ReportWire

Tag: last weekend

  • Legend of the Game: Leonard Wheeler

    [ad_1]

    CHARLOTTE Former safety Leonard Wheeler might have only played one season for the Panthers.

    But his impact on the team, its players, and the community, continues.

    The 56-year-old Wheeler has a lot of titles these days, from executive coach, motivational speaker, to NFL Legends community co-executive director. But the one he loves to talk about is prostate cancer survivor.

    Thanks to an early diagnosis, he’s well now, and using his platform to encourage other men to get checked.

    Wheeler played here in 1998, but a torn ACL the following year ended his NFL career after eight seasons. He also played for the Bengals and the Vikings, but has made Charlotte home, and is a regular presence at Legends events here, including last weekend when he gathered with nearly 100 other former players to watch the Panthers come back to beat the Dolphins.

    This week, he’ll be back to hit the Keep Pounding drum heading into the fourth quarter, and tell his important story to anyone who will listen.

    Panthers.com caught up with Wheeler this week to talk about his journey, and the importance of early detection.

    Q: What does it mean to be back here at Bank of America Stadium this weekend to celebrate Crucial Catch weekend?

    Wheeler:“It means a lot to be able to share the story. When you think about it, us having over 2,500 guys playing this game, they’re going to all be affected in some way with prostate cancer in their families, right? When you think about it, one out of eight men and one out of six men of color would be impacted by prostate cancer. So to be able to bring that awareness on such a Crucial Catch weekend is huge.

    “It’s about staying alert, staying aware. My mantra now is “suit up, get checked.” When you think about us as former athletes or as athletes in general, we’ve been suiting up our whole life pretty much, right? And one of the things that we’re really good at as men is that we’re great at hiding. So it’s really creating that accountability around, I need for you to stop thinking that you’re OK, and I need for you to know that you are.”

    Q: When were you diagnosed, and how did that come about?

    Wheeler:“I was diagnosed in July of last year, and I went through my procedures about seven and a half months ago. There were a lot of different options for me because they caught it so early. But, early or late, it’s still cancer inside your body. So I went through the Tulsa Pro procedure, which was a whole prostate ablation. Instead of having a radical prostatectomy, I was not eligible for radiation or anything like that because it was so early.

    “But this is what’s so scary about it. No symptoms. My PSA rose from 1.1 to 2.1 and 3.1 over three years. So my physician saw a trend. I was not over the threshold, which is 4. I was at a 3.1. So, thank God that my physician, my primary care doctor is curious.”

    Q: So you weren’t experiencing any problems, no reason to think you were anything other than completely fit and healthy?

    Wheeler:“Not one, not one reason to think anything was wrong, not one, nothing. Absolutely nothing. But that’s how scary it is, because sometimes you’re not going to have any symptoms. That’s why we have to do our part and get checked and get screened.”

    Q:I remember having this conversation with Brentson Buckner last year, and he was saying there’s just so much to live for once you’re in your 50s. We still have a lot of life to live, right?

    Wheeler:“That’s right. There’s a lot to do. So my wife is a nurse of 28 years, OK? So she knows the language. She was scared before we were all even thinking about anything because she knew. So to have her in my corner was a godsend. And we have a lot to be grateful for.”

    Q: Since the ACL injury in 1999 that cut your career short after eight seasons, what have you been doing since then?

    Wheeler:“I started my company 25 years ago. I’ve been doing global executive coaching for major corporations. I work in the NFL office with the Legends Community. Chad Pennington and I are co-executive directors for the Legends Community, and we have Mike Rucker, one of our directors, here in Charlotte. Thomas Davis is one of our coordinators here. And so we’ve been able to really create a lot of awareness around the benefits, and we’re trying to change the narrative on how former players look at the NFL.”

    Q: With all that you’ve done since your playing days, what is the thing you’re most proud of?

