Washington — The results of Tuesday’s midterm elections continued to reverberate across the U.S. political landscape two days after voters went to the polls, with the GOP still in position to win control of the House and the battle for the Senate coming down to a handful of races that remain unresolved.
Both parties and their allies have already begun to prepare for a Dec. 6 runoff in the Georgia Senate race between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker that could prove decisive, depending on the results of contests in Nevada and Arizona. Republicans need to pick up two out of the three seats in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada to win the Senate, according to CBS News’ projections.
Vote counting in Nevada, which remains a toss-up, could last another week, one state official said Wednesday, with tens of thousands votes remaining to be tallied in the state’s largest county. In Arizona, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly leads Republican challenger Blake Masters by more than 95,000 votes in a race that CBS News characterizes as leaning Democratic, with nearly a quarter of the votes cast still uncounted. Alaska’s Senate race also remains a toss-up, but the top two candidates are both Republicans, meaning the outcome won’t impact the partisan makeup of the Senate.
The GOP remains in striking distance of winning control of the House, with CBS News estimating Republicans will win at least 210 seats out of the 218 needed to secure a majority. Democrats are estimated to win at least 200 seats.
President Biden hailed the better-than-expected results as a “good day” for democracy in a press conference at the White House on Wednesday, saying “the American people have spoken and proven once again that democracy is who we are.” Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is said to be privately infuriated at the results, with a source close to him telling CBS News that Trump is “blaming everyone except himself” over the results.
Full results and projections for every House, Senate and governor’s race can be found in the CBS News Election Center.
BEIJING — Global stock markets fell Thursday ahead of a U.S. inflation update that will likely influence Federal Reserve plans for more interest rate hikes as investors waited to see who will control Congress after this week’s elections.
London, Shanghai, Frankfurt and Tokyo declined. U.S. futures were higher. The euro fell back below $1.
Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index tumbled Wednesday as votes were counted to decide whether Republicans take control of Congress, possibly leading to changes that can unsettle markets. Investors were rattled by the crypto industry’s latest crisis of confidence and weaker profit reports from The Walt Disney Co. and some other companies.
Forecasters expect U.S. government data Thursday to show inflation eased in September but stayed near a four-decade high. That might reinforce arguments that rates have to stay elevated for an extended period to slow economic activity and extinguish inflation.
“An upside surprise today would present a challenge for officials who expect to slow the pace of rate hikes,” Rubeela Farooqi of High-Frequency Economics said in a report.
In early trading, the FTSE 100 in London was 0.1% lower at 7,285.86. The DAX in Frankfurt lost 0.1% to 13,647.47 and the CAC 40 in Paris shed 0.2% to 6,417.98.
On Wall Street, futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 0.3%.
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 lost 2.1%, erasing gains from a three-day rally leading up to Election Day.
Disney sank 13.2% for the largest loss in the S&P 500 after reporting quarterly results that fell short of analysts’ expectations.
The Dow fell 2% and the Nasdaq composite, dominated by tech companies, tumbled 2.5%.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms rose 5.2% after saying it will cut costs by laying off 11,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce. It is down nearly 70% for the year.
In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 1.7% to 16,081.04 and the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo sank 1% to 27,446.10. The Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.4% to 3,036.13.
The Kospi in Seoul declined 0.9% to 2,407.70 and Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 was off 0.5% at 6,964.00.
India’s Sensex shed 1% to 60,447.97. New Zealand, Bangkok and Jakarta declined while Singapore and Malaysia gained.
The Philippines’ market benchmark lost 0.5% after the government reported the economy grew by 7.6% in the three months ending in September.
Investors worry rate hikes this year by the Fed and central banks in Europe and Asia to cool inflation might tip the global economy into recession. Traders hope indicators that show U.S. housing sales and other activity weakening might prompt the Fed to back off plans for more rate hikes.
In the United States, Republicans were within nine seats of the 218 needed to control the House of Representatives as votes still were being counted in some states. Control of the Senate depended on races in Nevada and Arizona that hadn’t been decided.
The outcome will determine how the next two years of President Joe Biden’s term play out. Republicans are likely to launch a spate of investigations into Biden, his family and his administration if they take power. A GOP takeover of the Senate would hobble the president’s ability to appoint judges.
Still, the election “impact on markets is pretty irrelevant beyond the very near term,” said David Chao of Invesco in a report. “Investors should be worried about inflation, since that will help to dictate the Fed’s future path.”
Forecasters expect Thursday’s data to show inflation decelerated to 7.9% in September from the previous month’s 8.3%. However, prices were expected to rise 0.6% compared with August, accelerating from July’s 0.1% increase.
Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy prices to show a clearer trend, is expected to accelerate to 6.5% from August’s 6.3%. That suggests costs of rent, medical services, autos and other goods and services still are rising in response to strong demand.
Traders expect the Fed to raise rates again next month but by a smaller margin of one-half percentage point after a series of 0.75 percentage-point increases. The Fed’s key lending rate is a range of 3.75% to 4%, up from close to zero in March. A growing number of investors expect it to exceed 5% next year.
Also Wednesday, cryptocurrencies fell amid worries about the industry’s financial strength after a big player, Binance, called off a deal to buy troubled rival FTX. That at least temporarily ended hopes for a bailout after FTX users scrambled to pull out their money.
Bitcoin fell 14% from a day earlier to $15,900. That is down 77% from last year’s high of $69,000.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which helps dictate rates for mortgages and other loans, fell to 4.08% from 4.13% late Tuesday. The two-year yield, which tends to more closely track expectations for Fed action, dropped to 4.60% from 4.66%.
In energy markets, benchmark U.S. crude shed 49 cents to $85.34 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the price basis for international oil trading, lost 42 cents to $92.23 per barrel in London.
The dollar gained to 146.31 yen from Wednesday’s 145.56 yen. The euro declined to 99.83 cents from $1.0073.
NEW YORK — Americans awoke Wednesday to Election Day outcomes that remained nearly as murky as the night before: “House, Senate control still hangs in the balance,” a CNN caption blared.
Yet if the results of midterm elections hadn’t solidified, the media narrative clearly had. Good night for Democrats. Bad night for Republicans. Bad night, especially, for Donald Trump.
This quick analysis took shape despite the very real possibility that Republicans would wind up wresting control of one or both houses of Congress from the Democrats. From the coverage’s perspective, Republicans had failed to meet expectations.
“Republicans wildly underperformed, and heads should roll,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted.
The Washington Post’s website headlined, “Congress Hangs in the Balance as Democrats Defy Expectations.”
The New York Times headlined, “Control of Congress Hinges on Closely Fought Races.” Yet further headlines on the newspaper’s site said there were no signs of a red wave that Republicans expected, and the lead analysis story was about why an expected GOP rout fell short.
