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      J.R. Majewski, Ohio Winner, Has Expressed Fringe Views on QAnon and Jan. 6

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      When J.R. Majewski emerged as the surprise winner of a Republican House primary election on Tuesday in northern Ohio, Democrats supporting the longtime incumbent congresswoman in the district, Marcy Kaptur, celebrated.That was because Mr. Majewski had beaten out two lower-key Republicans for the nomination, both of whom Democrats worried could have posed serious problems for Ms. Kaptur in the conservative-leaning Ninth Congressional District in a challenging election year for her party.Mr. Majewski is anything but low key.A hulking Air Force veteran who works in the nuclear security field, he first gained attention in Ohio by turning his lawn into a 19,000-square-foot “Trump 2020” sign.During his campaign, he ran one ad showing him carrying an assault-style rifle in which he says, “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to return this country back to its former glory,” adding, “If I’ve got to kick down doors, well, that’s just what patriots do.”He also posted a “Let’s Go Brandon” music video on his website in which he raps a verse, warning, “Just try to put a mask on me, you’ll see red, white and blue.”Understand the Ohio and Indiana Primary ElectionsTrump’s Grip: J.D. Vance’s win in Ohio’s G.O.P. Senate primary was a strong affirmation of the former president’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.Vance’s Rise: The author of “Hillbilly Elegy” owes his ascendant political career in large part to Donald J. Trump, whose style he has tried to emulate.Ohio Takeaways: It was a good night for Mr. Trump, and not just because of Mr. Vance. Here’s why.Winners and Losers: A progressive challenger was defeated (again) in Ohio, and a Trump-endorsed Pence (not that one) won in Indiana. These were some of the key results.Mr. Majewski has a shot at winning in November: After the recent redistricting process, Ohio’s Ninth District went from being strongly Democratic to leaning Republican.But as his political profile has risen, he has expressed several conspiratorial and fringe views.In addition to advancing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen — now a common belief among Republicans — and floating doubts that the Capitol riot was driven by Trump supporters, he has expressed sympathy for believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. He said last year that one of their false claims about a prominent Democrat being a pedophile was “plausible.”Mr. Majewski, who did not respond to requests for comment, told a right-wing radio host in January that he had gone to Washington on the day of the Capitol riot, but had not participated in any violence.“I went to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 and I’m proud of it,” he said. “I didn’t do anything illegal. Unfortunately, there were some that did.”He added, invoking a baseless theory that the federal government had provoked the violence, “But, you know, we all know that a lot of that was driven by the F.B.I. and it was a stage show.”Mr. Majewski has also made multiple appearances on a podcast and Twitch livestream belonging to a man who goes by Zak Paine, or Redpill78, who pushes the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory and has talked about his belief that people are killing children to “harvest” a chemical compound from them.Mr. Paine was barred from Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site, this year under the site’s new misinformation policy, but before that he hosted Mr. Majewski and had asked his audience to donate to the candidate’s campaign.On the streams, the two men vape, talk about Mr. Majewski’s campaign goals and take calls from Mr. Paine’s listeners.“He is exactly the type of person that we need to get in Washington, D.C., so that we can supplant these evil cabal criminal actors and actually run our own country,” Mr. Paine said on one stream.Mr. Majewski has denied being a believer in QAnon, which claims, among other outlandish things, that top Democrats and other government officials are part of a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.“I’ve never read any QAnon drop — what they call the ‘Q-Drop,’” he told The Toledo Blade last year.In an interview in September on a far-right podcast, Mr. Majewski was asked about QAnon. He said he had been called a QAnon adherent, but he rejected that characterization.“God bless the folks that believe in the fact that they think that the Democrats are out killing babies and drinking blood and they have underground tunnels in Alaska and there’s earthquakes in Antarctica,” he said.“That’s fine, if you want to believe it, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m never going to tell you anything otherwise. But if you ask me what my opinion is, I don’t think that happens.”When the podcast host asked Mr. Majewski if he thought John Podesta, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, “is a pedophile,” he replied, “I think there’s, again, a lot of information out there that’s compelling that, you know, is plausible that this guy, you know, is a pedophile.”Mr. Podesta has dismissed QAnon believers’ attempts to connect him to their wild theories.“It’s certainly no fun,” he told CNN last year. He went on, “There’s nothing, I think, to do other than to continue to fight back on the lies, and to really take seriously the issues around domestic violent extremism which we saw play out in the Capitol on Jan. 6.” More

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      J.D. Vance’s Victory in Ohio Is More Proof. Trump Has Already Won.