    Wheeler:“I would say that I’m most proud of my family. When I think about my wife and our kids, we have a daughter, who finished her master’s at the University of Madrid in Spain. We have a son who’s a senior in college, and a son who’s a freshman in college. So, I’m really proud of my wife. I’m proud of my family. And I’m really proud that we’re creating awareness around something that could change the narrative for families when it comes to prostate cancer.

    “Man, we have to get better at having hard conversations when it comes to health. Especially African American men, we are great hiders. You grow up keeping everything to yourself. Can’t do it.”

    Q: You were here last weekend, when you gather around a bunch of former Panthers players, what are those conversations like?

    Wheeler:(Laughs) What is so funny is that you remember that maybe the two interceptions you had in ’95 become five interceptions in 2025. But the camaraderie becomes even more important because it’s great to have the connection. It becomes the extended locker room where you can chop it up, and you start to realize that you’re not alone, and that some of us are going through the same struggles when it comes to transition after your career. Or you can celebrate things that you might be proud of about your kids or about your wife and you’re able to celebrate that with each other. And it just becomes magical, man. I mean, it becomes a locker room mentality. And you don’t even care about really what you did in the NFL. You just love seeing the guys and their families and loving them.

    “It is really cool because you get to help paint a canvas of how you want life to look like moving forward. And you get to help create that canvas for them. And that’s exciting. For us to be able to, for me to be able to work in the league office with (NFL executive VP of football operations) Troy Vincent and educate guys on the benefits available to them, and to be in the locker room with my boys like John Randle and Warrick Dunn and Torry Holt and Will Shields, and Orlando Pace and Mike Rucker and Thomas Davis. All of us get to still work together. Come on, that’s priceless.”

    For more information about early detection and the NFL’s efforts to encourage everyone to get regular screenings and how those early screenings can save lives,you can click here for the American Cancer Society’s web page.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities

    What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities

    [ad_1]

    Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president’s event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden’s lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled.

    Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most public of figures. He does not need to be babied by other politicians or members of the media. Trump disrespects all manner of people, but he had notably avoided mocking Biden’s stutter throughout the 2020 campaign. No more.

    Read: Trump finds another line to cross

    This is bigger than Biden, though. Stuttering is a genetic neurological disorder—one that can be covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, one that 3 million Americans have. Trump may or may not know that, but he certainly knows that having a disability is something both Democrats and Republicans experience. Scores of Trump supporters are older, and are therefore more likely to be disabled themselves. Most everyone can think of at least one disabled friend or family member, a person they wouldn’t want taunted by a bully on the dais.

    On Saturday, as we awaited Trump’s arrival by private plane, my colleague Hanna Rosin and I spent the day wandering the grounds of Wright Bros. Aero Inc., asking rally attendees uncomfortable questions about what they’re comfortable with. Virtually everyone was bothered by specific examples of Trump’s recent bullying. But as they unpacked their thoughts, they continually found ways to excuse their favored candidate’s behavior. Many interviewees repeatedly contradicted themselves, perhaps because of a particular variable: I’m a person who stutters, and that day, I was asking real people how they felt about Trump making fun of stuttering.

    A married couple from Dayton, Todd and Cindy Rossbach, were waiting in a long, snaking line to take in their sixth Trump rally. “He’s the best president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Todd said. “Probably Reagan comes in second.” I asked him if he had seen Trump’s comments during the Georgia rally, and specifically, if he had seen Trump imitate Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point,” Todd said. “The level of, uh, cruelness, may seem tough, but they’re being very cruel with him, so it seems justified.”

    His wife spoke up. “I disagree, because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad,” Cindy said. “It’s not the Christian way to be,” she added a little later. “I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. But he is just stooping to their level, and I don’t like it.” Nevertheless, neither of them felt that Trump could do anything between now and November to make him lose their vote.

    Farther back in line was Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally trying to get children out of homelessness. Beverly shared that she has a learning disability and has trouble spelling. Even as an adult, she’s regularly ridiculed. “It does hurt my feelings at times,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s hard to “see a lot of people make fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction among members of the community. “We’ll just go in a dark secret hole and not come out,” Beverly said. Yet she also said she still planned to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate Trump’s taunts from her personal feelings by chalking his behavior up to politics. If a child asked her about Trump’s belittlement, she imagined that she would liken it to playing a game: “You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser,” she offered. “It’s just trash-talking.”

    Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”

    From the January/February 2020 issue: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say

    A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”

    I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.

    This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump was still a man worth their vote. A woman named Susie Michael, who runs a Mathnasium tutoring center, told me, “I don’t appreciate the making-fun-of part, but he doesn’t have to be my best friend. He just has to do the best job for the country and for me. So I have to overlook that, because everybody has their good points and their bad points.”

    Shana, a special-education teacher from Indiana who did not give her last name, told me, “​I would still support him because I feel like people make mistakes. They say things they shouldn’t say. And I feel like God is the judge on that, you know, and that we’re to forgive him.” She noted that if Trump were to mock Biden’s stutter at this rally, she’d be inclined to write him a letter saying that “everybody was born of God and that we shouldn’t be making fun of anybody.”

    Saturday’s event was hosted by the Buckeye Values political-action committee, ostensibly in support of the U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. But Trump, of course, was the real draw. Moreno, who last night won the Ohio Republican primary, was merely among the president’s list of warm-up speakers, alongside South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

    When Trump’s plane touched down on the runway behind the stage, the dramatic electric-guitar instrumental from Top Gun played over the loudspeakers. Because of the wind, the teleprompters were swaying, making it nearly impossible for Trump to read his prepared remarks. So he went off script and rambled for about 90 minutes. “Hey, it’s a nice Saturday, what the hell, we have nothing else to do,” Trump said. Most of Trump’s rhetoric vacillated between aggrieved and menacing. He called migrants “animals” and warned of a “bloodbath” next year. (The latter comment came after Trump was talking about the auto industry, though some intuited the remark to refer to political violence.) Trump didn’t bust out his schoolyard mimic of Biden’s stutter this time, but he did repeatedly attack the way Biden speaks. “He can’t talk,” Trump said.

    People began filing out long before Trump finished speaking. When the event was finally over, I loitered by one of the merch tables. (A selection of that day’s T-shirt and sticker offerings: Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go, Jihad Joe, Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, a cartoon Trump urinating on Biden à la Calvin and Hobbes.) One man, a union worker named Joseph Smock, told me that he’d been “red pilled” eight years ago after seeing the effects of illegal immigration in his native California. (He now lives in Dayton.) Unlike many other attendees I spoke with, Smock fully acknowledged Biden’s history with stuttering, rather than dismissing it as a media invention or a political ploy for sympathy. He characterized Trump as someone with a “hard slant.” When, like Biden, you’re in the big leagues, he said, Trump’s “going to hit you, and if he sees a weakness, he’s gonna go for it. Some people like that; some people don’t.”

    Read: You should go to a Trump rally

    A man on an electric scooter, Wes Huff, rolled by with a big grin and his wife, Lisa, by his side. Wes told me that this was their first Trump rally, and that they thought it was “awesome.” Wes is disabled—he has dealt with diabetes and kidney failure, and is missing five toes. He shared that all of his siblings are also disabled. He hadn’t seen Trump’s clip from a week earlier. I asked Huff a hypothetical question: If Biden made fun of a rival for using a wheelchair—someone like Texas Governor Greg Abbott—would he find that offensive? “Yeah. Oh yeah,” he said.

    But then our conversation migrated back to stuttering in particular. “I actually used to stutter,” he said. He was bullied for it as a kid. He also told me about an old colleague of his who stuttered, who was ridiculed as an adult. Huff was kind and sensitive as he described their friendship, how he would look out for him. “You shouldn’t make fun of disabled people,” he said. He also said he still planned to vote for Trump this fall.

    [ad_2]

    John Hendrickson

    Source link

  • Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    [ad_1]

    As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.

    In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.

    The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.

    Read: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.

    But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.

    That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls has been stuck at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. In the lastest Fox News poll, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.

    In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.

    But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.

    One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.

    The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.