The Times’ closely watched “Needle,” which barely budged much of Tuesday night, predicted Wednesday afternoon that the Democrats had a 66 percent chance of controlling the Senate, and the Republicans an 83 percent chance of winning the House.
Trump, who opted not to announce a 2024 candidacy the night before the election, faced a particularly rough media assessment.
A Washington Post analysis explained, “why the 2022 election was such a disaster for Trump.”
The New York Post, overlooking the governor’s race in its home state, put Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump rival on its cover, standing before a huge American flag. “DeFuture,” was the headline.
Fox News’ website ran a steady stream of stories with damaging headlines: “Trump-endorsed Vance doesn’t mention former president in victory speech.” “Republican Brad Raffensperger, reviled by Trump, wins again in Georgia.” And “Conservatives point finger at Trump after GOP’s underwhelming elections results.”
“This ended up being a referendum on crazy,” said MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch on Wednesday.
Armed with statistics and projections on election night, television networks were wary of drawing conclusions about the closely divided nation’s political future. The night’s first big story, DeSantis’ big win, was favorable for Republicans.
But as Tuesday night slipped into Wednesday morning, the story of what was not happening for the GOP became the main talking point.
“Republicans will have some soul searching to do here,” said Fox News Channel’s Dana Perino.
Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump aide who was a commentator on Fox, grew impatient at one point with on-set discussions about Republicans not performing up to expectations or hopes.
“It’s enough,” she said. “We’ll take it.”
Television networks made an extra effort on Tuesday to have personnel on hand to deal with threats to democracy, such as election deniers or attempts to prevent voting. Instead, there wasn’t much for them to do.
Through it all, news organizations stressed transparency, and how counting election results had become more difficult because of increased early voting and different state rules in how the vote was counted.
“This is more complicated than it was 10 years ago,” CNN’s John King said, “because people are voting in different ways.”
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David Bauder is AP’s media writer. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dbauder
MarketWatch readers: Ask our Washington bureau chief Robert Schroeder about the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections — and what comes next — during a live, dynamic session beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.
Before the Q&A starts, please start leaving your questions and comments here and let us know what’s on your mind.
Republicans need to flip just five seats during Tuesday’s midterm elections in order to win majority control of the House of Representatives and would need to net one Senate seat to overcome Democrats’ marginal 50-seat majority in the Senate.
Republicans have better odds of winning both chambers than Democrats, though their odds are higher on the House side. As of Tuesday morning, FiveThirtyEight placed Republicans’ odds of taking majority control of the Senate at 59 in 100 and the party’s odds in the House at 84 in 100.
As the Associated Press calls results nationwide, follow along for updates on which seats are flipping.
Florida
The first congressional seats to flip were in Florida, where Republican Anna Paulina Luna defeated Democratic candidate Eric Lynn by 8.6-points (with 99% of results reported). The since-redrawn district was represented by Democrat Charlie Crist, who left the office to launch an unsuccessful challenge against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
A second seat flipped in the state’s is the 7th District, where Republican Cory Mills came out on top with 58.5% of the vote. The district, previously represented by Democrat Stephanie Murphy, was redrawn to be solidly red.
Virginia
Republican Jen Kiggans ousted Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria in Virginia’s 2nd congressional district. Luria’s seat was one of two Virginia seats deemed “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report. With 73% of the results reported, Kiggans had received 55% of the vote.
The other incumbent in a toss-up race, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, secured re-election with about 52% of the vote.
Tennessee
Republican Andy Ogles has won election to Tennessee’s 5th congressional district, the AP called shortly after midnight. He received about 56% of the vote, with 97% reported.
Ogles will replace retiring Democrat Jim Cooper, who decided not to seek re-election following redistricting that shifted the district from a solid Democratic district to “likely” Republican, according to Cook Political Report.
North Carolina
Democrat Wiley Nickel defeated Republican Bo Hines in North Carolina’s 13th congressional district with 51.3% of the vote. The state senator’s win marks the first pick-up for Democrats.
The race was rated as a “toss-up” by CPR following Republican Rep. Ted Budd’s decision to leave the House to run for the open Senate seat in North Carolina. The AP has called the Senate race for Budd.
Texas
Two-term Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez defeated Republican Mayra Flores, who won a special election in June to replace Democratic Filemon Vela Jr., who left Congress to work at a lobbying firm. The two incumbents were set to square off following redistricting. Gonzalez picked up just under 53% of the vote, compared to Flores’ 44%.
MONTGOMERY, Ala — Republican Katie Britt on Tuesday won the U.S. Senate race in Alabama, becoming the first woman elected to the body from the state.
Britt will fill the seat held by Richard Shelby, her one-time boss who is retiring after 35 years in the Senate. Britt was Shelby’s chief of staff before leaving to take the helm of a state business lobby. Britt defeated Democrat Will Boyd and Libertarian John Sophocleus.
Britt, 40, cast herself as part of a new generation of conservative leaders and will become one of the Senate’s youngest members. She will be the first Republican woman to hold one of the state’s Senate seats and the state’s first elected female senator. The state’s previous female senators, both Democrats, had been appointed.
“Tonight, parents, families and hard-working Alabamians across the state let their voices be heard. We said loud and clear this is our time,” Britt told supporters at her victory party in downtown Montgomery.
Britt, who noted her early dismal poll numbers and how some initially dismissed her notion of running for Senate, said her campaign is “proof that the American dream is still alive.”
Fueled by deep pockets and deep ties to business and political leaders, Britt ran under the banner of “Alabama First” and secured the GOP nomination after a heated and expensive primary. She was first in the initial round of voting and then defeated six-term Rep. Mo Brooks in a primary runoff.
Brooks, who ran under the banner “MAGA Mo” — Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan — and was initially endorsed by the former president, had been an early favorite in the race. But Brooks faltered under a barrage of attack ads and lackluster fundraising. As Britt surged in the polls, Trump rescinded his endorsement of Brooks and swung his support to Britt.
Britt began her political career working for Shelby. She thanked the outgoing senior senator for taking a chance on her 20 years ago and called him “Alabama’s greatest statesman” who left a lasting legacy on the state.
The senator-elect was introduced by her husband Wesley Britt, a former football player for the New England Patriots and the University of Alabama, who said his best title is, “Katie’s husband.”
Flanked by her husband and two-school-age children, and with her speech occasionally punctuated by the sound of children popping the red, white and blue balloons that fell to celebrate her victory, Britt called herself a “Mama on a mission” to get things done in Washington.
Britt, who spent much of her race in partisan appeals, criticizing the policies of President Joe Biden and lamenting a country she said she no longer recognized, promised to work for all Alabamians, “even those that have different beliefs than I do.”
