Key figures in the Democratic Party increasingly view Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in Ohio this cycle as an important test case for a slew of critical and challenging 2024 Senate races — even if many remain skeptical Ryan can actually pull off a victory on Tuesday.
Ryan’s U.S. Senate campaign, which has kept him neck and neck with Republican venture capitalist J.D. Vance despite Ohio’s conservative lean, the poor overall political environment and a massive outside spending advantage for the GOP, has already become an object of fascination for key operatives and donors. They’re hoping to replicate his economic-focused strategy and his approach to breaking with the national party and progressives.
Vance has opened up a clear but small lead in public polling over Ryan, though the Democrat is persuading a significant number of voters to split their tickets: Polls typically show him running 5 percentage points or more ahead of former Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, the party’s gubernatorial nominee.
That skill is going to be crucial for Senate Democrats in 2024, when they will have three incumbents — Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio — running for reelection in states Donald Trump won by more than 8 percentage points in 2020. The party has another four incumbents running in states Trump won in 2016 before losing four years later. And it has few obvious pickup opportunities, with Republican-leaning Florida and Texas hosting the most vulnerable senators.
Politics in Ohio, like almost all of Democrats’ tough Senate seats in 2024, is dominated by white working-class voters, who have moved sharply toward the GOP during the Trump era. Their prevalence in key presidential swing states and dominance of the nation’s less-populated states has put Democrats at a significant disadvantage in the Electoral College and Senate.
“We can’t write off big areas of the country and expect to win the Senate,” said former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D), who ran 5 points ahead of President Joe Biden as a Senate candidate in 2020 but lost regardless. “I think people are excited about what Tim has been doing.”
Rep. Tim Ryan, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, speaks during a Souls to the Polls rally at Mount Hermon Baptist Church on Nov. 5 in Columbus, Ohio. Key figures in the Democratic Party increasingly view Ryan’s campaign as an important test case for a slew of critical and challenging 2024 Senate races.
Drew Angerer via Getty Images
Ryan has also won admirers among almost the entire Biden-era Democratic coalition, from Never Trump figures such as Republican Accountability Project founder Sarah Longwell to the major labor unions who funded a super PAC backing Ryan to progressives in the orbit of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The donor network that’s built up around LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has been particularly intrigued by Ryan’s campaign, three Democratic sources said.
It amounts to a massive personal political turnaround for the Youngstown, Ohio, native, who long seemed to have far more star potential than actual political direction. A challenge to Nancy Pelosi for leadership of the Democratic caucus fell flat on its face; his presidential run in 2020 fizzled, its most noteworthy moment potentially a misplaced phone call in which he told a reporter Biden was “declining”; he looked and repeatedly passed on statewide bids; and his ideology was difficult to pin down — he once appeared at confabs for the progressive Netroots Nation and the moderate group Third Way in the span of the same month.
All Economics, All The Time
If you’re looking for a quick way to separate Ryan from every other major Democratic Senate candidate this cycle, try this: His campaign never aired a TV ad focused on abortion rights.
That isn’t to say it shied away from the issue. Ryan targeted liberal and persuadable voters with digital ads on the topic, and Republicans have attacked him for not outlining what abortion restrictions he would support in interviews. But for the messages his campaign was quite literally broadcasting to Ohioans, he stuck to economic issues, attacks on Vance and pledges of independence.
“Lots of people have bet on abortion as their get-out-of-jail-free card, and Tim didn’t,” said Irene Lin, a Cleveland-based Democratic strategist who now works for Welcome PAC, which is wooing Republicans on Ryan’s behalf. “He knew kitchen table issues were the winner here.”
His opening ad of the general election is a classic example: Walking through the Youngstown neighborhood he grew up in, Ryan boasts of voting against a trade deal supported by former President Barack Obama and with Trump on trade deals.
“I don’t answer to any political party,” he says in the 30-second spot. “I’ll work with either party to cut costs and pass a middle-class tax cut, because you deserve some breathing room.”
To some Democrats, Ryan’s simple acknowledgment of economic struggle goes a long way, especially in comparison with attempts by many leading members of the party to spin the economy as stronger than how Americans perceive it to be.
“You need to show respect for the economic plight of the working class,” said Bullock, who is now the co-chair of the Democratic super PAC American Bridge. “If you don’t show up and talk about kitchen table issues, there’s a vacuum. And if there’s a vacuum, voters will go for the GOP’s culture war issues every time.”
Breaking With Biden
Ryan has been a steadfast supporter of Biden’s legislative agenda, voting for the bipartisan deals on gun safety and infrastructure, Democrats’ failed attempt to overhaul voting laws, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
But he’s also broken with him on key issues, most recently and notably Biden’s move to cancel $10,000 or more of student debt for borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year. While the administration worked to make sure nearly all of the benefits went to people making less than $75,000 a year, Ryan nevertheless agreed with critics who said it amounted to a slap in the face to working-class voters who would not benefit.
“I think a targeted approach right now really does send the wrong message,” Ryan said on CNN at the time. “There’s a lot of people out there making $30,000 or $40,000 who didn’t go to college, and they need help as well.”
Ryan wants Democrats to talk more about vocational education and bringing back manufacturing jobs — ideas that are regularly featured in Democratic campaign ads in the Midwest, but not as frequently by the party-aligned pundits on MSNBC or CNN.
And some of Ryan’s past missteps have aided him in breaking with the party: Linking him to Pelosi, a favorite Republican tactic, is harder when he challenged her for party leadership. His suggestions Biden shouldn’t run for reelection seem more authentic when he first raised issues around Biden’s mental acuity in 2020.
“If you don’t show up and talk about kitchen table issues, there’s a vacuum. And if there’s a vacuum, voters will go for the GOP’s culture war issues every time.”
– Former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D)
As important as any break with Biden, however, may be Ryan’s decision to ignore criticism from some liberal and Asian American groups after he aired an ad sharply criticizing the impact free trade with China had on manufacturing communities in Ohio. The groups argued the ad was xenophobic and risked inflaming violence against Asian Americans. (Ryan noted he spoke out against violence against Asian-American communities in 2020, and supported a House resolution
“It is us versus China,” Ryan says in the ad, which aired in April and was a compendium of his speeches. “And instead of taking them on, Washington is wasting our time on stupid fights.”
Lin, who is Asian American, said Ryan’s ads were not perfect — he should have specified the Chinese Communist Party rather than simply condemning the country — but said his decision showed seriousness about standing up both to China and to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
“The fact that most Democrats have allowed Trump to have a monopoly on being anti-China is political malpractice,” Lin said. “And it’s maddening to see suburban wine moms and some of my fellow Asian Americans lecture Tim on xenophobia and racism instead of taking seriously all the Ohio towns that have been hollowed out thanks to jobs moving overseas.”
Replicating Ryan
The ability, and desire, of Democratic senators up for reelection in 2024 to replicate what Ryan has done will vary from race to race. Manchin, for instance, does not need to take lessons on how to separate himself from the national Democratic brand. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, on the other end of the spectrum, has a more progressive voting record than Ryan and experience selling it to the Badger State electorate.
And while Republicans’ struggles to nominate high-quality candidates are likely to continue, not every Democrat will get to face a Republican as troubled as Vance — a gaffe-prone millionaire who left Ohio for an extended period of time and seems to be incapable of raising money for his campaign — as their opponent.
Still, 2024 has long loomed over Democrats as a zero year for their problems with the white working class, a year where Republicans could assume long-term control of the Senate. David Shor, the internet-controversial Democratic data scientist, once suggested Republicans could easily win a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority that year while earning a minority of the vote.
Manchin, who has made his affection for Ryan clear by campaigning with him, is already getting started on his reelection, demanding Biden apologize for suggesting coal plants around the country would soon shut down.
“Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” Manchin said. “The president owes these incredible workers an immediate and public apology.”
PUEBLO, Colo. ― It took only a minute for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) to say the magic words: “trickle-down economics.”
“You remember that trickle-down economics, that supply-side economics, that privileging everybody in our in our economy and in our society that wanted to export stuff and make it as cheaply as possible in China and Southeast Asia?” he asked a few dozen loyal Democrats assembled to hear him speak at a historic railroad station on Sunday. “The result has been that for more than 40 years, the economy, when it’s grown, has worked really well for the top 10% of Americans, but hasn’t really worked for anybody else.”
The speech was a hit with the crowd in Pueblo, a blue-collar steel town where the geopolitical landscape resembles the industrial Midwest perhaps more than anywhere else in Colorado.
At one point, an attendee interjected to ask what Bennet was doing to raise corporate taxes. Bennet proudly replied that he had fought to insert the “alternative minimum tax” provision into the Inflation Reduction Act, ensuring that corporations pay at least 15% of their income in taxes.
But Bennet, who is seeking a third full term in Congress, doesn’t change his message based on the audience. He deployed a similar narrative before a statewide audience in his televised debate with Joe O’Dea, his Republican challenger, the Friday night before.
And in an interview with HuffPost after his speech in Pueblo, Bennet used “neoliberalism” ― an academic term for post-1970s market fundamentalism ― interchangeably with “trickle-down economics,” blaming the phenomenon for creating fertile ground for former President Donald Trump’s rise.
“It’s almost inevitable in human history that if people lose their sense of economic mobility, that’s when somebody shows up and says, ‘I alone can fix it,’” he said, quoting Trump’s infamous line.
Colorado is an increasingly Democratic state. President Joe Biden won it by 13.5 percentage points in 2020, compared with Democrat Hillary Clinton’s victory by just under 5 points four years earlier.
Still, Bennet is something of a break with recent tradition in Centennial State politics.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), himself a former governor, come from a long line of centrist, business-friendly Colorado Democrats embodied by former Sen. Gary Hart (D), a leader of what was known in the 1980s as the “Atari Democrats.” They are about as likely to denounce “trickle-down economics” or offshoring in their stump speeches as the Colorado Rockies are to win a World Series.
A commitment to confronting economic inequality “sets [Bennet] apart” from some other Colorado Democrats, said Scott Wasserman, president of the Bell Policy Center, a Denver-based think tank that advocates for progressive economic policies in Colorado. “For me, at least, that’s refreshing,” he said.
But Bennet’s reelection bid tests the appeal of progressive populism in Colorado, including by embracing domestic policy achievements under Biden that Democratic candidates in other states are loath to discuss.
O’Dea’s efforts to run as a relative moderate on social issues make the race an even clearer referendum on liberal economic ideas.
“He doesn’t have the luxury of an opponent that is a pro-Trump crazy opponent, that is a kind of extreme right-wing, ‘the election is stolen’ candidate,” said Anand Sokhey, a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Because Bennet cannot easily run against that like some Democrats around the country, he’s pivoting and distinguishing himself on some other things.”
“But I think also if he had that option ― of just saying, ‘This guy supports Trump and you don’t want that and here I am’ ― it would be a way easier message to communicate,” Sokhey added.
Bennet has made his opposition to “trickle-down economics” a core part of his bid.
Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
‘Things I Didn’t Completely Comprehend’
Bennet’s early career suggested that he would follow in the centrist footsteps of his predecessor, former Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), whom he was tapped to replace when then-President Barack Obama appointed Salazar secretary of the interior in 2009.
Bennet, a Wesleyan and Yale-educated attorney, moved to Colorado in the late 1990s to accept a role as managing director for billionaire Philip Anschutz’s private investment firm. He played a key role in overseeing the consolidation of three bankrupt movie theater chains into the massive Regal Entertainment Group.
Bennet went on to serve as then-Denver Mayor Hickenlooper’s chief of staff and superintendent of Denver’s public schools. In 2009, as governor, Hickenlooper ― a fellow Wesleyan alumnus ― tapped the political newcomer to serve in the Senate.
In keeping with the fiscal austerity craze in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis ― and perhaps his own centrist inclinations ― Bennet made debt reduction a priority during his first year in office. At a time when housing advocates were desperate for the Obama administration to use more of the Wall Street bailout money to help struggling homeowners, Bennet passed a budget amendment reducing the size of the financial industry bailout and requiring the federal government to use any unused funds to pay down the national debt.
Bennet touted the “pay it back” plan in a TV ad during his 2010 run for a full Senate term.
Another 2010 TV spot, “Common Sense,” also reflected Bennet’s efforts to appeal to business-friendly moderates in Colorado.
“Michael Bennet’s a businessman who saved jobs,” the narrator says. “In his year in the Senate, he’s fought for tax cuts for the middle class and helped pass tax cuts for small businesses so they can create jobs.”
Bennet’s campaign website in 2010 even included a section on “entitlement reform,” a term often used by conservatives for making changes to Social Security and Medicare. Referring to those two programs, Bennet wrote, “We must find a way to preserve the integrity of these programs while reducing the increasingly large impact they have on the overall federal budget.” (More recently, Bennet has said that he wants to increase Social Security benefits for the most vulnerable, and sees lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes, among other revenue increases, as the best route for closing Social Security’s funding gap.)
Bennet shakes hands with O’Dea at the conclusion of a televised debate on Oct. 28. O’Dea asked Bennet if he regretted voting for any spending bills in the past two years.
David Zalubowski/Associated Press
As Bennet’s Senate career progressed, he began championing more ambitious and traditionally liberal bills.
In 2019, he introduced what would become his signature policy proposal: expanding the Child Tax Credit for low- and middle-income families with an eye toward eradicating childhood poverty. The American Family Act, which sought to increase federal payments per child by hundreds of dollars a month, became the basis for a key component of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act.
Unlike most other Democrats, Bennet has made the expanded Child Tax Credit, which cut childhood poverty nearly in half, a central part of his pitch to voters. The benefit’s expiration after six months is just another reason to send him back to the Senate to make the tax cut permanent, Bennet argues.
Bennet told HuffPost he is open to compromise with Republicans to achieve his goal, but emphasized that he sees the credit’s “full refundability” ― meaning that it can give a person more cash back than they have paid in taxes ― as essential. For low-income families that already have a negative federal income tax burden, the current expanded tax credit simply amounts to an increase in their incomes.
“It is just inexcusable that the poorest kids in America wouldn’t have the full benefit of the credit,” he said.
Notwithstanding a greater focus on economic inequality in recent years, Bennet has never veered into the most progressive corner of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
For example, rather than get behind Medicare for All, he introduced legislation in 2019 to create “Medicare X,” which would be a public health insurance option that people could buy on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
In fact, Bennet developed a reputation as something of a gladiator against the left wing of the party during his short-lived presidential run in the 2020 election cycle. He used his limited campaign funds to attack Medicare for All, Sanders’ signature policy, in TV ads, ripping it for requiring Americans to drop their current insurance and enroll in a newly expanded federal program.
“The truth is a health care plan that starts by kicking people off of their coverage makes no sense. We all know it,” he said in one spot. “Before we go and blow up everything, let’s try this: Give families a choice ― keep your health care or join a public option.”
“What I have learned during the time that I was in the Senate is that we have the worst income inequality that we’ve had since the 1920s.”
– Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)
Bennet took some flak from Colorado progressives for his decision to not only oppose Medicare for All, but make opposition to it a core theme of his presidential campaign. Some of those critics confronted him in person during town halls in 2019.
“The themes that he campaigned on were awful,” said David Sirota, a Denver-based progressive journalist who worked on Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Sirota called Bennet’s focus on attacking Medicare for All “very discordant from somebody who says, ‘I care about economic inequality.’”
Bennet stands by his decision to run those ads. He said it was precisely his focus on reducing poverty and economic inequality that motivated him to run for president ― and limited his patience for what he sees as the wrong kinds of solutions.
“I have not changed. I still don’t think Medicare for All is a good idea. I don’t think it’s a good substantive idea. I don’t think politically it’s a good idea,” he told HuffPost. “I think reversing the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and having a permanent child tax credit and an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit, having the alternative corporate minimum tax ― those are really good substantively and really good politically.”
But Bennet admits that hearing the stories of working families struggling to make ends meet ― first as superintendent of Denver public schools, and later, as a U.S. senator ― has made him more empathetic to their needs than he was while working in the private sector.
“What I have learned during the time that I was in the Senate is that we have the worst income inequality that we’ve had since the 1920s,” he said, before rattling off a series of economic criteria on which the United States ranks poorly among developed nations. “Those are things I didn’t completely comprehend.”
Nowadays, even Sirota gives him credit for running unabashedly on progressive economic policies like the expanded child tax credit.
“He understands the salience of economic issues, which is more than you can say of most Democratic senators,” Sirota said.
Joe O’Dea appears on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sept. 18 as an image of Trump looms. O’Dea, who is walking a careful ideological line, does not want Trump to run again.
William B. Plowman/NBC/Getty Images
A Republican Joe Manchin?
Most outside experts do not see O’Dea’s campaign to unseat Bennet as especially competitive.
Bennet has maintained consistent polling leads over O’Dea, including a 14-percentage-point edge among likely voters in a recent University of Colorado, Boulder, poll.
Perhaps as a result, donors have been warier of investing in O’Dea. As of late October, Bennet outspent him by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
The super PAC gap is equally great, with Bennet getting outside support worth about $19 million, compared to just over $9 million for O’Dea. Tellingly, the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC affiliated with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has stayed out of the race.
“I will be surprised if [Bennet] falls short,” Sokhey, the University of Colorado political scientist, said.
But unlike many of the statewide Republican candidates expected to lose in an otherwise strong cycle for the GOP, O’Dea’s underdog status is not due to any glaring flaws he has as a candidate.
With the mantra that he is a “carpenter and a contractor” rather than a “politician,” O’Dea has tried to make the election a referendum on Biden, whose approval numbers are underwater in Colorado, and on inflation, which he says the Bennet-backed spending legislation has fueled.
Bennet “dumped $1.9 trillion into our economy that’s caused record inflation,” O’Dea said in an Oct. 28 debate at the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins. “Compound that with a war on energy fully backed by Michael Bennet and Joe Biden that’s caused record inflation on gas and diesel prices directly reflected in the fertilizer price.”
He also asked Bennet if he regrets voting for any of Biden’s spending bills. Bennet replied that he regrets the inflation people are experiencing, but cast blame for it on “broken supply chains” and oil company price gouging, rather than big spending bills. (Bennet supports legislation that would impose a “windfall profits tax” on large oil companies and invited O’Dea to do the same.)
O’Dea even managed to turn an exchange about Trump into an opportunity to rip Biden. When Bennet asked him why, after voting for Trump twice, O’Dea has said that he doesn’t want the former president to run again, O’Dea implied that Trump’s candidacy would get in the way of defeating Democrats like Biden and Bennet.
“I started thinking about Joe Biden serving another four years, and you serving another six years and I gotta tell you: It’s terrifying,” O’Dea said.
At least one swing voter with whom HuffPost spoke found O’Dea’s anti-inflation message compelling. Fred Lewis, a retired federal employee and registered Republican from Greenwood Village, said he voted for Biden in 2020 because he found Trump “scary.”
Now he’s voting for O’Dea. “I’m tired of what the Democrats are doing here,” Lewis said. “They’re spending too much money.”
Indeed, to many Colorado Republicans, a business-minded conservative like O’Dea is exactly the kind of person who can appeal to moderate Democrats and independents in a highly-educated state where Trump was unpopular.
Dr. John Sacha, a Denver spinal surgeon who had come to hear O’Dea and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) speak at an alpine-themed bar on Oct. 29, believes that O’Dea’s relative leniency on issues like abortion is a good fit for Colorado Republicans.
“We’re liberal Republicans,” he said. “We’re more middle of the road on social issues, but we’re far right when it comes to everything fiscal.”
To appeal to those voters, O’Dea supports codifying same-sex marriage in law and said he would back federal legislation codifying abortion rights up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother after that cutoff point. He also said he would have voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill and wants to give Dreamers ― undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children ― legal status, albeit only as part of a comprehensive bill that improves border security.
“I’m going to use my seat like Joe Manchin has used his seat to get good things for West Virginia.”
– Joe O’Dea, Republican Senate nominee for Colorado
Rather than Trump or a member of the Republican GOP Conference, O’Dea cites Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) as a model for the kind of independence he plans to embody as a senator.
“When I’m in the U.S. Senate, I’m going to use my seat,” he said at the Oct. 28 debate. “I’m going to use my seat like Joe Manchin has used his seat to get good things for West Virginia.”
O’Dea has to strike a difficult balance between attracting moderates and keeping his conservative base happy. Bennet continues to attack him as an out-of-step radical, citing O’Dea’s opposition to the bipartisan gun control legislation Congress adopted this year, his 2020 vote for a failed state-level referendum banning abortion after 22 weeks without exceptions for rape and incest, and his support for additional tax cuts for the rich.
At the same time, social conservatives are hardly enthusiastic about going to the polls for O’Dea.
Curt Clifton, a retired engineer from Aurora who was wearing a Trump hat, said he did “not particularly” like O’Dea, “but I don’t like the Democrat a whole lot worse.”
His wife, Cathy, a retired nurse and anti-abortion activist, is also going to hold her nose while voting for O’Dea. “I don’t really know if he’s against abortion at the last minute ― at 38 weeks or 40 weeks or something,” she said.
Another factor working in Bennet’s favor is the presence of Brian Peotter, a Libertarian Party candidate, on the Senate ballot. O’Dea clearly sees Peotter as a greater threat to his share of the vote than to Bennet’s.
“The bottom line is: a vote for the Libertarian is a vote for Michael Bennet,” O’Dea told HuffPost after his event with Christie. “And I know all those libertarians, none of them have anything in common with Michael Bennet.”
In part due to third-party candidates, Bennet has never received more than 50% of the vote.
But whether those candidates, who have included left-leaning Green Party nominees in the past, have hurt Bennet more than his opponents is unclear. In 2016, the Libertarian nominee received 3.6% of the vote ― not enough to cover the gap between Bennet and his Republican opponent even if all of them had voted Republican instead.