    One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.

    Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”

    Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.

    Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”

    The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.

    Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.

    Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said they believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”

    That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.

    Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign.

    Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.

    Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.

    Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.

    “This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, Oh, he’s just a showman.”

    A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.

    “He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.

    Read: The Americans who need chaos

    Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. In the new CBS/YouGov poll, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: A survey of battleground states released yesterday by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.

    Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.

    In the 2022 election, Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • How Election Denial Lost

    How Election Denial Lost

    [ad_1]

    Outside the Maricopa County tabulation center last weekend, a few dozen outraged Arizonans paced single file along the sidewalk waving KARI LAKE flags. Through megaphones, some of them denounced imaginary corruption schemes and clamored for a “redo” election. Others chanted the Lord’s Prayer, like the musicians on the Titanic playing hymns to calm the passengers.

    The noteworthy thing about the Maricopa protest, though, wasn’t the scene. It was its singularity. Two years ago, shouts of “Stop the steal!” could be heard across the country in nearly every state. This year, the refrain was largely limited to one block in downtown Phoenix, where at times reporters outnumbered the demonstrators.

    If any state was going to devolve into chaos after a disappointing election for Republicans, it would have been Arizona—ground zero for election denial in 2020, and where this year, primary voters nominated an entire slate of fringe election cranks to all of the state’s major offices. Instead, the midterms delivered a sure blow to the election-denial movement, both there and everywhere else: The most prominent conspiracists, such as the Arizona secretary-of-state candidate Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, lost by significant margins; some of these candidates even acknowledged their losses by—surprise!—actually conceding. On Monday night, Lake was declared the loser in her race for Arizona’s governorship, adding a final note to what has seemed like a comprehensive repudiation of the denialists. And where experts and reporters had anticipated widespread election-fraud mayhem, nothing close to it has yet emerged.

    Read: In Arizona, shouts of ‘fraud’ again

    It would be foolish, though, to pronounce “Stop the Steal” dead. The movement may have fizzled without Donald Trump, but if he runs again in 2024, we haven’t seen the last of it. Even if Trump isn’t on the ballot, an entire swath of the Republican Party is now open to the idea that any narrow loss can be blamed on fraud. Trust in elections among rank-and-file GOP voters remains low, and in some respects has gotten worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. The damage inflicted in 2020 endures. “He’s broken the seal,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. Election denial “is part of our politics now.”

    Things could have been so much worse.

    Ahead of the election, poll workers in Arizona and beyond feared for their safety, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law reported an uptick in calls to its Election Protection hotline. In the Phoenix suburbs, armed men were patrolling ballot drop-off sites. The day before the election, I watched a group of women stake out a ballot box, studying voters through binoculars for signs of cheating. The central counting facility in downtown Phoenix was fenced off with a ring of plastic Jersey barriers, and police patrolled the streets on horseback.

    Election officials in Maricopa County, who appeared very tightly wound, held a press conference to get ahead of any potential claims of election chicanery. A time-consuming vote count does not indicate fraud, they reminded the room full of reporters; ballots are processed and reviewed by bipartisan teams; tabulation machines work.

    Unfortunately, events on Election Day quickly undermined those careful efforts at reassurance. The sun had not yet risen when the first handful of tabulation machines stopped reading ballots. By midday, dozens of machines were malfunctioning at polling sites throughout the county. Voters at those sites were told to feed their ballots into “Door 3,” a regrettably sinister-sounding name for a secure slot that would sort the misread ballots to be counted later. And they would be counted later, as officials reassured voters in a series of follow-up press conferences.

    Read: Trumpism has found its leading lady

    Voters I spoke with were understandably confused and frustrated. And the malfunctioning machines had state GOP leaders immediately taking to Twitter to suggest wrongdoing. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” GOP Chair Kelli Ward posted. Those complaints spiraled into partisan hysteria as the counting went on. Frustrated MAGA commentators suggested that Maricopa County officials had engaged in outright corruption and “CIVIC TERRORISM.” Finchem accused them of “screwing with the election counts.”