“No one will worker harder than me in the United States Senate. I am going to listen to you, not lecture you. I know that every one of you is not going to agree with me on every single issue and that’s OK,” Britt said.
“I am going to be a voice for parents and families and hard-working Alabamians across this state,” she said, “and I’m going to work tirelessly every single day to make Alabama proud.”
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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
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Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.
Washington — Polls have closed in states across the U.S. as one of the most contentious and divisive campaign seasons in recent memory nears its end, with control of Congress and critical offices around the country hanging in the balance in this year’s midterm elections.
Results are coming in from Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and other states, with Republicans picking up several early victories, according to CBS News’ projections. Full results and projections for every House, Senate and governor’s race can be found in the CBS News Election Center and in updates below.
All 435 seats in the House are up for grabs, as well as 35 Senate seats. Three dozen governorships hang in the balance, as well as hundreds of races to determine control of state legislatures.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio, both Republicans, won their reelection bids, boosted by support from Latino voters, early exit poll data showed. Both candidates lost the Hispanic vote in their previous elections in 2018 and 2016, respectively.
Millions of Americans turned out to vote on Election Day, with millions more casting early votes or submitting ballots by mail. No major issues with voting processes were apparent, and federal cybersecurity officials said they saw no signs of threats to election infrastructure.
CBS News is providing live coverage of the midterm results throughout the night and into the early morning on the CBS News Streaming Network, and on CBS stations from 8 to 11 p.m. Elections officials at the state level have cautioned that counting all the votes will take time, and that delays in determining the winners of races or control of Congress are part of the process to ensure an accurate count.
Republicans appear in a solid position to take control of the House and challenge Democrats for control of the Senate. Early exit poll data showed voters have a pessimistic view of the economy, with three in four calling it “bad.” Nearly eight in 10 say inflation has been a hardship for them, including about 20% who say that hardship has been severe. Most say they have been negatively impacted by gas prices, and nearly half of voters say their financial situation is worse than it was two years ago, more than twice the number who say it’s better.
Democrats, meanwhile, were pinning their hopes on strong turnout among their core constituencies, including young voters, who they hope will be enough to stem the tide of GOP gains and retain control of Congress.
Elon Musk used his Twitter megaphone to appeal to “independent-minded voters” on Monday, urging them to vote Republican in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections. In doing so, the new CEO of Twitter stepped into a political debate that tech company executives have largely tried to stay out of — so their platforms wouldn’t be seen as favoring one side over the other.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion, has expressed political views in the past, on and off the platform. But a direct endorsement of one party over another now that he owns the platform raises questions about Twitter’s ability to remain neutral under the rule of the world’s richest man.
“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Musk tweeted.
To independent-minded voters:
Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.
It’s one thing for the CEO of Wendy’s or Chick-fil-A to endorse a political party, said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor at Syracuse University who studies social media and politics. It’s a whole other thing, though, for the owner of one of the world’s most high-profile information ecosystems to do so.
“These social media platforms are not just companies. It’s not just a business. It is also our digital public sphere. It’s our town square,” Stromer-Galley said. “And it feels like the public sphere is increasingly privatized and owned by these companies — and when the heads of these companies put their finger on the scale — it feels like it’s potentially skewing our democracy in harmful ways.”
Musk’s comments come as he seeks to remake the company and amid widespread concern that recent mass layoffs at the social media platform could leave the company unable to deal with hate speech, misinformation that could impact voter safety and security and actors who seek to cast doubt on the legitimate winners of elections. Though Musk has vowed not to let Twitter become a “free-for-all hellscape,” advertisers have left the platform and Musk himself has amplified misinformation.
Musk on Sunday tweeted and deleted a link to an article pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. The tweet from Musk, posted just three days after he took charge of the platform, raised concerns about the type of content that will be allowed on the social media site under his control.
It’s not a secret that when it comes to tech workers and executives, the political mix tends to favor the left, with a good amount of Silicon Valley libertarianism thrown in. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance has donated to candidates on both sides of the political spectrum, but in recent years he’s veered more toward Democrats. Publicly he’s stayed away from pledging allegiance to either party.
But in their platform policies and content moderation, tech companies such as Facebook (now Meta), Google and even Twitter have taken great pains to appear politically neutral, even as they are routinely criticized — largely by conservatives but also by liberals — for favoring one side over the other.
“Now, you might say, look, Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and that’s his voice amplified,” said Charles Anthony Smith, a professor of political science and law at The University of California at Irvine. “But the difference is that gets filtered through a variety of different script writers and on-air personalities and all this other sort of stuff. So it’s not really Rupert Murdoch. It may be people that agree with him on things, but it’s filtered through other voices. This is an unadulterated direct contact. So it’s an amplification that is unrivaled.”
Global feathers rustled
Musk’s tweets could also stir up trouble in global politics outside of the U.S. elections. On Sunday, the billionaire signaled willingness to explore reversing decisions blocking some accounts of Brazilian right-wing lawmakers. The nation’s electoral court last week ordered their suspension. All are supporters of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who on October 30 lost his reelection bid by a narrow margin to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Most had aired claims of election fraud.
Paulo Figueiredo Filho, a political analyst who often defends Bolsonaro on social media and is also the grandson of the military dictatorship’s final president, tweeted that Twitter has become a strict and spontaneous censor.
“Your moderators are currently being more dictatorial than our own courts!” Figueiredo wrote.
Musk responded: “I will look into this.”
The suspended accounts include that of Nikolas Ferreira, who garnered more votes in the October race than any other candidate for a seat in the Lower House. According to orders issued by the electoral authority, Ferreira’s account and most others were blocked for sharing a live video from an Argentinian digital influencer questioning the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting system. The video was largely shared by allies of Bolsonaro, who himself has often claimed the system is susceptible to fraud, without presenting any evidence.
“Upsetting the far right and the far left equally”
Twitter’s policies, as of Monday, prohibit “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”
In a tweet just two days after he agreed to buy Twitter in April, Musk said that for “Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”
And to attract the largest possible number of advertisers and users, Big Tech has tried to go this route, with varying degrees of success. For years, it managed to succeed. But the 2016 U.S. presidential elections changed online discourse, fueling the country’s increased political polarization.
In early 2016, a tech blog quoted an anonymous former Facebook contractor who said the site downplayed news that conservatives are interested in and artificially boosted liberal issues such as the “BlackLivesMatter” hashtag. The blog did not name the person, and no evidence was provided for their claim.
But in the explosive political climate that preceded the election of former President Donald Trump, the claim quickly took a life of its own. There was plenty of media coverage, as well as as inquiries from GOP lawmakers, then, later, congressional hearings on the matter. In the years since, as social media companies began to crack down on far-right accounts and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, some conservatives have come to see it as evidence of the platforms’ bias.
