The election is driven by the central tension.

The 2020 Presidential Race: Why a Second-Term Representative Tom Malinowski Is a Political Gor, and Why he Needs to Redraw His Congressional Map

To demonstrate his conclusion, Nate mapped the 2020 presidential vote onto the 2022 House map, created after the recent census. When he did, he found that 226 of the current districts voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and only 209 voted for Trump.

Gerrymandering is a real problem for American democracy, especially in the drawing of state legislature districts, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently documented. If the Supreme Court upholds a case that restricts the authority of state courts, North Carolina will likely be forced to rewrite its congressional maps. Still, if you were going to rank the biggest current threats to American democracy, gerrymandering would not be at the top of the list.

The movement inside the Republican Party to not accept defeat would be the top one. The lack of congressional representation for residents of Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico would follow, along with the growing influence that the Senate gives to residents of small states.

SCOTCH PLAINS, N.J. — When New Jersey’s congressional map was redrawn last year, Representative Tom Malinowski, a second-term Democrat, was widely considered a political goner.

President Biden’s popularity had plummeted, gas prices were soaring and Mr. Malinowski’s Seventh Congressional District — in which he barely eked out a re-election victory in 2020 — had been redrawn to include nearly 27,000 more registered Republicans. Mr. Malinowski said in a terse statement that he would run for a third term.

But 10 months later, as voters have absorbed the impact of the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, there are signs that Democrats believe the national political momentum has shifted to a degree that even this race, written off by some as a strategic sacrifice, is narrowing.

Any path by which Democrats are able to stave off a midterm rout or retain a slim House majority cuts straight through districts like Mr. Malinowski’s, where moderate, well-educated voters helped Democrats win control of the House in 2018 and are seen as crucial to holding it.

It’s impossible to understand why so many Americans no longer trust US elections without understanding the information universe in which they reside. Bad-faith television hosts, radio personalities, podcasters, and websites that now unquestionably dominate the right-wing media landscape have poisoned the information well with lies and conspiracy theories about the elections process.

This summer, McGowan had a meeting with White House chief of staff Ron Klain. (“An old friend,” Klain calls McGowan in an email.) She tells me that President Biden is stuck in an old model and will need to win over a few national reporters at traditional big-name institutions to break through with the public. “He still lives in a world a lot of the people I meet live in, which is, ‘It was better before. Why can’t we just do that again?’” She says it.

I offhandedly mention to her that just that morning, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had said, “The thing people need to understand about these legacy DC, New York outlets is: We don’t care what you think anymore.” It seemed like a bit of bluster, that the mainstream press is irrelevance. He gets what he wants from Fox News and other right-wing media. If her newsrooms aren’t in a similar location around the time of the election, she’ll judge that she has failed.

The stakes are a bit higher. At issue is not so much the future of journalism as the future of cynicism. McGowan is trying to figure out if it is still possible to combat the noise in America and hit the message that apathy is a reasonable response to the state of the world. The alternative—that citizens are fated to only grow more disconnected from the news of the day and less invested in the country’s fate—is almost too distressing an outcome to contemplate.

Records Requests in the House and Senate: A Perspective from John Fetterman, Mike Lindell, and the Election Deniers, Winnebago, Wis.

The structural dynamics defining House races, in part due to redistricting, have long made holding onto an already exceedingly narrow majority a tall task. In recent days, Republicans have grown more aggressive in their spending targets, indicating they view an expanding map and growing environment as more favorable by the day.

In the past, the party in power has lost a few elections. Political pundits have predicted debacles for the Democrats this year.

And races that will decide the fate of the Senate also appear to be narrowing, like in Arizona, for instance, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly once had a clear lead. A shaky debate performance by John Fetterman, a candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate, rattled Democrats as he is still trying to recover from a stroke. The commonwealth represents the party’s best chance to pick up a seat and could be critical to their hopes of holding control of the 50-50 Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he thought the debate in Pennsylvania didn’t hurt us, but that he was worried about the race in Georgia.

“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” Forrest K. Lehman is the director of elections and registration. “It should be number one.”

The National Association of State Election Directors Executive Director, Amy Cohen, said the onslaught of records requests had hit red and blue counties alike. “Election officials don’t wake up on Election Day or the day before and decide to put on an election,” she said. It takes weeks of preparation to run an election.

Sue Ertmer, the county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., said that she received 120 demands for records in a couple of weeks. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. It is a little overwhelming.

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. The Election Deniers offered instructions on filing records requests during a seminar in August.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. He added that local supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, commonly called cast vote records, from more than a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.

The Democratic Party has been attracting voters who do not approve of Biden, according to polls. Some recent surveys have found Democrats even leading slightly among voters who say they “somewhat” (as opposed to “strongly”) disapprove of Biden’s performance – a remarkable reversal from 2018 and 2010 when the president’s party lost about two-thirds of voters who “somewhat” disapproved of his performance, according to exit polls.

Look where the parties are spending their money in order to understand their views about the campaign. The places that Joe Biden won in 2020 are places that the Democrats are pouring money into. Politico’s election forecast, for example, now rates the races in California’s 13th District and Oregon’s Sixth District as tossups. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.

“The polling suggests that the side supporting abortion rights is favored in many of these debates, especially in deep-blue California and Vermont,” wrote Brown. Kansas lost a state referendum that would have banned abortion, which shows that even red states can block pro-life initiatives.

The Biden Democrat Sea-Wall: Addressing the Problems of Economic Discontent with the New Tax Cut and Other Redressal Measures

Even though the White House says that Biden’s own standing is better than that of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, his own standing is not.

According to detailed results provided by Marist, voters who focused mainly on inflation gave Republicans about two-thirds of their votes for Congress, as did voters who prioritized immigration. But Democrats attracted about three-fourths of those who emphasized abortion or health care, and over three-fifths of those focused on preserving democracy.

Democrats are stressing issues about rights and values while also warning about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his movement. Since June, Democratic candidates have spent more on abortion-themed ads than Republicans.

Biden’s speech made a case that when they come to full fruition, his policies will repair decades of declines in manufacturing and American industry. He argued that his signature bills passed during a legislative hot streak, including a bipartisan infrastructure measure, a law meant to ignite US semiconductor production and another that builds a clean energy economy, would bring jobs and prosperity. He declared that his social spending measure passed over the summer would make Americans more prosperous since it would cut some long-term health care costs.

But those plant openings are mostly still in the future and only a few Democrats (such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona Sen. Kelly, and Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan) are emphasizing those possibilities this year.

More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Garin believes highlighting specific initiatives can help candidates overcome their negative assessment of Biden’s economic management. He is concerned that too many Democrats are concentrating on abortion while misrepresenting the message of the economy.

The Democrats are trying to build a sea wall against the currents of economic discontent, with arguments like the coming manufacturing boom, cost-saving provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the case that they are offering struggling families opportunities to better their condition. Will the final weeks determine if that current surpasses all of the party’s defenses?

Editor’s Note: Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She has written about slavery and abolition in the Civil War as well as a new book on the rise of the Second American Republic. The views expressed here are hers. You can read more opinions on CNN.

Things looked a bit different recently. The Biden administration’s considerable legislative successes, the tamping down of gas prices until the slowdown of oil production by Russia and OPEC countries, and the forgiveness of some student loans, combined with the Supreme Court’s unprecedented Dobbs decision, the never-ending saga of Trump’s legal troubles and extremists running on the Republican ticket have leveled the playing field somewhat despite Republicans blaming global inflation on the Biden-Harris administration and playing to fears about crime.

The nation faced a President who incited and condoned political violence in 1866. Though in the present case, Trump, unlike Andrew Johnson, is no longer in office. While complaining of persecution, Trump recently signaled support for paranoid QAnon conspiracies.

Then as now, the American republic had been saved from grave danger, the slaveholders’ rebellion in 1865 and Trump’s dangerous efforts to keep power in 2020. The former Confederates and Trump’s loyalists did not concede defeat, instead doubling down on their folly. Some Republican candidates still aspire to overturn the results of the presidential election of 2020, just as unrepentant Confederates wanted to undo the results of the Civil War. A stolen election is the new lost cause mythology for many Republicans.

Then, as now, armed paramilitary groups threatened the country. The Ku Klux Klan was founded after the Civil War and during the bloody summer of 1866, racists and ex-Confederates attacked freed people and Unionists in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans. The January 6 insurrection by a violent mob of Trump supporters was just as much a wake up call as the Memphis and New Orleans massacres. The congressional hearings on the riots were eye-opening for many Americans.