In reality, O’Dea’s biggest obstacle is the same partisan polarization affecting Democrats in increasingly red states. It’s the kind of political force of nature that makes it unlikely that Rep. Tim Ryan (D) will win in Ohio’s Senate race, or that Rep. Val Demings (D) will win in Florida’s Senate race, despite their strengths as candidates.
When a state’s tribal identity shifts in a more decisive partisan direction, it becomes harder for voters to see any candidate outside of that lens ― especially in congressional races.
“Is [O’Dea] actually going to be able to get much of the crossover vote?” Sokhey said. “Probably not, in the era of polarization that we’re in.”
On the other hand, if O’Dea prevails against the odds, he is likely to be held up as a model for GOP success in similarly difficult terrain. His victory would also speak to the extent of the political backlash to inflation and its perceived link to Biden’s policies.
“If Bennet loses, it’s a very bad night for the Democrats nationally, and it’s probably a bad night for them in Colorado in some other dimensions too,” Sokhey said.
DURHAM, N.H. – Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Friday said Democrats should deal with the “debt ceiling” in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, removing the threat of an economic armageddon for the rest of President Joe Biden’s term.
“We need to act during the lame duck. We cannot let the Republicans take our economy hostage and use it as leverage to take away Social Security and voting rights from people,” Warren told HuffPost at a campaign event for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) in Durham, New Hampshire.
Federal law bars the government from borrowing more than a certain amount of money, forcing lawmakers to periodically raise or suspend the “debt ceiling” to prevent a federal debt default, which could cause a financial crisis and economic chaos.
Since the government runs a budget deficit every year, the total amount of accumulated debt keeps going up. The next debt ceiling deadline will come sometime next year, though the precise date is uncertain because incoming tax revenue can be unpredictable month to month.
But one thing is certain: If Republicans retake the House of Representatives, they will refuse to support a debt ceiling increase without extracting major policy concessions from Democrats.
When Donald Trump was president, Congress raised the debt ceiling three times. Democrats did not demand concessions. But Trump has been encouraging Republicans to use the debt limit as ruthlessly as possible.
Several others in the Democratic caucus have said they shouldn’t leave the debt ceiling to next year and let Republicans take the world economy hostage. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said this week that dealing with the debt limit before new lawmakers take office in January would be “a wise course of action.”
Separately, a group of House Democrats said in a letter to party leaders this week that Congress should pass a permanent debt ceiling solution before next year. One option would be to simply repeal the limit; another would give the Treasury Department unilateral authority to deal with it.
But dealing with the debt limit in the “lame duck” session of Congress would require either 10 Senate Republicans to go along or Democrats to use a time-consuming reconciliation process, which could interfere with priority legislation such as bills protecting same-sex marriage and changing the way Congress certifies elections. Ten willing Republicans would be hard to find, and Democrats seemingly did not agree among themselves when they had the opportunity to use reconciliation last year.
Another obstacle: President Joe Biden, who has said he opposes getting rid of the debt ceiling.
“That would be irresponsible,” he said last month.
“That is wrong,” Colbert said. “If you’re going to show up to my door and intimidate me, at least let me buy a few boxes of Thin Mints.”
Colbert called some of them “cosplay crossing guards” because they wear special vests and carry fake badges. At some homes, they attempted to interrogate the residents about who lived there. And at one residence, they were accused of demanding the location of the family’s daughter.
“Hot tip,” Colbert said. “The good guys usually aren’t the ones banging on your door screaming: ‘Bring out your daughter!’”
Winfrey made the comments during a virtual voting event with community leaders Thursday, part of her OWN Your Vote initiative to encourage Black women to participate in elections.
“If I lived in Pennsylvania, I would’ve already cast my vote for John Fetterman, for many reasons,” Winfrey said during the Zoom call, The 19th News’ Jan Staley reported.
HAPPENING NOW: I’m watching @oprah online event to mobilize voters. She just told people tuning in: “If I lived in Pennsylvania, I would’ve already cast my vote for John Fetterman, for many reasons.”
HuffPost has reached out to Winfrey’s team for comment.
The endorsement is a notable shift for Winfrey, a longtime friend of Oz who helped vault him to national fame, initially as doctor guest on her talk show.
When she first welcomed Oz onto her daytime show in 2004, she referred to him as “America’s doctor” and gave him a national platform to promote health advice. She was responsible for launching his “Dr. Oz Show” in 2009 under her Harpo Productions banner, which made Oz a household name.
Winfrey has been relatively quiet on Oz’s bid, simply saying last year: “One of the great things about our democracy is that every citizen can decide to run for public office.”
“Mehmet Oz has made that decision,” she said at the time. “And now it’s up to the residents of Pennsylvania to decide who will represent them.”
On Thursday, Winfrey said she supported many Democrats running around the nation, including Rep. Val Demings, who’s running for a Senate seat in Florida; Beto O’Rourke, challenging the Texas governor; and, in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock, who’s running for reelection, and Stacey Abrams, who’s seeking the governorship.
“If we do not show up to vote, if we do not get fired up in this moment, the people who will be in power will begin making decisions for us,” Oprah said during the event, according to Today. “Decisions about how we care for our bodies, how we care for our kids, what books your children can read, who gets protected by the police and who gets targeted.”
“And right now, you have a say in these things we do,” she added.
BRADDOCK, Pa. ― John Fetterman has no shortage of fans in the small steel town where he served as mayor for 13 years.
The Democratic Senate nominee’s most dedicated supporters often have stories of his gallantry.
When Marcie Gans was fired from her job a few years ago, she fell $1,200 behind on her mortgage. To avoid foreclosure, Gans began selling her worldly possessions in a yard sale.
Gans invited Fetterman to check out her sale items, but he offered to lend her the money, rather than purchase items he didn’t need. Months later, having recovered financially, Gans tried to pay Fetterman back. He refused.
“He said, ‘It’s nobody’s business, but I live off a big trust fund, and I help other people with it. And I appreciate you. Help somebody with your money,’” Gans recalled. “That’s the type of person he is!”
(Fetterman does not technically have a trust fund, but his parents’ insurance industry fortune heavily subsidized his work in Braddock.)
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman takes photos with supporters Aug. 12 following a rally for his U.S. Senate bid at the Bayfront Convention Center in Erie.
Nate Smallwood via Getty Images
Denise McClinton, a resident of neighboring Rankin, remembers Fetterman’s work helping her children graduate from high school and get jobs while he was running a program for high school dropouts prior to becoming mayor. “He did more than anybody else would for them.”
Rodney Surratt, who owns a small landscaping business in Braddock, credits Fetterman with giving him paid work to beautify the town. “He got my vote ― I wish I could vote again and again.”
After more than three terms as mayor, Fetterman was elected lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2018. He now faces Republican Mehmet Oz in the U.S. Senate contest.
Fetterman’s tenure as Braddock mayor has been a cornerstone of his pitch for higher office. He promises to champion Pennsylvania’s forgotten cities and towns because, he says, he already has the experience of reviving a borough that much of the state had written off as irreparable.
A map of Braddock from the late 1800s hangs on the wall at Peppers N’At, one of the town’s few restaurants.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
A “For sale” sign hangs on a storefront in Braddock; a large sign for the local Rotary Club chapter stands along the main street in Braddock; and horse shoes are advertised in a vacant lot in the business district.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Fetterman used his family wealth to found a nonprofit, Braddock Redux, that circumvented the local government to buy up and revive abandoned properties that could then be leveraged for additional private and public investment. The result is a revived downtown artery, Braddock Avenue; the arrival of popular community services like the Free Store erected by Fetterman’s wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman; and a national interest in the town that has even lured new employers.
“There has been some change since he was here,” Hope Pickens, who grew up in neighboring North Braddock, said after Sunday services at the Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church in Braddock on Oct. 16. “There’s light and traffic and people moving around, and you can go shopping and go into a store.”
But some residents say that Fetterman generated more hype for his achievements than they deserved, especially given the persistence of poverty and crime in the town.
“The gentrification that you see around has never really reached the people, so that there are people here who are still struggling while there are businesses that are thriving,” said Demetrius Baldwin, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant who grew up in Braddock and still lives here.
Annette Baldwin (left) listens to the sermon at Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church on Oct. 16 in Braddock. At right, Demetrius Baldwin sits on steps along the street where his grandmother Annette lives.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Doing ‘A Lot In A Short Time’
Growing up, Annette Baldwin, 84, remembers Braddock Avenue as a bustling strip of commercial activity. There were three movie theaters, “shoe stores galore,” and plenty of places to dine and enjoy an adult beverage. On at least one occasion, Frank Sinatra performed at one of the night clubs, according to Baldwin, a retired school district secretary and Democratic Party activist.
“Everybody came to Braddock because it was here,” Baldwin, who is Demetrius’s grandmother, told HuffPost over coffee after services at the Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church.
Braddock thrived for so many years as a hub for neighboring boroughs along the Monongahela River ― a region known locally as the “Mon Valley” ― thanks to its central place in the steel industry. In 1875, Andrew Carnegie chose Braddock as the site for hisEdgar Thomson Plant, his first steel mill.
As the steel industry declined, Braddock’s fortunes fell as well, first gradually and then precipitously, in 1978, when the Carrie Blast Furnaces in neighboring Rankin ceased operation.
U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Plant has been active in Braddock since 1875.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Braddock is now home to just over 1,700 residents ― down from its peak of nearly 21,000 in 1920. About 70% of the town’s residents are Black descendants of Southerners who migrated north for opportunity in the early and middle 20th century. The plumes of smoke that emerge periodically from U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Plant, which operates with a fraction of the workforce it once employed, are the last living remnant of Braddock’s storied industrial past.
It was this Braddock where Fetterman arrived in 2001 in the hopes of helping disadvantaged kids. He started a GED program for the community’s high school dropouts.
Fetterman, a conspicuously tall white man from central Pennsylvania, encountered his fair share of skepticism.
“When he first came here, he came kind of with a black cloud,” recalled Lisa Baldwin, an Allegheny County employee and real estate broker, who was also at Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church. (Lisa is Annette’s daughter, and Demetrius’ mother.)
“This is a Black town,” she said. “And so here’s another white male coming into our town ― like, ‘Who is this?’”
Lisa Baldwin sings during a service at Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church. She’s Annette’s daughter and Demetrius’ mother.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
But Fetterman slowly won residents over through his dedication to the young people and his use of his family’s insurance industry fortune to host giveaways of Christmas gifts, school supplies and bicycles for Braddock’s children.
When two of Fetterman’s GED students were gunned down, Fetterman decided to run for mayor in 2005. He ended up surpassing Virginia Bunn by one vote in the Democratic primary. (Both candidates outperformed incumbent Mayor Pauline Abdullah.)
The structure of Braddock’s borough government does not give mayors much power beyond overseeing the police department and breaking tie votes on the council.
