The Republican House is ready to take over. Nancy Pelosi has already moved out of the Speaker’s office and the GOP’s ever-so-small majority will be sworn in to the new Congress Tuesday. But even with just 24 hours left until his party assumes power, Kevin McCarthy is apparently still short of the votes he needs to take over the gavel.
A group of nine extremely right-wing House Republicans wrote Sunday that McCarthy still has not done enough to win over their support. His most recent overtures in what has been a weeks-long lobbying effort came “almost impossibly late” to address their concerns, read a letter signed by noted ultra conservatives Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, and Chip Roy, among others.
McCarthy can only afford to lose four votes from his own party Tuesday when the decision comes to the House floor. On Sunday, he made a series of key concessions to the right flank of his party, including promising the creation of a select committee to investigate the “weaponization” of the FBI and Department of Justice, and giving House Republicans the ability to oust him in a snap vote at any time. Still, the remaining holdouts said McCarthy’s offers were “insufficient” and “vague” (one of their requests appears to be that they essentially want it to be even easier to oust the McCarthy as Speaker). For his part, McCarthy told Punchbowl’s Jake Shermanthat he was feeling “actually really good” Monday.
Should McCarthy repeatedly fail to win the speaker vote Tuesday, Republicans will need to quickly coalesce around another leader. So far, no alternative candidates with enough support to win over the Republican House have stepped forward. Though, if Tuesday does indeed fall into chaos, all eyes will be on someone like Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who has quickly risen in the party’s ranks and is seen as the apparent successor to McCarthy.
Despite all this leadership drama, the contours of a Republican-led House are already taking shape. McCarthy’s offers to Republicans, which came in the form of a House Rules package, give an excellent window into how any Republican speaker would govern the body. The rules proposal called for eliminating legislative staff’s right to collectively bargain, undoing a hard fought change last summer that ushered in a wave of unions in Democratic congressional offices.
McCarthy also called for reinstating a rule that would allow Republicans to use spending bills to slash salaries of, or even fire, specific federal employees. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargentpointed out, this could have major implications for the next Congress given the GOP’s appetite for political investigations and its ire towards agencies like the FBI and IRS. While any attempts to actually defund positions or Donald Trump-related probes would likely fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate, these maneuvers could go a long way to sabotage already tricky government funding negotiations.
Trump wrote on Monday that he “specifically asked” his daughter and Kushner not to get involved in his campaign this time around.
“Contrary to Fake News reporting, I never asked Jared or Ivanka to be part of the 2024 Campaign for President and, in fact, specifically asked them not to do it – too mean and nasty with the Fake & Corrupt News and having to deal with some absolutely horrendous SleazeBags in the world of politics, and beyond,” Trump ranted.
He continued: “There has never been anything like this “ride” before, and they should not be further subjected to it. I ran twice, getting millions more Votes the second time (RIGGED), & am doing it again!”
Kushner has reportedly refused to help the former president on his 2024 campaign, according to New York Magazine, and he’s started handing out Trump’s number to people who ask for help whereas he’s acted as a link between 45 and others in the past.
“He was like, ‘Look, I’m out. I’m really out,’” a source aware of the situation told the publication.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep.-elect George Santos, R-N.Y., admitted Monday that he lied about his job experience and college education during his successful campaign for a seat in the U.S. House.
In an interview with the New York Post, Santos said: “My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry.”
He also told the newspaper: “I campaigned talking about the people’s concerns, not my resume” and added, “I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign.”
The New York Times raised questions last week about the life story that Santos, 34, had presented during his campaign.
The Queens resident had said he had obtained a degree from Baruch College in New York, but the school said that couldn’t be confirmed.
On Monday, Santos acknowledged: “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume.”
He added: “I own up to that. … We do stupid things in life.”
FILE – Santos, who won a seat in Congress in the November election, admitted Monday that he lied about his job experience and college education during his successful campaign.
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File
Santos had also said he had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company could find any records verifying that.
Santos told the Post he had “never worked directly” for either financial firm, saying he had used a “poor choice of words.”
He told the Post that Link Bridge, an investment company where he was a vice president, did business with both.
Another news outlet, the Jewish American site The Forward, had questioned a claim on Santos’ campaign website that his grandparents “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told the Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Santos first ran for Congress in 2020 and lost. He ran again in 2022 and won in the district that includes some Long Island suburbs and a small part of Queens.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) says there has been “one line of effort” to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Americans still haven’t given sufficient attention.
Schiff, a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, addressed the panel’s final report in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday. The piece focused in particular on the Republican lawmakers in Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
Even after Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police put down the insurrection at great cost to themselves, the majority of Republicans in the House picked up right where they left off, still voting to overturn the results in important states.
A total of 147 Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the election results — 139 of 221 House Republicans and eight of 51 Senate Republicans.
The committee on Monday sent four criminal referrals against Trump to the Justice Department. In his op-ed, Schiff urged the DOJ to “ensure a form of accountability that Congress is not empowered to provide”: prosecution.
“Bringing a former president to justice who even now calls for the ‘termination’ of our Constitution is a perilous endeavor,” Schiff wrote.
“Not doing so is far more dangerous.”
In a separate op-ed penned for the Los Angeles Times, Schiff wrote that the Justice Department “must hold itself to the standard it set at the beginning of its investigation” into the deadly riot: “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
“But there is more needed to protect our democracy,” he continued, “than oversight, accountability and even justice.”
He called on Congress to take action to prevent “another would-be autocrat from tearing down our democratic institutions” by enacting reforms based on the committee’s findings.
“The oversight the Jan. 6 committee did was difficult, and the pursuit of justice may be even more so,” Schiff wrote, “but the steps we take to prevent another despot from subverting our democracy in the future may be the most challenging and consequential of all.”
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board on Saturday absolutely flamed “dimwitted” Republican lawmakers who can’t find their way out of a tangled power battle in Congress between centrists and extremists.
“Republicans are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight — except at one another,” mocked an editorial in the newspaper.
“Too many House Republicans are too dimwitted to understand the uses of power and how to wield it,” the Journal argued. “They’d rather rage against the machine to no useful effect.”
While House Democrats have effectively managed a “seamless” changeover after the elections, while the Republicans “can’t even find the votes to elect a GOP Speaker, much less agree on budget strategy or much of anything else,” according to the Journal.
Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) resoundingly won the GOP caucus vote to become House GOP leader against Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs. But Biggs is still planning to run against McCarthy for speaker on the House floor on Jan. 3. Others may also oppose McCarthy, which could lead to “multiple ballots, and … even a Democratic speaker,” the Journal emphasized, which would be disastrous for Republicans.
Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are doing McCarthy “no favors” by joining Democrats to pass a giant omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2023, according to the Journal. Most House Republicans prefer a continuing resolution to fund the government only into early next year, when Republicans will have more leverage as the House majority.
That “lack of coordination” between the House and Senate GOP “bodes ill for any coherent” Republican agenda over the next two years, the editorial warned. Republicans could be in such disarray that President Joe Biden and the Democrats could roll right over them.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, outgoing head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is revealing more about how he navigated his “very uncomfortable” time in President Donald Trump’s administration. (Watch below.)
Fauci told CNN’s Chris Wallace he felt “uncomfortable” publicly disagreeing with Trump during White House briefings.
“And that’s how I evolved essentially in the, you know, public enemy number one of the far-right, which I did not desire to be put in that position,” Fauci said.
Fauci added that he’s happy to cooperate with GOP-threatened House investigations into his pandemic recommendations, even if he becomes a “punching bag” for his critics.
Fauci is set to retire this month following a 54-year career in government that includes 38 years as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.
Watch more of Fauci’s interview with Wallace below.
Elon Musk’s tease concerning a massive reveal about Hunter Biden, his infamous laptop and Twitter “suppression” flopped big time Friday, even with right-wingers who were supposed to swoon over the information.
“So far I’m deeply underwhelmed,” tweeted right-wing radio host Seb Gorka, who served in the Trump administration. “We know the Dems in DC collude with the Dems in Palo Alto. Big Whop [whoop],” he added.
Gorka said he was hoping for a “string of felonies” to be bared. But that didn’t happen, he noted, after journalist Matt Taibbi released a lengthy Twitter thread detailing Musk’s touted findings.
So far I’m deeply underwhelmed.
We know the Dems in DC collude with the Dems in Palo Alto.
One prominent right-winger blown away by the information was Donald Trump, who found the Twitter files leak so damning that he called for terminating articles of the Constitution so that he could be reinstated as president or for an election re-do.
But nearly everyone else seemed unimpressed.
“Twitter files [are] underwhelming so far,” right-wing Free Beacon reporter Joe Simonson tweeted. Twitter was “staffed by Democrats” who acted like Democrats, he said.
Musk hyped the release Friday by Taibbi of exchanges among Twitter executives — which he now has access to — revealing a debate about how to handle tweets concerning a discovered laptop with information about business activities belonging to Joe Biden’s son. Twitter eventually restricted comments because of fears the politically charged issue would involve tweets rife with disinformation, the communications reveal.
Critics have blasted the move as a violation of the First Amendment, which is not a factor in business decisions.
Gorka had to school his own Twitter followers about Constitutional issues: “Err no, it’s not the DNC asking a private company to censor … has nothing to do with the First Amendment.’”
A columnist on the right-wing network Bulwark mocked those mistakenly upset about denied First Amendment rights.