It is highly likely that the massive reaction the Black Codes engendered in the North in 1866 will be replicated in 2022, especially among women voters who are out-registering men this election. It is an irony of history that the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868 to protect the rights of former slaves is the amendment from which we derive our modern rights, including the right to privacy that legalized abortion, same-sex marriage and the outlawing of gender-based discrimination.

Will the new year bring about a repeat of 1866? I am a historian and a woman, and I hope that it does. The South threatened that freed people would swarm the North. Republican Govs today. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are using migrants as human pawns by transporting them to blue states in a sick political stunt.

Americans need history not just to understand the present but also as a guide to the future. The first federal civil rights law was passed in 1866 by congressional Republicans. If the Democrats are able to retain control of the House, they will be able to get rid of the Senate’s filibuster and that could lead to federal laws protecting the right to vote and abortion. Then as now democracy is at stake.

Among likely voters nationwide, the race is a tight split, with 50% backing the Democratic candidate and 47% behind the Republican. In competitive congressional districts, the Republicans are favored over the Democrats by 48% of likely voters.

Sixty-two percent of Democrats said they plan to vote, while 46 percent of Republicans plan to do so. A majority of Republicans said they plan to vote in-person on Election Day.

Democratic candidates do hold some advantages, though. According to a survey, registered voters nationwide are more likely to see local Democrats than Republicans as caring about the people they represent, working to protect democracy, and unifying the country. And voters are more likely to see Republican candidates as too extreme (40%) than Democratic ones (36%).

Former President Donald Trump – though also not a factor for about half of voters (50%) – prompts a more even partisan reaction, and may work in Democrats’ favor in the competitive districts. 26% of voters nationwide say they are voting to send a signal of opposition to Trump, while 20% are going to send a message of support. In competitive districts, 54% of Democrats say their vote will be to express opposition to the former President while 47% of Republicans say they’ll be voting to express support.

The results of the survey of nearly 1,600 people were reported on Oct. 27th by the NPR and PBS NewsHour. There is a margin of error of 4%, which means the results may be lower or higher than what’s listed.

The First Day of the Capitol Riot: What Happened During Trump’s Campaign to Overturn the 2018 U.S. Election?

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot broke new ground Thursday with two extremely dramatic moments. One was the extraordinary ending: the unanimous vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify about his role in the riot. “We must seek the testimony under oath of Jan. 6’s central player,” Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney said.

The panel examined how intentional the Trump administration had been in attempting to spread doubt about the election results – from testing different theories about challenging the results, to leaning on state officials – like their push in Georgia – to literally change the vote, to mobilizing supporters to intimidate Congress as they certified the Electoral College results.

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He wrote and edited “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views he makes in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Cheney said that the committee is obliged to get answers from the man who put this all in motion. Every American has a right to answers so that we can act to protect our republic.

They exploded when they saw little help on the way. “Why don’t you get the President to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr. Attorney General, in your law enforcement responsibility,” Schumer barked at Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. The legislative leaders went all out to restore peace in comparison to Trump who did not take action as the riot unfolded in the White House.

In public hearings the panel tried to get the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.

Unlike the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, one of the most distinctive elements of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election is that so much of it happened in broad daylight.

The plans were hatched before the election took place, and Trump publicly launched his allegations during a press conference on election night. As the votes continue to be counted, he declared victory. “President Trump,” Cheney explained during Thursday’s meeting, “had a premediated plan to declare the election fraudulent and stolen before Election Day, before he knew the election results.”

The Jan. 6 Committee on the Analytic Investigation of the 2020 Capitol Hill Controversy: An Even Strange Day for Trump and His Inner Cabal

Yet the committee managed to fill out the story in very important ways, providing shocking evidence and details as to how the events of those months were even more dangerous than we understood at the time.

January 6 was not some kind of one-off, chaotic day of chaos where there was an unexpected turn of events. It was premeditated.

As viewers could hear, Steve Bannon said to a group of non-identified associates that the former president would declare victory, which didn’t mean he was victorious, just that he would say he was. If Biden wins, Trump will do some crazy shit.

When told in subsequent weeks repeatedly by top election and legal advisers, such as then-Attorney General William Barr, that the claims of fraud were “bullshit,” Trump and his inner cabal ignored those warnings and moved forward with reckless abandon.

On the day of the protest, Trump knew that protesters were dangerous and he did nothing to stop them. He wanted to go to Capitol Hill but was stopped by the Secret Service. The former president even lunged at a Secret Service agent and tried to steer the wheel of the car when he was told he couldn’t go, according to former aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

Orchestration: The campaign to overturn the 2020 election was not a haphazard effort where Trump deployed a chaotic plan, desperate to keep power. Rather, key members of the administration, including the former president and key advisers, deliberately pushed to overcome electoral defeat. Roger Stone said that possession was nine tenths of the law. F–k you.

Tape recently surfaced of former Trump lawyer John Eastman, whose involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 election has been a central theme of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol, encouraging a crowd in New Mexico to scrutinize their election officials and take detailed notes that can be used in future lawsuits.

The committee also showed that Roger Stone and militant right-wing groups had extensive contact with Donald Trump. There were warnings from both the Secret Service and Intelligence that there was a serious threat against the Capitol.

Continuum: January 6 was just one piece of a much larger story. Although the panel is called the January 6 committee, it would be more accurate to call it a committee to investigate the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.

The Night of January 6: The Last Days of Demigratory Democracy and the Rise of the Founding Foundations of the Reform Reform Act

Throughout these events, we have learned, Trump understood exactly what was happening. He was warned many times about the dangers he was taking and how he was making claims that were not true. Even advisers, lawyers such as Barr and conservative media figures such as Sean Hannity who publicly supported him were privately urging him to stop.

Then on January 6, Trump purposely ignored many warnings of violence. He wanted to lead the troops to Capitol Hill. As the attacks on Congress unfolded and as his friends pleaded with him to call off the troops, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland reminded viewers that he sat passive, watching television. On January 6, Trump didn’t act but he didn’t want to. “Can you believe this?” Pelosi was heard saying to Thompson that day.

The committee wanted to make it clear that the danger isn’t over in 2022. There’s a danger to our electoral system and democratic institutions, that’s something that will come through in our final hearing. This is not ancient history we’re talking about; this is a continuing threat.” That continued threat exists on many levels. The rhetoric of election denialism has taken hold among many of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans who subscribe to this agenda are also running for several key offices, ranging from gubernatorial positions to secretaries of state in key states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, all of whom will play a key role in overseeing future elections. The former president is the leading contender for the Republican nomination in twenty four years.

The point was made by Cheney when she asked, “Why Americans should assume that those institutions will be able to stay afloat the next time they are in power.” The story of January 6 turned out to be a string of officials, many of whom were Republicans, who refused to go along with the scheme. She reminded everyone that the institutions are only strong when the men and women of good faith are also strong.

The committee successfully unpacked the dark days that followed the 2020 election. They have been exposed in clear detail right in front of our eyes. The biggest mystery left is whether as a nation we will close our eyes and simply move forward without demanding accountability, justice and reform.

The first person to object to Mr. Liggett was a Democrat who objected to his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But the second one — a friend with whom Mr. Liggett, a 73-year-old retired gemstone dealer in North Carolina, had traveled to jewelry shows for 20 years — came as a shock.

Mr. Liggett thought he was a good conservative. He said he didn’t want to talk to you anymore. And I asked why. And he says, ‘Because I don’t believe in this Republican G.O.P. MAGA’” stuff, using a far sharper expletive.

According to a new poll, the stark ideological divides of American politics have personal consequences. Nearly one in five voters — 19 percent — said that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships, according to a poll conducted last week by The New York Times and Siena College.

Many people in the United States worry about political rhetoric and political conflict, but they don’t seem to worry about the amount of time it takes for people with very little experience to come to an unashamed conclusion.

The Elections When Inflation Breaks: Lee Zeldin vs. Donald J. Trump, a Republican Representative in the Rotunda

On the day lawmakers emerged from hiding and police officers counted the wounded, Representative Lee Zeldin walked into the Rotunda and broadcasted his live on Fox News.

Other Republican leaders had already begun distancing the party from President Donald J. Trump, whose monthslong campaign to overturn his election loss helped incite the violence. Mr Zeldin was prepared to exonerate him that evening.