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      J.D. Vance’s come-from-behind victory in the Ohio Republican primary was the first test of Donald Trump’s influence in 2022 election cycle as well as the future of the Republican Party. Spoiler alert: He’s influential.Mr. Vance was endorsed by Mr. Trump, who has also thrown his considerable influence behind candidates for office all the way from U.S. Senate seats down to state-level insurance and safety-fire commissioner.Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.And some Republicans have also worried that some of the outlandish candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump could lose winnable races.Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates.Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first. What is new this cycle is Mr. Trump’s endorsements of so many federal, gubernatorial, state executive and state legislative candidates. Many of these candidates agree with his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s not unreasonable to assume he’s endorsing these local candidates to lay the groundwork to run in 2024. Who better to help shape the outcome of the next election than Republicans who believe the last election was stolen?On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania was best-known as the former star of “The Dr. Oz Show” and is vulnerable to charges of carpetbagging. The biggest primary endorsement flop is likely to come in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is hoping to unseat Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent governor, with former Senator David Perdue, whose distinction in the race seems to consist mostly of repeating Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.There’s one candidate quality Mr. Trump can’t resist: celebrity. In endorsing Dr. Oz, Mr. Trump said, “When you’re on television for 18 years, that’s like a poll, that means people like you.” Celebrity also brings with it an edge when it comes to public performance. As Axios reported, Mr. Trump “puts a ton of stock in debates” and was “impressed” with Mr. Vance’s debate performances. In one debate, he thought “all the G.O.P. hopefuls were terrible except Vance. Trump says Vance ‘has the look.’”Republicans discount Mr. Trump’s instincts at their peril. I’ll admit to scoffing at his eager endorsement of the former football star Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and Republicans like Mitch McConnell were reportedly skeptical of the candidate, concerned about parts of his personal history. Mr. Walker has admitted, for example, to playing Russian roulette several times and to being “accountable” for what his ex-wife has called abusive behavior. (He said that he has struggled with mental illness in the past and wrote about it in his book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder.”)But when I conducted focus groups in Georgia, I immediately realized that Mr. Trump understood something I didn’t: Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, “He keeps winning.” And indeed, Mr. Walker is going to win the Republican Senate primary easily.In Ohio, before Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance in April, Mr. Vance was in third place, polling at about 10 percent, behind Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons, each at about 21 percent. Without the Trump endorsement, Mr. Vance almost certainly languishes at around 10 percent and finishes fourth.The other characteristic of many of those Mr. Trump has endorsed is their unreserved embrace of “Stop the Steal.” It’s apparent why: When you listen to Trump voters — as I’ve discovered conducting regular focus groups with them — their beliefs are crystal clear. A majority believe the 2020 election was stolen and would like to see Mr. Trump run again in 2024, and even those who don’t want him to run still want him to play a big role in the G.O.P.Inevitably, many of Mr. Trump’s chosen will wind up in office. And whenever one of the candidates loses, there will be a horde of Republican political operatives ready to tell reporters — on deep background, of course — how this or that defeat signals that the Republican Party is finally ready to move beyond Mr. Trump.The problem is that I see absolutely no evidence of this being true. We can tally Mr. Trump’s endorsement wins and losses, but we cannot fail to grasp a key point: Mr. Trump has already won.Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy. If Brian Kemp and a handful of the elected officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump survive their primaries, it will be good for democracy. But it will not be sufficient to blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party.For that to happen, scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election. Only sustained defeat delivered by high Democratic turnout and right-leaning, college-educated suburban voters refusing to support these Trumpy candidates will change the current trajectory of the Republican Party.Unfortunately, for reasons historical (the party in power almost always loses seats in a midterm) and practical (inflation, violent crime and more), it’s shaping up to be a difficult election cycle for Democrats. Still, some key opportunities exist for Democrats, especially in swing-state gubernatorial and secretary of state races.Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s win-loss record is likely to be mixed. And that won’t be enough to pull the Republican Party from his grip, not in this cycle. On the existential question, Mr. Trump has already won — for now.Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) is a founder of Defending Democracy Together, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project, the publisher of The Bulwark and the host of “The Focus Group,” a podcast.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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      5 Takeaways From Ohio’s Primary Elections