    Still, despite those initial glitches and dark mutterings, Election Day unfolded mostly without threats or funny business. Poll workers weren’t harmed, and voters were, for the most part, not intimidated. Almost everyone on the America First Secretary of State Coalition slate lost last week, including Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who’d described Democrats as having a “satanic agenda”; Finchem, the mustachioed Oath Keeper of Arizona; and the head of the coalition himself, Nevada’s Jim Marchant.

    Parroting Trump’s election lies got many Republican candidates across the finish line in their primary. Finchem’s repeated election-fraud claims won him a regular spot on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. The former president has praised Lake’s commitment to the bit, too, reportedly telling donors that even if asked about the weather, Lake would find a way to bring the conversation back to 2020. But these wild claims proved poisonous to moderates and swing voters—polling suggests that some went to the polls explicitly to vote against deniers. We know this because many Republicans who didn’t traffic in election lies performed well: Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by almost eight points in the Georgia governor’s race. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points.

    Fans of democracy can take heart that only 14 out of 94 election deniers won in races for positions that oversee elections, including secretary of state, attorney general, and governor, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for election integrity. Of those 14, only five candidates were not incumbents. “The movement is still not gaining ground,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of States United Action, told me.

    David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.

    That things didn’t turn out worse is a relief, given the chaos of 2020. But the dynamic of this year’s election was different in a few important ways. Republicans were on the defensive back then: The general election was a national referendum on their president. This year, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot—whereas, in 2020, he had spent months priming the base to blame polling fraud if he lost. It’s clear now that nobody does Stop the Steal like 45.

    “The thing that gives you power as an election denier is that people believe you, and Trump was able to make people believe him,” Longwell told me. Few other candidates have that power, and none in this midterm election could nationalize the issue as he did in the presidential contest. This time, the GOP had no central character over whom Trump supporters could feel outraged.

    Yet the election-fraud fires that Trump and his allies have fanned for so long will not be easily extinguished. If repeated audits and cold evidence haven’t done enough to deter conspiracists these past two years, then a disappointing midterm cycle won’t dissuade them either.

    Election deniers didn’t win in swing states, but elsewhere they did. Four of them will oversee elections in Indiana, Wyoming, Alabama, and South Dakota. More than 200 Republicans running for Congress and statewide positions who’d questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election won or retained their office last week, including more than 180 in the House. Other election deniers won at the state level in ultraconservative districts across the country. These ruby-red areas might sink deeper into denial, creating islands where both voters and officials are debilitatingly distrustful of elections.

    Read: ‘Stop the steal’ is a metaphor

    Take Cochise County, Arizona. There, 170 miles southeast of Phoenix, some GOP election officials have been hankering to do a full hand-count audit in the election. Paradoxically, Republican candidates won handily there both this year and in 2020, so no obvious motive for distrusting the results is apparent. But the years-long drumbeat of misinformation from the state GOP chair, Ward, and her allied band of election-fraud kooks have nurtured a deep suspicion of the whole process.

    Republican leaders in Arizona don’t believe in machine tabulation and view hand counts as the purest, most accurate way to tally votes—never mind the extensive evidence that the opposite is true. This year, Cochise County tried to forge ahead with a full hand-count audit, even after a judge ordered local officials not to. Only a timely ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court last week kept them from carrying one out. “What I’ll be doing over the next two years is looking at these counties that have gone really hard to the right,” Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of Votebeat, a nonpartisan election-news outlet, told me. “Because there’s no one to push back.”

    Even in states where election deniers lost, voters have been primed to suspect outcomes they don’t like, glitches they don’t understand, and delays in counting. “If [Lake] doesn’t announce that she’s going to win tonight, we might have to go through like a week or so of shenanigans—the same shenanigans that they pulled in 2020,” Stephen Tenner, a former actor from New York, told me at a lavish GOP Election Night party in Scottsdale. “We’re waiting for it this time; we weren’t ready last time. So we’re going to catch the fraud.”