Once elected, Fetterman nonetheless came into conflict with members of Braddock’s political establishment, who saw him as a self-interested white interloper.
Rather than work with them, he used his Braddock Redux nonprofit, erected with his share of the family fortune, to circumvent them. The nonprofit would buy up properties that were either abandoned or in disrepair and use them to subsidize private development or turn them into community spaces.
Some locals resented that Fetterman’s plans were not the product of a democratic process.
For example, in 2009, Fetterman agreed to let Levi’s Jeans film some TV ads in the town that made the town’s decaying infrastructure seem like an exciting frontier of American reinvention. Rather than pay the borough government for the privilege of filming, Levi’s contributed more than $1 million to Fetterman’s nonprofit. The money went toward the funding of a community farm, the town library and the renovation of an old church that opened as a community center in 2010.
Filmmaker Tony Buba, who now lives in West Braddock, takes issue with the decisions Fetterman made when spending money from his own nonprofit.
Nate Smallwood for HuffPost
The Braddock Carnegie Library, seen through the stained-glass windows of the Braddock community center.
Nate Smallwood for HuffPost
“There was no community discussion of where that million dollars was going to go,” said Tony Buba, a filmmaker who grew up in Braddock and now lives in neighboring Braddock Hills. More community input might have prompted Fetterman to prioritize making the building accessible for people with disabilities over restoring the old church’s stained-glass windows, Buba lamented.
In fact, local Braddock government agencies solicited community input for the church renovation plan beginning in 2004, though it is unclear how much influence community stakeholders had once the Levi’s money came in.
The building does lack complete wheelchair accessibility and is undergoing additional renovations to become more wheelchair accessible.
Regardless, many residents of Braddock say that improvements in the town’s infrastructure would not have occurred without Fetterman’s leadership, including his willingness to work around the borough council for the sake of efficiency.
Referring to the members of the borough council during Fetterman’s early years as mayor, Gans said, “These are people who finally got on council and did nothing ― nothing!”
The community center is now home to Aunt Cheryl’s Café, a lunch spot that opened in 2016. Cheryl Johnson, a former Braddock resident who now lives in Penn Hills, would not be able to sustain the business without the discounted rent she receives from Fetterman’s nonprofit, which still owns the community center building. For several years prior, Fetterman had allowed her to use the space free.
“He’s done a lot in a short time,” Johnson said.
Cheryl Johnson, owner of Aunt Cheryl’s Cafe, pays a discounted rent for her restaurant space in the community center building.
The old Ohringer Building, a shuttered furniture store with a classic neon sign, has become housing for artists, with a gallery on the ground floor. The building that once housed Hollander’s drug store has become the Hollander Project, a co-working space and business incubator founded by Fetterman’s wife, Gisele.
The Ohringer, which once housed an eight-story furniture store, now has apartments for artists. There’s an art gallery on the ground floor.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
And, of course, even Fetterman’s harshest critics admit that the Free Store ― another Gisele brainchild ― is one of the lasting achievements of Fetterman’s mayoralty. The store, housed in recycled shipping containers, is a depot of donated clothing and other household items ― from dog food to baby formula ― that provides all comers a chance to walk away with whatever necessities catch their eye, free of charge.
When HuffPost visited the Free Store on Oct. 18, there was a line of people waiting outside on an unusually cold day to peruse the day’s offerings as Gisele Fetterman and other volunteers organized the items and tended to customers.
Following her husband’s nearly fatal stroke in May, Gisele campaigned in his stead while he recovered for a few months and she continues to engage with the press frequently on behalf of the Senate campaign.
In an interview just outside of the store, Gisele, an immigrant from Brazil, told HuffPost that she came up with the idea to start the Free Store in 2012 because when she first arrived in the United States, she had been a “dumpster diver” and “curbside shopper.”
Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the wife of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, came up with the idea for the Free Store, drawing on her experiences as an immigrant.
Nate Smallwood for HuffPost
“I just knew that that could help so many other people as well,” she said. “So I wanted to create a space where all that can happen and be a really loving, supportive and dignified space.”
For Terrance Murtaza, a retired school bus monitor, who walked away with several items, the Free Store also provided an essential gathering place. And while the facility is Gisele’s brainchild, Murtaza identified it as a part of her husband’s legacy as well.
“He accomplished a sense of unity within the community where people can come out and not only come to the Free Store, but they can come out and help each other and they can also see exactly what’s going on with people, how bad things are for them, especially older people,” he said.
Volunteers sort donated goods outside the Free Store.
Nate Smallwood for HuffPost
Goods offered at the Free Store in Braddock come from donations, and volunteers help run the facility.
Nate Smallwood for HuffPost
Other Fetterman family projects have elicited a rockier reception. In 2013, Fetterman began collaborating with star chef Kevin Sousa to launch what, at the time, would have been Braddock’s only sit-down restaurant. He agreed to give Sousa free use of part of a former Superior Motors car dealership for the business. (Fetterman and his family live in a separate part of the shuttered car dealership compound.)
After several delays, the restaurant, simply named Superior Motors, got up and running in 2017. Sousa, who agreed to train and employ Braddock residents, served small and pricey haute-cuisine dishes that catered mostly to more affluent diners from outside of the borough.
Braddock residents were entitled to a 50% discount on every dish, but few Braddockites who spoke to HuffPost seemed aware of that.
“Superior Motors was a failure,” said Shayla Wolford, who works at Aunt Cheryl’s Café and was otherwise extremely positive about Fetterman’s tenure. “People that live here can’t afford it.”
Amid the strain of a COVID-19-related closure, Sousa severed ties to the restaurant in August 2021. Despite some indications from the project’s investors that the restaurant would reopen in a new form, nothing has yet taken shape.
A sign on the side of the former site of Superior Motors, a shuttered high-end restaurant that closed in Braddock a year ago. The chef had been given free use of the space.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Starting around 2009, Fetterman began getting national attention for his work in Braddock.
Rolling Stone called him the “mayor of hell.” The New York Times used the gentler moniker “Mayor of Rust.” And The Atlantic hailed Fetterman’s “record of success in revitalizing Braddock.”
The magazine profiles, along with some TV segments, tended to exhibit a kind of lurid fascination with Fetterman, a 6-foot-8 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of governance who wore Carhartt and Dickies apparel because he was a man of the people. Fetterman’s forearm tattoos, with Braddock’s ZIP code and the dates of violent deaths that occurred on his watch as mayor, also figure prominently in those accounts.
“The audience was enchanted,” the Times wrote of the reception to a speech Fetterman delivered at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival. “Here was a guy in biker boots bringing the Park Slope (Aspen, Marin, Portland, Santa Fe) ethos — organic produce, art installations, an outdoor bread oven — to the disenfranchised.”
Fetterman’s aesthetic and knack for public relations were unique. But in some ways, he was simply taking a trendy model of local governance in post-industrial towns to new heights.
In the absence of a national economic development strategy for struggling municipalities or the ability to deficit-spend their way onto sounder fiscal footing, cities and towns are forced to compete with one another for corporate investment or financing from nonprofit benefactors.
“That’s the menu of options that Fetterman or anyone else in his situation has at their disposal,” said David A. Banks, a lecturer in geography and planning at the University at Albany.
That predicament is especially acute in the Mon Valley, where there are myriad small and impoverished municipalities that sustain their own public services rather than pooling their resources for maximum efficiency.
Shuttered businesses along the main street in Braddock on Oct. 16.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Fetterman himself acknowledged the reality of courting philanthropists with whatever tools he had.
Praising Levi’s for its contribution to Braddock through his nonprofit following the filming of their TV ads, Fetterman told NPR in 2010, “If someone wants to give me $100 million, I’ll kiss their ass and call it ice cream.”
“These small towns’ only competitive advantage that can’t be outsourced is fundamentally their own history and identity,” said Banks, author of the forthcoming book “The City Authentic,” which examines how cities commodify their history to woo young professionals. “Braddock being very central to the history of manufacturing, and specifically steel, in the United States, Fetterman found a way to both turn that into a positive by taking that history and making it a theme that artists and restaurateurs could use to do the things they’re already doing.”
But if Fetterman was simply playing the hand he was dealt as mayor of a troubled small town, the criticism his approach elicited is also a common reaction to these public relations-fueled development strategies.
Part of the strategy of attracting private or nonprofit investment in a town like Braddock is to play up its mystique in the press and paint a picture of the town in the imagination of investors, nonprofit donors and prospective newcomers that is not necessarily the same as the reality experienced by longtime residents.
“Any mayor in these sorts of situations will always take more credit than they’re due. It’s part of the job,” Banks said. “A lot of it is faking it ’til you make it.”
Rev. Vincent Martin, pastor of Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church, says he has mixed feelings about the credit Fetterman gets.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Rev. Vincent Martin, the pastor of Holliday Memorial AME Zion Church and a resident of Pittsburgh, described having mixed feelings about the credit that Fetterman received for his mayoralty. He suggested that Fetterman’s identity as a white man had helped draw attention to Braddock that it had not previously received. That was ultimately a positive thing, even if the reasons for it were unfair, according to Martin.
“There’ve been workers and people trying to do things, but it never broke through until he became the face of that thing and that became a point of recognition for the outside,” Martin said.
Years after his mayoralty, though, some Braddock residents told HuffPost that they tire of media outlets continuing to depict Fetterman as a larger-than-life white rescuer.
“A reporter asked me, ‘What is it like to be rescued?’” said Chardae Jones, who succeeded Fetterman as mayor of Braddock from 2019 to 2021 and is supporting his bid for Senate.
“They were serious,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Have you ever seen the interior of Braddock? Because it’s like ‘The Twilight Zone.’ It’s been the same forever.’”
Indeed, even as Braddock Avenue became a livelier thoroughfare for commerce under Fetterman’s leadership, the town’s progress on core human-development indices has been mixed at best.
Braddock’s population declined from more than 2,000 people in 2010 to just over 1,700 people in 2018, the last year of Fetterman’s tenure as mayor.
Over that same period, the percentage of people in the town with incomes below the federal poverty level declined modestly, according to census data. But when the poverty rate drops from 37.4% in 2010 to 35.7% in 2018, economic hardship remains so prevalent that some residents do not see much progress.
“He didn’t have to live here in Braddock. Why would he come slumming if he didn’t have an interest in us?”
– Marcie Gans, retired home health aide
“Nothing’s been done. There’s been no jobs created. It’s not safe,” said Isaac Bunn, founder of the nonprofit Braddock Inclusion Project and son of the late Virginia Bunn, whom Fetterman defeated by one vote in his first mayoral race. “The only ones who’ve benefited from him being a famous politician on the backs of saving the Black community is him and his family and his nonprofit. Other than that, nothing really tangibly has been done.”
In her interview with HuffPost, Gisele Barreto Fetterman mocked the idea that her husband had moved to Braddock in 2001 with a scheme to leverage his work there into a career in higher office.
“Four terms he spent as mayor ― that was his long-term plan, right? He came here to teach GED so that one day he could run for lieutenant governor,” she mused sarcastically. “I think it’s important to look at who the critics are and what their motives are, but it’s a free country.”