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      Donald Trump showed his enduring grip over Republican primaries for Senate, and establishment Democrats won a House rematch against a progressive challenger.It was an early night in Ohio.Despite questions about turnout amid bad weather, the results of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday didn’t produce many surprises.In the night’s biggest race, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who remade himself as a die-hard supporter of Donald J. Trump, won the closely watched Republican Senate primary after his struggling campaign was lifted by a crucial endorsement from the former president last month.Here are a few key takeaways from one of the first major primary nights of the 2022 midterm cycle:It was a good night for Donald Trump, and not just because of Vance.Mr. Vance’s victory over a crowded field, in which he consolidated support the day of the vote, was unequivocally good news for Mr. Trump. The former president’s endorsement on April 15 came when Mr. Vance had been all but left for dead. Instead, with help from Mr. Trump and allies including Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Vance turned his campaign around.“If Trump supports Vance, then we know he will be good,” said Kurt Oster, 59, a voter in Eaton, Ohio.Trailing Mr. Vance by a relatively wide margin were Josh Mandel, a former Ohio treasurer who had run as a hard-right Trump loyalist — and, like Mr. Vance, faced criticism for contorting himself in doing so — and Matt Dolan, a state senator who sought more moderate voters. Mr. Dolan had seemed to gain ground during early voting, and other campaigns had closely monitored his apparent rise.Josh Mandel giving a concession speech on Tuesday night in Cleveland.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesBut the fact that Mr. Vance and Mr. Mandel received more than 50 percent of the vote combined running as pro-Trump candidates spoke to the former president’s enduring grip over certain races — particularly Senate primary elections, in which voters are sending people to fight for them in Washington as opposed to run their states.In the general election, Mr. Vance, who improved as a campaigner over the course of the primary, will face Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate Democrat who also claims to understand the concerns of Ohio’s white working class. Part of Mr. Trump’s rationale in endorsing Mr. Vance was his belief that Mr. Ryan would be a strong candidate, and that Mr. Vance was best positioned to take him on, according to a Republican briefed on the endorsement.Mr. Vance speaking to supporters Tuesday night in Cincinnati after his victory.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s not clear how much Mr. Vance’s message will change for the general election in a state that has become increasingly hostile for Democrats. Mr. Ryan, who is trying to win back blue-collar workers for his party, has signaled that he will try to paint Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate and venture capitalist, as a creature of the cocktail party circuit and Silicon Valley. But he faces an uphill battle in Ohio.For governor, Republican voters in Ohio preferred a familiar face.The night did not completely belong to Mr. Trump and Trumpism.Gov. Mike DeWine easily won the Republican nomination for another term despite angering many in the Trump wing of the party for what they saw as his heavy hand in controlling the pandemic. Last month, Mr. DeWine said that he could not attend a Trump rally in his state because he was committed to celebrating Ulysses S. Grant’s 200th birthday.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran, after voting on Tuesday in Cedarville, Ohio.Paul Vernon/Associated PressHis main opponent, Jim Renacci, sought out Mr. Trump’s endorsement but did not secure it, in large part because he was never a serious threat. Mr. Renacci’s “Ohio First” campaign was clearly an echo of Mr. Trump’s presidential bids, yet he never gained traction.A Trump ally rose, as a Republican who backed impeachment departs.One of Mr. Trump’s other victories in Ohio was that of Max Miller, a young former aide who worked for him in the White House.With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, Mr. Miller ran for Congress in a state where his family has deep ties, initially as an attempt to take out a House Republican who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot. That congressman, Anthony Gonzalez, dropped out. But when the seats were redrawn during redistricting, Mr. Miller ran in a different district, and won his primary on Tuesday night.Despite some ugly headlines — Mr. Miller was accused of domestic violence by an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, one of Mr. Trump’s press secretaries, an allegation that he denied before suing for defamation — he is expected to carry the safely conservative district easily in November.And if he does win, another House member whose candidacy began as a vengeance play will owe his political rise to the former president.It’s better to be the only Trump acolyte than the only establishment Republican in a race.Splitting the pro-Trump vote didn’t save Mr. Dolan’s candidacy in the Senate primary, but splitting the establishment Republican vote handed a pro-Trump candidate a surprising victory in Northwest Ohio’s Ninth Congressional District.J.R. Majewski, a burly businessman who painted his vast back lawn into one huge Trump sign in 2020, earned the right to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat who has served in Congress for decades. Her district was redrawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to try to thwart her bid for a 21st term.The new boundaries attracted two G.O.P. state lawmakers, State Senator Theresa Gavarone and State Representative Craig Riedel, to enter the primary. Then, almost as an afterthought, came Mr. Majewski, who ran ads showing him carrying an assault-style rifle, posted a “Let’s Go Brandon” rap on his website and earned a somewhat incoherent acknowledgment from Mr. Trump at an Ohio rally.The battle between Ms. Gavarone and Mr. Riedel, however, appeared to let Mr. Majewski squeeze through — though Ms. Kaptur may get the last laugh.Ohio Democrats showed little appetite for adding a new ‘squad’ member.Last August, Shontel Brown, a little-known chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, seemingly came from nowhere to win a House special election in Cleveland against Nina Turner, a former co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and a hero of the activist left.In Washington, the Democratic establishment had dearly wanted to keep Ms. Turner away from the House. She had made something of a career of bashing centrist Democrats, and planned to be a brash voice in the expanding “squad” of progressive members of Congress. Ms. Brown was seen by many on the left as the establishment’s creation.Representative Shontel Brown at her watch party in Cleveland on Tuesday night.John Kuntz/Cleveland.com, via Associated PressMs. Turner surprised no one when she challenged Ms. Brown to a rematch in this year’s Democratic primary.Her pitch was that this year would be different. Crossover Republicans from the Cleveland suburbs who had helped Ms. Brown in the special election would not be available this time, because they would be voting in the Republican primary. A redrawn district, still overwhelmingly Democratic, was more concentrated in and around Cleveland, Ms. Turner’s home base.But Ms. Brown ran this year not as an unknown but as an incumbent, who could point to her vote for the bipartisan infrastructure law. The Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed her, blunting any boost Ms. Turner might have received from Mr. Sanders’s endorsement and late support from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.And in a disheartening blow for Ms. Turner and the activist left, Ms. Brown easily won the rematch.Kevin Williams More