    Other Republicans I interviewed were less persuaded of the likelihood of fraud, but were comfortable entertaining the idea. “I’d like to go back to same-day voting and paper ballots. There are problems with machines,” a man named William from Phoenix, who declined to give his last name, told me at the party. Would he blame fraud if Republicans lost? I asked. “Well, there were problems with the elections two years ago,” he said, adding that, this time around, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs should have recused herself from official duties during the election. “I would be hesitant to say I thought [this one] was completely honest.”

    Barton Gellman: The impeachment of Joe Biden

    The thing about trust is that it’s painstakingly hard to build and relatively easy to demolish. Election denial is now a chronic wound in America’s body politic, only partially healed, and ready to reopen—red and raw—whenever circumstances permit. Those circumstances may arise sooner rather than later if Trump is on the ballot again in 2024. Even if he isn’t, the former president has already broken the tradition of gracious presidential concessions and peaceful transfers of power. He’s encouraged a populist animus toward institutions that will likely remain a litmus test for future Republican candidates. And more than anything, Trump has created a blueprint for exploiting the messiness and complexity of America’s elections. An audience for this type of exploitation is still out there, if Republicans want to take advantage of it.

    On Monday, after Maricopa County released a decisive batch of ballots that led all major news networks to declare Hobbs the next governor of Arizona, a few members of Team Lake sprang into action to ensure that any ballots with errors were quickly cured. That’s a standard and legitimate procedure in elections, and can be helpful in especially close ones. But other Republicans continued to follow the denialist script. Ward accused Maricopa County of voter suppression. Finchem, the failed secretary-of-state candidate, began to do the impossible calculations. “I should win by 3% and @KariLake should win by 11%,” he tweeted. “If that doesn’t happen you know the real story.”

    Lake’s own account was silent for more than an hour after the networks had called the race. After all of this, would this cycle’s Stop the Steal standard-bearer actually concede? The answer came at 10:30 p.m. eastern, with a simple tweet: “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake wrote.

    [ad_2]

    Elaine Godfrey

    Source link

  • The Double-Negative Election

    The Double-Negative Election

    [ad_1]

    This has become the double-negative election.

    Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.

    Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.

    If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”

    By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.

    Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.

    Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.

    These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.

    Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.

    But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.

    That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.

    But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.

    Read: What to expect when you’re expecting a Republican house

    For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).

    Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.

    When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.

    In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.

    Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”

    The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.

    Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.

    Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?

    Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?

    [ad_1]

    Every second of every day, oxygen-rich blood is coursing through your brain. Your heart pumps it up through your chest and neck, along tinier and tinier arterial tubes, twisting and turning among the grooves and lobes of gray matter until it reaches the brain cells it’s meant to nourish. But this journey can be interrupted. An artery can get clogged—often by a free-floating, gelatinous clot—which halts the flow of blood. The clog will starve your brain’s cells of oxygen. Within moments, your brain’s tissue will start to die.

    This is what happened to John Fetterman in May of this year, when he suffered an ischemic stroke—a type that affects roughly 700,000 people in the United States annually. Five months later, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor says he still struggles to process the words that he hears, and sometimes he can’t quite express what he means. For a regular person, these effects would not be newsworthy. Fetterman, though, is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. This week, NBC News’s Dasha Burns said that Fetterman seemed unable to participate in preinterview small talk conducted without closed captioning, but other recent Fetterman interviewers pushed back, saying he’d done just fine when they spoke with him.

    Clearly, observers cannot agree about the degree of impairment or disability that Fetterman is experiencing. But this much is certain: His health is a legitimate consideration for the voters he is seeking to represent in Congress. And although Fetterman’s critics are framing his stroke as a liability, the Democrat is hoping that his health challenge makes him a more relatable—and therefore more appealing—candidate. The question is what voters should make of it all.

    For most of the summer, Fetterman’s campaign used social media to compensate for the fact that the Democrat was unwell. On Twitter, Fetterman and his team mocked his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, for his many mansions and his ham-handed attempts to seem like an ordinary Pennsylvanian. They scored headline after fawning headline for their snarky social-media strategy. But the candidate himself stayed home, trying to heal.