“This isn’t just about the president of the United States,” he said, referring to what prompted the riot that he condemned. “This is about people on the left and their double standards.”

Here’s the thing about elections: When they break, they usually break in one direction. All the indicators on my political dashboard are red for Republicans right now.

Inflation has been a political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and is thought to have resulted in the rise of Extremism in the 19th century. That is how politicians fear it the most, and why the Biden White House initially claimed that the surge of prices was caused by Covid-19.

The conditions that helped Democrats gain over the summer appear to have stopped, according to a new New York Times/Siena poll.

Democrats had a golden summer. The Dobbs decision led to a surge of voter registrations. Democrats were given victories in Alaska, Kansas and New York by voters.

Demagogy of the Tea Party: How Republican Candidates Returned After the 1980 Elections and Their Impact on the State of the Party: The Case of Newt Gingrich

More than 170 Republican candidates have lied or denied the results of the election, according to a monthslong New York Times investigation. Mr. Trump supports Republican candidates according to his false claims.

The midterms could turn supporters of election denialism into the new Freedom Caucus – the Tea Party Republicans who came to Washington after the 2010 midterms and organized into a powerful faction in the House GOP within a few years. There is a chance that they could be the driving force of a new majority that pushes policies that are anti-democratic.

FiveThirtyEight reports that 60% of Americans will have an election denier on the ballot. Among the deniers are some hoping to be secretaries of state, which – if victorious – would allow them to run state elections in coming years.

In contrast to Newt Gingrich’s transformation in the 1980s, Draper shows how Greene has turned into a leader of the party. She will be appointed to a position of power if the Republicans win. Moreover, Politico has reported that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who former GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner derided as a “political terrorist,” would become one of the party’s main power brokers in the lower chamber.

In other words, Republican success in the 2022 midterms will cement that Trumpism wasn’t some sort of aberration – it is the norm. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is out.

One of the best examples of this can be found in 1978. The results for President Jimmy Carter were not bad since Democrats retained control of the House and Senate.

The 1978 election was a critical moment in the direction of the conservatives. The way the political winds were blowing made Moderate Republicans like Howard Baker change their approach to issues. Baker said he was against the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union as hardliners took control of the GOP.

Republicans gained six gubernatorial seats, an area where the Republican National Committee had heavily invested. Republicans have control over 12 state legislative chambers, up from four. “This is the most profound change for us,” noted then-RNC Chair Bill Brock, in Time magazine.

The numbers were not as important as the inner substance. Gingrich of Georgia was one of many up and coming Republicans who rejected the older generation of party leaders who believed in the need to stick to the center.

Republicans like Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi won seats that had been controlled by conservative Democrats for decades. James Eastland, an opponent of civil rights was Cochran’s opponent in the election. Dick Clark was defeated in Iowa by a senator who attacked him for his anti-apartheid work. These Republicans emphasized themes such as tax reductions and a stronger stance against communism.

There were new conservative political organizations that flexed their muscle. The National Conservative Political Action Committee helped oust several prominent Democrats and was one of the New Right’s most important forces. With the PAC’s support, Republican Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, a conservative abortion opponent, defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Thomas McIntyre.

After the New Deal, America swung rightward towards Republicanism, according to Newsweek. The true message of the election is that a new agenda for the nation has been created, one of which is taxation-and-spending government as the primary villain.

If Republicans win the House and Senate next week, they will feel confident about their culture wars and economic talking points going into the future. A strong showing in the polls is likely to make it easier for the GOP to unite behind Trump. Although there has been copious speculation about the rise of other Trump-like Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, it’s likely they will look “liddle” once the former President formally reenters the political arena – as his formidable opponents learned in the 2016 Republican primaries.

The party is trying to paint the former president in a bad light when he was trying to overturn a presidential election. He was unsuccessful in doing so, but his strategy lives on.

The Republicans will need to double down on this direction if they want to win back the House in the upcoming elections. If they win in the election, there will be no turning back from the new royalty of the party of Trump.

Biden has delivered his message in Washington, not standing on stage with Democratic candidates during some of the most heated races in the country.

But as things currently stand, despite the Democratic scramble and Biden’s own implicit acknowledgment that momentum has shifted back toward Republicans, White House officials see a path to bucking decades of history – and blunting a GOP wave.

Biden has concisely summarized the pendulum swing of the last several months in order to explain why Democrats are in better shape than they were a few months ago.

Biden said last week it had been back and forth with them and us. I think we will see one more shift to our side in the final days of the year.

It was a candid acknowledgment of a moment that finds Democrats trying to find a way to stop the Republicans in their tracks again, but with differing opinions inside their party of where the message should actually land.

It will be clear in 14 days whether or not that optimism is a mistake. Biden sees two years of unified Democratic power in Washington as the basis for his view.

Whether that will hold, particularly in a home stretch in which the small universe of undecided voters historically breaks toward the party out of power, is the definitive outstanding question.

The campaign official said that they had suck themselves back into their own firing squad. At the end of the summer it was not as good as people thought, but it is not as bad as people think it is. But it could be if we don’t pull it together.”

The burden of that history, not to mention the acute headwinds created by economic uneasiness that continues to rank first among voter concerns in poll after poll, are not lost on Biden or his advisers.

After a few weeks of deliberately smaller scale official events, he will start hitting the road for larger campaign events, with continued insistence, advisers say.

The Impact of the Supreme Court Decision on the Senate Budget and the Economy: Implications for the Optimism of the Re-elected Representatives

They point to two factors specifically on that front: gas prices, which have been on a steady downward trajectory for the last two weeks, and the third quarter GDP report, which analysts expect to show robust growth after two quarters of contraction.

Officials acknowledge their deficit on the economy, despite cornerstone legislative achievements and a historically fast recovery from the pandemic-era downturn, isn’t going to flip over the course of 14 days.

They see an opportunity to make some gains or fight to a draw with undecided voters or those who might decide not to vote in the last days of the election.

It is one that has been laid bare in a very acute manner by the Republicans, whether it is on abortion, popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, or proposals to eliminate the individual provisions enacted by Biden that polls in the favor of Democrats.

Biden has spent the last several weeks trying to highlight issues that officials see as key motivators to base voters who need to turn out in a big way in order to counter Republican enthusiasm.

The burst of optimism among Democrats after a late summer string of major legislative wins and energy caused by the Supreme Court ruling was viewed by many inside the West Wing as overly optimistic.

But Democratic Senate candidates in battleground races are all polling with narrow leads or within striking distance. The pathway to hold onto the Senate exists, even if a sharp break away from Democrats could imperil several of the party’s biggest new stars.

Where do we stand in 2020? Jay Bookman: Why the Georgia Republicans are so desperate to regain their trust in the Electoral System

Editor’s Note: Jay Bookman is a writer and political columnist from Georgia who works for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He writes for the Georgia recorder on a regular basis. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Voters continue to turn out in record numbers here in Georgia, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season like this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?

Uncertainty is a problem for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. It is a caution for the rest of us if we put too much faith in pollsters’ work product.

Georgia Republicans, however, are ready to claim victory on at least one front. The Democrats had claimed that the election integrity act was an effort to suppress voter turnout, but the high turnout proves that is not true.

That’s what happens when you sell people on a false narrative, then rewrite state law to encourage taking action on that false narrative. If voting is not being suppressed, then there is definitely confidence in voting.

Democrats have built an effective, well-funded voter-protection apparatus to help people overcome whatever bureaucratic hurdles are placed between them and the ballot box.

The last point is very important. Republicans say the changes made in the legislation are necessary to fight voter fraud. The motive makes no sense.

The greatest danger to election integrity may, in fact, come from the results of state and local races that will determine who actually conducts the election and counts the votes in 2024. The attempts by Mr. Trump to deny the election results and to prove voter fraud were stymied by two things, first, that they could not produce credible evidence that voter fraud had occurred and second, that the election infrastructure was defended by the public.

The consequences of that bad-faith narrative should worry us. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.

Trump is still making that argument to this day, telling supporters at rallies this fall that “I don’t believe we’ll have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.”

In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. It now says that “There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge.” Local election boards have to hold a hearing on the challenges within 10 business days.

Around the state, conservatives are attempting to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on extremely flimsy grounds and are growing frustrated that those challenges keep failing.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. If you want your county to be in order, get your things in order.

