to sit this one out.”That doesn’t mean the Giulianis aren’t trying: Both appeared at a recent fund-raiser hosted by Representative Elise Stefanik at Trump National Golf Club Westchester, where a round-table discussion and photo op with the former president cost $25,000 a head. Mr. Astorino was also there, mingling near the back; Mr. Zeldin had a prior commitment.In remarks at an outdoor reception, the former president lavished praise on the younger Mr. Giuliani, but the compliments had nothing to do with his political future.“He did talk about him, but it was all about golf,” said Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, which has endorsed Mr. Zeldin. “I do not believe the president is getting involved in the race at all, as much as the Giuliani people want him to.”Andrew Giuliani spent four years in the Trump White House, working in the Office of Public Liaison and as a special assistant to the president.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersThere has been little definitive polling on the race, though Mr. Giuliani has taken to calling himself “the front-runner” as a result of a single online poll from May, something that the Zeldin campaign scoffs at, citing other polls that show Mr. Giuliani with higher unfavorable ratings than Mr. Zeldin. (Mr. Giuliani, however, has higher name recognition, with better favorable ratings than Mr. Zeldin.)Katie Vincentz, a spokeswoman for the Zeldin campaign, said that the congressman intended to “run up the score” on Primary Day to prove that he could beat Ms. Hochul.“Lee Zeldin is going to win this race, because New Yorkers need him to win this race, and save our state,” she said.Mr. Giuliani and his supporters have cast his run as an outsider’s campaign, arguing that his lack of experience in New York politics and policy is actually a positive.His platform leans heavily on tackling crime, promising a $5 billion fund for police forces around the state while also pledging to cut the state budget. He is not averse to Trumpian nicknames, dubbing Ms. Hochul “Crime Wave Kathy.”His father has employed some of the same imagery on the campaign trail as Mr. Trump, calling Albany “a swamp” that’s “got to be cleaned up,” echoing the former president’s own rhetoric about Washington in his 2016 campaign.Curtis Sliwa, last year’s Republican nominee for New York City mayor, has been stumping for the campaign as well. He supported the elder Mr. Giuliani’s first unsuccessful run for mayor back in 1989, “when Andrew was just a little tot,” he said.Nowadays, he said, he backs Andrew because of his focus on crime, something that Republicans feel is a winning issue this election cycle, particularly in New York, where opposition to bail reform has been a potent issue for conservatives.“It is the talk of everybody that I deal with,” said Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, the citizen patrol group. “And it’s not just in the five boroughs; it’s throughout the state. They want to know what the next governor is going to do about the high crime rates.”Mr. Giuliani declined a request for an interview, but at various events on Long Island and in Albany and outside Rochester, he was friendly and open to brief questions from a New York Times reporter. (The elder Mr. Giuliani did not return requests for comment.)But he also told Newsmax last week that he felt “legacy outlets” had a liberal bias and claimed that he had chided the Times reporter about it. (For the record, he had not.)“I told him that, ‘You remind me more of Pravda than you do a free press right now because you are so tilted on one side,’” Mr. Giuliani said. “I don’t mind tough questions, but just make sure they’re fair on both sides of the aisle.”As for how he might manage a state of 20 million people with no executive experience, his father suggested that he had learned — as many children do — by observation.“He watched me do it,” the elder Mr. Giuliani said during his remarks on Long Island, talking about how to lower crime rates, adding, “He knows how to do it.”Still, some New York Republicans say that the younger Mr. Giuliani is overreaching by starting his political career running for the state’s highest office.“If his name was Andrew Smith, obviously he wouldn’t be running for governor,” said John J. Faso, a former Hudson Valley congressman and the 2006 Republican nominee for governor, who called Mr. Giuliani’s candidacy a “sideshow.”Mr. Giuliani, at a recent event in Manhattan with Curtis Sliwa, left, has highlighted divisive culture-war topics on the campaign trail.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesMr. Giuliani has impressed some with his natural political skills: He’s comfortable and affable on television and in front of crowds, with a wide smile and a more easygoing demeanor than his sometimes temperamental father.But his campaign rhetoric is cast in the Trump mold, emphasizing divisive culture-war topics, railing against critical race theory and a “war on cops,” and professing disdain for phrases like “gender dysphoria.”