    John Hendrickson: Don’t patronize Fetterman

    Fetterman sounds a lot more like his old self now than he did in August, when he first returned to the campaign trail. But he still stumbles in his speech. At a rally I attended outside Philadelphia last weekend, he delivered a few applause lines and phrases that were difficult to understand; occasionally, the audience would answer with tentative claps. After the event, Fetterman did not entertain questions from reporters, and seemed unable to respond all that meaningfully to on-the-fly comments from voters; his wife, Gisele, appeared to be the one leading those interactions. But while Fetterman may not be able to do small talk, he is able to participate in interviews where he can use real-time closed-captioning, a live transcription of questions appearing on his laptop. He’ll use the same tool during the upcoming debate against Oz scheduled for October 25.

    That accommodation for someone who’s recently had a stroke is the same sort of allowance that would be made for a Senate candidate who was hearing impaired. Still, it’s reasonable to ask whether Fetterman’s stroke damaged his cognition, his ability to learn and to comprehend language—and how he might function as a senator.

    The campaign says that Fetterman has taken two different cognitive tests and scored “in the normal range” on both. (It has released the results of one of those tests.) But the campaign has declined to release Fetterman’s full health records. “John Fetterman is healthy. He also has an auditory-processing challenge that is still lingering from his stroke in May,” Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to Fetterman, told me. “The only proof you need to know he can do his job is the fact that he’s doing this campaign right now.”

    Ed Yong: Lost for words

    Still, in the absence of those records, we can only observe and guess. The phrase auditory processing is not really a medical diagnosis, Adam de Havenon, an associate professor of neurology at Yale, told me. Instead, Fetterman’s symptoms seem consistent with aphasia, a common stroke effect in which a person loses their ability to comprehend or express spoken words—sometimes both. That doesn’t necessarily indicate severe brain damage. “It’s very possible to just have trouble understanding spoken language or getting words out without any impact on cognition,” de Havenon said. This would certainly seem consistent with Fetterman’s condition, given that he is able to read and respond to closed captioning. Even if Fetterman does have some cognitive impairment, “I don’t think it would be profound, in terms of what he’s doing on a day-to-day basis,” de Havenon said.

    So why keep his full health records under wraps? Fetterman’s neuropsychological or aphasia test results might suggest that he is more impaired than he seems. Or maybe those records show a complicated picture—one that would be easily misinterpreted by laypeople or intentionally misconstrued by political opponents. Either way, keeping those records a secret isn’t a great look for a candidate who has suffered a serious health setback on the campaign trail.

    Five months after his stroke, Fetterman is still within the poststroke recovery window. Normally, a stroke patient needs about six months for the brain to heal, de Havenon told me, and 12 months for their brain to learn how to compensate for any loss in function. Which means it’s still entirely possible for Fetterman’s apparent aphasia and his neuropsych test results to improve. “I see patients like John very frequently in the emergency department and clinic,” de Havenon said. Otherwise healthy, middle-aged people who have ischemic strokes receive treatment and generally respond quite well—including over the long term.

    America’s laws have long been written, at least in part, by the elderly—the word senator actually comes from the Latin for “old man.” The average age in today’s Senate is 64—in other words, when most people are thinking about retiring, America’s senators are just getting going. But historically, some senators have been barely sentient by the end of their career.

    In his early 90s, the longest-serving senator in history, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was delivering halting speeches on the Senate floor. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, still in office at 100, died a hunched shadow of his former self—although his former self had been an unapologetic segregationist.

    Other senators have had health issues in office that made their jobs next to impossible: Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, who had a serious heart condition, didn’t set foot in the chamber for the last four years of his six-year term, Donald Ritchie, a former Senate historian, told me. Democrats needed California Senator Clair Engle’s vote to break the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act, but he was partially paralyzed and unable to speak because of a brain tumor. “All he could do was put his finger up to his eye,” Ritchie said. “They took that as an aye vote.” In our own time, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is showing signs of age-related impairment: According to recent reporting, she sometimes fails to follow policy conversations or recognize her colleagues.