“No you do not have a constitutional right to post Hunter Biden’s dick pick on Twitter,” headlined a story by Tim Miller. Some Twitter posts about Hunter Biden that Joe Biden’s campaign asked to remove linked to shots of him in the buff.
The Taibbi information mostly regurgitates what was already known, Miller noted: That Twitter “throttled the New York Post’s initial story about Hunter’s laptop based on what we now know was an incorrect assessment of its source.” It also underscored business as usual when political campaigns and government “work with social media companies — in this case Twitter — to flag troubling content,” he said.
Hunter Biden has been repeatedly blistered by Republicans for serving on the board of energy company Burisma in Ukraine while his father was vice president and working to clean up corruption in the nation.
There was nothing illegal in such a job, though some consider it to be unethical to profit from a relative’s position of power in the federal government.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who both served as advisers in the Trump administration despite a lack of any political experience, have profited from their connections.
For example, the Saudi Public Investment Fund poured a massive $2 billion into a $2.5 billion fund set up by Kushner, who had no experience running such an operation. The Saudi investment was made just six months after Kushner left the White House, where he spent years nurturing a cozy American relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Kushner helped negotiate a hugely controversial agreement for Saudi Arabia to buy billions of dollars worth of American weapons while the nation was bombing civilians in Yemen. And Trump became a key defender of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who American intelligence determined was responsible for the horrifying dismemberment murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.
The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.
Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.
Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. It also comes as Republican officials, including McCarthy and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, are locking arms in support of Elon Musk’s push to allow extremist voices more access to Twitter.
Although it took days to develop, some believe the widespread Republican criticism of Trump’s meeting could signal a new determination to restore the barriers between mainstream conservatism and far-right Christian and white nationalism that eroded during the Trump era.
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”
Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.
If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”
Trump famously declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi riot against the removal of confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, during his first year in office. Asked to denounce the extremist Proud Boys during one 2020 presidential debate, Trump instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” After the January 6 insurrection, in which white-supremacist groups played a central role, the overwhelming majority of House and Senate Republicans voted against impeaching or convicting Trump for spurring the violence. More recently, hardly any Republicans have raised objections to Trump repeatedly floating the possibility of providing mass pardons (and even government apologies) to the insurrectionists if he wins the presidency again in 2024.
Other officials inside the GOP coalition have pushed through the boundaries Trump has weakened. Gosar and Greene both appeared at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference. So did Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who called the audience at one of the events “patriot,” and declared, “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”
The Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate censured Rogers this year for threatening her colleagues, but she was nevertheless fulsomely embraced by Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor this year. Other prominent GOP candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, also associated with white and Christian nationalists or directly echoed themes from those movements this year.
In a similar vein, in the days before the election, McCarthy made clear that he would restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, whom the Democratic majority had stripped of such roles for their association with extremists and embrace of violent imagery. McCarthy also promised Greene and other hardline conservatives that he would authorize an investigation into the government’s prosecution and treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom are extremists tied to white and Christian nationalism.
“After Trump’s rise, these barriers became softer and softer, and they really broke down in the aftermath of January 6 altogether,” Hayden said. “And now you have this kind of opening between the fringe world and the mainstream world in a way that is very difficult to separate.”
Musk has quickly become a major new factor in further razing those barriers between the far right and the conservative mainstream, restoring the Twitter accounts of figures banned for misinformation, promotion of violence, or intimidation—including Trump and Greene. Hayden said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research shows that some previously banned white nationalists have already been restored to the site.
In a torrent of combative posts, Musk wrapped himself in the mantle of “free speech” to justify restoring accounts previously banned for violating the site’s standards. And he’s accused individuals and institutions that argue for drawing a line against extremist rhetoric of threatening the core American value of free expression. In Musk’s formulation, even the most noxious forms of hate speech can be justified as free speech, and any effort to combat divisive rhetoric is an un-American attempt at censorship or intimidation by the “woke” mob. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk insisted in one tweet. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” That’s quite a minuet: According to Musk’s logic, it’s a form of “tyranny” to oppose his amplification of authoritarian, racist, and neo-Nazi views antithetical to democracy.
The rush of GOP leaders such as McCarthy, DeSantis, and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to support Musk as he works to restore more banned accounts shows how hard it will be for the GOP to completely divorce itself from white and Christian nationalism. So does McCarthy’s pledge to restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, as well as the reluctance of almost all GOP officials to directly criticize Trump.
But a much larger slice of Republican partisans express views that might be called white-nationalist adjacent. In various polls, preponderant majorities of GOP voters have said that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault, and that the growing number of immigrants threatens American values and traditions. About half of Republicans have expressed agreement in other polls with tenets of white nationalism, including the racist “replacement theory” that elites are importing immigrants to undermine the political power of native-born white people, the core Christian-nationalist belief that “God intended America to be a new promised land,” and the assertion that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
Only a minuscule percentage of those Republican partisans might contemplate violence or join extremist organizations, Neumann and other experts point out. But the receptivity of so many Republican voters to arguments, even if less virulent, that overlap with those championed by white- and Christian-nationalist organizations may be a crucial reason for party leaders’ reluctance to confront Trump and others, like Greene, who have associated with such groups. Given the extent of such views inside the GOP coalition, Neumann said, Republicans feel no political incentive to reject the far right “other than out of the goodness of their heart and moral clarity. And apparently that wasn’t enough.”
Neumann, now the chief strategy officer of Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism, worries that organized far-right violence could still erupt if Trump ever faces a trial as a result of the various investigations targeting him. But she sees the possibility that the visibility and influence of the extreme right inside the GOP peaked with this fall’s converging events, especially the party’s disappointing election results. “I really do think this is, like, a 10-, 20-year process,” she told me, but “I have a slight hope that this sticks and that we move past it.”
Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a history of Christian nationalism, is less optimistic. He believes Christian-nationalist beliefs are spreading more widely among Trump’s followers because they believe “they are at a kind of ‘last stand’ moment” for their vision of a white-Christian-dominated America. “The unwillingness of party leaders, time and time again, to denounce Trump for giving these voices support and cover has allowed them to move into the center of the GOP today,” Jones wrote to me in an email. “I would be surprised if we didn’t see increasing numbers of GOP party leaders openly associating with these voices in the future, particularly leading up to the 2024 presidential election.”
Greenblatt is also less sanguine. The Anti-Defamation League tracked more than 2,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2021—the highest annual total it has ever recorded and triple the number of incidents it documented as recently as 2015, the last year before Trump emerged as the GOP’s leading man. Furthermore, Greenblatt is unconvinced that the current Republican distancing from Trump will last any longer than it did in earlier episodes, such as Charlottesville. And he worries that Musk is on course to radically increase the volume of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter, which was already a problem before Musk bought the company.
On all of these fronts, Greenblatt sees what he calls “the normalization of extremism” hardening in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. “Society itself is at risk if we don’t finally move the extremists … out of the mainstream, back to the margins where they belong,” he told me. “I think we don’t realize the peril that we run, the risk that’s upon us, if we don’t get this right.”
The GOP tweeted on Friday: “Let freedom be free.” It added a quote allegedly from Washington saying: “It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.”
But CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski fired back that Washington had nothing to do with the quote, according to the George Washington Mount Vernon Estate. It lists the phrase in the GOP tweet under “spurious quotations.”
Kaczynski helpfully included a link with his corrective tweet.
The estate has been unable to definitively trace the actual origin of the quote. One Twitter wag attributed it to a 1650 letter written by Oliver Cromwell, a British politician of the 1600s. Several other fact-checking websites agreed.
Critics on Twitter found it searingly ironic that the GOP screwed up a quote about freedom amid the party’s crackdowns on reproductive rights for women, human rights for the LGBTQ community, people of color and voting rights.
The GOP quote was still up late Saturday night, and still falsely attributed to Washington.
Lake, however, had disproved one of the former president’s claims just weeks ago.
Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that there was a large number of voting machines in Arizona’s “Republican areas” that were “BROKEN” on Election Day, part of a conspiracy theory that Lake peddled on Twitter earlier this week, Mediaite noted.
Trump, later in his post, attempted to sell Lake’s conspiracy theory to his followers by bringing the election-denying candidate into the heart of his unfounded claim.
″[Voters] left the voting lines in complete exasperation, unable to return. When ‘mechanics’ went in to fix the machines, they got worse. Kari Lake couldn’t even vote in her own district,” Trump wrote.
He continued: “Voter fraud – DO THE ELECTION OVER, or declare Kari, Blake [Masters], Abe [Hamadeh] the winners. Act Fast!!!”
Trump’s claim that Lake couldn’t vote in her district, however, has been debunked by the candidate herself, who has already said she traveled to a different area and had no problems.
“We switched from a Republican area to vote, we came right down into the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines,” Lake said on Election Day.
“And guess what? They’ve had zero problems with their machines today. Not one machine spit out a ballot here today, not one in a very liberal area.”
Voting sites in Arizona’s Maricopa County did experience printing issues which stopped the counting of some ballots, however, those issues were not limited to areas that tend to vote Republican or Democrat, the Associated Press found.
Voters were able to try another tabulator at sites, cancel and go to another site to vote or put their ballots in a box that would be brought to and counted at Maricopa County’s tabulation center later.