Musk himself is at least listening to such claims, and he’s repeatedly engaged with figures on the right and far-right who would like to see a loosening of Twitter’s misinformation and hate-speech policies.
Evidence suggests those voices are already being heard. In an October study, for instance, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that “Twitter gives greater visibility to politically conservative news than it does content with a liberal bent.”
Musk’s tweet garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and many retweets Monday on the day before the final votes are cast in thousands of races around the country. But in replies and retweets, many prominent (and not so prominent) Twitter personalities expressed criticism for the Tesla CEO — often poking fun at him. For Smith, that’s a sign Musk may not quite be a billionaire political kingmaker that some of his peers, like venture capitalist Peter Thiel, are aspiring to be.
“I wonder if we’re we’re having the emergence of a new type of billionaire, the ones who want to decide what happens and get credit for deciding what happens,” Smith said. “So this more like an oligarchy approach than the old school billionaires who would drop lots of money but then they didn’t want anybody to know their names.”
A controversial proposal to change the pay structure for servers and other workers at Washington’s bars and restaurants goes before voters Tuesday, four years after approval of an identical ballot issue that was later overturned by the D.C. Council.
Initiative 82 would eliminate the so-called tipped wages system in which restaurant owners pay certain staff members well below the $16.10 minimum hourly wage on the assumption that the difference would be made up through customer tips.
Currently, restaurant managers pay some staffers salaries as low as $5.35 per hour. If the employees’ tips for the night don’t raise that income up to the minimum, the employers make up the difference.
The proposal would gradually eliminate the two-tiered system, requiring employers to pay every staffer the $16.10 minimum by 2027.
The issue spawned fierce debates among the hospitality industry in 2018, and its revival has done the same this year, with campaign placards for and against it alongside those for mayoral or council candidates.
The council and Mayor Muriel Bowser drew heavy criticism for reversing the 2018 initiative, and several council members who voted to overturn the previous initiative have publicly stated they would not do so again if the new one succeeds.
While some states have set higher minimums, the federal “tipped minimum wage” has stagnated at $2.13 an hour since 1991 — while inflation has steadily eroded its purchasing power to less than half. Despite federal law requiring restaurants to ensure tipped workers end up with the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 by making up the difference when tips fall short, violations are rampant.
Pennsylvania raised its monthly tip threshold in March from $30 to $135, meaning that employers can pay tipped employees less the state’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, to as low as $2.83 an hour, only if they make at least $135 a month in tips.
Supporters of the Washington proposal claim the change will offer protection and equal footing for all employees, while opponents — including the local restaurant association — warn that the extra expense will drive up costs, force smaller independent restaurants to close and lead to extra charges that would drive away customers and discourage high-end tipping.
Danny Meyer, CEO of the upscale Union Square Restaurant Group, announced in 2020 that his restaurants would be moving away from a five-year-long no-tipping policy when they reopened in March of that year. The company, which owns Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, laid off more than 2,000 workers after New York ordered restaurants to close during the pandemic.
Concerns that workers wouldn’t return without the lure of gratuities were a big factor in the decision to reinstate tipping, Meyer said on LinkedIn at the time.
Illusion of change
The dynamic is more complex than merely labor vs. management; the debate has divided the staffs of restaurants and bars. Many waiters and bartenders oppose it since they currently earn well above the minimum on tips and fear those tips would shrink if an extra service charge is imposed.
Geoff Tracy, a prominent local chef with two restaurants in D.C., opposes the measure, but he stops short of predicting it will lead to layoffs or restaurant closures. Rather he described it as providing the illusion of change without actually accomplishing much.
Tracy said servers and bartenders in his restaurants make below $6 per hour, but after tips the servers average $36 per hour and the bartenders make more than $40. He predicted that adding another $10 per hour to their base pay would simply force a new service charge, drive down tipping and, in the end, everybody would be making about the same amount or less.
“I’m not really a big fan of raising prices on my customer base,” Tracy said. “Really the only beneficiary will be the District of Columbia, which is going to charge 6% taxes on all these new service charges.”
Ryan O’Leary, one of the leaders of the pro-Initiative 82 campaign and a former tipped server, said the initiative was meant to protect some of the most vulnerable members of the hospitality industry. O’Leary said the strongest internal opposition has come from “really well-established bartenders who are at the top of the pecking order.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is convening an Election Day operations center with election security partners from across government and the private sector, a senior agency official said Tuesday. The agency is linked virtually with election officials in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories to facilitate sharing of information and respond if any issues emerge.
There are currently “no specific and credible threats to disrupt election infrastructure” and CISA maintains “high confidence in the security and resilience of the elections,” the senior CISA official told reporters.
The official conceded that there will likely be issues. “There are 8,800 election jurisdictions — we see issues pop up every Election Day,” said the official.
CISA has not yet identified nor attributed any malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure, but the official warned there may be “low-level cyber activity,” such as denial of service attacks and defacement of websites.
“We may see election related website outages for completely innocuous reasons,” the official noted. “It’s important to remember that such activity would not affect a person’s ability to cast a ballot or know that their ballot was counted accurately, and that the election is secure.”
In response to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin’s admission on Monday that he had interfered in U.S. elections and would do so in the future, the CISA official said Russia’s “playbook is out there” and the agency will continue to partner with officials to safeguard elections.
The official noted that key players remain Russia, Iran and China. While Russia began its meddling in 2016, the official noted that Iran ramped up its influence operations in 2020. “Then in 2022, we observed China participating in influence behavior,” the official said.
Asked to elaborate on China’s actions, the official pointed to previous announcements by the Department of Justice and Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
“My point is… we have observed new participants who did not really engage in 2020 willing to engage in election influence in 2022,” the official said.
The agency is aware of potential issues with voting machines in Virginia, the official said, saying CISA has “been in touch.” The agency has heard of isolated, routine issues in the state, “but nothing that suggests a widespread outage of voting systems.”
CISA will continue to update its “Rumor vs. Reality” blog to combat any misinformation or disinformation surrounding the election, the official added.
TOKYO — Asian stocks were mixed Tuesday ahead of the U.S. midterm elections with trading likely to stay bumpy in a week that brings new inflation data and other events that could shake markets.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 gained 1.3% to 27,876.20 on strong earnings reports. The Kospi in Seoul advanced 1.1% to 2,397.41 and Australia’s S&P/AXS 200 gained 0.4% to 6,958.90.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng sank 0.6% to 16,488.44, while the Shanghai Composite index shed 0.8% to 3,052.93. Thailand’s SET gained 0.7%. India’s markets were closed for a holiday.
The week is full of potentially market-moving events, including U.S. inflation data and the election, which could leave the U.S. government split between Democrats and Republicans.
For Tuesday, at least, “Look for markets to trade political headline spin rather than substance,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.