Fetterman’s many defenders also note that the Fetterman family decided to stay in Braddock in 2019, rather than move into the lieutenant governor’s mansion in Harrisburg. Gisele also spearheaded an effort to open the mansion’s pool up to the broader public.
“He never left,” observed Annette Baldwin.
The Fetterman family’s commitment to the town is simply something that cannot be faked, according to Gans.
“Why would he pick us? He didn’t have to live here in Braddock,” she recalled replying to Fetterman’s skeptics on the borough council. “Why would he come slumming if he didn’t have an interest in us?”
A padlock secures a door on a shuttered storefront in Braddock.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
‘Running On My Record On Crime’
Fetterman has touted his success in reducing violent crime in Braddock more than any other aspect of his 13-year tenure as mayor.
From the moment Oz, his Republican Senate opponent, began accusing him of trying to free too many convicted criminals as chair of Pennsylvania’s board of pardons, Fetterman shot back with TV ads recounting how two of his GED students’ murders inspired him to run for mayor in the first place.
“I worked side by side with the police, showed up at crime scenes,” Fetterman says in one 30-second spot. “We did whatever it took to fund our police ― and stopped gun deaths for five years.”
Braddock indeed went more than five years, from 2008 to 2013, without a murder in its boundaries.
“I am a Democrat that is running on my record on crime,” Fetterman has taken to saying in his stump speech.
Today, when asked about Fetterman’s public safety legacy, people living in and around Braddock focus on the same tattoos marking local deaths that have become an indelible part of his national image.
A billboard in Braddock, with a line at the bottom that says “Paid for by Doctor Oz for Senate,” takes a shot at John Fetterman’s campaign.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
Some Braddock residents told HuffPost that they fondly remember Fetterman’s efforts to make the town safer simply through his constant presence on the town’s streets.
“He just did the work,” Shayla Wolford said. “He was out here all the time ― crime scenes, things like that, funerals ― he was there. He tried to make everybody else care.”
But Fetterman’s zeal for reducing violence in Braddock led to the biggest scandal of his political career.
While standing outside with his son on a late afternoon in January 2013, Fetterman heard what he describes as a “crushing burst of gunfire” coming from an area known as a hub for gun violence. Spotting a man jogging nearby with a face mask, Fetterman, armed with a shotgun, pursued him in his pickup truck and detained him until the police arrived. The man, Christopher Miyares, was Black and turned out to simply be jogging, unarmed.
Miyares claimed that Fetterman pointed the shotgun at his chest, but Fetterman denied it. Fetterman has refused to apologize for his actions, claiming that he was trying to faithfully execute his duties as mayor and that due to Miyares’ attire, which concealed most of his skin, he was unaware of Miyares’ race when he decided to pursue him.
“I made a split-second decision to call 911, get my son to safety and intercept an individual, the only individual out running from where the gunfire came, and intercept him until our first responders arrived as Braddock’s chief law enforcement officer and as the mayor,” Fetterman said in a Democratic primary debate in April, shortly before his stroke.
Most people with whom HuffPost spoke in Braddock were either ambivalent about the 2013 incident or outright sympathetic to Fetterman.
Lisa Baldwin characterized herself as “right in the middle” between his critics and his fiercest defenders.
“I understood why he did it, but at the same time, had it been a white guy, would you have done it?” she wondered. “Because that’s always in the back of our minds.”
Gans believes that Fetterman responded reasonably.
“If I couldn’t take the crime … and I live way up on the border [of town], how do you think he felt, and he had young kids?” asked Gans.
Chartia Worlds, 36, the sister of Christopher Miyares, an unarmed Black man whom John Fetterman pursued after hearing gunfire in 2013, stands near her home in Turtle Creek, Pa., on Oct. 16. She criticizes Fetterman for not apologizing for the mistaken pursuit.
Justin Merriman for HuffPost
But Chartia Worlds, Miyares’ sister, is still angry about the incident ― and Fetterman’s response to it.
“The problem is, he didn’t get in any trouble,” she told HuffPost. “He didn’t apologize.”
Worlds, a food service worker, grew up in Braddock but now lives with her kids in neighboring Turtle Creek. She still frequents the Free Store from time to time and describes Gisele as “lovely.”
Worlds is not sure she can bring herself to vote for Fetterman, though. If she does cast a ballot for him, she won’t do it enthusiastically.
“You just pick the lesser of two evils,” she said. “That’s how I feel.”
A Georgia voter decked out in a Donald Trump hat got lost in some twisted logic in a new video from the prankster duo known as The Good Liars.
Comic Jason Selvig asked the voter to justify his support in light of the accusations, and… well… just check out what happened:
The Good Liars are known for their viral moments, including one where they trolled National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre during the organization’s convention.
When the coronavirus began spreading in the United States, the 23 schools in the Central Bucks School District were forced to shutter to keep students and staff safe. When students eventually returned to classrooms, they were still following safety measures like masking and social distancing.
Many parents in the wealthy, majority-white Bucks County refused to accept the new reality — and they made their opposition known at school board meetings.
“We had this fairly active group that was coming in to make public comments, speaking at every meeting,” Karen Smith, who represents some of the towns that make up the district for the board, told HuffPost. “And they were adamantly opposed to wearing masks.”
The battles over masks and COVID safety measures — which Smith saw as commonsense steps to keep kids and staff safe — became so heated that they inspired her to become a Democrat after six years on the school board as a Republican.
As time went on, Smith noticed school board meetings that were supposed to be about pandemic policies veering in very different directions: primarily, toward anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and panic over “critical race theory.”
Residents would come to public meetings and read excerpts from books they wanted to ban, cherry-picking explicit passages so they could accuse the libraries of having pornographic material.
“They take ‘Genderqueer’ and they open it up to the page where there is a dildo blow job, but they don’t talk about the rest of the book or what the book is even about,” Smith said, referring to Maia Kobabe’s bestselling book that describes their journey to figuring out they’re nonbinary.
The entrance to the Central Bucks School District’s administrative building in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
When the school board election rolled around in November 2021, and five seats were up for grabs, the divide was clear. Democratic candidates generally ran on COVID safety, while Republicans candidates bolstered their campaigns by claiming the mantle of “parental rights,” which included anti-masking, vitriol about gender identity and outrage about CRT, a college-level academic theory that conservatives claim is being taught in public schools and used to teach white children to hate themselves.
The parental rights crowd won out, and the Central Bucks school board became a 6-3 conservative majority.
With that came a tangled web of proposals designed to silence anyone who isn’t white, straight, cisgender and conservative, including rules to dictate what teachers can wear and how students can express their gender identity and sexuality.
Conservatives may be preaching about specific issues — like so-called sexually inappropriate library books being made available to students — but the whole movement is about destabilizing public institutions like schools.
This dynamic is playing out in school districts across the country, especially in reliably red states. But in perennially purple Pennsylvania, the moral panic over social justice and books with LGBTQ themes is happening against the backdrop of critical midterm races that could determine the state’s political leanings for years to come. Republican Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor who is vowing to fight cancel culture, is facing Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) in a tight Senate race. And for governor, far-right state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Christian nationalist who has advocated for banning books, is up against Democratic state Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
The school board proposes a controversial new library policy
About eight months after the conservative majority took over the school board, dozens of Bucks County residents gathered before a vote on Policy 109.2, which lays out the criteria for removing books from school libraries and, critically, allows anyone in the district to challenge any book and potentially get it pulled from circulation.
More than two dozen people made public comments during the meeting, mostly to voice their opposition to the proposed policy.
“An apology to the three of you who are trying your damnedest to live up to your oath and protect the lives of children,” English teacher Stephen Albert said to the Democrats on the board. “But to the majority: At long last, have you no sense of shame?”
The room erupted in applause.
But the conservatives weren’t swayed, and the policy passed. There was scattered applause in the room, as well as a few boos. Meeting attendees yelled “Shame!” and “Shame on you!” as they filed out.
“Look at the adults we have in the room,” a Republican board member said sarcastically, reprimanding the people opposed to the policy.
Policy 109.2 was enacted in July, but educators, staff and residents are still waiting for the board to clarify who will be in charge of determining the fate of challenged books.
Smith voted against a proposal to allow anyone in the school district to challenge any library book and potentially get it pulled from circulation.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
Smith was one of the votes against the library proposal. “No, absolutely not,” she said when she stepped up to vote.
The evidence of Smith’s new liberal leanings are clear both inside and outside of her home: She has a big rainbow flag flying outside, pro-reading bumper stickers on her cars and a tote bag declaring “READ BANNED BOOKS” next to her desk.
“These are human rights issues and the rights of our students,” Smith said. “I’m not going to be quiet about that.”
During the public comment section of one school board meeting last November, two residents made transphobic and antisemitic statements. Smith tried to cut off a man making antisemitic comments, but other board members pushed back and said she was infringing on residents’ First Amendment rights.
Many of those same conservative school board members were throwing their support behind the book-banning and censorship policy just a few months later.
Bucks County parents fight back
Kate Nazemi, who has two children in Central Bucks schools, is in staunch opposition to the new book policy. In September, she organized a parade against book banning.
Like Smith, she noticed a shift on the school board when the pandemic began. When experts said masking and social distancing would keep staff and students safe, conservatives pushed back and said they were wrong. When school librarians chose books with care for their students, the conservative majority said those books were inappropriate or pornographic.
“I called it the COVID formula: Belittle the experts in the field, and then say we don’t need to listen to them, we can figure it out our own way,” Nazemi said while sipping coffee in a busy cafe in Doylestown, the county seat.
“There’s this narrow worldview that is being applied to all 17,500 kids. It’s limiting kids’ access to books, materials and discussions in the classrooms,” she added. “How are these kids supposed to think critically about issues and develop as humans, if they are so limited in what they’re able to read and discuss and learn?”
Kate Nazemi, a mother of two children in the Central Bucks School District, is seen at her home in Doylestown on Nov. 1. Earlier this year, she organized a local parade in protest of book bans.
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a complaint against the school board on behalf of seven students, alleging widespread discrimination and hostility toward LGBTQ students.
In the complaint, the lawyers say that the school board does things that actively harm LGBTQ students, including removing Pride flags and directing teachers not to use preferred names. They specifically call out the library book policy, saying it’s “a thinly disguised effort to censor LGBTQ+-themed materials.” The school board president responded by asking the ACLU to reveal the names of the students filing the complaint.
The U.S. Department of Education has opened up an investigation.
“The board members are not interested in a democracy,” Nazemi said. “What they want are either one of two things: public schools with Christian values, or public schools that fail so badly that we can then use our tax dollars to pay for private school.”
Some parents are worried that schools will be more likely to go down this path if Mastriano is in the governor’s mansion.
At an October hearing at the statehouse, parents from all over Pennsylvania testified in support of a parental rights bill that Mastriano had put forth. The bill says it aims to give parents more say in how public schools are run, but critics say it’s an attempt to silence and bully LGBTQ students and families.