Far-right candidates who promoted the thoroughly debunked theory that schools are providing litter boxes for students who identify as animals didn’t fare well Tuesday, with several key Trump-allied candidates losing their elections—although a few big names survived.
GOP candidates, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have spread the debunked theory that … [+] students are identifying as cats and using litter boxes in schools.
Getty Images
Key Facts
Loser: New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc falsely claimed students at a New Hampshire high school had identified as “furries and fuzzies” and used litter boxes provided by the school, although the school denied his claims—he lost to Sen. Maggie Hassan (53.6% to 44.4%).
Loser: Heidi Ganahl, a GOP candidate for Colorado governor who repeatedly claimed without evidence that public school students “all over Colorado” were dressing up as animals and communicating with barks and growls while schools are “tolerating it,” lost on Tuesday to Democrat Jared Polis 57% to 40.8%.
Loser: GOP House candidate Catalina Lauf, running for election in Illinois, tweeted at CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski last month, “this is not a hoax and is happening in schools in Illinois, too”—she lost this week to Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.).
Loser: Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, who asked on the campaign trail why elementary school students are able to “choose their gender” or why they are given “litter boxes” at school, also lost on Tuesday, falling to Democrat Tim Walz 52.3% to 44.6%.
Loser: Ed Thelander, a Republican House candidate in Maine, spread the myth last month before backtracking and admitting the theory had no basis, lost in a 62.8% to 37.1% landslide to Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine).
Winner: In Ohio, Trump-backed Republican J.D. Vance, who promoted the debunked theory, saying in an interview on the right-wing Billy Cunningham Show last month it’s a “crazy point we’ve reached in this country where schools are doing this stuff”—he defeated Democratic challenger Tim Ryan in the key Senate race, taking in 53.3% of the vote.
Winner: Far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R), who has supported multiple QAnon conspiracies, falsely claimed students were dressing up as cats and using litter boxes, telling reporters outside a campaign event in September, “that’s their prerogative”—she soundly defeated Democrat Marcus Flowers, receiving 65.9% of the vote.
Undecided: Far-right GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), one of the loudest supporters of the theory, has called it an “identity crisis” that goes beyond “furries” to the question of gender identity, saying “when we have a large portion of the population who can’t tell us what a woman is, there’s a crisis”—she holds a narrow lead over her Democratic challenger Adam Frisch in a surprisingly close race that hasn’t yet been called.
Key Background
The theory came into the national spotlight in January when Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock posted on Facebook, “Kids who identify as ‘furries’ get a litter box in the school bathroom.” One day later, a far-right social media account called Libs of TikTok tweeted a video of a Michigan school board meeting where a woman claimed “kids who identify as a cat or a dog” use litter boxes in school bathrooms—while the school superintendent denied the claim. Libs of TikTok went on to post similar theories, in one instance calling a Kentucky sex education teacher a “predator,” a post that Fox News host Laura Ingraham picked up, calling out schools for being “essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals.” Over the next several months, the theory caught on among far-right candidates and right-leaning media hosts, even though there was never any evidence of students identifying as animals. Earlier this year, several GOP state officials, including Colorado state Rep. Scott Bottoms, Texas state Rep. Michelle Evans and Nebraska state Rep. Bruce Bostelman, caught on to the “furries” theory, although Bostelman walked back on his claim that students are using litter boxes, admitting it had no basis. An NBC News report found at least 20 right-wing candidates and elected officials spread the debunked theory this year, and that every school district they referenced has denied the claims as untrue. School officials across the country have debunked the claims, with some writing to parents to assure them students are not using litter boxes.
Tangent
“Furries” is a subculture that’s existed for years among some adults who dress up as animal characters. Adults who dress up as “furries” also include a high percentage of queer members, although the community that participates in the subculture decries characterizations of the practice that focus on a perceived sexual element—a form of fear mongering that’s been called “fur-mongering.” The theory that children are identifying as cats and dogs, however, seems related to as right-wing policy makers introducing legislation that targets identity and transgender rights in schools, including Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law preventing elementary school teachers from instructing on gender identity, as well as numerousstate bills targeting trans children in school sports—although several, including in Utah and West Virginia, have been blocked in courts.
Surprising Fact
Last month, popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who has a huge conservative following, said on his Joe Rogan Experience that a school “had to install a litter box in the girls room” for a student who “identifies as an animal,” backtracked on his claim two weeks later, admitting “it doesn’t seem like there was any proof that they actually put the litter box in there.”
Some vote-counting machines in Arizona’s Maricopa County malfunctioned on Election Day, leading state Republican leaders to spread unsubstantiated claims of fraud and offer contradictory advice to voters, with the state’s GOP chair Kelli Ward claiming without evidence that voters who follow county officials’ advice would essentially be letting someone else “decide how you voted.”
A voting tabulator glitch in Arizona’s Maricopa County has GOP officials claiming voter fraud, … [+] although local Republican officials say it’s just a technical error.
Getty Images
Key Facts
Tabulators in roughly 20% of Maricopa County’s polling places are struggling to read some ballots, according to county Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates (R), who called the situation a “technical issue” in a press conference Tuesday afternoon, adding “none of this indicates any fraud.”
If a tabulator isn’t working, the county encouraged voters to place their ballots into a secure box marked “3,” and their votes will be tabulated in the evening at a central counting center.
However, in an interview Tuesday with former President Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Ward claimed voters who follow Maricopa County officials’ advice by submitting ballots into the secure box are sending their votes to “digital adjudication,” and urged voters to ignore the county’s guidance if at all possible.
Ward tweeted her own advice on Tuesday, telling voters to stay in line and request to use another machine called an accessible voting device, claiming voters who check into a polling place are stuck “like a prisoner” and can’t vote at another location—the county’s election department, however, denied that claim, saying voters have the option of checking out, turning in their ballot and going to another of the county’s polling sites.
In a tweet, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—who, like Ward, has repeatedly spread the false conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen—also urged voters to ask for an accessible voting machine or wait until a tabulator starts working again, but differed from Ward in her advice for voters who “can’t wait,” advising them to put their ballots into box 3.
Trump-backed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters retweeted a post urging voters not to leave their polling place for a new one if their votes aren’t counted, while Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social “don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” claiming “they are trying to steal the election with bad machines and DELAY.”
Key Background
The baseless allegations of voter fraud come after months of debunked vote-rigging theories were spread by many GOP leaders, including 202 Republican congressional candidates who believe the 2020 election was either flawed or based on fraud, according to data from the Brookings Institution. A Gallup poll released last week found three in five Republicans believe votes in the midterms will be cast and counted inaccurately, compared to just 15% of Democrats. Nearly 40% of Republicans said they would blame voter fraud if the GOP doesn’t take control of Congress, including 19% who said it’s “highly likely” Republicans would lose because of fraud, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released last month. In Maricopa County, misinformation claims “really kicked into high gear” last week, Gates said, although there have been numerous unsubstantiated allegations of fraud since the 2020 elections, leading to a 2021 audit of tabulators. Meanwhile, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs—the Democratic candidate for governor—is investigating numerous reports of voter intimidation.
Surprising Fact
Maricopa County, a traditionally Republican-leaning county that includes Phoenix, Glendale, Mesa and Scottsdale, is not only Arizona’s most populous county, but it’s also run by Republicans, including Gates. Election workers in the county have faced more than 100 violent threats and intimidation ahead of the election, including emails, social media posts and threats of posting photos of election workers, Reuters reported.
A judge on Monday blocked a rural Arizona county from moving forward with a plan by Republican officials to hand-count every ballot cast in Tuesday’s midterm, shutting down the latest attempt by swing-state officials to pore through votes by hand this year—a push driven in part by evidence-free allegations that voting machines are rife with fraud.
A election worker recounts ballots in Madison, Wisconsin, November 20.
Getty Images
Key Facts
Judge Casey McGinley ruled that Cochise County—a sparsely populated area on the U.S.-Mexico border—can’t tally its votes using both machines and a manual count, arguing this process violates state election rules that only allow counties to hand-count a small number of randomly selected ballots in order to check for accuracy.
The county’s board of supervisors voted 2-1 last month to order a hand count, citing voters’ concerns about election integrity, with the county’s two Republican supervisors voting yes while the body’s lone Democrat voted no, according to the Associated Press.
A group of retirees represented by prominent Democratic attorney Marc Elias’ law firm sued the county, arguing a manual count “will sow confusion among voters and undermine the public’s confidence in Arizona’s elections.”
Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs (D) argued in a brief that Cochise County’s hand-counting plan could raise ballot security concerns, lead to inaccuracies and “threaten the County’s ability to timely canvass its election.”
Meanwhile, an attorney for County Recorder David Stevens, who handles voter registration and was tasked with helping to oversee the hand count, has said there’s no harm in checking for accuracy by counting ballots twice—once by machine and once by hand—and stated he had a plan to finish the count before a state-imposed deadline.
Stevens’ lawyer also argued the county is protected by a provision in Arizona’s election rules that give counties the discretion to hand-count more ballots than the minimum required to check for accuracy (Judge McGinley said Monday this policy doesn’t give officials the power to count every single vote from every precinct).
Chief Critic
“Allowing Cochise County to proceed with an unlawful full hand count – motivated by baseless conspiracy theories – would set a dangerous precedent and inject chaos, disruption, and insecurity in the middle of an election,” Hobbs’ office said in its amicus brief.