Joe Biden, the Future of the United States, and the Prospects for Elections in 2020: A Critique of the Political Situation in New York

The President was on the road Thursday – not in one of the most pivotal Senate swing states – but in New York to tout semiconductor manufacturing. The fact that he showed up in a state that he won by more than 20 points two years ago shows how hard it is to climb out of a hole when your approval ratings are low.

Biden has used the economy to highlight some bright spots, such as a vigorous effort to compete with China, and high job creation. Many Americans depend on Social Security and Medicare in their retirements, and he says they would be devastated by a GOP proposal.

His approach reflected the extraordinarily testing election environment facing Democrats, who are in danger of losing their control of the House of Representatives as their hopes of clinging onto the Senate appear to ebb.

The loss of both chambers could be disastrous for the President, who is bracing for a series of investigations targeting his administration, his handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his son’s business affairs.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered a stark warning to Americans that the future of the nation’s democracy could rest on next week’s midterm elections, an urgent appeal coming six days before final ballots are cast in a contest the president framed in nearly existential terms.

When the unemployment rate is low, and GDP is growing, the speech shows the political impossibility of highlighting positive aspects of the economy.

Biden warned of battles over entitlements and government spending and warned of a fight over the debt ceiling, both of which were examples of the fights to come if political control is split between the parties.

“They’re going to shut down the government, refuse to pay America’s bills for the first time in American history to put America in default… unless we yield to their demands to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The President admitted that there are always Democrats who charge that Social Security is at risk in elections, but also claimed that the proposals by Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin do threaten the retirement program.

If they succeed, all of those measures will not show up in time to be felt in this election. There is a chance that they could help Biden in the 20th century, if he decides to run for reelection.

Some 47% of voters in Wisconsin, 45% in Michigan, and 42% in Pennsylvania stated that the economy and inflation was the most important issue affecting their vote. In each state, this more than doubled the number of those most exercised about the next-highest-ranking issue – abortion. Democrats had hoped outrage over the Supreme Court decision would have neutralized their economic liabilities heading into the November 8 election.

In New York, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office in twenty years, the gubernatorial race was competitive because of the latter. Hochul was with Biden on Thursday in Syracuse, where there is a competitive House race.

Joe Biden and the State of the Economy: What the Democratic Party Needs to Stop Doing with the American Dream and Focus on the Core Problem

The problem, however, is that the President was conjuring a vision of an economy that many Americans do not recognize. Democrats could be doomed if the two realities of an economy that performs strongly in many areas and lives in the country are not the same.

High inflation causes political extremists to be drawn to demagogues and radicals with their political creed being built upon stoking resentment and stigmatizing outsiders.

When a voter’s income is not keeping up with their costs, especially for the staples of everyday life like meat, bread, eggs and gasoline, they are bound to look for scapegoats. And Biden, as the president in power, gets the blame.

The invasion ofUkraine and the subsequent supply chain disruption caused by it pushed up living costs and gasoline prices, which are now easing, as well as Biden blaming outside factors. Republicans say Biden flushed the economy with billions of dollars in cash and caused it to get overheated.

In an interview with CNN, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned people to be patient as many of the measures that have been taken to boost the economy will take time to come on line.

“People are still struggling with inflation. I grew up in a community, in a place where when my dad would say, at the end of the month, if you – what you’re making didn’t cover all your expenses, you were in real trouble,” Biden said in a virtual fundraiser this week for Iowa Rep. Cindy Axne, who faces a tough reelection.

Biden’s comment showed that he understands the problem that will likely doom Democrats this election season. But there’s nothing in the short term he can do about it.

President Joe Biden will finally make his way to the state he has been planning to visit since he was a little kid, and it will be as a backdrop to his warnings against the Republicans.

“You can’t shake a stick (in Florida) without hitting a Republican that represents the MAGA extremes that the president is talking about,” a senior Biden adviser said. “So, it allows the president to really drive home what’s at stake and what the choice is.”

Scott is one of his chief foils, because he had laid out a policy plan that would put Medicare and other government programs up for a vote every five years. The state has both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis who will likely run for president in the next few years.

A senior Biden adviser stated that the contrast argument was even more relevant in the closing week of the elections because of Florida.

“As the congressional Republican plan to either eliminate Social Security and Medicare, cut Social Security and Medicare or hold it hostage to debt limit negotiations becomes even more apparent…it’s even more relevant for the President to draw that choice for the voters of Florida and the voters across the country,” the senior adviser said.

The president was effusive about Crist in an interview with CNN that was filmed on the eve of Biden visiting his state to help Crist. Crist is hoping to deny the reelection of Ron DeSantis.

“He’s the most important man in the world,” Crist said. “The fact that he’s coming down to Florida with a week to go until the election says everything you need to know about how important Florida is.”

More than any other issue, Crist said he hoped – and expected – Biden to zero-in on the topic of abortion rights when the president headlines the rally for Crist and Senate nominee Val Demings. DeSantis’ record as governor on the issue speaks for itself, Crist said, adding that abortion rights is the “number one issue” in his race.

When Biden toured the damage from Hurricane Ian in Florida last month, he and the president put aside their political differences to emphasize an effective response.

But a few weeks later, the governor made clear Biden was still in his sights as a potential rival, even as he demurred about a potential national run during a debate with Crist.

While Democratic officials insist Biden is foremost focused on the upcoming elections, campaigning for the Democrat trying to win back the Congress this week might give a glimpse of what a Biden-DeSantis match-up might look like in 2041. In a debate last week, DeSantis would not commit to a full four-year term if he were to win reelection.

The first and last question is: what do I need to do to succeed? That is the same conversation that Trump has with himself,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee.

How Much Has the Former President Done for Campaigns? On the Importance of Rally Planning, Campaigning and Funding in the Midterms

Biden insisted to reporters that more than a dozen different campaigns requested him in the final stretch of the election and that he is in demand on the campaign trail.

That is not true. There have been 15. He said to count after a reporter suggested he hadn’t been holding many rallies in the final stretch.

Privately, Biden accepts not every Democratic candidate will welcome him as a surrogate while his approval ratings remain underwater. He has told fellow Democrats he respects their political intuition when it comes to their own races and has joked publicly he would “campaign for … or against” his preferred candidates, “whichever will help the most.”

But he has grown frustrated at coverage suggesting he is political albatross, according to people familiar with the conversations, arguing his policies – when properly explained – are widely popular with voters.

Democrats familiar with decision-making said Biden is not in demand from campaigns in more competitive races. They also argued that rallies are costly and less valuable from an organizing perspective than they used to be.

Now, it is the former president who appears to be the most sought-after Democrat for the nation’s marquee races. He held rallies in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin over the weekend, and will visit Nevada and Arizona this week.

Biden and Obama will appear together next Saturday to boost the Senate and gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania – one place Biden, who was born there, has been welcomed.

Biden scaled back battleground state politics in favor of speeches in Washington and official events where he warned of the Republicans and spoke about his accomplishments like infrastructure and manufacturing investments.

Biden has been in demand on the fundraising circuit, though, speaking at multiple high-dollar fundraisers nearly every week this fall to help the DNC raise a midterm record total of $292 million through September. Democratic officials credited Biden’s decision to share his presidential campaign list with the DNC at the start of his presidency with powering a midterm record $155 million in grassroots fundraising.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain suggested on CNN in October that the lack of big rallies was strategic: “I don’t think rallies have proved effective for candidates in the midterms, and so we’re trying something different,” he said, noting the Obama and Trump models failed to stave of losses for their respective parties.

Pre-Migda Law: Monitoring Election Violence and Preventing Election Denial: An Interview with Nancy Pelosi and Mark Finchem

The shadow of violence that has hung over American policies since Trump incited the Capitol insurrection was exacerbated as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled the moment of trauma when she was told by police that her husband Paul had been attacked with a hammer. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she also condemned certain Republicans for joking about it.

While that continuum is the essence of democracy, the run-up to these midterms has also highlighted the depth of the nation’s self-estrangement in a political era in which both sides seem to think victory for the other is tantamount to losing their country.

While the internal bulletin warned federal agencies of a heightened threat period, it identified “lone offenders” as the most likely to commit violence, rather than organized extremist groups. It outlined a number of grievances that may motivate those actors, including debunked claims of widespread election fraud and polarizing social topics such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.