His supporters showed up with campaign buttons on their clothing. Mastriano, who was present at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot but maintains he did not enter the U.S. Capitol building, is running a far-right campaign that aims to stoke fear of immigrants, liberals and transgender people among his fan base.
“What’s happened to us where bureaucrats get to decide how your kids identify? Pronoun games have no place in schools,” Mastriano said at the statehouse, apparently forgetting that grammar is a core part of schooling. “This has to end. Madness has come in. Parents have the last say, period.”
Various parents expressed similar thoughts. “School administrators all over the country, including Pennsylvania, have decided parents should be excluded from vital conversations with regard to their child’s education and well-being,” said Megan Brock, a parent from Bucks County.
Democratic state Sen. Maria Collett represents the 12th District, which includes CBSD. She didn’t participate in the parental rights bill hearing, even though she is a member of the state government committee.
“The people of the 12th District elected me to use my time, energy and resources to better their lives,” she said. “Not to legitimize horseshit.”
She is unabashed in her criticism of the conservatives leading the charge in the outrage over books.
“They distract, they deflect, and they make up a story about a boogeyman that is trying to lure your kid into an alley with a pornographic book,” Collett said from her office desk, which features a photo of herself and President Joe Biden.
“They don’t have answers to the problems that are plaguing Pennsylvania,” she added. “That’s why they’re so fixated on identity politics.”
Collett said her constituents aren’t calling her to complain about library books or rainbow flags in schools — they’re more worried about issues like Social Security benefits and unemployment plans.
Evidence of the “anti-lockdown” to “critical race theory panic” to “book-banning” pipeline can be found all across the country. What began as the idea that wearing a mask was an affront to freedom morphed into a panic about teaching kids about racial privilege in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, then seamlessly became an effort to censor books with racial justice or LGBTQ themes.
Conservatives on the Bucks County school board want “one of two things,” Nazemi says. “Public schools with Christian values, or public schools that fail so badly that we can then use our tax dollars to pay for private school.”
Rachel Wisniewski for HuffPost
The book bans came first as a trickle, then as a storm. According to PEN America, the past year saw a record number of book challenges in schools and libraries across the country. State lawmakers proposed bills and made lists of books they wanted to ban; parents claimed that schools and libraries were filled with sexually explicit books, and that anyone who didn’t stand with them was aiding and abetting child abuse.
Why are books in school libraries the latest target for conservative ire? Books are democratizing. They help students expand their worldview. And if your end goal is control over society by any means, having a well-read and well-educated public is not in your best interest.
Although the Bucks County border is just 10 miles from Philadelphia, more than 80% of the 646,000 residents are white. The wealthy suburb typically leans Democratic, but the school board has lurched to the right in just one election cycle ― and some residents worry that the shift will only continue, especially considering Mastriano’s influence on the state.
Even if he loses the race, Mastriano and the CBSD are setting the stage for Pennsylvania to become a blueprint for conservatives in other states, not unlike how conservative education policies in Florida and Texas have provided a playbook for Pennsylvania’s GOP.
“We will still have like Mastriano-style politics here on the school board until the next election,” Nazemi said.
“We have one of the candidates saying, ‘I want to model us after a state we’ve seen pass really damaging legislation that is hurting children, teachers and parents,’” Collett said. “If we don’t stand up and say, ‘No, not on my watch,’ then we all become complicit.”
Obama, who spoke in front of a Milwaukee crowd on Saturday, slammed 2020-election-denying GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels while calling on residents to not boo — but vote — during the rally, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The former president also delivered a storm of criticism toward Johnson as he questioned the senator’s relatability with voters due to his support of a tax plan that allowed people to write off the costs of private jets on their tax returns.
“His adult children bought not one, not two but three private planes. Because apparently carpooling wasn’t an option,” Obama said of Johnson’s children.
Obama later went after Johnson on Social Security as he claimed the senator wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and supports a plan that puts Medicare and Social Security “on the chopping block.”
“The point is some of you here are on Social Security, some of your parents are on Social Security, some of your grandparents are on Social Security, you know why they have Social Security? Because they worked for it,” Obama said.
“They worked hard jobs for it, they have chapped hands for it, they have long hours and sore backs and bad knees to get that Social Security,” Obama said. “And if Ron Johnson does not understand that… he should not be your senator from Wisconsin.”
Mike Doyle, a Republican, is running to represent the Pittsburgh area in Congress.
Mike Doyle, a Democrat, is also retiring after representing the Pittsburgh area in Congress for 27 years.
Oddly, a first-time Republican congressional candidate shares his name with a long-serving Democratic congressman, and the potential for confusion at the ballot box has Summer Lee’s campaign on the offensive.
Lee, a progressive Democrat, is running against the Republican Doyle for control of Pennsylvania’s 12th, which was redrawn along with districts across the country after the 2020 Census. The problem is that many people in the new 12th district were part of the old 18th district, which was repped by the Democratic Doyle.
Summer Lee, a progressive Democrat running for U.S. House in western Pennsylvania, fears voters will confuse her opponent, Republican Mike Doyle (left), for the outgoing Democratic congressman Mike Doyle (right).
Lee’s campaign released a short video Wednesday to try to set the record straight.
“I’m running against an extreme anti-choice, pro-NRA Republican who wants to cut Social Security & Medicare,” she tweeted. “Your vote in #PA12 is a vote for a far-right GOP majority or against it.”
“We always knew it was going to be an issue,” Lee’s campaign manager, Abby Gardner, told HuffPost.
Campaign staffers saw “an uptick in confusion” among residents in the area after mail-in-ballots went out to voters in early October, she said.
Let’s clear up the confusion.
I’m running against an extreme anti-choice, pro-NRA Republican who wants to cut Social Security & Medicare.
He also shares a name with retiring Congressman, @USRepMikeDoyle.
West Pennsylvania resident Anita Gordon, 79, told HuffPost she filled in the oval for the Republican Mike Doyle on her mail-in ballot by accident. She only realized her error when checking Nextdoor, the neighborhood social media app.
“I liked the Democratic Mike Doyle. I mean, he had been in Congress for quite some time,” Gordon said. “I had no idea. To think that there would be a Republican with that name ― that was unbelievable.”
Asked whether she thought the Republican candidate’s campaign had been clear about his political position in its messaging, Gordon replied, “I can’t say yes.”
Gardner told HuffPost that she believes the Doyle campaign is not going out of its way to make a clear distinction between the Democratic veteran and the Republican newbie. She said that some voters told her they just weren’t thinking when they saw Doyle listed as a Republican, because Pennsylvania allows candidates to cross-file to multiple parties in certain other elections, including school board and judicial seats.
“I think the entire purpose of his campaign is to confuse people. I think they’re not interested in clarifying, because his website does not identify that he’s a Republican. His literature doesn’t identify that he’s a Republican. His yard signs say, ‘Democrats for Doyle.’”
The Doyle campaign did not return HuffPost’s request for comment.
Back in May, Doyle told an opinion columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that “it felt too much like a gimmick to run against the current congressman ― also named Mike Doyle ― in a head-to-head race.” He said he decided to throw his hat in the race after the incumbent announced his retirement and the borders of the district shifted to be less favorable to a Democratic candidate.
“My name is on the ballot,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette two weeks ago. “But it’s not me. There is a gentleman with the same name as me who is running in the new 12th District, which is part of the old 18th District. That’s about the only thing we share in common is the same name.”
PHOENIX (AP) — Phoenix police have made an arrest in connection with a burglary at the campaign headquarters for Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor.
An officer saw a news story with surveillance photos of the suspect and recognized him as the man arrested for a burglary at another office in the area, police said. The officer contacted the jail to ensure the 36-year-old suspect would not be released and re-arrested him for the burglary at Hobbs’ office.
The man had items missing from Hobbs’ office with him when he was arrested for the unrelated burglary, said Phoenix Police Sgt. Phil Krynsky.
Police have not said whether the theft was politically motivated.
Hobbs’ campaign manager, Nicole DeMont, has said items were taken during the burglary, but the campaign has declined to say what they were.
Hobbs is in a tight race against Republican Kari Lake, a former television news anchor. Hobbs has received death threats stemming from falsehoods over the 2020 election in Arizona, which she oversaw as secretary of state.
In a statement Wednesday, DeMont blasted Lake and her allies for “spreading dangerous misinformation and inciting threats against anyone they see fit,” but stopped short of blaming Lake or her supporters for the break-in.
Lake summoned reporters to her office Thursday for an “emergency press conference” and lectured journalists for reporting on the break-in and DeMont’s statement without evidence it was tied to Lake.
Stephen Colbert spotted some alarming news in Michigan, where Republican candidate for governor Tudor Dixon is making book bans a central part of her campaign.
Dixon has issued overblown claims about certain books, calling them “pornographic” and even stating that some school library books were “describing to children how to have sex.”
“She’s right. We looked it up,” Colbert said with as straight a face as possible. “And there are a lot of classic children’s books teaching kids about doin’ it.”
Then, he gave several classic children’s books an X-rated makeover in his Wednesday night monologue.
Warning: you might never look at some of these the same way again.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump continually attacks Mitch McConnell with childish insults, yet with two weeks left before the midterms has spent just a tiny amount on behalf of Republican candidates compared to the Senate GOP leader.
The former president’s Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC has, through Wednesday, reported a total of $8.5 million spent for Republican Senate candidates — barely 4% of the $204.5 million that McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund has spent, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
If Trump’s PAC continues spending at the rate it did for the first half of October, and even if all that money comes from his Save America “leadership” PAC rather than outside benefactors, Trump would still be left with more than $80 million available for his own personal or political use after the midterms.
Trump’s staff did not respond to HuffPost queries. Weeks ago, they touted the new super PAC as a way for Trump to “spend heavily” to help Republicans win back Congress.
Trump has spent $1.2 million attacking Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), $1.6 million opposing Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and $1.1 million going after Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). He has also spent $1.6 million and $2.3 million attacking John Fetterman and Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate nominees in Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively, and another $706,000 boosting Blake Masters, the GOP nominee in Arizona.
Indeed, in all five races, the Republican nominee is Trump’s choice, based almost entirely on a willingness to spread Trump’s lies that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him through voter fraud. In each of those five states, Republicans may have had a stronger chance of winning had a more mainstream candidate wound up as the nominee.
The Mitch McConnell-connected Senate Leadership Fund super PAC has doled out 25 times as much for Republican candidates than Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again Inc.
Yet even in most of those states, McConnell’s PAC has vastly outspent Trump’s. In Georgia, for example, the Senate Leadership Fund has already spent $33 million attacking Warnock. It has spent $29 million attacking Ryan in Ohio, $22 million on Cortez Masto in Nevada, and $42 million on Fetterman in Pennsylvania.
Only in Arizona — where McConnell had been hoping to persuade termed-out Gov. Doug Ducey to run against Kelly, only to have Trump chase him off for failing to help him steal the election there — has the Senate Leadership Fund not played a role. The group has also spent heavily in Wisconsin, North Carolina and New Hampshire, states where Trump’s group has not spent anything.