Contra
“No voter will be negatively impacted by this decision [to hand-count ballots],” Stevens’ attorney argued in court papers. “The expanded hand count will merely serve as an additional confirmation of the accuracy of that process.”
Surprising Fact
Cochise County isn’t the only place where courts have scuttled plans to hand-count every ballot. Officials in rural Nye County, Nevada, began counting early ballots by hand over a week ago, citing suspicion about voting machines, but the state Supreme Court ruled the process was illegal, forcing it to grind to a halt after just two days. And Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem (R)—both of whom have promoted false voter fraud allegations—filed an unsuccessfullawsuit against Hobbs seeking to bar the use of voting machines and require hand counts statewide.
Tangent
If the goal of hand-counting ballots is to make elections more reliable, many experts think this approach could backfire. Hand counts are prone to human error and can lead to mistakes in vote tallies, according to someresearch. Manually counting ballots is also slow: On the first day of Nye County’s hand count last month, some groups of volunteers took three hours to count just 50 ballots, and mistakes led to time-consuming recounts, the AP reported.
Key Background
This week’s midterms are the first nationwide elections since the 2020 presidential race, which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed was ridden by fraud. Since then, many Republican voters and elected officials have echoed Trump’s unproven voter fraud allegations and called for wide-ranging changes to how elections are conducted, often fixating on unsubstantiated claims that voting machines are rigged. Last year, Arizona’s GOP-controlled state Senate commissioned an “audit” of ballots cast in 2020 in Maricopa County to look for evidence of fraud, kicking off an often-bizarre process that reportedly included inspecting some ballots for traces of bamboo to assuage conspiracy theorists who believed phony votes were shipped in from Asia. The audit—led by an obscure company called Cyber Ninjas—confirmed President Joe Biden’s win in the county. And earlier this year, officials in a small New Mexico county briefly refused to certify the results of a midterm election due to vague and unfounded concerns about voting machines, though they eventually signed off on the election results due to an order from the state Supreme Court.
PENNSYLVANIA — LifeGate Church is nestled in a wooded area of Elizabethtown, 6 miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that partially melted down in 1979, almost rendering this pretty patch of central Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River a radioactive wasteland. The church was formed in 2010, and now a half-acre of trees behind the building lay on their sides, cut down to make room for an expansion that will include a new youth center.
On an overcast Sunday morning last month, about 80 congregants pulled into the parking lot underneath brilliant orange and yellow foliage and filed in through the church’s red front doors, sharing warm greetings and smiles. I also pulled into the parking lot, glancing in the rearview mirror to see a car pulling in behind me with a sticker on its front windshield declaring, “CRT MARXISM SUCKS.”
I was welcomed by Pastor Don Lamb, a tall, gray-mustachioed man who had recently recovered from a heart attack. (He’d collapsed in a nearby diner and technically died, he told me. But people rushed to his aid and performed a “miracle,” resuscitating him.) Lamb had made it clear before I arrived at LifeGate that he was wary of journalists like me, but that the church would stand by its promise to welcome anybody for Sunday service. I took my place in the rows of adjoined chairs as a full band — keyboardist, guitar player, bass player, drummer — started to play worship songs. The congregants rose to their feet, some with palms facing upward and eyes closed, singing.
Lamb then introduced a visitor to the day’s service, Calvin Greiner, a middle-aged white man from over in Lititz who claims to receive prophetic visions from God. Greiner walked to the front of the room carrying a long sword and grabbed hold of the microphone.
“I was instructed years and years ago to make a sword and to put on it specific words,” Greiner said. He recited the sword’s inscription. “Anointed and appointed. Worship. Warfare. Prayer. Intercession by the direction of the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said. “The other side says, The sword of the Lord — my name’s not on here — it’s The sword of the Lord. The sword of the Spirit.”
“This was in the office of Doug Mastriano — some of you might know him — for 225 days,” Greiner continued. Mastriano, of course, is a state senator and Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania.
Greiner explained how God recently told him to retrieve the sword from Mastriano’s office in Harrisburg, take it to Philadelphia, where a pastor at a church blessed it, and then to the nation’s capital. “God said, ‘After Philly, this must go to D.C. This must go to my Capitol in D.C. from Harrisburg,’” Greiner recalled, his voice breaking.
But before D.C., God told him to stop at LifeGate, where he’d meet a man named Jim Emery, a church member who had worked as security for Mastriano during his campaign.
Greiner invited Emery and a couple of other men to join him at the front of the church, where they laid their hands upon the sword and began to pray as the guitarist strummed a soft melody.
“Oh Lord and heavenly father, we thank you and pray to you that you gave us this sword to bind the powers of Satan and cast it out!” one of the men said. “As this sword moves to Washington, I pray by the powers of the Holy Spirit you will send your angels in and around that building, Lord. And you will touch the mighty Angel of God and find the power of Satan in Washington and run him out of town, Lord!”
The guitarist continued playing as Greiner closed the prayers by exclaiming: “So let God arise! Let his enemies scatter! Let those who hate God flee right now!”
Lamb took hold of the microphone again.
“We welcome you all to LifeGate, the church in the country that’s trying to affect the country,” he said. “We truly believe that God has called the church to be more than a house of offerings, a house of sermons, a house of hymnals. This will be a house of activating people to be engaged in the world we will live in.”
Lamb asked the congregation: “How many of you look forward to the return of Christ?” The crowd erupted into cheers and amens.
“That’s coming,” Lamb assured them, “but you got work to do until then.”
Doug Mastriano, GOP nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, holds a sword at an event hosted by QAnon conspiracy theorists in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in April 2022.
In April, Mastriano spoke at an event in Gettysburg hosted by believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory. He told the crowd that he would be the next governor of Pennsylvania because “my God will make it so.”
The event’s organizer, Francine Fosdick, then gave him what she called “the Sword of David.” She explained that she was giving him the sword because of the “warfare” Mastriano would have to wage on the campaign trail. “You’ve been fighting for our country, and you’re fighting for our religious rights in Christ Jesus,” Fosdick told him.
“Oh yeah,” Mastriano replied, holding up the blade. “Where’s Goliath?”
Mastriano’s campaign did not answer any questions for this story, including whether this sword was the same one I saw at LifeGate.
Mastriano has run an insular campaign for governor, often outright refusing to engage questions from a mainstream media eager to press him about his apocalyptic Christian worldview. He has preferred instead to remain in a conservative media bubble, almost solely granting interviews to far-right figures like Steve Bannon.
To better understand Mastriano, I traveled to central Pennsylvania to see the Christian nationalist extremists in his orbit up close. His supporters, some of whom are self-anointed “prophets,” see Mastriano as ordained by God to be governor of the Keystone State at a crucial moment in American history. Along the way, I joined a traveling far-right roadshow and neo-Charismatic Christian revival called the Great ReAwakening, hosted by former Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and Oklahoma businessman Clay Clark.
It’s a festival of MAGA and QAnon conspiracy theories — about the 2020 election, vaccines, the COVID pandemic, 5G, critical race theory and a globalist cabal of Democratic Satan-worshiping pedophiles — so outlandish that it’d be easy to dismiss as fringe if it weren’t regularly attracting thousands of people. It’s also routinely endorsed by some of the most powerful Republican figures in the country, including Mastriano.
If polls, not prophecies, are to be believed, Mastriano will be clobbered by his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, in Tuesday’s election. But his likely defeat shouldn’t distract from what Mastriano represents: The ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party into a sect that sees its victory as inevitable and predestined from above, and which paints its opponents as the literal incarnations of the Devil in need of vanquishing. In this view, democracy is merely a roadblock in a divine quest for domination.
Waiting For Mastriano
Manheim, PA – October 21 : Attendees are baptized at the Great ReAwakening America Tour held at the Spooky Nook Sports Complex on Friday, Oct 21, 2022 in Manheim, PA.
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Early on a Friday morning last month in Manheim, a small town in the fertile farmland of Lancaster County, a few thousand people — almost all white, most middle-aged — entered the sprawling Spooky Nook Sports complex, laying their coats down on white folding chairs as a band on stage broke into song.
“Way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light in the darkness. My God that is who you are,” the band sang as the crowd joined in. They wore T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President,” and “FAUCI LIED.”
Pastor Dave Scarlett took the stage, flanked by half a dozen people holding shofars — rams-horn trumpets traditionally used by Jews in religious ceremonies. In recent years the far-right has appropriated the instrument for its battle cry, a way of commencing “spiritual warfare.” Shofars were seen frequently during the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Let’s go to war,” Scarlett told the crowd, the shofars sounding off seven times.
So began the 17th stop of the Great ReAwakening tour. Attendees were told by speaker after speaker that they — the true, real Americans — are under attack on all fronts, and their salvation lies in seizing political and cultural institutions to pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ.
Many speakers claim they have a direct line to God. Bo Polny describes himself as an “experienced cycles timing analyst” in “Gold, Silver and Cryptocurrency” who uses “prayer and prophetic dreams” to forecast the markets.
“The U.S. Stock Market Crashed 38% in March 2020, as forecast,” his website claims. “NEXT comes the OCTOBER 2022 WORLD ECONOMIC COLLAPSE followed by the return of President Trump… how will Bitcoin, Gold, Silver and Cryptocurrencies react in the turmoil? Become a PRIVATE MEMBER TODAY and get all the DETAILS!” (A 14-day trial is “only” $99.)