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      Vance Wins Republican Senate Primary in Ohio After Nod From Trump

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      J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” won a G.O.P. race that saw nearly $80 million in television advertising. The author and venture capitalist parlayed an endorsement from Donald J. Trump into victory, beating out a crowded field of conservative challengers.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesCINCINNATI — J.D. Vance, the author whose memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about life in Appalachia became a best seller, decisively won the Ohio Senate primary on Tuesday after a late endorsement by Donald J. Trump helped him surge past his rivals in a crowded primary field.Casting himself as a fighter against the nation’s elites, Mr. Vance ran as a Trump-style pugilist and outsider who railed against the threats of drugs, Democrats and illegal immigration, while thoroughly backpedaling from his past criticisms of the former president.The contest, which saw nearly $80 million in television advertising, was one of the most anticipated of the 2022 primary season for its potential to provide an early signal of the direction of the Republican Party.The result delivered a strong affirmation of Mr. Trump’s continued grip on his party’s base. But a fuller assessment of Mr. Trump’s sway will come through a series of primaries in the next four weeks — in West Virginia, North Carolina, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Georgia.Mr. Vance had been trailing in most polls behind Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer who had also aggressively pursued Mr. Trump’s backing, until the former president’s mid-April endorsement helped vault Mr. Vance ahead. A third candidate, State Senator Matt Dolan, ran as a more traditional Republican, sometimes mocking his rivals for their unrelenting focus on the former president instead of Ohio issues and voters.Cheers went up at Mr. Vance’s Cincinnati election party when The Associated Press called the race shortly after 9:30 p.m.“The people who are caught between the corrupt political class of the left and the right, they need a voice,” Mr. Vance said in his victory speech. “They need a representative. And that’s going to be me.”Mr. Vance is an unlikely champion of the Trumpian mantle, after calling the former president “reprehensible” in 2016 and even “cultural heroin.” But he had changed his tune entirely by 2022, and Mr. Trump called to congratulate him on his victory on Tuesday evening, according to a person briefed on the call.With more than 80 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Vance was leading across almost the entire state. But the results also captured some of the tensions and demographic trade-offs of a Republican Party pulled in different directions as Mr. Dolan was strongest in the voter-rich cities of Cleveland and Columbus.Trump-style Republicans did not prevail in the other top contest on Tuesday. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a more traditional Republican who has held offices in the state for more than 40 years, finished far ahead of his multiple primary rivals after a strong right-wing challenge never gained traction despite some conservative backlash to Mr. DeWine’s early and assertive response to the coronavirus pandemic.Gov. Mike DeWine and his wife, Fran DeWine, greet their daughter Anna Bolton and grandson Calvin after voting in Cedarville, Ohio, on Tuesday.Paul Vernon/Associated PressMr. DeWine had almost double the votes of his closest rival, Jim Renacci, a former House member. In the fall, he will be running against Nan Whaley, the former mayor of Dayton, who won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, becoming the first woman in Ohio history to be nominated by a major party for governor.In the Senate race, Mr. Vance will now face Representative Tim Ryan, a 48-year-old Democrat from the Youngstown area who has positioned himself as a champion of blue-collar values and has not aligned with some of his party’s more progressive positions.If Mr. Vance prevails in the fall, the 37-year-old graduate of Yale Law School and investor would become the second-youngest member of the Senate, the chamber’s youngest Republican and a rare freshman who would arrive in Washington with a national profile.Mr. Vance’s metamorphosis from an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican in 2016 to a full-throated Make America Great Again warrior in 2022 echoes the ideological journey of much of the party in recent years. Republicans have moved closer and closer to the former president’s hard-line policy positions on issues like trade and immigration, and to his combative posture with Democrats and on cultural issues that divide the two parties. For some Republican voters, the primary was animated by fears that traditional family values and a white American culture were under attack by far-left Democrats, establishment Republicans and elites.Mr. Vance also won the endorsements of some of the Make America Great Again movement’s loudest firebrands, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, both of whom campaigned with him in the race’s final weekend, and Donald Trump Jr., who also traveled to the state. He also had a crucial financial benefactor: His former boss, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor who pledged $10 million to Mr. Vance even before he joined the contest and who added millions more in the final stretch to trumpet Mr. Trump’s endorsement.The Senate primary was unusual in the extent that it unfolded in two places at once. In Ohio, there was the typical fevered competition for votes, in town halls, debates and television ads. In Florida, there was the battle for Mr. Trump’s approval at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, with public shows of fealty, lobbying by surrogates and shuttle diplomacy. In one episode last year, multiple Ohio candidates vied for Mr. Trump’s support in front of one another at an impromptu meeting at Mar-a-Lago.In a verbal flub that seemed almost fitting to how the candidates ran, Mr. Trump accidentally conjoined the names of two rivals over the weekend. “We’ve endorsed J.P., right?” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Nebraska. “J.D. Mandel.”Mr. Trump’s endorsement set off a frenzy among Ohio Republicans who questioned Mr. Vance’s Republican credentials, with rivals circulating fliers online and at a Trump rally accusing him of being a Democrat in disguise and resurrecting his past comments against Mr. Trump.The Senate candidate Josh Mandel, center, with supporters, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, left, in Columbus, Ohio, last week.Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Mandel had been the front-runner for much of the race, casting himself as the true pro-Trump candidate (“Pro-God. Pro-Guns. Pro-Trump” was the tagline in his TV ads). But that became an all-but-impossible argument to prosecute in the final weeks after Mr. Trump picked Mr. Vance.“If the whole issue in the campaign is who is most Trump-like, expect it to work against you when you don’t get the endorsement,” said Rex Elsass, an Ohio-based Republican strategist.At a restaurant in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood on Tuesday, more than a dozen Mandel supporters and campaign volunteers struck an optimistic tone at the start of the night, expressing confidence. But it was not too long before Mr. Mandel took the podium to deliver the news. Mr. Mandel told the crowd that he called Mr. Vance “to congratulate him on a hard-fought victory” and would do what he could to help get him elected. “The stakes are too high for this country to not support the nominee,” Mr. Mandel said to a round of applause in the room.Beyond Mr. Vance, Mr. Dolan and Mr. Mandel, the crowded race included a single female candidate, Jane Timken, a former Ohio Republican Party chair, who was backed by the retiring incumbent, Senator Rob Portman, as well as Mike Gibbons, a businessman who poured millions of his own money into the race and at one point had vaulted to the top of the polls.Mr. Dolan had toiled for most of the contest far behind the polling leaders, avoiding direct attacks from his rivals. But he tapped into his own fortune to fund more than $11 million in television ads as he cut a path separate from the rest of the Trump-focused field by refusing to amplify the falsehood that the 2020 election was rigged. At one debate, Mr. Dolan was the lone candidate to raise his hand to say the former president should stop talking about the 2020 election.State Senator Matt Dolan greets supporters at a library opening in Bay Village, Ohio, last week.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesThe contest was nasty and lengthy, with nothing capturing the intensity more than a near-physical confrontation between Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Mandel at one March debate, where they bumped bellies as they lobbed verbal threats at one another.Mr. Vance scolded them both. “Sit down. Come on,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”Much of the race was shaped by huge sums spent on television — nearly $80 million, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, with a lot of it coming from outside groups and out-of-state donors. The conservative Club for Growth spent more than $12 million on television ads aimed to boost Mr. Mandel or tear down his rivals. Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor, seeded a pro-Vance super PAC with $10 million in early 2021 — months before Mr. Vance even entered the race. Mr. Vance is one of two former Thiel employees — the other is Blake Masters in Arizona — running for Senate with Mr. Thiel’s hefty financial backing. Mr. Thiel had served as a key link between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump, attending an introductory meeting between them in early 2021. The politics of Ohio have changed drastically in the Trump era. Once the quintessential presidential swing state, Ohio broke for Mr. Trump by 8 percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, ending a half-century streak of the state backing the national winner. Republicans have sharply run up their margins among working-class white voters and in more rural areas, offsetting the losses that the party has suffered in the state’s suburbs around cities like Columbus and Cleveland.Representative Tim Ryan, right, with Michael S. Regan of the Environmental Protection Agency in Youngstown, Ohio, where lead pipes will be replaced as part of new federal infrastructure spending.Dustin Franz for The New York TimesIn the Democratic primary, Mr. Ryan, who briefly ran for president in 2020, easily turned back a primary challenge from Morgan Harper, 38, a former adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who ran as a progressive, banking $5 million for the general election.Mr. Ryan has already run an anti-China ad that focuses on Ohio jobs and his opening ad of the general election has him tossing darts inside a bar and seeking to separate himself from the broader Democratic brand, lamenting those who have called for defunding the police.But Mr. Ryan faces an uphill race in a state that has trended Republican and in a year when his party is saddled with President Biden’s low approval ratings. Some Republicans see Mr. Ryan as formidable — Mr. Trump among them — but the general election is not seen by either party as among the half-dozen closest contests that will determine control of the Senate, now divided evenly 50-50.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati. Jazmine Ulloa reported from Beachwood, Ohio. More

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      J.D. Vance’s Rise From ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Author to Senate Nominee

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      Before the 2016 election, J.D. Vance called Donald J. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”On Tuesday, Mr. Vance’s triumph in a crowded Republican field for Senate in Ohio was thanks largely to an endorsement, late in the race, from the former president he once denounced.The conversion of Mr. Vance, an author and venture capitalist, from Trump skeptic to full-on Trump ally might fill a second memoir, a sequel to his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s story of growing up poor in Kentucky and Ohio. When that book was published in 2016, it was devoured by the “coastal elites” he now rails against as a means for them to decode white working-class support for Mr. Trump.Mr. Vance’s book pointed inward to explain the woes of his community: He blamed a personal “lack of agency” for drug abuse, welfare dependency and chaotic lives. But as a politician, he has pointed the finger outward, at external enemies, just as Mr. Trump did.On the campaign trail, Mr. Vance blamed corporations for shipping jobs to China and accused liberals of opening borders to cheap labor and opioid traffickers. The intimate voice of “Hillbilly Elegy” yielded to a darker tone and language. He castigated “idiots” in Washington and “scumbags” in the news media.Mr. Vance announced his campaign for the Senate last year in Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.Jeffrey Dean/Associated PressHis critics, including Republican rivals in Ohio, said he had turned himself inside-out to mimic Mr. Trump’s bellicosity in pursuit of votes. Opponents spent millions on attack ads to remind voters that Mr. Vance had once called himself “a Never Trump guy” and had said some voters backed Mr. Trump “for racist reasons.”Mr. Vance, on a slog across Ohio he called the “No B.S. Town Hall Tour,” explained to modest crowds that he had undergone a political evolution, recognizing that Mr. Trump was right on issue after issue.