Every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is up for election this year, along with about a third of the U.S. Senate. On the line is control of both houses of Congress, currently under Democratic leadership.
Voters are also electing governors in most of the states this year. They’ll be in office in 2024 when the next presidential election happens and could affect election laws or vote certifications. Many state legislative and local authorities also are on the ballot.
A divided government would likely bring gridlock rather than big, sweeping policy changes that could upset tax and spending plans. Historically, when a Democratic White House has shared power with a split or Republican Congress, stocks have seen stronger gains than usual.
On Monday, the benchmark S&P 500 rose 1% to 3,806.80 while the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.3% to 32,827.00 and the Nasdaq composite added 0.9% to 10,564.52.
Analysts say a strong performance by Democrats in the elections could lead to increased spending to help the economy that might fuel inflation and leave the Federal Reserve obliged to continue to hike interest rates to get prices under control.
It may take a while to get clarity because of the process to count votes that came in through the mail.
Economists expect a report Thursday to show the consumer price index rose 8% in October from a year earlier, slightly lower than September’s 8.2% inflation rate.
Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, “It is still all about inflation and while this report might not be as hot as the last few, it still should show that rents and the core-service sector part of the economy are still hot,” Edward Moya of Oanda said in a report.
Higher rates put the brakes on the economy by making it more expensive to buy a house, car or anything else on credit, though they take time to take effect. Rate hikes could bring a recession, and they tend to drag on prices for stocks and other investments.
A fourth straight month of moderating inflation from June’s 9.1% rate could afford the Federal Reserve leeway to loosen up a bit. The Fed has said that it may soon dial down the size of its increases to half a percentage point, after pushing through four straight mega increases of three-quarters of a point.
Monday’s gains for Wall Street came despite a shaky showing for its most influential stock. Apple rose 0.4% after dropping earlier in the day. It had warned customers they’ll have to wait longer to get the latest iPhones after anti-COVID restrictions were imposed on a contractor’s factory in China.
Earnings reports are also causing share prices to swing.
The reporting season for summertime profits is roughly 85% done, and S&P 500 companies are on track to deliver growth of a little more than 2%. Analysts are forecasting a drop in S&P 500 profits for the final three months of the year, of nearly 1.5%. They had been forecasting growth of 4% at the end of September.
In other trading, U.S. benchmark crude oil lost 50 cents to $91.29 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It lost 82 cents to $91.79 per barrel on Monday.
Brent crude, the international pricing standard, gave up 45 cents to $97.47 per barrel.
The U.S. dollar was unchanged at 146.63 yen. The euro slipped to $1.0008 to $1.0016.
There is mounting anxiety about what Tuesday’s American midterm elections may mean for Ukraine and U.S. support for the country, amid fears that a Republican surge could weaken American backing for Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials and lawmakers are scrutinizing the opinion polls and parsing the comments of their counterparts.
“We hope that for our sake that we don’t become a victim to the partisan debate that’s unfolding right now in the U.S.,” Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a former Ukrainian deputy prime minister and now opposition lawmaker, told POLITICO. “That’s the fear, because we are very much seriously dependent on not only American support, but also on the U.S. leadership in terms of keeping up the common effort of other nations.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the potential next speaker if the Republicans prevail, said last month that there would be no “blank check” for Ukraine if the House comes back under Republican control. The Biden administration has tried to assuage concerns about the government’s commitment to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, but populist Republican sentiment in Congress is urging less support for Kyiv and more attention on U.S. domestic problems.
“I’m worried about the Trump wing of the GOP,” said Mia Willard, a Ukrainian-American living and working in Kyiv. “I have recently read about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s promise that ‘not another penny will go to Ukraine’ if Republicans retake control of Congress.”
According to the latest poll data, the Republicans are favored to take over the House and possibly the Senate in Tuesday’s voting.
“I do hope that regardless of the election results,” said Willard, “there will be a continued bipartisan consensus on supporting Ukraine amid Russia’s genocide of the Ukrainian people, which I cannot call anything but a genocide after firsthand witnessing Russia’s war crimes in the now de-occupied territories,” said Willard, who is a researcher at the International Centre for Policy Studies in the Ukrainian capital.
Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin is confident that U.S. military and financial support for his country will continue after the midterms. “I don’t see a critical number of people among the Republicans calling for cuts in aid,” he told POLITICO. At the same time, Klimkin acknowledged that the procedure for congressional consideration of Ukraine aid may become more complex.
Klimkin said he believes that the U.S. stance toward Ukraine is “critical” for Washington beyond the Ukrainian conflict — “not only with respect to Russia, but also to how the U.S. will be perceived by China.”
Voters line up outside the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections center in Cleveland, Ohio | Dustin Franz/AFP via Getty Images
For Ukraine, Klimkin said the “real risk” is the debate taking place in Washington on both sides of the aisle about the fact that “the United States is giving much more than all of Europe” to Kyiv’s war effort.
According to the Kiel Institute of the World Economy, the U.S. has brought its total commitments in military, financial and humanitarian aid to over €52 billion, while EU countries and institutions have collectively reached just over €29 billion.
“The U.S. is now committing nearly twice as much as all EU countries and institutions combined. This is a meager showing for the bigger European countries, especially since many of their pledges are arriving in Ukraine with long delays,” said Christoph Trebesch, head of the team compiling the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker.
Europe’s stance
If the Republicans prevail in Tuesday’s vote, the anxiety is also that without U.S. leadership, Ukraine would slip down the policy agenda of Europe, too, depriving Ukraine of the backing the country needs for “victory over the Russian monster,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said.
If the worst happened and U.S. support weakens following the midterms, Klympush-Tsintsadze said she has some hopes that Europe would still stand firm. She has detected in Europe “much more sobriety in the assessment of what Russia is and what it can do, and I hope there would be enough voices there in Europe, too, to ensure there’s no weakening of support,” she said.
Others are less sanguine about how stout and reliable the Europeans would be without Washington goading and galvanizing.Several officials and lawmakers pointed to the Balkan wars of the 1990s and how the Clinton administration stood back, arguing the Europeans should take the lead only to have to intervene diplomatically and militarily later.
“We in Ukraine have been watching closely the developments in the USA and what configuration the Congress will have after the midterm elections,” said Iuliia Osmolovska, chair of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center and a senior fellow at GLOBSEC, a global think-tank headquartered in Bratislava.
A local resident rides a bicycle on a street in Izyum, eastern Ukraine on September 14, 2022 | Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images)
“This might impact the existing determination of the U.S. political establishment to continue supporting Ukraine, foremost militarily. Especially given voices from some Republicans that call for freezing the support to Ukraine,” she said.