Polny spoke at the Great ReAwakening show on Oct. 21. After a hard-to-follow explanation about the Biblical significance of the number “24,” Polny told the crowd that something big was going to happen soon, on Nov. 24 — perhaps the crash of the American dollar. “The system is a fraud, people!” Polny said. “It’s a fraud. Haggai 2:8 states that ‘the silver and the gold are mine, saith the Lord.’ Not the U.S. dollar!”
He then added: “The seven mountains that are built — the financial system, the church, education, the government, arts, entertainment, media — all of it is coming down, and seven new mountains will be built!”
The crowd — which knew this prophecy well — cheered.
The “Seven Mountains Mandate” is at the core of the New Apostolic Reformation. This relatively new evangelical movement believes in miracles, the supernatural, and the existence of modern-day apostles and prophets. It’s a movement characterized by Christian dominionism, the belief that Christians must gain control of the “seven mountains” of societal influence to form a perfect world. Only then, the prophecy goes, can Christ return to Earth.
This theocratic philosophy makes no room for equal governance in a pluralistic society like that of the United States. Yet the GOP candidate for governor of the country’s fifth largest state is a devotee. Though Mastriano has attempted to distance himself from New Apostolic Reformation, he has appeared repeatedly on the campaign trail with its apostles and prophets, allowing them to lay hands on him in prayer.
Mastriano was scheduled to speak at this Great ReAwakening in Manheim — organizer Clay Clark said Mastriano’s campaign asked to include him on the speaker list — but he wouldn’t appear until the end of the second day of the conference, after 16-plus hours of songs, baptisms, healing ceremonies and the casting out of demons.
And wild speeches like Polny’s.
“We’re about to witness the Third Seal of Revelation,” Polny told the Great ReAwakening crowd. “The angel of death is coming to visit these people before the end of the year.”
A graphic appeared on the screen behind him showing photos of Hilary Clinton, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, President Joe Biden, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), billionaire George Soros, former First Lady Michelle Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and others.
A graphic projected onto a screen at the far-right Great ReAwakening show in Manheim, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 21, 2022 prophesying that the “angel of death” will visit twenty-four political figures by the end of the year.
“These people are going down!” Polny exclaimed as the audience cheered and clapped. “These people who think they are pharaohs! Present-day pharaohs who you shall never see again!”
“This is coming with the greatest wealth transfer in human history,” he continued, making sure to plug his business. “Gold and silver are going to explode in value…”
Polny’s hit list, which included many of the MAGA movement’s stated political opponents, was taken from “Julie Green Prophecies,” according to the graphic on the projector.
Green, a fixture of the Great ReAwakening tour, is a “prophet” whose prophecies are reliably pro-Trump. They are sometimes violent too, like her prophecy that God — any minute now — is going to strike down Democratic politicians “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” She has also falsely alleged that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood” and that the federal government is performing “human sacrifices.”
She nevertheless enjoys a close relationship with Mastriano. The GOP nominee for governor once shared a video of Green prophesying that Pennsylvania is a “hornet’s nest of corruption” but that “I, the Lord, am cleansing your state.”
Mastriano has been photographed with Green and once invited her to give a prayer at a campaign rally. At the Patriots Arise conference in Gettysburg — where Mastriano accepted his sword — Green delivered another prophecy. “Yes, Doug, I am here for you, and I have not forsaken you,” Green said, speaking as God. “The time has come for their great fall; for the great steal to be overturned. So, keep your faith in me.”
I knew all this about Green when she took the stage at the Great ReAwakening in Manheim. I did not expect to witness how much her followers adored her and how excited they were to watch her reveal prophecies on stage.
“Says God, ‘you can’t stop my son, who is the rightful president, and his name is President Donald Trump…” she said, as the crowd broke into hysterical cheers. “He is on his way back, and how he takes his position back on center stage, you will never see that coming because you won’t see me coming. And I am with him.’”
Green said that Trump’s return to the White House might happen before 2024. “God said he can take this country back in unconventional ways. He doesn’t need an election to do it,” she added.
Later, I saw Green wafting around the conference like a celebrity. She, at times, placed her hands on people’s heads, casting out their demons, causing her followers to break down in tears and even collapse. She and other “prophets” performed these rituals frequently.
They claimed to heal the sick. A woman in a wheelchair stood up and walked, saying this Great ReAwakening was the first time she’d done so in 13 years.
Attendees are prayed over during a worship and prayer time at the Great ReAwakening America Tour held at the Spooky Nook Sports Complex on Friday, Oct 21, 2022 in Manheim, Pennsylvania.
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Valeri Boland, who coordinates volunteers for Mastriano’s campaign in Dauphin County, told me I had a demon.
I had been watching the failed U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette speak on stage when Boland sat next to me. She had seen my tweets about the conference. She whispered in my ear that they were “trash” and “full of lies,” pointing her finger toward my chest. She said she would pray for me to have a “radical encounter with God” so that the “demons inside me” causing me to lie would leave.
She went back to her seat. Twenty minutes later, she found me again and apologized, offering to pray with me, an invitation I declined. She was joined by Francine Fosdick, the QAnon believer from Gettysburg who had gifted Mastriano the sword. The pair both wore “Mastriano” pins on their shirts and launched into a series of conspiratorial rants that they asked me not to record — including about the COVID vaccine and the Georgia Guidestones — while trying to convince me to accept Jesus into my heart.
I walked over to where various MAGA vendors were hawking their wares. There were prophetic paintings, one of Jesus hugging an American flag and another of a lion, surrounded by American flags, and the text: “What storm Mr. President? You’ll find out” — an apparent reference to the QAnon “storm” prophecy that Trump will mass-arrest his political enemies one day.
Other vendors sold $100 metal crosses, handbags shaped like guns, and “Trump is still my president, but Christ is King” sweatshirts. There were various questionable health supplements for sale, vitamins and anointing oils, and a blanket that purportedly protects you from 5G’s radioactive waves.
One woman, who had hurt her wrists working as an Amazon delivery driver, showed me the bottle of “micronic silver” she had just bought, which she claimed instantly stopped her pain.
Mastriano’s campaign had a booth amidst all this snake oil where supporters could sign up to volunteer. A nervous campaign worker moved aside as I took photos of the booth, stacked with literature about Mastriano’s pledge to restore “voting integrity,” “end mask and vaccine mandates,” and “put parents in charge of education.” I asked the campaign worker if Mastriano would still speak at the conference, and she said probably not. He was too busy. Clark, the conference organizer, kept telling me that Mastriano was still on the schedule.
“I identify as a man today — is it OK to be in here?” a man in the men’s bathroom loudly joked as he used a urinal, with three other grown men next to him guffawing. (Nearly every speaker at the conference had gone after transgender people, some calling gender dysphoria the work of the devil.)
Outside, I found Pennsylvania state Rep. Dave Zimmerman, who I’d interviewed a few weeks prior at a small rally for Mastriano in Harrisburg. At that rally, he had admitted to being subpoenaed by the FBI, likely over his involvement with Mastriano’s scheme to install fake electors after the 2020 election to give the presidency to Trump.
I showed Zimmerman a photo of the “angel of death” prophecy that had been projected on stage, making sure it was close enough so he could read the text above the faces of the 24 people prophesied to die in the next couple of months: “Angel of Death coming for them by year-end. ’TREASON will be written on them for ETERNITY.”
Is this OK? I asked Zimmerman. He demurred.
“I don’t know what was said. But there’s no question there’s, you know, there’s good things, and there’s bad things happening in our country, and some individuals promote good things, and some individuals promote bad things.”
I asked him: “Do you believe in modern-day prophets who have a direct line to God?”
”You know, throughout the Old Testament, New Testament scripture, God used prophets, and I’m sure he’s using prophets today as well. There’s clearly prophets that can talk to God, I’m sure,” Zimmerman said.
“QAnon’s actual core is that you need mass murder to save America, and that part hasn’t died.”
Outside the building, I eavesdropped as about a dozen attendees smoked cigarettes while chatting about their favorite far-right media personalities.
“I go to sleep listening to InfoWars.”
“That BS with the Sandy Hook lawsuit fucked him over.”
“We were listening to Ben Shapiro on local radio — he talks too fast, though.”
“Tucker Carlson — he is so funny sometimes. He just cracks me up. And that laugh of his!”
Lisa, from Elizabethtown, lit a second cigarette after agreeing to explain her “Save The Children” T-shirt to me. The Illuminati, she said, are harvesting adrenochrome from the blood of sex-trafficked kids in underground tunnels. She’d seen video evidence of these rituals via DuckDuckGo — a Pennsylvania-based search engine. She turned around so I could see the back of her shirt, replete with a map of “THE TUNNEL SYSTEM OF THE UNITED STATES.”
A woman at the Great ReAwakening show in Manheim, Pennsylvania, shows off a shirt mapping out underground tunnels across the U.S. where she believes the Illuminati are harvesting children’s blood.
Christopher Mathias / HuffPost
This conspiracy theory is at the heart of QAnon, the authoritarian fantasy that one day Trump will destroy this cabal of pedophiles, who incidentally are his political foes. Support for QAnon was evident at the Great ReAwakening — with one speaker leading the crowd in reciting the movement’s slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.” But it was far less pronounced than it might’ve been at a MAGA event two or three years ago.