“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” he told a conservative podcaster last year.Today, Mr. Vance, who graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State University and went on to Yale Law School, has found a political home with the movement known as national conservatism, an effort to add an intellectual framework to Trumpism. National conservatives lean right on issues like diversity and immigration restrictions but lean left on economics, opposing unfettered free trade, especially with China.Mr. Vance at a rally hosted by Mr. Trump in Delaware, Ohio, last month, after his endorsement.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Vance, 37, grew up in Middletown, Ohio, where a grandfather had moved from Kentucky for a steel mill job. In the years after J.D. Vance was born in 1984, the city hollowed out as blue-collar jobs left, opioids arrived, marriages dissolved and much of the industrial Midwest became “a hub of misery” for the white working class, he wrote in his memoir.Mr. Vance’s mother, Bev, struggled with drug addiction. He was raised largely by his maternal grandparents, particularly the grandmother he called Mamaw, who “loved the Lord,” “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns, he said on the campaign trail.Out of high school, Mr. Vance enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He returned home a man in a hurry, sailing through Ohio State in under two years.At Yale, he met a fellow student he would marry, Usha Chilukuri, who went on to clerk for an appeals court judge, Brett M. Kavanaugh. Democrats’ fierce opposition to Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 appeared to be a turning point in Mr. Vance’s political transformation.“Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” he recalled in 2019.Mr. Vance went to work as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, a billionaire founder of PayPal, whom he had heard speak at Yale. Mr. Thiel, a Silicon Valley conservative, also influenced Mr. Vance’s politics, especially his opposition to China and to immigration.Mr. Vance with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, at Allen & Company’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2017.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesWhen Mr. Vance moved his family, which now includes three children, back to Ohio, he raised money from Mr. Thiel for a venture capital fund of his own — and followed the Thiel tradition by naming the business, Narya Capital, with a “Lord of the Rings” reference.Mr. Thiel poured $13.5 million into a political action committee to support Mr. Vance’s race.As a candidate, Mr. Vance had struggled to translate celebrity as an author into broad recognition and support from the Republican base. He was perpetually running behind his rivals in polling, and Mr. Thiel’s millions were nearly gone.But all that turned around with Mr. Trump’s endorsement on April 15. Most of the Republican field had aggressively auditioned for the former president’s seal of approval. Mr. Vance first pitched Mr. Trump at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago brokered by Mr. Thiel. Donald Trump Jr. and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson also lobbied for Mr. Vance.“J.D. Vance may have said some not so great things about me in the past,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice, “but he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.” More

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      Overnight, Midterms Get a White-Hot New Focus: Abortion

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      Exultant Republicans planned new bans. Democrats, who have struggled to rally around abortion rights, hoped a bruising Supreme Court loss could jolt their voters into action.A leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade instantly propelled the debate over abortion into the white-hot center of American politics, emboldening Republicans across the country and leaving Democrats scrambling to jolt their voters into action six months before the midterm elections.Although the Supreme Court on Tuesday stressed that the draft opinion was not final, the prospect that the nation’s highest court was on the cusp of invalidating the constitutional right to abortion was a crowning moment for Republicans who are already enjoying momentum in the fight for control of Congress, statehouses and governor’s offices. Republican state leaders on Tuesday announced plans to further tighten restrictions on the procedure — or outlaw it outright — once the final ruling lands in the coming months.Democrats, reeling from the blow and divided over whom to blame, hoped the news would serve as a painful reality check for voters who have often taken abortion rights for granted and struggled to mobilize on the issue with the passion of abortion rights opponents. They said they planned to drive home the stakes in the fall, particularly in state races, putting abortion rights on the November ballot in key contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and other battlegrounds.“People were concerned about the lack of energy for voters in the midterms and not coming out to vote — well, the Supreme Court has just handed us a reason for people to vote,” said Representative Susan Wild, a Pennsylvania Democrat who faces a competitive re-election.“At one time I would have said they’re never going to take away right to contraception. But I don’t believe that anymore,” she said.Independent voters have overwhelmingly soured on President Biden, and many core Democratic constituencies have shown signs of trouble. Some party strategists privately cautioned against the idea that even something as seismic as overturning Roe would surpass the importance of the economy and inflation with many voters, something Republicans argued publicly.“Conventional wisdom right now is this helps Democrats because it will spur turnout, but it also could certainly spur turnout for base Republicans,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican strategist. “Generally most voters focus on the economy, for instance, and right now of course, inflation is dominant.”A woman writing a message supporting abortion rights before a protest on Tuesday in Manhattan.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesAn anti-abortion protester on Tuesday outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Miss.Rory Doyle for The New York TimesBut polling also shows that Americans strongly oppose completely overturning Roe v. Wade — 54 percent of Americans think the Roe decision should be upheld while 28 percent believe it should be overturned, a new Washington Post-ABC poll found. Democrats argue that many voters have long believed it was not truly in danger of being gutted. The draft opinion may change their calculus in meaningful ways, especially with suburban women and disillusioned base voters, those strategists say.