    David A. Graham: Dianne Feinstein is the future of the Senate

    Several senators have had strokes in office, too, including recently Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. After Illinois Senator Mark Kirk’s stroke in 2012, aides were hesitant to discuss how he’d changed mentally, according to a National Journal profile. He returned to the chamber a year later, but his health may have played a role in his later loss to Tammy Duckworth.

    This is not to compare John Fetterman’s ailment to those of senators past—or to judge the decisions of the lawmakers who have stayed in office past their prime. But the Senate is familiar with disability—brought on by age or any number of other factors. It has and will accommodate it. If Fetterman is elected, Ritchie told me, the secretary of the Senate will help organize the tools he’ll need for a committee hearing or floor speeches. Given how manageable these measures are, the Fetterman campaign could be more transparent about what the Democrat’s everyday life as a senator might look like.

    None of this can be easy for Fetterman. Less than a year ago, he was discussed by voters and journalists alike with something akin to awe: A 6-foot-8-inch man in a hoodie, with a goatee and tattoos, is not your typical political candidate; despite his relatively privileged upbringing, Fetterman was the straight-talking everyman, the guy with the irreverent vibe. Back then, the biggest question surrounding his campaign was whether he’d show up to the Senate in cargo shorts.

    Fetterman may still be all of those things, but now, he is also a man wrestling with an uncooperative brain. And the entire country is watching, making note of his every pause and stammer.

    “We are pulling back the curtain on his recovery,” Katz from Fetterman’s campaign told me, “and having worked in the Senate and seen firsthand how many senators cover up their various challenges, I can tell you that this is refreshing for people. He is being very honest about the challenges he’s facing at this moment.”

    Even if his campaign could have been more forthcoming earlier about his condition, it is true that Fetterman has found a way of talking about it since he returned to the trail in late summer. Near the beginning of his stump speech, he asks: “How many of you have had your own personal health challenges?” And every time, nearly every hand in the audience goes up.

    Last week, I traveled to Bristol to see Fetterman in action. “I’ve had a hemorrhagic stroke, which is worse,” Jeanette Miller from Bristol Township told me with a shrug when I asked her whether Fetterman’s stroke gave her pause. Rob Blatt, a retiree from Feasterville, looked at me blankly when I asked him the same. “I’ve beaten cancer and a whole bunch of other stuff,” he said. “He’s one of us—a working man trying to do the right thing by his family, his community, and his country.”

    Read: Trump returns to rally Team MAGA

    A younger fan, Eric Bruno from Levittown, told me he’d worked with people who’d had strokes. “Outwardly, it takes a while to come back. But inwardly you’re still the same person,” he said, adding, “I trust the people around him.” Again and again I asked Fetterman’s supporters about his stroke, and they all responded the same way: So what? Fetterman’s point—that knowing what it’s like to go through a major health challenge, to live with a disability, and to navigate the thorny thicket of the American health-care system can be assets for a Senate candidate—seemed to land well with his supporters. If our elected leaders are supposed to represent us, the Democrat seems to be asking, shouldn’t they be representative of us?

    Oz has been closing the gap with Fetterman’s slightly higher poll numbers in recent weeks, but this tightening of the race may owe more to the imminence of the election than to sudden doubts about Fetterman’s health. After weighing their options, Pennsylvanians appear to be sorting themselves into their partisan corners; politically, Pennsylvania is very evenly split. Fetterman’s cognitive ability may ultimately weigh less with Keystone State voters than the simple fact that he is a Democrat, not a Republican.

    “I will admit, it wasn’t the best speech I’ve ever heard,” Bobby Summers, a local IT manager, told me after the Bristol rally. He stood next to his wife, Lara, and their baby son on the grassy lawn where Fetterman had just been. “I don’t need a golden tongue,” Lara cut in. “I just need someone who gets the job done and breaks the tie.”

    [ad_2]

    Elaine Godfrey

    Source link