Shannon Hiller, Executive director of the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University, said it was very much in line with their monitoring of political violence. “But we’re not concerned about safety and security on Election Day.”

Mr. Biden also expressed concern about Republican tactics that might intimidate voters in the name of election monitoring. A federal judge in Arizona this week restricted a group that had been planning to operate near polling places from taking photos of voters, openly carrying firearms and posting information about voters online.

Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for Arizona secretary of state who spread baseless claims of election fraud and encouraged his followers to monitor vote operations in their communities, is one of them.

“You are responsible for what happens in your election!” At the beginning of last year’s rally, those in attendance pledged their loyalty to the flag at the Capitol. “You need to be at the polls. You can’t leave this to someone else.

Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said recently the RNC had trained more than 30,000 poll watchers ahead of this year’s midterms.

Carly Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County, Colo., told Colorado Public Radio that all 35 poll watchers she approved for the state’s June primary had ties to election denial groups.

That can present a complicated situation. On the other hand, having conspiracy-minded volunteers involved in the process can give them a better idea of how elections work.

But Spencer Overton, a voting expert at George Washington University, says it can also be a powder keg if those people are set in their beliefs that there is widespread fraud and they need to uncover it.

“It’s about activism and vindicating an election from a couple years ago, not about volunteering or doing service,” he said. “That can result in real conflict.”

Researchers say the days following the election may pose a greater risk of violence than Election Day itself, particularly in locations where vote counting drags on.

“What if people don’t have their preferred candidate win?” asked Oren Segal, Vice President of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. They have seen that denial is a way forward, and that you can create a conspiracy around that. I believe violence is not far behind.

They have seen that denial is a way for people to build a conspiracy around that. I think violence is not that far behind.

Creation of Evidence in a Scenario for Detecting Correlated Election Propagation in State and Local Councils, with Application to Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia

Already, some influential voices on the right have said they’re readying for contentious litigation around races that don’t end up favoring Republican candidates.

“You are allowed to make a written record of anything you see not going on correctly,” Eastman said, according to audio obtained by the watchdog group Documented. “That’s the practice of creating evidence.”

Hiller, of the Bridging Divides Initiative, said she expects the field of locations where threats of violence are most pernicious to narrow fairly quickly. Her team is focused on the races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, where false claims of past election fraud have been embraced by some political leaders as well.

“They’re [states] where there are senior leaders, specifically in the Republican Party, that are already calling into question the results of the election or have a history of advocating for violence or condoning violence around it,” she said.

Nonetheless, Hiller is optimistic that institutions that have preserved the democratic process in the past will have the resources they need in the face of these threats.

“One of the stories of 2020 for me is that many of the fail-safes worked. The court systems were effective. A lot of the recounts that happened were incredibly effective. And folks were able to surge resources to those locations,” she said. “So we’re in for another election that’s going to test those resources and that resolve.”

The fact that Trump poses a serious risk does not mean that he will be the next president. Trump had turned off many independents and even some Republicans by 2020 and it remains unclear if he can win their support in crucial swing states. Presidents who are facing reelection campaigns can still find a way to win.

Towards a dry run for democrats to protect democracy: Social Studies and the Last NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll

“This should be a dry run for people who want to protect democracy,” he said. This is a dry run for our leaders to make sure that they are doing everything possible to protect our democracy moving forward.

The upcoming mid-terms will test local organizing of right-wing groups who are challenging voter rolls and vote counting, and increased presence as election workers. Those efforts would ramp up into the election if it does happen.

She said that groups have been preparing all day. “Even if some small incidents occur, if there’s someone in a polling place trying to purposely create issues, then I think that the vast majority of polling locations, of counting locations, are going to be really well prepared for that. There has been a lot of thinking on how to support people with de-escalation skills.

Segal encourages institutions and leaders to show how they will navigate a political event in the coming weeks.

The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that some key base voters in the Democrats are much less excited about voting than the Republican base voters. It is the last NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey before voting wraps up Tuesday.

The poll also found, though, that Republican voters are largely OK with voting for an election denier, as long as they agree on policy positions — and it found in this age of hyperpartisanship, a huge shift away from people thinking divided government is a good thing.

While white women with college degrees, who are an important bloc for Democrats, are among the most enthusiastic to vote, Black voters, Latinos and young voters are among the least.

In this survey, it’s tied 46%-46% — and that tends to be bad news for Democrats. They need a large lead on the question if they are going to do well in the House.

Republicans are trusted by wide margins on inflation (R+20), crime (R+16) and immigration (R+12), the three issues the GOP has focused on most in these elections.

The majority of Republicans said they would vote for someone who wrongly thought the election was stolen, as compared to one in five Democrats and a third of independents.

Three-quarters of Americans said they have confidence in their local and state governments to conduct a fair and accurate election, though. Republicans were less likely to say so, but still almost two-thirds of them said they do have that confidence despite extreme rhetoric coming from candidates and people like Trump.

Now by a 53%-to-38% margin, they say it’s better for the government to be controlled by the same party. Democrats, who are seeing their majorities threatened this year, are driving that with 73% saying so, but a slim majority of independents and about half of Republicans feel the same way.

27% of Americans say they’ve already voted, while another 22% plan to vote before Election Day. Forty three percent of people say they will vote in person on Election Day.

The Fate of America as a Faithful Legacy of the First Seventy-One Years of President Donald Trump’s Muove

The biggest questions is whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law will prevail. This is the struggle we are currently in, a struggle for democracy, a struggle for decency and dignity, a struggle for prosperity and progress, and a battle for the soul of America itself.

Biden’s speech Wednesday, delivered blocks from the US Capitol that was ransacked by ex-President Donald Trump’s mob on January 6, 2021, was a strong election-closing argument. There’s an election taking place next week.

Biden told voters that they have the power, and that the fate of the soul of America lies with them.

In the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and the cities all around, the gut check issue is less about self-government than it is about people. It’s the more basic one of feeding a family. This is an election more about the cost of a cart full of groceries or the price of a gallon of gasoline than America’s founding truths.

According to the retiree in Arizona, The price of everything was better during Trump, and they were looking forward to retirement.

Declining stock markets and American’s credit card debt took a hit on Wednesday when the Federal Reserve raised its short-term borrowing rate. There are fears that the Fed may ruin one of the best aspects of the Biden economy, the low unemployment rate.

Biden has stress on the threat to US political institutions posed by Trump, asking voters to prioritize the historical foundation of America’s political system over their own economic fears.

“As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America – for governor, for Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re in,” Biden said. “That is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s not legal. It is not American.

It’s not that Biden hasn’t been also talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.

The president has talked about what he perceives as the threat to democracy posed by Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in previous campaign speeches, but he decided to devote a televised nighttime address to the subject just six days before Election Day to bring more attention to it.

The man has put his own interests first and abused his power. And he’s made the Big Lie an article of faith in the MAGA Republican Party – a minority of that party,” Biden said, being careful not to insult every GOP voter as he did when referring to “semi-fascism” earlier this year.

The president said that the threat was even bigger now than it was in the 2020 election. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America: for governor, Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit – who will not commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re running in,” the president warned.

The backlash against the first Black presidency of Barack Obama caused the White voters who supported Trump to embrace his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal. The 44th president has been making his own searing defenses of democracy and repudiation of Trump on the midterm election campaign trail in recent days.

Biden said you can’t love your country only when you win. The president is right – the essence of democracy depends on the loser in an election accepting the verdict of the people. This is why Trump’s behavior was so noxious in 2020 since his refusal to admit defeat did not just ruin one election. The political system that made America great over two and a half centuries before Trump’s political career caused damage that will last for many years.

The president was speaking from Union Station in Washington, blocks from where a mob tried to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.

President Joe Biden, just days before the crucial midterm elections, stood before the country on Wednesday from Washington’s Union Station and delivered a dire warning.

Biden’s speech placed blame for the dire national situation squarely at the feet of his predecessor, Donald Trump, accusing the former president of cultivating a lie that has metastasized into a web of conspiracies that has already resulted in targeted violence.

Biden’s message Wednesday was anything but optimistic, even as he remained hopeful that Americans would reject the menacing forces he described. Aides said Biden was propelled to deliver the address after an attack last week on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by an intruder who, according to his social media, wallowed in right-wing conspiracies, including about election fraud.

Biden made sure to note that most Americans, and even most Republicans, would not resort to violence. But he said those who would have outsized influence.