Trump soured on McConnell from the day the Electoral College certified his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden and McConnell congratulated the president-elect. McConnell delivered Trump a severe scolding on the Senate floor after the mob Trump had incited attacked the Capitol in his last-ditch coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, but within days worked to make sure that Trump would not be convicted by the Senate following his second impeachment.
Despite having effectively saved Trump’s political career with that action, McConnell since then has nevertheless borne repeated insults from Trump, who calls him “the old crow” and urges Republican senators to dump him as their leader in the next Congress. Most recently, Trump also attacked McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, with a screed that called her “Coco Chow” and alluded to her Chinese heritage. Chao served as Trump’s transportation secretary until she resigned after Jan. 6.
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol ― his last-ditch attempt to remain in office ― killed five, including one police officer, injured another 140 officers and led to four police suicides.
Nevertheless, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.
The scenario that keeps Adrian Fontes up at night goes something like this: It’s December 2024, a month after President Joe Biden has, by all honest accounts, narrowly won reelection. A tight race came down to Arizona and its 11 Electoral College votes, which pushed Biden across the 270-vote threshold necessary to secure a second term.
But Mark Finchem, after winning Arizona’s secretary of state race in November 2022, has refused to certify the results of Biden’s second consecutive victory in the state, just as he suggested he would. Four years after embracing the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, Finchem has followed through on his pledge to keep Democrats from “stealing” the election again.
“What happens to our democracy?” Fontes asked in a recent interview. “It’s upturned.”
Democrats like Fontes, a former elections official and Finchem’s opponent in Arizona’s Nov. 8 secretary of state contest, are desperately seeking to prevent that scenario from having any chance to come to fruition.
The problem is particularly stark in places like Arizona, one of three swing states ― along with Michigan and Nevada ― where election deniers won GOP nominations for both secretary of state and attorney general.
The ability of election deniers to triumph in GOP primaries has heightened the stakes of typically sleepy down-ballot races, and Democrats in recent weeks have more clearly laid out the implications to voters: The 2024 presidential election and American democracy as a whole, they have argued, hang in the balance of this November’s races.
“These are the offices that make democracy work,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), whose Republican opponent, attorney Matthew DePerno, spread conspiracy theories that electronic voting machines were rigged against Trump; met with Trump officials in Washington, D.C., on the day of the 2021 Capitol insurrection; and launched legal challenges seeking to overturn the results in one Michigan county.
“If we have the wrong people in these offices, it’s not just that democracy won’t function well,” Nessel said. “We won’t have a functioning democracy at all.”
From left, Kristina Karamo, candidate for Michigan secretary of state, Mark Finchem, candidate for Arizona secretary of state, and Jim Marchant, candidate for Nevada secretary of state, attend a conference on conspiracy theories about voting machines and discredited claims about the 2020 presidential election at a hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, Sept. 10, 2022.
Jim Rassol via Associated Press
Many experts have long considered the decentralized nature of the U.S. election system ― in which the country’s political contests are managed at the state and local level ― an important safeguard against the type of takeovers that have turned other democracies into so-called “competitive authoritarian” states. That term is used to describe nations that hold elections and maintain the pretense of democracy, but in which one party uses its power to create and maintain distinct advantages that render political opposition effectively powerless.
That diffuse system, however, has now become “the soft underbelly of democracy” in the U.S., said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political science professor and a co-organizer of Bright Line Watch, an academic collective that monitors and highlights risks to the country’s democracy.
“The lack of centralization made it hard to rig an election simultaneously across the country,” Nyhan said. “But it also means that the system is permeable. That institutional choice has turned out to create a terrible vulnerability right now.”
It has also given the GOP a massive structural advantage. The Republican Party’s near-total capitulation to its authoritarian impulses has left Democrats as the only bulwark against democratic collapse. To vanquish the threat that Republicans pose to the 2024 election and democracy as a whole, Democratic candidates need to win every race ― at least in major battleground states. Republican election deniers, by contrast, only have to win one such race in order to open the door to the kind of scenario Fontes describes.
“We’re in this position where the poor Democrats have to win every election, have to run good candidates and not make mistakes…just to save democracy,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political science professor and the author of “How Democracies Die,” a book originally published in 2018. “That’s not a position we want to be in.”
Democrats would have to win numerous razor-thin races in order to pull off a clean sweep of swing state contests against the GOP’s most prominent conspiracy theorists.
Polls in down-ballot races are limited, but the Arizona secretary of state’s race is a dead heat, with Finchem holding slight leads that land within the margin of error. In Nevada, former state Rep. Jim Marchant, a Republican, holds a lead in the secretary of state’s race. Marchant has spread conspiracies about the 2020 contest, said he wouldn’t have certified the outcome of that race, and waged a legal challenge seeking to overturn his own loss in a congressional race two years ago.
The Democrats’ prospects look better in Pennsylvania, where Republican election denier Doug Mastriano would appoint the secretary of state if he won his bid for governor. He is currently trailing state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) by roughly 10 points in polling averages.
In Michigan, incumbent Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) leads her election-denying opponent, Kristina Karamo, according to polls. The attorney general’s race between Nessel and DePerno, however, is within the margin of error.
Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania collectively represent a critical 51 Electoral College votes, and in a close race, any one state could prove decisive.
The GOP’s embrace of election lies remains broadly unpopular. Sixty percent of independents and 54% of voters overall say they wouldn’t be comfortable casting a ballot for a candidate who spread election lies, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday.
Overall, however, voters appear to be prioritizing economic issues, including rising inflation, over the maintenance of democracy, and the first midterms of a new presidency historically favor the party not in the White House. In a two-party system, that has made election denial a more powerful political force than it might be in a multiparty democracy.
“In a democracy, both parties win,” Levitsky said. “In a democracy, inflation and crime rates piss people off, so they vote for the opposition party. But right now, when we vote for the opposition party, it’s a bunch of authoritarian thugs. That’s the risk: As long as the Republicans are an authoritarian party, every midterm election is going to be that way.”
Democrats like Fontes and Nessel have tried to make those risks clear to voters. A hostile secretary of state like Finchem, Fontes argued, could cause a litany of problems even before it came time to certify an election result. He could decertify electronic tabulation machines, or overhaul the election procedures manual that acts as a rulebook for election officials across the state. Fontes warned that Finchem and the GOP-controlled Arizona legislature could further target mail-in voting, the method by which roughly 90% of Arizonans typically cast ballots.
“We’ve been running against the guy who has basically said he’s willing to pick the winners, and stop people from voting, to muck up the system on purpose,” Fontes said of Finchem. “He has said it repeatedly and in a variety of different ways.”
DePerno, who won Trump’s endorsement in the Michigan GOP primary, is currently under investigation from the state attorney general’s office, which in August alleged that he helped orchestrate a scheme to improperly access and tamper with election machines in three Michigan counties. A special prosecutor is overseeing the case.
As attorney general, DePerno could “wreak havoc” on Michigan’s contests, Nessel said, leaving the state vulnerable to the sort of conspiratorial election challenges that DePerno helped lead in 2020.
“This is a man that has spread more misinformation and disinformation in his career than any attorney that I’ve ever seen. He was hand-selected by Donald Trump in order to do his bidding,” Nessel said. “This is a man who does not even believe in the basic concept that we’re a democracy, that the person who gets the most votes wins an election. And he’s demonstrated that over and over again.”
The Times/Siena poll, however, found that while nearly three-quarters of American voters believe democracy to be under threat, few regard it as a major concern in this election. Democratic candidates acknowledge that it’s been tough, at times, to persuade voters that their democracy is truly in peril.
“I have shouted this from the rooftops, and I’ve done that ever since the experience I had in 2020,” Nessel said. “But candidly, sometimes I feel like I’m screaming into the wind.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is among the Democrats running against Republican election deniers this November. Her opponent, Matthew DePerno, led legal challenges that sought to overturn the 2020 election and is under investigation for allegedly tampering with voting machines.
Bill Pugliano via Getty Images
More than half of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen, and nearly half have little confidence that the 2022 elections will be legitimate, according to an Associated Press poll released this week. Nearly three-quarters of GOP voters are fine voting for an election denier, the Times/Siena poll found. That GOP voters want anti-democratic candidates, or at least will tolerate them, has made reaching across the aisle for pro-democracy votes almost impossible.
A third of independent voters, meanwhile, are comfortable voting for an election denier, the Times/Siena poll found, and just 7% consider democracy their top priority ― potentially making it difficult to convince such voters that contests like the Arizona secretary of state race are existential battles for the country’s future.
“It’s kind of hard, because when you run around screaming ‘The sky is falling,’ not a lot of people want to listen,” Fontes said. “Even if the sky is actually falling, and people really do need to be paying attention.”
Many Americans, Nyhan said, may not realize how close Trump came to actually stealing the 2020 election. Instead, people might lean on the more comforting idea that the country’s democratic institutions ultimately held ― and will do so again.
“Sometimes people have taken too much confidence from what happened in 2020, and they say, well, it would be hard to steal an election,” he said. “But you don’t have to steal it in the sense of literally stuffing the ballot box. All you have to do is create confusion and doubt. And I think that’s unfortunately a much lower bar to clear than convincingly stealing an election.”
Voters’ prioritization of other issues over fundamental questions of democracy is something frequently seen in countries where democracy is on the brink.
“Americans are broadly supportive of democracy in the abstract,” Nyhan said. “But at the same time, they may not have well-developed views about exactly what it means. And they may trade off those relatively abstract values for factors… that are closer to their core concerns.”
Across the world, he said, voters have proved “a weaker constraint on authoritarianism than we might hope.”
Democrats running for Senate or Congress, or to be a state’s governor, can prioritize other policies that match voters’ concerns. But that’s a tougher task for down-ballot candidates for whom the economy isn’t really a central responsibility of the office they’re seeking.
In an effort to broaden their appeal, Nessel and other Democratic attorney general candidates have presented themselves as bulwarks against the GOP’s aggressive anti-abortion policies in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade this summer. Nessel has also touted her efforts to target price gouging amid concerns about high gas prices.
Fontes, meanwhile, has leaned on his background as the county recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. He oversaw the county’s elections in that role, and says he’s introduced himself to voters as an official who’s “done this before and isn’t trying to upset the applecart.”
Democrats remain hopeful that their warnings will alarm voters who are just now tuning in to down-ballot races that don’t often garner much attention early in campaign cycles. The party’s campaign arms ― the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and the Democratic Attorneys General Association ― have brought in record fundraising hauls that could help boost candidates in the final stages, and individual campaigns are financially well-positioned for the stretch run.
Democrats have also sought to turn voters’ attention to the contests in the closing stages of the race. Every Eligible American, an affiliate of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, recently launched a campaign aimed at young voters, who typically turn out in lower numbers for midterm elections. “Go Down for Democracy,” as the campaign is known, is laced with humor and sexual innuendos ― a recent ad promoting vote-by-mail is called “Lick It & Stick It” ― that its focus groups say are more likely to engage millennial and Generation Z voters than traditional campaign messaging.