“I’m not a biologist,” Mr. Giuliani said during a campaign stop in Conesus, N.Y., south of Rochester. “But I do know the difference between a man and a woman.”Married with a young daughter, Mr. Giuliani is an avid golfer who once sued after being left off the Duke University golf team.He says that he has had little time to hit the links since the campaign started, telling a prospective voter, Keith Hilpl, that he’d played infrequently in the last year, though he had caught a round with Mr. Trump.Mr. Hilpl had driven about 80 miles to see Mr. Giuliani at the event in Conesus after hearing him on Steve Bannon’s podcast and visiting his campaign website.“I always liked his father,” said Mr. Hilpl, a software programmer. “And I wanted to see if he was made of the same stuff.”Sure enough, he seemed impressed, leaving the event with a campaign hat and a lawn sign.Mr. Giuliani has seemed at ease in public, more affable and easygoing than his father.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBack at the event in Hauppauge, a Suffolk County hamlet that sits on the edge of Mr. Zeldin’s district, many in attendance expressed unequivocal adoration for the elder Mr. Giuliani.“He saved New York,” said Penny Cialone, 60, adding, “And I think Andrew could do exactly what his dad did.”The younger Mr. Giuliani happily joked with his father, briefly jumping up as he began to speak.“We have a tradition of me interrupting his speeches,” he said. “I haven’t matured at all.”At the same time, the candidate also seemed aware of his father’s star power, even as the former mayor handed him the microphone.Taking it, Andrew Giuliani said he was thankful his father wasn’t running for governor.“Because I’d be in a whole lot of trouble,” he said, “if he could.”Nicholas Fandos More

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      If You Must Point Fingers on Inflation, Here’s Where to Point Them

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      As the midterm elections draw nearer, a central conservative narrative is coming into sharp focus: President Joe Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress have a made a mess of the American economy. Republicans see pure political gold in this year’s slow-motion stock market crash, which seems to be accelerating at the perfect time for a party seeking to regain control of Congress in the fall.The National Republican Congressional Committee in a tweet last month quipped that the Democratic House agenda includes a “tanking stock market.” Conservatives have been highlighting a video clip from 2020 when then-president Donald Trump warned about a Joe Biden presidency: “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash.” Right wing pundit Sean Hannity’s blog featured the clip under the headline: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT.”But the narrative pinning blame for the economy’s woes squarely on Democrats’ shoulders elides the true culprit: the Federal Reserve. The financial earthquakes of 2022 trace their origin to underground pressures the Fed has been steadily creating for a over a decade.It started back in 2010, when the Fed embarked on the unprecedented and experimental path of using its power to create money as a primary engine of American economic growth. To put it simply, the Fed created years of super-easy money, with short-term interest rates held near zero while it pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system. One way to understand the scale of these programs is to measure the size of the Fed’s balance sheet. The balance sheet was about $900 billion in mid-2008, before the financial market crash. It rose to $4.5 trillion in 2015 and is just short of $9 trillion today.All of this easy money had a distinct impact on our financial system — it incentivized investors to push their money into ever riskier bets. Wall Street-types coined a term for this effect: “search for yield.” What that means is the Fed pushed a lot of money into a system that was searching for assets to buy that might, in return, provide a decent profit, or yield. So money poured into relatively risky assets like technology stocks, corporate junk debt, commercial real estate bonds, and even cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens, known as NFTs. This drove the prices of those risky assets higher, drawing in yet more investment.The Fed has steadily inflated stock prices over the last decade by keeping interest rates extremely low and buying up bonds — through a program called quantitative easing — which has the effect of pushing new cash into asset markets and driving up prices. The Fed then supercharged those stock prices after the pandemic meltdown of 2020 by pumping trillions into the banking system. It was the Fed that primarily dropped the ball on addressing inflation in 2021, missing the opportunity to act quickly and effectively as the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, reassured the public that inflation was likely to be merely transitory even as it gained steam. And it’s the Fed that is playing a frantic game of financial catch-up, hiking rates quickly and precipitating a wrenching market correction.So, now the bill is coming due. Unexpectedly high inflation — running at the