“I believe the voices excusing or calling for violence and intimidation are a distinct minority in America,” Biden said. “But they’re loud and they are determined.”

The decision to give a speech on democracy had been contemplated by Biden and his team for a while, but they decided to go ahead because of anti-democratic rhetoric and threats of violence. But the attack on Paul Pelosi deeply alarmed Biden and his top advisers; the shocking home intrusion and attack on Pelosi landed the 82-year-old in the hospital for surgery and he has since been recovering from a skull fracture, among other injuries.

Biden’s Civil War reference hardly appeared coincidental; he was seen this week carrying a copy of historian Jon Meacham’s new book, “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,” which explores how America’s 16th president confronted secession and threats to democracy.

The U.S. Voting Problem and the Repression of Electoral Deniers by Extreme Left Angry Left a Comment on ‘The Last Stand of Democracy’

Extreme Republicans aim to question the legitimacy of elections being held today and into the future. The extreme MAGA element of the Republican Party, which is a minority of that party, as I said earlier, but it’s its driving force. They failed at subverting the electoral system in 2020 and are trying to do it again. It requires denying your right to vote and deciding if the vote counts.

Instead of waiting until an election is over, they’re starting well before it. They are starting now. They’ve emboldened violence and intimidation of voters and election officials. There are hundreds of election deniers on the ballot this year. We can’t ignore the impact this is having on our country. It is damaging, it is corrosive and it is destructive.

Make no mistake, democracy is on the ballot for all of us. Democracy is a covenant. We need to start looking out for each other again, seeing ourselves as we the people, not as entrenched enemies. This is a choice that we are able to make. Disunion and chaos are not inevitable. There has been anger in America before. There has been some level of division in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.

Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party. Billions of people have been shaped by the battle between the desires of the many and the power of the few, between the people’s right for self-seeking, and the self-determination.

Carlson, the First Black Holes: How Do We Recognize the Failure of Democracy? Revealing Our Lives Through the Media Landscape”

This will be “the first election since the events of Jan. 6, when the armed, angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol,” he said. I wish that I could say that assault on our democracy was over that day. But I cannot.”

The line in the speech that was aired by cable news, but not by the broadcast networks, is not a matter of opinion. It does not include a political spin. It is a tragic fact.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The evolving media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.

“There is no such thing as election denying in a free society. It is referred to as free speech. You’re allowed to say it if you think it, period,” Carlson said. “And yet our media, which exists to defend free speech, is doing its best, day after day, to shut it down. How dare you raise any questions about next week’s midterms. Why are you being told that? It is ominous.

Carlson’s rhetoric is easy to dismiss as fringe. To say he is a radical cable news talker is to say that he is not representative of the larger right-wing media universe.

It is understandable that some people don’t care about it. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that so many Americans — neighbors, friends, family members — are being radicalized by extreme voices who are wrestling for control of the Republican Party.

But doing so would be to ignore the forces allowing a cancer to grow in our society. For news organizations, ignoring the toxicity of the right-wing media universe leaves readers without a complete picture of what is happening in the country.

A Rodeo of a Thousand and One: Trump’s 2016 Presidential Candidate Runaways and the Investigating Investigation of the Russia Investigation at Mar-a-Lago

It looks like former President Donald Trump is going to launch another bid for the White House. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail – and top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Trump hopes to be the first president since Cleveland to win two elections in a row.

It would send shock waves through the political world if it were to be announced that Trump was going to run again. One of the most controversial and destabilizing political leaders in modern US history is Trump. His presidency was consequential, as well as the toxic rhetoric and support for conspiracy theories within the GOP, as we have seen with recent Supreme Court decisions.

Any incoming GOP majority would be dominated by pro-Trump radicals. Prospective committee chairs have already signaled they will do their best to deflect from Trump’s culpability on the January 6, 2021, insurrection and go after the Justice Department as it presses on with several criminal investigations into the ex-President’s conduct. And Tuesday’s election could usher in scores of election deniers in state offices who could end up controlling the 2024 presidential election in some key battlegrounds. GOP dominance of state legislatures could further curtail voting rights.

And if Trump announces his candidacy, the Department of Justice is weighing the possibility of announcing a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at Mar-a-Lago. The attacks on Robert Mueller, who oversaw the Russia investigation, will likely not stop Trump. And once Trump is formally a candidate, it will make prosecuting him all the more difficult. Trump is certain to claim that the investigation is just a politically motivated effort to take him out of the running.

If Trump avoids prosecution, he’d surely unleash a fierce assault on the President, who could very well still be struggling with a shaky economy and divisions within his own party. If election deniers get positions of power and Trump gets no punishment for his crimes, he will use loyalists who have been involved in election offices to ensure that victory is his. Trump will also come to the race having been to this rodeo before, which will mean he can perfect the technique and rhetoric that put him into office in 2016. Now that Musk has bought a social media company, Trump might be back in the news again and he might be able to influence and shape the discussion once more. (Trump, who founded Truth Social, where he has been active since he was banned from Twitter, has not publicly indicated that he will return).

The Right Way to Reclaim Our Democracy: Voices from an Old War College on the Crisis of the 21st Century. What Do They Tell Us About the United States?

This weekly column may be signed up as a newsletter. Looking back at the best opinions of the week from CNN and others.

The US Army War College used the acronym VUCA in order to view a world in turmoil. It stands for uncertainties, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Years later, both professors Nate Bennett and G. James Lemoine were quoted as saying, “Hey, it’s crazy out there!”

Biden told reporters that he thought it was going to be difficult. “I think we’ll win the Senate and I think the House is tougher,” he said, admitting life would become “more difficult” for him if the GOP takes control of Congress.

The issues being fought over in the election are exactly the same as the issues the two parties differ on. While Democrats see threats to democratic values in the way inflation and immigration are emphasized by the Republicans, they do not see similar threats in the way that the Republicans do.

The future of democracy is being warned of by Democrats. Losing our Democracy could be permanent if we were to lose inflation. He cited the “Washington Post’s recent reporting that a majority of the GOP nominees on the ballot his year for the House, Senate and statewide office have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election. We have never seen anything like this in our lifetimes – if ever in the history of the United States.”

The economy is top of mind for voters. “It’s nothing new,” wrote historian Meg Jacobs. She pointed out that the first televised political advertisement, for the winning Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, focused on inflation. “In the ad, he talks to an ‘average’ housewife, who complains that ‘high prices are just driving me crazy,’ and Eisenhower promises to fight on her behalf. At the time, inflation was less than 2%.

“The message is clear: As energy companies continue to rake in massive profits, energy has become increasingly unaffordable for lower-income Americans. The federal government needs to take action now to help families maintain access to affordable energy throughout the winter.” He argued that the US should follow the European Union by taxing the excess profits of fuel companies, directing the money toward consumers struggling to pay their bills.

“Obama served up the perfect closing question for voters: ‘Who will fight for your freedom?’” The answer is clearly that the Democratic Party, as the former President pointed out, was threatening reproductive rights and same-sex marriage.

Having Obama make the closing argument may not be a good idea according to a Republican. “Hindsight can be rosy, but Obama’s record of helping down-ballot Democrats is … less than stellar. In fact, Obama presided over the loss of more state legislative seats than any other president in history. It is not surprising that many Democrats don’t want Biden to join them on the campaign trail. They are hoping that Obama will be the one to save them. He may be electoral kryptonite based on his disastrous record.

Midterms Are Vuca Elections And They Are Not: CNN’s My Election Dashboard And Why We Care About The Insurrection

On Tuesday crucial races will determine control of the House, Senate, and hundreds of governorships across the country. You can follow the contests that matter to you and build a custom dashboard with CNN’s My Election tool. Log in or create your free CNN account to get started.

While talking to his fellow officers who defended the US Capitol on January 6, Michael wrote that he noticed that many Americans remained indifferent about the insurrection. In other words, most Americans just don’t seem to care. An overt attempt to end our democracy? I think it’s Meh…

About three-quarters of the states have an initiative on the ballot. Joshua A. Douglas states that democracy is on the ballot in four years. “Not only do we have candidates who have questioned the 2020 election or refuse to say they will accept defeat this year, but numerous states and localities also will vote on measures to change how elections are run or who may vote in them.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Times of Musk: How the ‘Never Trump’ left behind a powerful party and what might it teach us about the future of social media

The Republicans are a strong united party. That unity can’t be shaken. The ‘Never Trump’ contingent didn’t emerge as a dominant force. Indeed, officials such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney were purged from the party.”