But Osmolovska remains hopeful, noting that “Ukraine has been enjoying bipartisan support in the war with Russia since the very first days of the invasion in February this year.” She also believes President Joe Biden would have wiggle room to act more independently when it comes to military assistance to Ukraine without seeking approval from Congress thanks to legislation already on the books.
But she doesn’t exclude “the risk of some exhaustion” from allies, arguing that Ukraine needs to redouble diplomacy efforts to prevent that from happening. What needs to be stressed, she said, is that “our Western partners only benefit from enabling Ukraine to defeat Russia as soon as possible” — as a protracted conflict is in no one’s interest.
“There’s a feeling in the air that we’re winning in the war, although it is far from over,” said Glib Dovgych, a software engineer in Kyiv.
“If the flow of money and equipment goes down, it won’t mean our defeat, but it will mean a much longer war with much higher human losses. And since many other allies are looking at the U.S. in their decisions to provide support to us, if the U.S. decreases the scale of their help, other countries like Germany, France and Italy would probably follow suit,” Dovgych said.
Yaroslav Azhnyuk, president and co-founder of Petcube, a technology company that develops smart devices for pets, says “it’s obvious that opinions on how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine are being used for internal political competition within the U.S.”
He worries about the influence on American political opinion also of U.S.-based entrepreneurs and investors, mentioning David Sacks, Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya, among others. “They have publicly shared concerning views, saying that Ukraine should cede Crimea to Russia, or that the U.S. should stop supporting Ukraine to avoid a global nuclear war.”
Azhnyuk added: “I get it, nukes are scary. But what happens in the next 5-10 years after Ukraine cedes any piece of its territory or the conflict is frozen. Such a scenario would signal to the whole world that nuclear terrorism works.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that regardless of the results of the U.S. midterms, Kyiv is “confident” that bipartisan support for Ukraine will remain in both chambers of the Congress. Both the Republicans and Democrats have voiced their solidarity with Ukraine, and this stance would remain “a reflection of the will of the American people,” he said.
The Ukrainian side counts on America’s leadership in important issues of defense assistance, in particular in expanding the capacity of the Ukrainian air defense system, financial support, strengthening sanctions against Moscow, and recognizing Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, Podolyak told POLITICO.
And this isn’t just about Ukraine, said Klympush-Tsintsadze, the former deputy premier.
“Too many things in the world depend on this war,” she said. “It’s not only about restoring our territorial integrity. It’s not only about our freedom and our chance for the future, our survival as a nation and our survival as a country — it will have drastic consequences for the geopolitics of the world,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said.
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, September 22, 2022.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the brutal home invasion attack on her husband last month will affect her decision on whether to remain in the Democratic leadership in Congress.
But Pelosi, D-Calif., who police say was the actual intended target of the man charged in the attack, did not reveal in a new CNN interview whether that means she will leave her leadership post or stay in it.
Pelosi, 82, has been the top House Democrat for two decades.
Pelosi’s comment came as her party is battling to remain in control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Republicans are favored to win control of the House.
Her 82-year-old husband, Paul Pelosi, had his skull fractured early Oct. 28 by an assailant wielding a hammer, after the other man broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco, police have said.
David DePape, 42, has been charged with attempted murder and other state crimes in the attack.
Federal prosecutors have charged DePape with the federal crimes of attempted kidnapping of a federal official — Nancy Pelosi — and assaulting an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official.
Authorities have said DePape was prepared to kidnap and detain Nancy Pelosi and break her kneecaps when he went to her residence. The speaker was in Washington, D.C., at the time of the break-in.
During her interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Pelosi said her decision on whether to stay in leadership “will be affected about what happened the last week or two.”
Cooper then asked, “Will your decision be impacted by the attack in any way?”
It could take up to days of waiting before it’s clear who will win Tuesday’s US midterm elections and before it’s apparent whether Republicans or President Joe Biden‘s Democrats will control Congress, experts say.
All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 35 US Senate seats and 36 governorships.
Republicans would need to pick up five seats to take a majority in the House and just one to control the Senate. Non-partisan election forecasters and polls suggest Republicans have a very strong chance of winning a House majority, with control of the Senate likely to be closer fought.
A massive wave of Republican support could lead to declarations of victory hours after polls close.
But with dozens of races expected to be close and key states like Pennsylvania already warning it could take days to count every ballot, experts say there’s a good chance America goes to bed on election night without knowing who won.
“When it comes to knowing the results, we should move away from talking about Election Day and think instead about election week,” said Nathan Gonzales, who publishes the non-partisan newsletter Inside Elections.
The earliest vote tallies will be skewed by how quickly states count mail ballots.
Because Democrats vote by mail more often than Republicans, states that let officials get an early jump on counting mail ballots could report big Democratic leads early on that evaporate as vote counters work through piles of Republican-leaning ballots that were cast on Election Day.
In these “blue mirage” states – which include Florida and North Carolina – election officials are allowed to remove mail ballots from their envelopes before Election Day and load them in vote counting machines, allowing for speedy counting.
‘Blue mirage, red mirage’
States including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don’t allow officials to open the envelopes until Election Day, leading to a possible “red mirage” in which Republican-leaning Election Day ballots are reported earlier, with many Democratic-leaning mail ballots counted later.
Experts like Joe Lenski, co-founder of Edison Research, which will be tracking hundreds of races on Tuesday and supplying media organisations with results, will keep an eye on the mix of different types of ballots each state is counting throughout the night.
“Blue mirage, red mirage, whatever. You just have to look at what types of votes are getting reported to know where you are in that state,” said Lenski.
The first wave of vote tallies is expected on the East Coast between 7pm and 8pm ET (00:00-01:00 GMT Wednesday, November 9). An early indication of Republican success could come if the races expected to be close – like Virginia’s 7th congressional district or a US Senate seat in North Carolina – turn out to be Democratic routs.
By around 10pm or 11pm ET, (03:00 or 04:00 GMT) when polls in the Midwest will be closed for an hour or more, it’s possible Republicans will have enough momentum for experts at US media organisations to project control of the House, said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
If the fight for the House still looks close as vote tallies start coming in from the West Coast – where there could be more than a dozen tight House races – it could be days before control of the chamber is known, experts said.
California typically takes weeks to count all its ballots, in part because it counts ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive days afterward. Nevada and Washington states also allow late ballots if postmarked by November 8, slowing down the march to final results.
“If the House is really on the edge, that would matter,” said Kondik.
It may take longer, perhaps weeks longer, to know which party will control the Senate, with close contests in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia likely to determine final control.
If Georgia’s Senate race is as close as expected and no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff election would be scheduled for December 6, possibly leaving control of the chamber in limbo until then.
Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and a key figure in the war in Ukraine, admitted bluntly on Monday to interfering in U.S. elections.
“Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering, and we will interfere,” declared Prigozhin in a statement quoted by his company, Concord. The oligarch has been sanctioned by Washington for running a “troll factory” to influence the outcome of votes in the U.S. and elsewhere.
“Accurately, precisely, surgically, and the way we do it, the way we know how to,” Prigozhin quipped in response to a request for comment on the specifics of the interference from a Russian news outlet.
Prigozhin is the financial benefactor behind a so-called Russian “troll farm” previously called the Internet Research Agency. The group, which has changed it’s name multiple times, creates and uses inauthentic social media pages to spread misinformation or incendiary speech to affect voters and sow discord. Such organizations are believed to exist in Russia, China and Iran, at least, with the same intent.
The U.S. Treasury Department accused Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency of interfering in the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterm elections. The organization was frequently mentioned by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe into Russia’s election interference.
In July, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on Prigozhin in connection with his “engagement in U.S. election interference.”
Prigozhin’s own admission came on the eve of this week’s round of U.S. midterm elections, which will be key to shaping the rest of President Joe Biden’s presidency. It was the first such admission from an individual who has been formally accused by Washington of efforts to influence American politics.
Speaking on Sunday to CBS’ “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan, Chris Krebs,the former director of the U.S. government cybersecurity agency said, “we’ve seen reports of Russia, China, Iran back at their old tricks,” referring to online interference operations.
Krebs said two U.S. research firms had released information suggesting trolls linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency “are back at itand are undermining Democratic candidates for Senate” in this week’s midterms.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied ever seeking to influence elections in the U.S. or any other outside nation. Russian President Vladimir Putin ridiculed Mueller’s 2018 indictment of 13 Russians accused of a conspiracy to meddle in the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House.
“How low the Western information and political environment has fallen if a restauranteur from Russia could influence elections in the United States or a European country,” the Russian leader said at the time, referring to Prigozhin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/AP
The businessman is sometimes called “Putin’s chef” for the lucrative catering contracts he received from the Russian state.
The oligarch has kept a low profile for years, but recently Prigozhin has emerged as an increasingly public figure as the mercenaries from his Wagner Group have become a key force in bolstering Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin denied bankrolling the Wagner Group for years, but in September he admitted to funding the pseudo-military company since 2014. Since then, the private Wagner army has helped advance the Kremlin’s geopolitical and business objectives in conflicts from Syria and Africa to Ukraine.
NEW YORK (AP) — Time was, a television reporter assigned to “democracy issues” would have a quiet time on election night sets, occasionally popping up to talk about broken voting machines at a polling place or two.
That’s not the case in 2022.
Between election deniers and threats to voting rights, news organizations have emphasized the beat. That will continue next Tuesday, with coverage plans for the midterms rounding into shape.
CBS News will have its first-ever “Democracy Desk” to look at those issues and how law enforcement is dealing with threats. NBC News’ “Vote Watch Unit” is looking at election security and disinformation. ABC News has assigned the team of Dan Abrams, Pierre Thomas, Terry Moran and Kate Shaw to the topic.
News teams, mindful of public suspicion about journalists, also promise transparency in their own operations.
“Because there is an adamant disinformation campaign, there are efforts to sow chaos, one of the most important things we can do is stick to the facts,” said CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell.
Following a precedent set in the 2018 midterms, the broadcast networks will set aside their entire prime-time schedules to follow the action. CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC will have wall-to-wall coverage. There will be a wealth of online options for those whom one screen won’t do.
Expect surprises. Close pre-election polls, with control of the House and Senate up for grabs, combined with the lingering question of whether any politician will take Donald Trump’s example from 2020 and not accept the results, make the night potentially combustible.
“The stakes are high,” said David Chalian, CNN’s political director. “The results of this will alter the course of Biden’s presidency.”
ABC News is preparing for the possibility that answers to which party controls the House and Senate won’t be known when the network’s planned cut-off point of 2 a.m. Eastern is reached — and to extend that if necessary, said Marc Burstein, who’s in charge of the coverage.
“There’s just a lot of tight races,” said Martha MacCallum, who will co-anchor Fox News’ coverage with Bret Baier. “As a reporter and anchor that makes it a lot more fun to cover. It’s going to be a really exciting night in a lot of ways in terms of the drama that has already been built into this.”
Fox became a major part of the election night stories in 2018, when it declared long before its rivals that Democrats would control the House, and in 2020, when its first call of Arizona for Joe Biden infuriated Trump and his supporters.
After the fallout, one of Fox’s decision desk executives retired and another was reassigned, soon to leave the network — even though Fox got it right.
As a result, Fox viewers will probably see a lot of Arnon Mishkin, who returns to lead the network’s decision desk. Fox wants to bring viewers into the process as much as possible this year, so they can see the communication between the anchors, decision desk and producers, MacCallum said.
“We want people to understand how the calls are made,” she said. “We’re definitely making an effort to open up that process so viewers can see for themselves.”
Networks won’t say they’ll be more cautious than usual in calling races, not wanting the implication they weren’t careful enough in the past. Executives noted that news organizations didn’t declare Biden the winner in 2020 until the Saturday after the election.
But transparency — showing with perhaps mind-numbing detail how voting is going in close races — was a byword.
“We care about being right,” said Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of “Meet the Press” and executive in charge of NBC News’ election coverage, “not necessarily being first.”
Burstein preached patience with so many local races. “We’re not going to jump to any conclusions that it’s a red wave or a blue wave,” he said.
The Associated Press, which has counted the nation’s votes for more than a century, does not declare a winner in an individual race until it has determined that there is no scenario under which trailing candidates can close the gap — even if a candidate has declared victory or others have conceded.
One of Tuesday’s biggest mysteries is whether any 2020 election deniers become 2022 election deniers.
“I can’t control what a politician comes out and says about the election results,” Chalian said. “What is in our control is our ability to present the factual results to the viewer.”
CNN will have more reporters out in the states than it ever has for a midterm election, he said. Other networks echo him; CBS News is preparing to tap into the expertise and staffing of its local stations across the country. NBC News has assigned six reporters each to Georgia and Pennsylvania alone.
“Through it all, they are going to have to be nimble and cover whatever story that emerges,” Budoff Brown said.
NBC News’ coverage will be led by the team of Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell. David Muir anchors ABC’s coverage. CNN says its hosts include Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon.
With the exit of news anchor Brian Williams, MSNBC’s coverage will be led by three anchors who host opinion shows: Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Nicolle Wallace.
___
David Bauder is the media writer for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dbauder
Delegates landing in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh for U.N. climate talks this week are a global elite bent on tearing down national borders, stripping away individual freedoms and condemning working people to a life of poverty.
That dark view is held by a range of far-right or populist parties — among them Donald Trump’s Republicans, who are seeking to retake control in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections. Some of these radicals are rampaging through elections in Europe while others, such as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro last week, have been defeated only narrowly.