I called Thomas LeCaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University who studies apocalyptic religion and political violence, to ask him whether this was because QAnon’s brand, with all of its wild prophecies and numerologies, and its association with the Jan. 6 insurrection, had simply become too toxic. “I think it’s much worse than that,” he said. “I think QAnon became so normalized in the far right that you don’t need the specific banners of Q to announce it’s already there.”
When you peel away all the “genuinely batshit crazy prophetic aspects,” LeCaque explained, QAnon at its core is a “mass murder fantasy” about the coming “storm” when all of the MAGA movement’s enemies will be arrested and lynched.
“The ideology that your enemies are literal monsters and that something needs to be done about them — that part has unfortunately become far too mainstream,” LeCaque said. “I think that’s the part that should worry us a lot more. Like it’s really easy to make fun of QAnon in its purest state, but QAnon’s actual core is that you need mass murder to save America, and that part hasn’t died.”
Hand gun and rifle themed American flags, hats and other MAGA gear is sold during the ReAwaken America Tour held at the Spooky Nook Sports Complex on Saturday, Oct 22, 2022 in Manheim, Pennsylvania.
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Inside the conference, there was excitement about the arrival of Trump’s adult son. “Does anybody in this room not think that we won Pennsylvania?” Eric Trump asked the crowd after taking the stage. “It was the biggest fraud.”
He then gave a speech similar to the ones he’s given at other ReAwaken tour stops — the election was stolen, Christianity is under attack, liberals are indoctrinating your kids in schools — before taking out his phone and calling his dad.
Eric Trump held the phone to the microphone so the crowd, growing ecstatic, could hear the former president say, “We love you. We’re going to bring this country back because I think our country has never been in such bad shape as it is now.”
The crowd started to chant: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Then Eric Trump thanked Clark, the conference’s organizer, who had joined him on stage. “I love you guys,” he told Clark, “the job you’ve done…” The crowd started to cheer loudly for Clark. I was close enough to the stage to see the tears welling up in Clark’s eyes.
Clark is a far-right podcaster and business consultant from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who believes that a 2013 prophecy from a self-anointed Christian “prophet” named Kim Clement about “a man by the name of Mr. Clark and… another man by the name of Donald” was about him and Trump.
He interpreted this prophecy as a call from God to launch the Great ReAwakening, holding the show’s first iteration in Tulsa last April. He has used the tour to push the unhinged conspiracy theory that the COVID vaccine is a trick by billionaire Bill Gates to alter our DNA, making the number of genes a variant of the devil’s number — 666, also known as the “Mark of the Beast.”
“The shot, the injection, the bioweapon, what is being called the vaccine —everyone needs to look this up — it’s called SM-102,” Clark said. “A core ingredient of the shot, SM-102, also contains a technology called luciferase—Lucifer race.”
Now, here he was being thanked by Eric Trump in front of thousands of people. “He doesn’t need to be doing this crap, and neither do I, frankly,” Eric Trump said of Clark. “But the guy doesn’t stop because he loves this nation, and he loves everything this country stands for. And you are incredible at everything you put together.”
After Eric’s speech, many in the crowd started to filter out of the Spooky Nook complex, walking back to their cars as the sun set. A middle-aged white couple named Carl and Lori were driving a red, white and blue pickup truck covered in decals spelling out, “Doug Mastriano For Governor.”
“He’s gonna do all he’s gonna say he’s gonna do,” Carl said of Mastriano. “No same-sex marriage, no killing babies, that’s the main thing, and taking care of the schools and not having teachers teaching what they’re teaching. All this transgender goings-ons and all that crap.”
Carl loved all the speakers at Great ReAwakening. Lori particularly liked the prophet Julie Green.
“She’s a very good, strong Christian woman,” Lori said. “God speaks to her.”
Carl from Hershey, Pennsylvania, stands with his truck covered in decals supporting the far-right GOP nominee for governor Doug Mastriano on Oct. 21, 2022 in Manheim.
Christopher Mathias / HuffPost
On day two of the Great ReAwakening, I met Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the woman fatally shot by Capitol police as she tried to crawl through a shattered window into the Speaker’s Lobby during the insurrection.
Witthoeft carried a small, 19-year-old dog named Fuggles in a backpack as she walked around the conference. She wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the letters “J4J6” — Justice For Jan. 6 — next to a photo of her daughter outside the Capitol building.
“That’s my daughter an hour before she was murdered by the United States government,” Witthoeft said.
This was her fourth time at a Great ReAwakening event. She was here with Randy Ireland, who led the New York chapter of the Proud Boys, a violent neo-fascist gang that played a major role in the insurrection. She and Ireland had joined forces to raise awareness about the mistreatment of Jan. 6 prisoners, who they said were being “robbed” of their due rights under the Constitution.
Every month they host a candlelight vigil outside the prison in D.C. where a few dozen alleged insurrectionists are being detained. “We pray,” Witthoeft said. “We sing hymns. We have call-ins from the prisoners that we put out over livestream through a microphone and the telephone, and then at nine o’clock, we all sing the National Anthem.”
I asked her how she felt about the Great ReAwakening.
“I think there’s a lot of different people here with a lot of different messages, but one consistent message is we need God in this country. We need God in our lives. We need God to move us forward in our paths, individually and collectively. And so I believe, you know, it’s a feel-good moment for a lot of people that are here.”
Micki Witthoeft, mother of Ashli Babbit, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the letters “J4J6” — Justice For Jan. 6 — next to a photo of her daughter outside the Capitol building.
Illustration: Benjamin Currie/HuffPost; Photo: Getty
Nearby people lined up to be healed by prophets, to have their demons cast out. Over on the main stage, a murderer’s row of bigots, grifters, COVID-deniers, and QAnon influencers gave speeches. It became clear that Mastriano wasn’t going to show. He was speaking at a rally up in Scranton and likely wouldn’t have time to get here. Not that he was going to sway any voters here, anyway. He had their votes. His campaign workers packed up their booth and walked out of Spooky Nook.
In his scheduled time slot, Donné Clement Petruska, the daughter of the late “prophet” Kim Clement, took to the stage and played videos of her dad “prophesying” Sept. 11, the rise of ISIS, and the election of Trump.
The crowd oohed and aahed.
The Sermon
The next morning at LifeGate church in Elizabethtown, Pastor Pete Ogilvie used part of his sermon to talk about the Great ReAwakening conference. “It was like drinking water from a firehose, the release of all the information and things — I couldn’t take it all in,” he said.
“It was a disturbing conference,” he said. “It was lovely and disturbing all at once.”
I had come to LifeGate because of its close ties to Mastriano and its involvement with the GOP. Lancaster Online, the local newspaper, had reported that four LifeGate members, including one with direct ties to an armed militia, had been working as a security team for Mastriano on the campaign trail. One of them, Jim Emery, along with two other LifeGate members — Stephen and Danielle Lindemuth, who were at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the insurrection — also won seats on the local school board.
The church was making real inroads into local politics. I noticed Emery sitting in the back of the church during the sermon, holding the sword that had recently been in Mastriano’s Harrisburg office. Emery raised the sword aloft when he felt moved by the pastor’s words.
“These are the things that we come against in the name of Jesus, that we wage war with, and these are the things that we will declare victory over today!” Ogilvie declared. On the wall behind him, a projector displayed a long list of the church’s enemies:
“Mail-in Ballots, Dominion Machines, Election Day lasting longer than a week, Stolen elections, An illegitimate Administration in the WH….Human-Trafficking, Fentynol flooding our country, opioid addiction rampant, sexual immorality being the standard, Greed, Satanic Worship… Doctrines of demons, Critical Race Theory in our schools, Porn in our libraries, Boys competing in girl’s sports, pronoun protocols, Liberal media lies and canceling the conservative voices…”
Ogilive clicked through to the next slide:
“Medical Tyranny, Mask mandates, Vaccination Mandates, Covid Testing… Clause Schwab, George Soros, Fauci, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Wolf, Richard Levine, Gerry Nadler, the Jan. 6 Committee, Liz Cheney, The rest of the swamp in Both Parties, and Both Houses of Congress and the Senate….”
“Lord, we believe that all these enemies of Your Word will fall, all your enemies will cower,” Ogilive said.
Someone in the back of the church blew through a shofar.
“Lord, we thank you, we only have enemies because you have enemies,” he added. “All your enemies are under your feet, and therefore they’re under ours.”
A protest and fight broke out outside a pub in Eugene, Oregon, during a drag queen storytime event — adding to the growing list of attacks against drag events and the LGBTQ community across the country.
The event featured an 11-year-old performer as the guest of honor at Old Nick’s Pub on Sunday, The Register-Guard reported. There were roughly 200 protestors and supporters outside the pub —some armed. Several hours into the demonstration of the drag story hour, authorities said a fight broke out between the two groups, where rocks and smoke bombs were briefly thrown. The Eugene Police Department responded to the outbreak by shutting down the street.
“These protests are absolutely ridiculous, especially because these people claim to be supporting children,” Emily Chappell, owner of Old Nick’s Pub, told HuffPost. “[The protestors] have been manipulated by a targeted hate campaign in this country whose agenda is demonizing queer people and spaces in support of anti-LGBTQ legislation they want to push through this fall. It’s sad, really.”