“If Republicans do well next week, possibly retaking control of the House and Senate, members of the party will surely feel confident about amping up their culture wars and economic talking points going into 2024. For the GOP to unite behind Trump after a strong showing in the polls, a number of election-denying candidates will need to be defeated.

“All this has made West’s almost casual slurring of Jews all the more appalling. There is an electrical charge of insensitivity in the air, and there is a cultural icon who decided to wave the wire around and hang it around his neck, so that it wouldn’t fall off the pole of his fame.

Musk has spread misinformation, laid off a large share of the workforce and shared the idea of charging users for blue check verification status during his first few days of controlling the social networking site.

“Musk is making the remarkable power that US tech executives hold over our lives, from geopolitics to the health of democracy, painfully tangible to all”, wrote Marietje schake in the Financial Times.

The number of racist and neo-Nazi posts on the site exploded after the sale was confirmed. The accounts linked to Russian and Chinese state media requested that the labels on their posts state as much as be taken down. There was a lot of speculation about if Musk would reverse the account ban for extremists, conspiracy theorists or Donald Trump.

Musk “has placed no limits on his own speech,” wrote former advertising executive Rob Norman in the New York Times, “and, under his ownership, seems likely to enable the inflammatory, provocative and sometimes verifiably untrue speech of others.”

“I know from having represented the world’s biggest buyer of advertising space that advertisers worry about these things a lot. If advertisers worry too much, they could flee, costing the company all of its revenue. Without that money, the future of the platform is at risk and it could be disastrous for Mr. Musk.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

Midterms are Vuca Elections Column Galant: Martha Hickson and the worst year of her working life: How America’s schools can move forward

Martha Hickson, a high school librarian in New Jersey for more than a decade, called it the worst year of her working life. In 2021, protesters showed up at a school board meeting and “railed against ‘Gender Queer,’ a memoir in graphic novel form by Maia Kobabe, and ‘Lawn Boy,’ a coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Evison. They showed isolated images from the book and selected sentences from it.

“Next, they attacked Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The protesters thought it was a plot to lure kids to ruin.

One protester branded me a pedophile, pornographer and groomer of children, and that’s the real sucker punch. After a successful career, with retirement on the horizon, to be cast as a villain was heartbreaking.”

“Even worse was the response from my employer – crickets. The board sat in silence that night, and for the next five months refused to utter a word in my defense.”

Hickson’s piece was the concluding personal essay in CNN Opinion’s series on midterm issues, “America’s Future Starts Now.” Nine education experts also weighed in with thoughts on how to move America’s schools forward.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/opinions/midterms-are-vuca-election-opinion-column-galant/index.html

Divorcing Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen: New faces in the Latin American and Middle East, but with different political views

Elections in Latin America and the Middle East brought back familiar faces. In Brazil, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva “posted a stunning political comeback,” beating the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, Arick Wierson wrote.

Brazilians have faced two different candidates with opposite political views since the end of military dictatorship in the 1980’s. And “it’s clear that a sizable percentage of the voting population didn’t buy into either of their visions for the country.”

Benjamin Netanyahu is likely in position to form a right-wing governing coalition after the election last week put the former Prime Minister on the verge of returning to power.

“Likud is the most stable and durable political party in Israel’s system. Israel is now shaped by the right wing more than it has ever been before, and Netanyahu is the master.

NFL quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen are divorcing, a development that is hardly unusual in the world of celebrity power couples. Yet there’s enormous public interest in the split, Jill Filipovic noted. The “fascination with the Brady-Bündchen divorce comes from the fact that this couple’s split hits a perfect celebrity sweet spot: These are two people who are absolutely nothing like us, but who nonetheless seem to be splitting up over a familiar gender dynamic that is imminently relatable.”

After years of sacrificing so that he could thrive professionally, Brady wants to be able to spend more time with their family, and Bndchen suggests that he may be worried about his health playing a dangerous sport.

This is a familiar and frustrating dynamic: The husband who doesn’t seem to appreciate the sacrifice of taking care of his family when he needs to and the woman who has to go back to work to make sure her husband succeeds.

The Democratic Nightmare of Joe Biden and the Failure of the House of Representatives to Tame Inflation: The Democrat Voting Scenario

Democrats close their midterm election campaign Monday facing the nightmare scenario they always feared – with Republicans staging a gleeful referendum on Joe Biden’s struggling presidency and failure to tame inflation.

It is too early for postmortems. Forty million people have already cast their votes. Modern polling has baked into it uncertainty and no one knows what a red wave will look like. Democrats could still cling onto the Senate even if the House falls.

But the way each side is talking on election eve, and the swathe of blue territory – from New York to Washington state – that Democrats are defending offer a clear picture of GOP momentum.

A nation split down the middle politically, which is united only by a sense of dissatisfaction with its trajectory, is getting into a habit of repeatedly using elections to punish the party with the most power.

The chair of the Republicans said on CNN that the Democrats are crime deniers, education deniers and inflation deniers.

I’m loyal to the democrats but not happy. I just think that we are – we did not listen to voters in this election. And I think we’re going to have a bad night,” Rosen told CNN’s Dana Bash.

It’s a message that resonates strongly in Washington, DC, where the scars of the US Capitol insurrection are keenly felt. And it is undeniably important because the survival of the world’s most important democracy is at stake. The traditions of peaceful transfers of power between presidents were in serious danger due to Trump’s inciting insurrection.

The premise of his domestic presidency and his entire political career has been based on restoring the balance of the economy and restoring a measure of security to working and middle class Americans. His legislative successes could bring down the cost of health care for seniors and create a diversified green economy that shields Americans from future high energy prices amid global turmoil. The benefits will take a long while to arrive. Millions of people are hurting now and have not heard a plan from the president to quickly ease prices.

There is no guarantee that plans by Republicans to extend Trump-era tax cuts and mandate new energy drilling would have much impact on the inflation crisis either. And divided government would likely mean a stalemate between two dueling economic visions. The election turned into a vehicle for voters to stress their frustration with no hope that things will improve soon.

And in practice, there is not much a president can do to quickly lower inflation on their own. The Federal Reserve is in the lead and the central bank’s strategy of rising interest rates could trigger a recession that could further haunt Biden’s presidency.

The Republican Party got what it wanted as Biden was out of the picture when it came to shaping this election because Trump delayed his expected campaign announcement until after the fall, giving him the chance to make a case against the unpopular former president who beat him in 2020. The president could win over voters who still do not like the former president, if he confronted them about his low approval ratings.

It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. That test is next to the growing embrace of violent Extremism in the Republican Party.

And election officials say they feel increasingly on edge, ready not just for the frenzy of Election Day but the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow.

The Wild Side of Early Voting: A Case Study of Nevada, Nevada, and Cochise County, Nev., Attorney General David Hickman, Campaigner and Political Critic

Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Arizona, said that he feels like he has been stabbed multiple times in the back and doesn’t have anything but scar tissue.

The election office in Maricopa has beefed up security in preparation for Tuesday. After being a target of right-wing protests in 2020, the building has been fortified with a new metal perimeter fence. An email was sent last month that said it would look for their personal addresses and references the violence of the French Revolution. The Arizona secretary of state referred to the F.B.I.

When polls close, activists and lawyers will likely challenge the validity of ballots and lose candidates may file lawsuits, which makes the early voting quiet but heightens the risk of disruptions.

It is not hard to spot the potential hot spots. In Pennsylvania, thousands of ballots have been set aside because they do not include proper signatures or dates. The state Supreme Court recently ruled they should not be counted, in response to a Republican lawsuit. But the court also ordered election officials to segregate and preserve them, setting the stage for a future legal fight.

In Wisconsin, a Republican state lawmaker is suing to stop the state from counting military ballots, claiming there are security weaknesses in the system. The Thomas More Society is a conservative legal group that backs the election denial movement.

Some Democrats and outside groups have contributed to litigation, often pushing for an easier method of counting Absentee Ballots and challenging local Republican officials plans to hand-count Ballots.

One plan to count early ballots by hand in Nye County, Nevada has been halted by a lawsuit from the state of the American Civil Liberties Union. In Cochise County, a similar effort is being fought in court.