“You’ve just got to tell them, then you just keep telling them and keep telling them and keep telling them,” Fontes said. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was a lot of pressure. But it’s the battle of our generation.”
“We will be looking to the American people to decide if they want to live in a democracy, or if they don’t,” he said. “It’s a binary choice. There’s no middle ground here.”
A Pennsylvania recovery counselor said that his participation on a recent panel with Mehmet Oz, the state’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, was enough to be “swayed away” from voting for him.
Justyn Patton, a certified recovery specialist for DreamLife Recovery PA, was a member of an Oz “Safer Streets Community Discussion” panel in the City of Johnstown on Tuesday, The Tribune-Democrat reported.
Johnston is located in Cambria County, which has ranked among the counties in Pennsylvania with the highest per-capita overdose deaths, the newspaper said.
Oz spoke to the panel – which featured doctors and recovery professionals – about the problem of illegal drugs in the U.S. including the movement of potent, China-sourced synthetic opioid fentanyl coming in from the U.S.–Mexico border, the newspaper reported.
Cambria County District Attorney Greg Neugebauer, right, talks to Dr. Mehmet Oz, Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, on what he deals with as a district attorney dealing with drug related crimes during a Safer Streets Community Discussion on Tuesday.
Todd Berkey/The Tribune-Democrat via AP
Oz, who is running against Democratic opponent John Fetterman for a seat in the U.S. Senate, claimed there’s been a dramatic increase in fentanyl coming across the border, adding that law enforcement officials have confiscated more fentanyl than they did two years ago.
Patton recognized the GOP candidate’s claim about drug trafficking before also pointing to the pharmaceutical industry for its hand in the crisis years before.
He later told ABC’s senior White House correspondent Mary Bruce that he didn’t hear a plan from Oz and claimed the candidate addressed “the same old” points on detox and securing the border.
Patton, who said he came into the panel as an undecided voter, said the event changed his mind.
“You just spent about an hour on a panel with Dr. Oz and that swayed you away from him?” Bruce asked.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” said Patton, who described himself as “insulted.”
You can watch a clip from the panel, and Bruce’s interview with Patton, below.
Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” is off this week, but the Colbert-produced “Tooning Out the News” animated series dropped a wild new segment with an unexpected ― and unwitting ― guest star.
Given the claim, Smartwood decided to call Walker to report a crime.
R.J. Fried, co-creator of the show and the voice of Smartwood, wrote “this is real” on Twitter, and a spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast that the show actually got Walker on the phone.
“The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah took a look at some of the latest political campaign ads, including one that left him speechless.
It was a new spot from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) that features the cops coming for a woman who once had an abortion. Noah described it as “one of the most hardcore campaign ads you’ve ever seen.”
Noah was silent for about 6 seconds after the spot ended before finally letting loose with a “holy shit.” And that wasn’t the only ad that surprised him.
Check out his look at the latest political ads in his Tuesday night monologue:
WASHINGTON — If Republicans win control of the U.S. House of Representatives next month, they could hold the government’s credit hostage to force spending cuts ― including to programs like Social Security and Medicare.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other lawmakers said this month they’ll use the federal government’s “debt ceiling” to try to pry policy concessions from Democrats.
“And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, OK, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” McCarthy said. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?”
The debt ceiling is a legal limit on the amount of money that the federal government can borrow in order to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. Raising the debt limit doesn’t create new spending, it just prevents the government from defaulting on its debts.
A federal debt default would be unprecedented in modern times and could have catastrophic economic consequences. Republicans used it as leverage during the presidency of Barack Obama, but not when Donald Trump was president. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, debt ceiling drama is back.
“The debt ceiling is the natural place from which you can operate to affect spending change,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told HuffPost earlier this month.
The Treasury Department has said Congress will have to deal with the debt ceiling again sometime next year, though the timing is imprecise because it depends on somewhat unpredictable fluctuations in federal revenue and outlays.
Republicans threatened to block a debt limit increase last year, but 14 Senate Republicans ultimately voted in favor of allowing Democrats to raise the ceiling by themselves with a simple majority vote. Such an outcome would be much more complicated if Republicans control the House.
Republican House members vying to chair the House Budget Committee in the event of a GOP House majority told Bloomberg Government that they would use the debt limit to try to make Democrats agree to changes to Social Security and Medicare. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), for instance, said he favors raising the eligibility age for both programs.
Social Security and Medicare provide monthly cash and medical benefits to older Americans, and past proposals to cut the programs have proven unpopular before lawmakers abandoned them. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund faces a shortfall in 2028, while Social Security’s trust fund will remain solvent until 2034, according to the latest projections.
In 2011, Republicans won “discretionary” spending cuts as part of a debt ceiling standoff with Obama. The discretionary side of the federal budget is smaller than the “mandatory” side that includes programs like food benefits, Social Security and Medicare. The cuts affected a range of government services, including grants for Meals on Wheels programs that delivered hot meals to the elderly and disabled.
Even if Republicans won the House and the Senate, Democrats would retain the ability to block legislation in the upper chamber, and President Biden would still have a veto pen, but Republicans would likely bet that Democrats would agree to their demands rather than risk a debt default, which could roil financial markets.
One influential Democrat, House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.), told HuffPost this month that Democrats would consider handling the debt limit in a lame-duck session before the end of the year rather than give Republicans the opportunity to threaten to blow up the economy next year.
But Democrats have so far passed up opportunities to make the debt ceiling less of a nuisance by raising it by a huge amount or simply abolishing it.
President Joe Biden plans to promise to codify Roe v. Wade into law if Democrats manage to add Senate seats and hold control of the House of Representatives in November, making it the first bill he would send to the new Congress.
Biden will make the pledge at a Democratic National Committee event Tuesday afternoon at The Howard theater in Washington. He will promise to sign the legislation on Jan. 22, 2023 — the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to an abortion in the United States, earlier this year in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the months since, nearly half of the 50 states have either banned abortion or are set to do so shortly.
The backlash to the Dobbs decision dramatically changed Democrats’ political fortunes, stanching what appeared to be a burgeoning Republican wave election. In his speech, Biden will emphasize that Republicans want to criminally prosecute doctors who perform abortion and pass a national abortion ban.
The intransigence of Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on changing the terms of the filibuster has stymied Democratic efforts to codify the right to abortion after the Dobbs decision, meaning Democrats would have to pick up two Senate seats to make Biden’s pledge a reality.
Holding the House might be the tougher task. Political forecasters still consider Republicans heavy favorites to win control of the chamber.
It took us far too long to get to this point, so I implore the Biden administration to do everything in its power to prevent the student loan debt forgiveness movement from already entering its flop era.
In August, to my pleasant surprise, President Joe Biden announced the cancellation of up to $20,000 in student loan debt for certain borrowers ― fulfilling a campaign pledge that people like me had noted did not feel like a priority of hisadministration.
“People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt to get on top of their rent and utilities, to finally think about buying a home or starting a family or starting a business,” Biden said at the White House in remarks detailing the plan. “And by the way, when this happens, the whole economy is better off.”
That amount is still arguably kind of cheap compared to, say, the annual defense budget, but to Biden’s credit, it’s nonetheless historical. More importantly, it’s designed to benefit Black people who hold student loan debt — people who are already bombarded by other systemic social and economic disparities.
Biden’s plan to forgive at least $20,000 in individual debt may not cure everyone’s financial woes, but it will change so many lives for the better — as long as it actually works out as designed.
On Tuesday, the White House unveiled a preview of the application for people with federal loans who qualify for Biden’s plan, but there is reason to worry about how this rollout will go.
For starters, when Biden unveiled his plan, the White House said it would “advance racial equity.” And that declaration is now the subject of a lawsuit seeking to stop debt forgiveness from happening.
The suit, filed by the Wisconsin-based Brown County Taxpayers Association last week, claims that Biden’s plan violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because there is an “explicit racial motivation” on the administration’s part. The group also argues that the plan violates the constitutional separation of powers by usurping “the constitutional authority of Congress” and the Administrative Procedures Act, which determines how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
“By creating and implementing a federal program with an improper racial motive, Defendants violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, which among other things, prohibits federal spending based on race,” the lawsuit claims.
The plaintiffs’ stated goal is to promote “individual freedom and citizen responsibility; limited government that is fiscally responsible, transparent, and accountable to the people; and economic policy that encourages free markets.”
That’s Republican jargon for “tax cuts and write-offs for the wealthy are cool, but poor people need to stop looking for government handouts and get stock tips.”
The week before that suit was filed, six Republican-led states sued the administration with the same goal of blocking the debt relief plan from going into effect ― their argument being that it’s “patently unfair,” and that anyway Biden lacks the authority to execute it.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is leading the group of haters, said in an interview: “It’s patently unfair to saddle hard-working Americans with the loan debt of those who chose to go to college. The Department of Education is required, under the law, to collect the balance due on loans. And President Biden does not have the authority to override that.”
Since these suits have been filed, the Biden administration has already scaled back the parameters of who qualifies for relief ― meaning millions of borrowers are now ineligible for forgiveness.
The White House hasn’t explicitly said it’s acting in response to the lawsuits, but the connection feels obvious. And indeed, perhaps it’s a good idea to minimize potential liabilities as these various suits seek the attention of a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives. For now, though, the Biden administration should concentrate on the best ways to implement the program. Based on how things are going thus far, their efforts could use some focus.
Are the servers ready? Please don’t let this be a harbinger of Obamacare all over again.
Meanwhile, there is a loan relief FAQ page up, and according to White House officials, the application itself will be “simple and straightforward.”
It won’t require documents and will be made widely accessible, officials say. However, there is not yet a timetable for when the application will be made available.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona tweeted last month that the application would be ready in early October.
“We don’t have an announcement to make on the launch date,” a White House official said on a call with reporters, according to a USA Today article published Tuesday.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the delay during a press briefing on Tuesday.
“It’s taking some time, but the Department of Education is very much focused on this, and as soon as we have information on when that date will be for application signup, we will share that,” she said.
It will be Mariah Carey holiday music time before you know it. Time is of the essence. What are they doing over there?
And there is not enough pushback from the White House and Democrats about these Republican-led suits trying to obstruct the administration’s plan.
They want young people and nonwhites to vote at “presidential election year” levels for the upcoming midterms, and there is no messaging around the fact that Republicans are trying to block student loan forgiveness? We’re close to the holiday shopping season. How is it that I can keep hearing about this bipartisan infrastructure bill every five seconds, but not about Republicans hating debt forgiveness and abortion?
Free advice for the president and his fold: Figure out how to better inform people that while you can’t control gas prices, you can erase your miserable student loan payment plan if Republicans get out of your way.
It’s a winning argument, as long as it’s used ― and as long as there’s a functional website with an actual application for Americans to complete.