“It hasn’t ever been that voters don’t care about it,” said Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster and strategist, and the president of Impact Research. “It’s been concluded that it’s less effective because voters don’t believe that it could actually go away. And so with what the Supreme Court is signaling they’re about to do, is completely change and eliminate that sort of theory of the mobilizing power of abortion.”Understand the Challenge to Roe v. WadeThe Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could be the most consequential to women’s access to abortion since 1973.The Arguments: After hearing arguments in December, the court appeared poised to uphold the Mississippi law at the center of the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.Under Scrutiny: In overturning Roe v. Wade, would the justices be following their oath to uphold the Constitution or be engaging in political activism? Here is what legal scholars think.An America Without Roe: The changes created by the end of abortion rights at the federal level would mostly be felt by poor women in Republican states.An Extraordinary Breach: The leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade suggests an internal disarray at odds with the decorum prized by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.Familiar Arguments: The draft opinion, by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., draws on two decades-old conservative critiques of the Roe v. Wade decision.Legislative Activity: Some Republican-led state legislatures have already moved to advance abortion restrictions ahead of the court’s decision. Here is a look at those efforts.Without the court’s protection for abortion rights, states would be free to enforce their own restrictions or protections. That patchwork system is likely to shift the focus to governor’s races, where a state’s executive could have an outsize role in determining whether abortion is legal.Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a candidate for governor, said he would veto any legislation restricting access to abortions.Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general and Democratic candidate for governor, signaled that he planned to seize on the looming threat to Roe to cast himself as a one-man firewall against abortion rights opponents in his state. On Tuesday, he pledged to veto any legislation from the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature that would restrict abortion access.“Every Pennsylvanian should be able to raise a family on their own terms,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And that means deciding if and when and how they want to do that.”But for all the talk from Democrats about abortion being on the ballot this fall, Mr. Shapiro’s race is the exception. Far more states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin, all have laws on the books effectively banning abortion that would go into effect once Roe is invalidated. The November elections are unlikely to give Democrats the numbers to reverse those.In Wisconsin, for example, an 1849 law made performing an abortion a felony unless the pregnancy endangered the life of the mother. That law remains on the books, though several of the state’s Republican candidates for governor have endorsed proposals to eliminate any exceptions to the ban.On Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin sent a letter, signed by 15 fellow Democratic governors, urging Congress to enact federal abortion protections — a plea that is almost certain to go unmet.Although Mr. Evers won’t be able to make the case that he can save abortion protections in Wisconsin, he will argue that he can make other key decisions about how much the machinery of the state is used toward investigations and prosecutions of abortions, said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia played up a 2019 law that bans abortions in the state after six weeks.Alyssa Pointer/ReutersRepublicans were celebrating as they appeared on the cusp of victory. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican facing stiff primary and general election challenges, took a victory lap Tuesday, playing up a 2019 state law that bans abortion in the state after six weeks. The law has been held up in a federal appeals court awaiting the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision.“We are the voice of all those people that are out there and have been in the trenches for decades doing this and we’re glad to be in the fight with them,” Mr. Kemp said during a radio interview Tuesday.In South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican believed to have presidential ambitions, said Tuesday that she would immediately call for a special session to outlaw abortion in her state. Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri said a broad ban on abortions in the state was just a signature away from enactment if Roe is in fact overturned. The speaker of the Nebraska Legislature told colleagues to expect a special session on abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision.Democrats running for Senate renewed calls to put Roe’s abortion protections into federal law and change the Senate rules, if necessary, to do it. Although Democrats currently control the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, they do not appear to have the votes to codify a woman’s right to an abortion, a major point of contention and blame-shifting among Democrats.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia said Tuesday that he was still opposed to any changes to the filibuster, effectively ending any Democratic hopes of passing an abortion bill.Still, Democratic candidates signaled they planned to continue to promise to fight to codify Roe.“Democrats have to act quickly and get rid of the filibuster,” said Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who is running for Senate, to “finally codify Roe into law. We cannot afford to wait.”Kina Collins, a Democrat in a primary for a House seat in Chicago, called on the party’s leaders to “fight like our lives depend on it.”“There is no place in this party for Democrats who will not,” she said.Sensing the potential harm of yet another intraparty skirmish, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, warned against blaming fellow Democrats.“Focusing on what’s wrong with Democrats in the Senate or elsewhere is (another) circular firing squad,” Mr. Maloney wrote on Twitter. “We can only end the filibuster, pass real protections for choice IF WE WIN more power.”Trip Gabriel contributed reporting. More

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      Roe’s Fall Would Alter Political Battle Lines. But in What Way?