Republican and Trump acolyte Lauren Boebert derides the environmentalist agenda as “America last;” Britain’s Brexit-backing Home Secretary Suella Braverman says the country is in thrall to a “tofu-eating wokerati;” and in Spain, senior figures in the far-right Vox party dismiss the U.N.’s climate agenda as “cultural Marxism.”
Right-wingers of various strains around the world have co-opted climate change into their culture war. The fact this is happening in countries that produce a large share of global greenhouse gas emissions has alarmed some green advocates.
“Reactionary populism is now the biggest obstacle to tackling climate change,” wrote three climate leaders, including Brazil’s former Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira, in a recent commentary.
In the U.S., Republicans are eyeing a return to power in one or both houses of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Many at the COP27 talks will be reliving the first week of the U.N. climate conference in Morocco six years ago when Trump’s election struck the climate movement like a hurricane.
A Republican surge would gnaw at the fragile confidence that has built around global climate efforts since President Joe Biden’s election, raising the specter of a second Trump term and perhaps the withdrawal — again — of the U.S. from the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal.
“I don’t want to think about that,” said Teixeira’s co-author Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat who led the design of the Paris Agreement and who now leads the European Climate Foundation.
Some on the American right are pushing a more conciliatory message than others. “Republicans have solutions to reduce world emissions while providing affordable, reliable, and clean energy to our allies across the globe,” said Utah Congressman John Curtis, who will lead a delegation from his party to COP27.
Tubiana and others in the environmental movement are trying to put on a brave face. They argue Republicans won’t want to tamper too much with Biden’s behemoth Inflation Reduction Act, which contains measures to promote clean energy.
“You might see railing against it, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of political talk and rhetoric, but I don’t expect that would be a focus for the Republicans,” said Nat Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a green NGO based in Arlington, Virginia. Nevertheless, if Republicans take both houses, “we certainly won’t make any progress,” Keohane said.
Trump’s first term and the presidency of Brazil’s Bolsonaro — which ended in a narrow defeat in last month’s election — now look like the opening skirmishes in a struggle in which the planet’s stability is at stake.
In parts of Europe, the right present their policies as sympathetic to the risks of climate change while dismissing internationally sanctioned action as sinister elitism that threatens their voters’ prosperity.
“The Sweden Democrats are not climate deniers, whatever that means,” Swedish far-right leader Jimmie Åkesson told a crowd days before a September election that saw his party win big. But Sweden’s current climate plans, Åkesson said, were “100 percent symbolic” rather than meaningful. “All that leads to is that we get poorer, that our lives get worse.”
This is the gibbet on which the far right are hanging environmentalism: depicting them as the witting or unwitting cavalry of global elites.
“We consider it to be a globalist movement that intends to end all borders, intends to end our freedom, intends to end our freedom for our identities,” Javier Cortés, president of the Seville chapter of Spain’s far-right Vox party, said in an interview with POLITICO. “We are not in favor of CO2 emissions. On the contrary, we want to respect the environment. All we are saying is that the European Union has to clarify that it wants to sell us a climate religion in which we cannot emit CO2, while we make our industries disappear from Europe and we need to buy from China.”
To describe this as climate denial — a common but often inaccurate charge — would be to miss the point that this is now just another front in the culture wars.
Online disinformation about the last U.N. climate talks was largely focused on the hypocrisy and elitism of those attending, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The main spreaders weren’t websites and figures traditionally associated with climate denial, but culture war celebrities such as psychologist Jordan Peterson, Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
Populist attacks on globalism “rely on a well-funded transnational network,” said Tubiana. “It warrants serious scrutiny.”
But while economic interests may be powering parts of the movement, there is also a sense of political opportunism at work. Huge changes to the economy will be needed to lower emissions at the speed dictated by U.N.-brokered global climate goals. There will be winners and losers — and the losers may gravitate toward populists pledging to take up their cause.
“Far-right organizations are recognizing this as a potentially lucrative topic that they can win votes or support on,” said Balsa Lubarda, head of the ideology research unit at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.
Loving the losers
The far right’s focus on the losers has been “turbo charged” by the energy crisis, said Jennie King, head of civic action and education at ISD, which populists have wrongly argued is the fault of green policy. The European Parliament’s coalition of far-right parties has grown and capitalized on the energy crisis by joining with center-right parties to vote down environmental legislation.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson — newly elected with Åkesson’s support — aims to dilute the country’s ambitions for cutting some greenhouse gas emissions, a move center-right Liberal Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari justified in familiar terms: “That is a reaction to the reality people are facing.” And in Britain, Brexit leader Nigel Farage retooled his campaign to become an anti-net zero mouthpiece.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right | Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
Strains of right-wing ecology may also mean that not all groups are actively hostile to the climate agenda, said Lubarda. Italy’s new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a huge fan of the books of J.R.R. Tolkien, which center on the Shire, an idealized bucolic homeland. Meloni says she wants to reclaim environmentalism for the right, but the protection of national economic interests still comes first.
“There is no more convinced ecologist than a conservative, but what distinguishes us from a certain ideological environmentalism is that we want to defend nature with man inside,” she said in her inaugural speech to parliament last month.
While Meloni has announced that she will attend COP27, she has also renamed the Ministry for the Ecological Transition the Ministry for Environment and Energy Security. The governing program of her Brothers of Italy party includes a section on climate change, but it strongly emphasizes the need to protect industry.
It’s this broad sense of demotion and delay that alarms those who are watching these ideas grow in stature among populists on the right. They say that while it may not sound like climate denial, the result is effectively the same.
“You can say that you are climate friends,” said Belgian Socialist MEP Marie Arena. “But in the act, you are not at all. You are business friends first.”
Jacopo Barragazzi, Charlie Duxbury and Zack Colman contributed to this report.
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Trump mocked him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” in a rally speech Saturday in Pennsylvania, where the former president touted poll numbers — but did not provide the source of the figures — with his possible match-ups in a 2024 run for the Oval Office.
The nickname was not entirely original.
Long-time Trump ally and GOP political operative Roger Stone just last month warned “Ron DeSanctimonious” in a post on Telegram that it would be “treachery” if he ran against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. Stone called DeSantis an “ingrate,” who he claimed owes his position to Trump’s support.
Trump launched the dig against DeSantis in his speech, then moved onto his astonishing poll numbers in the latest indication he may be close to announcing his candidacy. It wasn’t immediately clear where the poll numbers originated.
“We’re winning big, big, big in the Republican party for the nomination like nobody’s ever seen before,” said Trump as the numbers went up on a jumbo screen.
“There it is, Trump at 71 [percent]. Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 percent,” Trump said. “Mike Pence at 7 — oh, Mike Pence doing better than I thought,” he said to laughter from the crowd.