hottest levels in four decades — is forcing the Fed to do what it has avoided doing for years: tighten the money supply quickly and forcefully. Last month, the Fed raised short-term rates by half-a-percentage point, the single largest rate hike since 2000. The aggressiveness of the move signaled that the Fed could take similarly dramatic measures again this year.A sobering realization is now unfolding on Wall Street. The decade of super-easy money is likely over. Because of inflation’s impact, the Fed likely won’t be able to turn on the money spigots at will if asset prices collapse. This is the driving force behind falling stock prices, and why the end of the collapse is probably not yet in sight. The reality of a higher-interest-rate world is working its way through the corridors of Wall Street and will likely topple more fragile structures before it’s all over.After the stock and bond markets adjust downward, for example, investors must evaluate the true value of other fragile towers of risky assets, like corporate junk debt. The enormous market for corporate debt began to collapse in 2020, but the Fed stopped the carnage by directly bailing out junk debt for the first time. This didn’t just save the corporate debt market, but added fuel to it, helping since 2021 to inflate bond prices. Now those bonds will have to be re-priced in light of higher interest rates, and history indicates that their prices will not go up.And while the Fed is a prime driver of this year’s volatility, the central bank continues to evade public accountability for it.Just last month, for instance, the Senate confirmed Mr. Powell to serve another four-year term as Fed chairman. The vote — more than four to one in favor — reflects the amazingly high level of bipartisan support that Mr. Powell enjoys. The president, at a White House meeting in May, presented Mr. Powell as an ally in the fight against inflation rather than the culprit for much of this year’s financial market volatility. “My plan is to address inflation. It starts with a simple proposition: Respect the Fed and respect the Fed’s independence,” the president said.This leaves the field open for the Republican Party to pin the blame for Wall Street’s woes on the Democratic Party’s inaction. As Jim Jordan, the Republican congressman from Ohio, phrased it on Twitter recently, “Your 401k misses President Trump.” This almost certainly presages a Republican line of attack over the summer and fall. It won’t matter that this rhetoric is the opposite of Mr. Trump’s back in 2018 and 2019, when the Fed was tightening and causing markets to teeter. Back then, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Powell on Twitter and pressured the Fed chairman to cut interest rates even though the economy was growing. (The Fed complied in the summer of 2019.) But things are different now. Mr. Biden is in office, and the Fed’s tightening paves a clear pathway for the Republican Party to claim majorities in the House and Senate.Republicans have also honed in on Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, meant to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as a cause for runaway inflation. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen rejected that, noting in testimony before members of Congress: “We’re seeing high inflation in almost all of the developed countries around the world. And they have very different fiscal policies. So it can’t be the case that the bulk of the inflation that we’re experiencing reflects the impact” of the American Rescue Plan.Democrats would be wise to point to the source of the problem: a decade of easy money policies at the Fed, not from anything done at the White House or in Congress over the past year and a half.The real tragedy is that this fall’s election might reinforce the very dynamics that created the problem in the first place. During the 2010s, Congress fell into a state of dysfunction and paralysis at the very moment when its economic policymaking power was needed most. It should be viewed as no coincidence that the Fed announced that it would intensify its experiments in quantitative easing on Nov. 3, 2010, the day after members of the Tea Party movement were swept into power in the House. The Fed was seen as the only federal agency equipped to forcefully drive economic growth as Congress relegated itself to the sidelines.With prices for gas, food and other goods still on the rise and the stock market in a state of flux, there may still be considerable pain ahead for consumers. But Americans shouldn’t fall for simplistic rhetoric that blames this all on Mr. Biden. More than a decade of monetary policy brought us to this moment, not 17 months of Democratic control in Washington. Voters should be clear-eyed about the cause of this economic chaos, and vote for the party they think can best lead us out of it.Christopher Leonard (@CLeonardNews) is the author, most recently, of “The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy” and executive director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the Missouri School of Journalism.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