Drag Story Hour (DSH) is a nonprofit organization that uses drag as a traditional art form to “promote literacy, teach about LGBTQ lives, and activate children’s imaginations,” Jonathan Hamilt, executive director of DSH, told HuffPost. It started in 2015 with drag queens reading to children in libraries and has since expanded to include literary and creative programming for children led by drag queens all over the world.
Republicans have routinely expressed disapproval and intentions to ban drag queen storytime events, claiming they expose children to sexually explicit material. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in June that the state’s child protective services should investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows, calling them “not age-appropriate.” That same month, Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R) echoed similar opinions in a tweet, likening the events to “perverted sex shows.”
Hamilt countered these conservative beliefs by explaining that the organization has received praise from parents and teachers.
“Let’s be clear: DSH provides age-appropriate programming, and we routinely receive praise from parents and educators who are delighted that we offer children safe spaces to express themselves and support one another,” he said.
Chappell said her pub has held other LGBTQ-friendly events and drag queen story hours, noting that they have positively impacted queer youth, making them feel safe, seen, and supported by the community.
“I have gotten hundreds of letters from people who support us, saying our events make their child feel safe and secure in a world that wants to demonize being gay,” Chappell added.
She credited conservative beliefs about the sexualization of drag queen story time to an overall lack of understanding of drag.
Rich Kuntz, also known as Gidget, reads to children during Drag Queen Story Hour on March 21, 2019. The LGBT+ Center Orlando canceled a weekend drag queen story hour for children after receiving online threats.
Sarah Espedido/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“There is nothing sexual about lip-syncing to uplifting songs and reading stories in an elaborate costume. They do it at Disney every day. While drag can present as sexual at adult-themed events, [the Oregon pub] event is not adult-themed, and neither are any of the drag queen storytimes I’ve ever heard about,” Chappell explained.
Alleged members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group, hurled slurs and yelled about “pedophiles” towards patrons attending an all-ages drag show at a bar in California in August. Recently, an LGBTQ center in Florida canceled their drag queen story hour event scheduled for Saturday after receiving threats from hate groups mere days after the protest in Oregon.
The protest outside of Old Nick’s Pub was far from surprising to Chappell, who said her business received numerous phone calls and messages the week prior filled with hate speech and threats. Protestors accused the event of sexualizing the child performers, reports The Register-Guard. Proactive measures were taken to ensure safety, with the business adding $2,000 worth of security to the event. The pub is raising money to fund extra security for future events in light of the recent incident and the growing number of received threats.
“We are indeed planning on having extra security at all of our LGBTQ events and some others that these hate groups have already said they are going to target,” Chappell said.
Rather than addressing real threats in the country, such as the epidemic of gun violence, Hamilt said right-wing politicians are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories and inciting violence against drag performers and the LGBTQ community. “This is part of a coordinated campaign to deny the rights of LGBTQ people, who already endure disproportionate rates of suicide and homelessness, and legislate us out of existence,” he said.
“Any attempt to criminalize our work is rooted in tired homophobic and transphobic hate and misinformation, and we refuse to give in to politicians who are too bigoted and boring to comprehend our vision for a world in which every child can be safe and fully expressing who they are,” said Hamilt.
Chappell said that the pub continues to receive threats even after the event, but they will not be backing down.
“Their goal is to get us to stop operating and stop hosting all ages events,” Chappell said. “They want to destroy safe spaces for queer youth. And we will not let them win.”
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alaska faces accusations he sexually harassed a former assistant while he was a borough mayor.
The lawsuit filed Friday accuses Charlie Pierce of “constant unwanted physical touching, sexual remarks, and sexual advances,” the Anchorage Daily News reported.
The case did not show up in an online court records system Saturday. The woman’s Anchorage-based attorney, Caitlin Shortell, said in an email to The Associated Press it was filed in the Kenai Superior Court, and she expected a judge to be assigned Monday.
“When an elected official abuses their power and position to sexually harass public servants, they must be held accountable,” Shortell said.
The AP does not normally identify alleged victims in sexual harassment cases.
Pierce is one of four candidates running for governor in Alaska, and all appeared at a forum Saturday morning in Anchorage.
“I have no comments on future litigation,” Pierce told the AP following the debate.
He said he also had no plans to end his campaign just a few weeks before the Nov. 8 election. “I’ll be in the race,” he said.
Charlie Pierce, a Republican running for Alaska governor, is shown prior to a televised debate on Oct. 19 in Anchorage, Alaska.
The lawsuit also names the Kenai Peninsula Borough south of Anchorage as a defendant in the case, claiming the local government failed to protect the woman. She also claims the borough provided no way to report harassment or discrimination without fear of reprisal.
An email seeking comment was sent to the borough’s attorney, Sean Kelley.
According to the lawsuit, the woman was Pierce’s assistant for about 18 months, until June 2022.
Pierce announced in August he would resign in September to focus on his campaign for governor. The borough assembly later released a statement stating Pierce was asked to consider voluntarily resigning after an employee made what were deemed to be credible claims of harassment against him.
In the lawsuit, she claims Pierce touched her breast, made sexual remarks, falsely imprisoned her in his private office, kissed her neck and face, asked questions about her sex life and made unwanted and unsolicited embraces and massages.
The borough has paid two other former employees a combined $267,000 in settlements for separate complaints against Pierce, the Daily News reported.
In one, the borough paid former human resources director Sandra “Stormy” Brown $150,000 in a settlement after she claimed in a lawsuit that Pierce fired her after she told him she had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She claimed gender discrimination, disability discrimination and creating a hostile work environment.
The borough also paid $117,000 to settle a complaint from a subsequent human resources director if the employee agreed he would not make “further allegations of ‘illegal acts’ by Mayor Pierce” and rescind his allegations of bullying, the Anchorage newspaper reported.
Former President Donald Trump said it would be “very disloyal” if former Vice President Mike Pence or others once in his Cabinet ran for president in the 2024 election. To date, Trump has not formally announced a third bid for re-election, although he often alludes to a decision.
The former president, who is currently facing numerous investigations, spoke to host Brian Kilmeade on his radio show via phone on Friday: “Many of them have said they would never run if I run, so we’ll see if that turns out to be true. I think it would be very disloyal if they did, but that’s OK too.”
“Will the results of this election and the people you endorse influence whether you run or not in 2024?” Kilmeade asked. “Yes and no,” Trump replied, doubling down on false claims that he won the 2020 election. “If we did badly, I’m not sure that that wouldn’t make it even more imperative to run because I’ve done very well. I won the first election. I won the second by a lot. A lot.”
He added the polls have him “leading by 40, 50 points;” a recent New York Times poll showed that 49% of registered Republican voters would support Trump in 2024, compared to the 26% who would support Florida Governor Ron Desantis. According to a Quinnipiac poll released this week, 78% of Republicans want Trump to run for president in the next election.
While most of the media attention has focused on DeSantis as a potential 2024 presidential candidate—and a poll last month showed that DeSantis was favored over Trump among Florida Republicans—a smattering of Republicans in Trump’s Cabinet have also hinted at running: Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
On Wednesday, when asked if he would support Trump if he were to run, Pence replied: “Well, there might be somebody else I’d prefer more.” He also added, “I never spent a lot of time in New Hampshire, but I may someday,” perhaps alluding to a potential presidential run himself.
Pompeo made remarks in September that suggested he was eyeing a 2024 presidential run: “We are trying to figure out if that is the next place for us to serve….If we conclude it is, we’ll go make the case to the American people of why that is. And in the end, the American people, I pray, will make a good decision about who’s going to be their next leader.”
Haley has also floated the idea of running in 2024: “I’ve never lost a race. I’m not going to start now. We’ll see what happens” after the midterms.
A set of photos shared on Twitter earlier this week appear to show Mary Ann Mendoza, a Republican candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives, in blackface and brownface, The Copper Courier reported Friday.
Two photos allegedly show Mendoza, who is running for a seat in Arizona’s 9th Legislative District, wearing blackface makeup along with an apron that reads “Aunt Jemima.”
The Aunt Jemima name and image, formerly used by Quaker Oats for its pancake mix and syrup brand, can be traced back to racial stereotypes from the 19th century.
Another photo appears to show the GOP candidate wearing brownface for a costume of historical Native American figure Pocahontas.
It’s unclear who took the photos, when they were taken or how Twitter user @Tylerhereforfun — who originally shared them in a tweet Monday — obtained them.
The Copper Courier, which first reported on the photos, wrote that Mendoza had not responded to an inquiry from the local news outlet.
HuffPost has reached out to Mendoza for comment, as well as to another Republican candidate in the district, Kathy Pearce.
Lorena Austin and Seth Blattman, their Democratic opponents for two seats in the Arizona House, wrote in a joint statement that the pictures “are a display of violent racism.”
“These photos are disgusting, hate-filled, and unfortunately part of a pattern for Mary Ann Mendoza,” the statement read, per The Copper Courier.
“This trend makes Ms. Mendoza unfit to become a legislator and represent the people of LD 9. If these photos are what they appear to be, Ms. Mendoza should withdraw her candidacy.”
Mendoza — who initially made headlines in 2014 after her son, a police officer, died in a car crash involving a drunk driver who was an immigrant — is no stranger to controversy.
In 2020, the Republican National Convention removed her from its lineup just hours after she pushed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on Twitter. She later apologized for the tweet.