Even if litigation does not change the results, the 2020 election demonstrated the ability of unsuccessful lawsuits to starkly affect politics in other ways. Many lawsuits filed by Trump campaign lawyers and other people were unsuccessful in court, but they led to the formation of a movement of supporters who believe the elections are rigged. That movement is responsible for much of the activism and paranoia surrounding this week’s election.

In Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, election skeptics have been monitoring the absentee ballot processing, asking questions rooted in conspiracy theories about hacking voting machines.

In Maricopa County, where the first “Stop the Steal” protest was held outside the county Elections Department office the day after the 2020 election, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stationed themselves outside a ballot drop box in Mesa, the Phoenix suburb.

A judge banned members of the right-wing group, Clean Elections USA, from openly carrying weapons within 250 feet of the drop box and from videotaping or photographing voters in Mesa, after issuing a restraining order against them.

“I have never been more intimidated in my life trying to vote and standing only three feet from the box,” the complaint said, according to records released by the secretary of state. Do I need to think about my family being killed if the results aren’t what they wanted?

Two years of legal arguments and talk claims that Democrats stole the election, the Republican candidates and party officials have encouraged their voters to cast their ballots in person on Election Day. When the candidates at a Thursday night rally called for the crowd to vote in person, they were met with a lot of applause.

“I was an absentee, mail-in voter for years,” said Janelle Black, a homemaker from Phoenix who attended the Lake rally. Ms Black thought that the 2020 election had been stolen and she didn’t trust the secretary of state to oversee the process. She wants to vote on “day of” so it’s counted. I don’t want to risk it.

In some states, Republicans’ skepticism about mail ballots may help re-create a “red mirage,” where the votes cast on Election Day are reported first and heavily favor Republicans, while mail-in ballots, which lean Democratic, come in later. It was Mr. Trump who suggested that the Democrats rigged the results two years ago.

But election denial has spread even to places Mr. Trump won handily. Tensions over elections have been rising for months in Northern California, where he won twothirds of the vote in 2020. Local activists have demanded a halt to early voting, pushed to count ballots by hand and sought to require voter ID at polling places — none of which are legal in the state.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/07/us/election-midterm-news/biden-tries-to-shore-up-support-for-hochul-in-the-homestretch

How has the State Election Day Voting Problem affected Shasta County? A.M.E. churches in Georgia have been under the scrutiny for a number of years

The health officer quit and the chief executive resigned in the face of public protest, after the health board denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said she has familiar Election Day worries: A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent some of the 180,000 voters in her mountainous county from getting to the polls.

In a state that has been plagued with intimidation and tension at polls, some community leaders expressed concern over the threats of political violence.

Bishop Jackson, the leader of more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia, admitted that he was uneasy about Election Day. I see people dressed in outfits in Arizona that are intimidating.

In Georgia, more than 60,000 voters have had their registration challenged by fellow citizens under procedures in the voting law. Even though most of the challenges have been thrown out, it has unsettled some Georgia voters, and tossed some off the rolls. Barbara Helm, a homeless woman in Georgia, had her registration removed by the Republican party and was forced to cast a vote on aprovisional ballot. Her dilemma was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But Bishop Jackson was also buoyed by surging turnout in the state, and pointed to efforts of his church and many other voting rights organizations to ensure voters were prepared for the midterms.

The War of the Dems: Joe Biden, the U.S. Capitol Insurrection, Border Security, and Investigations During the 2016 Midterm Elections

Republicans are increasingly bullish on winning big in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as they slam Democrats over raging inflation and crime while President Joe Biden seeks a late reprieve by warning that GOP election deniers could destroy democracy.

Kevin McCarthy, the likely next Speaker of the House if Republicans get five seats in the House, blamed Democrats for the heated political rhetoric as he laid out an aggressive agenda, targeting border security and investigations in an interview with CNN. Some members of his conference want Biden impeached, so he didn’t rule it out.

In a sign of the critical stakes and the growing angst among Democrats, four presidents – Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton – all took to the campaign trail over the weekend.

There will be a rally in Ohio on Monday for Senate nominee J.D. Vance, with ex-president Trump close to announcing a White House bid. In his speech on Sunday, Trump predicted that voters would get an amazing group of people to congress.

The nation’s core values are in danger, because of the Republicans who denied the truth about the US Capitol insurrection and the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, warned Biden, who spent Saturday campaigning with Obama in Pennsylvania.

The president is ending his attempt to stop voters from voting against him at a Democratic event. The fact that he will be in a liberal bastion and not trying to boost an even more vulnerable lawmaker on the last night of the election shows how badly his standing has deteriorated.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party would win both the House and the Senate and accused Biden of being oblivious to the economic anxiety among Americans with his repeated warnings about democracy.

In a speech on Saturday night in Pittsburgh, the president warned that the Republicans were faking concern about the economy and that they would cut social security and medicare if they won a majority.

“Look, they’re all about the wealthier getting wealthy. And the wealthier staying wealthy. The middle class is made to suffer. Under their policy, the poor get poorer, Biden said.

The Donald won’t win: The Trump victory is on the line for Republican nominees whose nomination is to go to the White House with the First Major Flavor Voting Campaign

Fears that Republicans may try to follow Trump in trying to ignore the will of voters even if they lose the election were raised after the president refused to accept the result of the election. Some, like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, have already raised concerns about the integrity of the vote.

A staffer at the headquarters opened a letter containing a white powder on Sunday that was sent by the Republican nominee for Arizona’s governor. Lake’s opponent, current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, condemned the incident as “incredibly concerning.”

The first major clashes of the 2024 GOP nominating contest, meanwhile, broke out in Florida with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding dueling rallies Sunday night. The man who is expected to launch a third White House bid within days was dubbed the “Ron DeSanctimonious” on Saturday.

But the Florida governor chose not to engage, turning his ire instead on Biden and calling his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, “a donkey” while taking credit for defying Washington officials and experts during the pandemic.

As he rallied for Rubio, who is seeking reelection, Trump didn’t repeat his mockery of DeSantis on Sunday but again teased the likelihood of a presidential run. In another sign the next presidential race is stirring, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has long eyed higher office, announced he would not join the Republican primary.

Clinton was stumping for Hochul in Brooklyn on Saturday. The Empire state should be safe territory for his party but Hochul’s closer-than-expected reelection race against Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin underscores the toughness of the national environment for Democrats.

“I know the average election rally is just ‘whoop dee doo do vote for me,’ but your life is on the line. Clinton warned the young people in the audience that their lives were on the line.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/politics/election-eve-campaigning/index.html

What Has Changed and What Hasn’t Changed in a Democratic Republic: The Case of Donald J. D. Trump, the Victim of Totalitarian State-Style Persecusion

A GOP majority would contain scores of candidates in Trump’s extreme image and would be weaponized to damage the president as much as possible ahead of a potential rematch with Trump in 2024. And a Republican Senate would frustrate Biden’s hopes of balancing out the judiciary after four years of Trump nominating conservative judges.

Nobody likes to think that we could live like that. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.

In a democratic republic, real people with real lives, set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym somewhere, check you in, hand you a ballot, and make sure the tabator is ready, even if it’s only for an election, because it’s practical reality.

It’s more likely that the nation will be divided on Tuesday when it votes for an election that is likely to cement the divisions it’s been created by.

The country is often cleansed by elections, where people choose their leaders, and the leaders accept the results.

On the eve of a election in which he isn’t on the ballot, Trump made it all about himself as he claimed that he didn’t want to overshadow Republican candidates. At a rally ostensibly for GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance in Ohio, Trump unleashed a dystopian, self-indulgent dirge of a speech laced with demagoguery, exaggerated claims that America was in terminal decline, and outright falsehoods about the 2020 election. And he laid the groundwork to proclaim he is the victim of totalitarian state-style persecution if he is indicted in several criminal probes into his conduct.

“In our democracy, there is one party that is doubting the outcome of the election, feeding that flame, and mocking any violence that happens. That has to stop, Pelosi said.

McCarthy told Melanie that they will not use impeachment for political purposes. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”

And Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who says he’s in line to be chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations if he wins reelection and Republicans take the Senate, said he’d use the power granted him, in what is likely to be a very narrowly decided election, to further crank up the partisan heat in Washington.

What do we have in common: a magic moment of democratic debates and fierce debates in a divisibility-free world?

There’s something magical about democratic elections, when differences are exposed in debates and fierce campaigns. But there’s mostly, until now, been an expectation that both sides would then abide by the verdict of the people.