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      Democrats who were privately hoping for a surprise development to shake up the midterms have gotten their wish. Nobody expected it to come in the form of a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, however.It’s a political bombshell. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to discern where the shrapnel lands.Democrats we spoke with on Tuesday were furious about Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, which was presented in the document as the view of the court’s conservative majority. Universally, these Democrats viewed it as an assault on the fundamental rights of women to control their own bodies.But in coldly rational political terms, they expect the news to energize their base and motivate key swing groups, such as suburban college-educated women. They also pointed to polling showing that banning abortion, as a number of states have indicated they would do if Roe were overturned, would be unpopular with the broader public.“The more you see Republicans cheering the decision, the more you’re going to have voters saying, ‘Wait a second, this is not what I thought they were going to do,’” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster.“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote in the draft, which a representative for the court emphasized in a statement was not necessarily a final opinion. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”Understand the Challenge to Roe v. WadeThe Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could be the most consequential to women’s access to abortion since 1973.The Arguments: After hearing arguments in December, the court appeared poised to uphold the Mississippi law at the center of the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.Under Scrutiny: In overturning Roe v. Wade, would the justices be following their oath to uphold the Constitution or be engaging in political activism? Here is what legal scholars think.An America Without Roe: The changes created by the end of abortion rights at the federal level would mostly be felt by poor women in Republican states.An Extraordinary Breach: The leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade suggests an internal disarray at odds with the decorum prized by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.Familiar Arguments: The draft opinion, by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., draws on two decades-old conservative critiques of the Roe v. Wade decision.Legislative Activity: Some Republican-led state legislatures have already moved to advance abortion restrictions ahead of the court’s decision. Here is a look at those efforts.Omero pointed to an April 26 polling memo by Navigator, a Democratic messaging group she is involved with, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling along these lines “would motivate Democrats and pro-choice Americans significantly more to turn out in 2022 than Republicans and those who are pro-life.”Now that Roe’s elimination is no longer hypothetical, Omero said, she expects voters will begin paying more attention to the issue. “We’re going to have a decision that is going to lay bare the differences between the parties,” she said.What Republicans are sayingSo far, top Republicans would rather talk about the leak itself than the potential decision’s political implications.Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, called the disclosure “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.” It was “a judicial insurrection,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. “An act of institutional sabotage,” said Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.“They’re always unsure how to talk about abortion,” said Rachel Bovard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Bovard said she had spent the past day discussing the implications of the leak with nervous Republican lawmakers and aides.Privately, Republicans are still trying to gauge how the issue will affect the midterms. On Tuesday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a memo urging candidates to “be the compassionate consensus-builder” on abortion, while also highlighting what Republicans say are extreme views among Democrats.Indicating some concern about how Democrats and activists on the left might try to portray Alito’s draft opinion, the memo also recommended that G.O.P. candidates “forcefully refute” statements by Democrats that Republicans want to ban contraception and “throw doctors and women in jail.”Several G.O.P. operatives said that the issue could ultimately play to Republicans’ advantage if the debate becomes about whether to enact restrictions on the timing of abortions rather than about whether there ought to be a federal right in the first place.“Running on overturning Roe is not a winning issue” in a general election, said Garrett Ventry, a Republican political consultant. “Late-term abortion is.”Other Republicans expressed skepticism that abortion, rather than inflation or crime, would move many voters in November.“The battle lines on this issue have been drawn for a long time,” said Sean Spicer, a former press secretary for the Trump White House and Republican National Committee strategist.But the decision is likely to affect how candidates, donors and activists approach the political fights ahead of them, funneling millions of dollars into Senate and state-level races that could determine the shape of the post-Roe world.“If you’re running for Senate, you are tied to the national ideological debate,” said Kristin Davison, a Republican consultant involved in midterm races across the country. Running for governor is more complicated, she added, because “now you have to do something about it.”For social conservatives who have waited decades to overturn Roe, the fight is just beginning.“There’s no doubt the battle goes to the state level,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a Christian conservative leader in Iowa, who added that the next focus for the anti-abortion movement would be pushing across the country for laws on fetal cardiac activity. “It’s not a political issue. It’s a right or wrong issue.”What to readWhat would the end of Roe v. Wade look like? Here is our map showing where various states stand on abortion, and here are key questions and answers.The leak of the draft decision on Roe was an extraordinary breach and left the Supreme Court seriously shaken. Our reporter Adam Liptak explores the possible motives, methods and whether defections are still possible.Outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday, scores of supporters and opponents of abortion rights gathered with megaphones and signs. Here’s what they had to say.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      What Do the Midterms Mean for Biden?

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      For President Biden, the outcome of the midterm elections will be critical, both for the fate of his policy agenda and for his ability to function without partisan distractions for the next two years.The president has already struggled to pass legislation he promised as a candidate because Democrats hold a bare majority in the House and the ability to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate. But that difficulty will become a near-impossibility if Republicans take control of the House or the Senate — or both. Republicans would not only have enough votes to defeat most of Mr. Biden’s proposed legislation, but they would be able to keep Democratic measures from even being considered.Furthermore, Republican control of Congress would put Mr. Biden’s political enemies in charge of investigative and oversight committees. Republicans have already vowed to use those positions to conduct high-profile inquiries into Hunter Biden, the president’s son; the administration’s handling of migrants at the border; and the chaotic exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.The result would most likely be a White House in a defensive crouch, constantly forced to respond to demands for information from congressional committees. Some White House staff would hire lawyers to defend themselves against subpoenas requested by Republican-led investigations. And White House briefings would be filled with questions about the newly empowered Republican majority.Previous presidents have faced the same situation. President George W. Bush called the 2006 midterms a “thumping” after Democrats won control of both chambers. In 2010, Republicans won back the House in what President Barack Obama called a “shellacking” by his adversaries. In both cases, the shift in the majorities hampered the presidents’ agendas and ratcheted up the partisan attacks from Capitol Hill.— More