“My apologies for not paying attention to the intent of the whole message,” wrote Mendoza, who has appearedalongside former President Donald Trump at several events over the years. “That does not reflect my feelings or personal thoughts whatsoever.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Florida native and lawmaker, voted against a measure to open the Federal Emergency Management Agency up to millions of dollars in disaster relief.
Gaetz was one of several House Republicans on Friday who voted against a resolution to allow FEMA to use up to $15 million in the Disaster Relief Fund, Newsweek reported.
The bill eventually passed in both the House as well as the Senate and it awaits President Joe Biden’s approval.
The vote comes in the same week that Hurricane Ian killed dozens of Florida residents, flooded communities and destroyed homes and businesses.
Gaetz and other GOP lawmakers added their names to a letter that said they’d “do what is necessary” to stop funding the Biden Administration, according to the news site.
“Any legislation that sets the stage for a ‘lame duck’ fight on government funding gives Democrats one final opportunity to pass that agenda,” the letter said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) walks down the House steps on Friday, September 30, 2022.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Gaetz is no stranger to voting against hurricane relief as the lawmaker didn’t vote in favor of a $15 billion relief package as Hurricane Irma – where at least 92 people died in the contiguous United States – approached Florida in 2017, the Miami Herald reported.
Gaetz did, however, pass a separate $7.5 billion hurricane relief bill earlier that week.
The $15 billion package was linked to a deal between Democrats and former President Donald Trump to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government until December 2017.
“Only Congress can find a way to turn a natural disaster into a trillion new dollars in spending authority,” Gaetz said at the time of the $15 billion package.
The map of competitive Senate elections is shrinking—and not just for November.
Though Republicans began the year expecting sweeping Senate gains, the party’s top-grade opportunities to capture seats now held by Democrats have dwindled to just two—Nevada and Georgia—and both are, at best, toss-ups for the GOP. And while Democrats, somewhat astoundingly, have emerged from the primaries with at least as many plausible flipping chances as Republicans, Pennsylvania is the only GOP-held seat clearly favored to go blue, and even that isn’t guaranteed. It remains entirely possible that November’s results will leave the Senate divided again at 50–50, something that has not happened in consecutive elections since the Seventeenth Amendment established the direct election of senators more than a century ago.
This standoff partly reflects the volatile dynamics of the 2022 election, in which Republican advantages on the economy have been largely neutralized by public unease over gun violence, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, the resurgent visibility of former President Donald Trump, and the GOP’s nomination of weak, Trump-aligned candidates. Yet the possibility of a virtual draw—after a campaign season in which the two sides have already poured more than $850 million into just the 10 most expensive Senate races—reflects larger changes in the electoral competition.
One of the most powerful trends in modern politics has been for each party to consolidate control of the Senate seats in the states it usually captures in the presidential election. That’s lowered the ceiling on the number of Senate seats each party can win. And that lowered ceiling, in turn, has diminished each side’s ability to maintain control of the Senate majority for any extended period.
The Senate is therefore frozen in the sense that neither side, in normal times, can seriously contest more than a handful of the seats held by the other party. Paradoxically, it’s unstable in the sense that the shrunken playing field leaves each side clinging to tiny majorities that are vulnerable to small shifts in voter attitudes in the very few states that remain consistently competitive.
Throughout the 20th century, it was common for one side to build a comfortable majority in which it held at least 55 percent of the Senate’s seats. Republicans hit that level of dominance in 10 of the 15 Congresses from 1901 through 1930. Then, from 1932 to 1980, Democrats regularly reached the 55 percent threshold. (The big exception to this pattern came in the 1950s, when the ideological lines between the parties blurred and neither won more than a two-seat Senate majority through four consecutive Congresses.) Even from 1980 to 2000, one side or the other reached 55 seats seven times. Since 2000, though, the parties have controlled at least 55 seats only three times: Republicans immediately after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 and Democrats immediately after Barack Obama’s presidential victories in 2008 and 2012.
Smaller margins have reduced both parties’ ability to defend their majorities for any extended period. Since 1980, neither party has controlled the Senate for more than eight consecutive years. That’s unprecedented: The U.S. has never gone four decades without a Senate majority that survived for more than eight years.
Both the thin margins and frequent turnover are rooted in a third trend: the growing alignment between states’ votes for president and Senate.
Especially through the second half of the 20th century, states routinely supported presidential candidates from one party and Senate candidates from the other. After the landslide reelections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, for instance, Democrats still controlled about half of the Senate seats in the states that voted for them both times.
But as American politics has grown more partisan and parliamentary, those split-ticket senators have virtually gone extinct, which has reduced the number of states each side can realistically contest.
After the 2020 election, the GOP held 94 percent of the Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Trump both times while Democrats held 98 percent of the seats in the 20 states that twice voted against him. Democrats have squeezed out their current 50–50 Senate majority by winning eight of the 10 Senate seats in the remaining five swing states that switched from Trump to Joe Biden.
Last spring, Republicans anticipated a midterm red wave that would break this stalemate, followed by a push toward a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority in 2024.
Both parties identified Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire as the most vulnerable Democratic senators. Beyond that, Republicans hoped to seriously challenge Michael Bennet in Colorado and Patty Murray in Washington. The 2022 electoral environment remains unsettled, and it’s possible that continuing discontent over the economy could improve GOP prospects before election day. But for now, with Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and New Hampshire all moving toward the Democrats, it appears that the list of fully plausible GOP Senate targets has fallen to just two: Nevada and Georgia.
All polls in Georgia show a tight race between Warnock and the Republican nominee, Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia football star. And with Republican Governor Brian Kemp holding a steady lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams, it remains possible that a Georgia crimson tide (pun intended) might carry Walker to victory. But Walker may be the most obviously unqualified Senate nominee in recent memory, and he’s facing a seemingly endless procession of personal scandals. Walker’s vulnerabilities might allow Warnock to survive even a strong Republican current; indeed all but one of the five most recent public polls have shown Warnock in the lead.
That leaves Nevada as the best chance for Republicans to capture a seat Democrats hold now. A state with legions of low-wage workers, Nevada has heavily felt the effects of coronavirus shutdowns and inflation. The state also lacks the large pool of college graduates and white-collar professionals heavily motivated by abortion and other social issues lifting Democrats elsewhere. But even with all that boosting them, Republicans can hardly be confident about Nevada: For longer than the past decade, Nevada Democrats, operating the political machine assembled by the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have shown a knack for turning out just enough of their voters to win very close races.
Democrats, unexpectedly, have kept a larger roster of GOP Senate seats in play. The Senate race most likely to change hands between the parties remains Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring. Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, although some polls show his margin narrowing, remains favored over Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee. Oz is laboring under strong unfavorable ratings and will likely face an undertow from the governor’s race, where Doug Mastriano, among the most extreme GOP nominees anywhere this year, could face a crushing defeat.
Polls also show Democrats Mandela Barnes and Tim Ryan locked in margin-of-error races in Wisconsin and Ohio. Barnes and Ryan have given themselves a realistic chance to win against GOP opponents who are also laboring under high unfavorable ratings, Senator Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and J. D. Vance in Ohio. But those are both states where Democrats often struggle to find the last few percentage points of support they need, and this will especially be the case while Biden’s approval rating is depressed among the white non-college voters so plentiful in each.
In North Carolina, Democrat Cheri Beasley is likewise step for step in polls with Republican Ted Budd—though, since 2008, that state has functioned as a kind of heartbreak hill for Democrats, who have suffered a succession of narrow defeats there. Florida has become an even tougher state for Democrats, but polls have consistently shown Democratic Representative Val Demings remaining closer to Republican Senator Marco Rubio than most analysts initially expected.
This playing field still leaves Republicans a path to a majority, but one much narrower than they anticipated. If the GOP loses Pennsylvania, which remains likely, its most plausible path to retake the Senate is to win both Nevada and Georgia, while simultaneously holding off the Democrats in both Wisconsin and Ohio, not to mention North Carolina and Florida. Republican upsets in Arizona or New Hampshire, or Oz surging past Fetterman during the final weeks in Pennsylvania, would ease that pressure. But today, none of those outcomes look probable.
Yet even if Democrats hold the Senate, it will likely be with a very narrow majority, and perhaps with nothing more than another 50–50 tie that Vice President Kamala Harris will step in to break. Democrats would still remain at substantial risk of surrendering their majority in 2024, largely because they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the states that twice voted for Trump—Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. That won’t be easy in a presidential-election year.
Early in Biden’s presidency, some Democratic strategists, such as the data analyst David Shor, ominously warned that the party could face an extended period of Republican dominance in the Senate, largely because of the GOP’s hardening advantage in heavily white interior states. The GOP probably does hold an edge in the long-term battle for Senate control because it is regularly winning slightly more states than Democrats in presidential contests. But the fizzling of the GOP’s Senate opportunities this year shows how difficult it may be for either side to secure a sizable, much less durable, majority.
Political scientists and strategists alike usually find far more meaning in elections that deliver resounding change than those that reconfirm the status quo. Yet it will send a powerful message if neither party in November can break through the forces that have left the Senate so precariously balanced. It will show that the two sides remain locked in a grinding trench warfare where neither can overwhelm the other’s defenses and the handful of states in the no-man’s-land between them hold decisive power to tilt the national direction. That’s a recipe for more years of bitter but inconclusive conflict between two political coalitions that are now almost identical in size—but utterly antithetical in their vision for America’s future.
