The curated articles discuss fall road trip destinations across North Carolina, highlighting small towns, iconic movie locations and the impact of Hurricane Helene on tourism in Western NC.
These places share a focus on autumn experiences, spanning from leaf peeping in the mountains to visiting towns rebounding from natural disasters.
In one article, small towns like Blowing Rock offer unique community experiences and recovery stories post-Hurricane Helene.
Another piece marks Lake Lure’s timeline for reopening after damage, emphasizing resilience.
Meanwhile, a travel guide highlights logistical updates on road openings for travelers, including access to parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Lastly, a feature celebrates Asheville’s comeback, with ‘Good Morning America’ airing to honor regional recovery efforts.
The Omni Grove Park Inn will reopen its main inn on Nov. 15.
NO. 1: OMNI GROVE PARK INN SETS REOPENING DATE AFTER HELENE’S HIT ON WESTERN NC
Here’s what to know if you want to visit the 111-year-old inn in Asheville, reopening with a reimagined gingerbread house competition. | Published November 11, 2024 | Read Full Story by Chyna Blackmon
Hickory’s downtown shopping area includes retail shops, restaurants, offices and entertainment venues. By Jared Kay
NO. 2: THESE ARE THE BEST SMALL TOWNS IN NORTH CAROLINA AND SOUTH CAROLINA TO VISIT IN 2025
Looking for a weekend getaway? We asked for your favorite small cities and towns to visit in North Carolina and South Carolina. Here’s what you said. | Published May 6, 2025 | Read Full Story by Melissa Oyler and Heidi Finley
Watching a Morrow Mountain sunrise should be on your spring hiking bucket list. By Courtesy of North Carolina State Parks
NO. 3: 4 NC STATE PARKS NAMED AMONG BEST IN THE US FOR 2025 (2 MADE THE TOP 20)
Four North Carolina state parks have been ranked among America’s Best State Parks for Great-Value Stays, with two landing in the top 20. | Published September 12, 2025 | Read Full Story by Evan Moore
Lake Lure Beach is one of the most popular spots on Lake Lure, North Carolina. By Sara Kendall
NO. 4: WHEN WILL LAKE LURE BE REFILLED? IT WAS LOWERED AFTER HURRICANE HELENE HIT NC.
To say Lake Lure has seen better summer days would be an understatement, a year after Hurricane Helene damaged the lake known for its “Dirty Dancing” fame. | Published September 18, 2025 | Read Full Story by Melissa Oyler
The Biltmore Estate.
NO. 5: ‘GOOD MORNING AMERICA’ IS LANDING IN ASHEVILLE TO HIGHLIGHT HELENE ANNIVERSARY
“Good Morning America” is returning to North Carolina this week for the second time in less than a month. | Published September 17, 2025 | Read Full Story by Heidi Finley
Ryan Arnst via Unsplash
NO. 6: THIS APPLE ORCHARD IN NORTH CAROLINA RANKS AMONG THE NATION’S BEST. HERE’S WHY
As autumn gets closer, one North Carolina destination has been named an ideal place for fall fun. | Published September 18, 2025 | Read Full Story by Simone Jasper
The Asheville skyline at sunrise over Town Mountain Road Bridge in the fall. By Andre Daugherty
NO. 7: WESTERN NC FALL TRAVEL GUIDE 2025: WHAT’S OPEN ONE YEAR AFTER HURRICANE HELENE?
One year after Hurricane Helene’s devastating impact, the resilience of Western North Carolina is as clear as the crisp mountain air. | Published September 26, 2025 | Read Full Story by Melissa Oyler
Fall foliage, N.C., Monday, Oct. 24, 2022. By Alex Slitz
NO. 8: PEAK LEAF SEASON IN NC: WHERE TO SEE THE BEST COLORS + WHICH WNC ROADS ARE OPEN
Peak leaf season is nearly here, which means a vibrant display of fall colors. | Published October 8, 2025 | Read Full Story by Tanasia Kenney
The summary above was drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All stories listed were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists.
The town of Canton, Connecticut, population 10,124, has been trialing a four-day workweek for its employees for nearly a month — and so far, it’s been a success.
On September 16, the town’s non-unionized employees who work in the town hall, social services, and senior services began getting Fridays off.
“I wanted to find a work-life balance for my employees because I think that if you can take care of your personal items at home and you’re not worried about making appointments and taking care of your kids, etc, then you’ll be more laser-focused at work,” Canton’s First Selectman Kevin Witkos told WTNH News on Monday.
He added that town employees on the four-day schedule “love it” and “the feedback has been great” from residents.
Town hall employees now work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and work an extra hour on Wednesday, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Senior and social services employees’ new schedule is from 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday.
Administrators in the town’s Department of Public Works and Police Department are also taking part in the four-day workweek, per Witkos. The trial period lasts four months, until January.
Canton joins other Connecticut towns, including Plainville, Redding, and Mansfield in implementing a four-day workweek.
Meanwhile, Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor told Kevin O’Leary in July that the company implemented a 4-day workweek and they’re “very productive” within those four days.
“I love the fact that the people at our company have interests,” Taylor said.
Most people are willing to work more hours Monday through Thursday if they get Friday off. According to a November 2023 Gallup poll, 77% of the U.S. workforce are in favor of a 40-hour, 4-day workweek and say it would positively affect their well-being.
The four-day workweek has also had proven outcomes. In June 2021, 70 companies in the UK experimented with it for six months. The majority found that business productivity was about the same or slightly higher than it was with a standard five-day week.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The Verge in June that AI can help cut the workweek to three or four days.
“Why not spend more time with your family?” Yuan said. “Why not focus on some more creative things, giving you back your time, giving back to the community and society to help others, right? Today, the reason why we cannot do that is because every day is busy, five days a week. It’s boring.”
The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has already been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.
About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those orders to expire; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
But “endgame” doesn’t mean “over”—and mpox will be with us for the foreseeable future. The U.S. outbreak is only now showing us its long and ugly tail: 15 daily cases is not zero daily cases; even as the number of new infections declines, inequities are growing. Black and Latino people make up a majorityof new mpox cases and are contracting the disease at three to five times the rate of white Americans, but they have received proportionately fewer vaccines. “Now it’s truly the folks who are the most marginalized that we’re seeing,” says Ofole Mgbako, a physician and population-health researcher at New York University. “Which is also why, of course, it’s fallen out of the news.” If the virus sticks around (as it very likely could), and if the disparities persist (as they almost certainly will), then mpox could end up saddling thousands of vulnerable Americans each year with yet another debilitating, stigmatized, and neglected disease.
At this point, there’s not even any guarantee that this case downturn will persist. “I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods,” says Sara Bares, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. Immunity, acquired through infection or vaccines, is now concentrated among those at highest risk, says Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. But researchers still don’t know how well those defenses can stave off another infection, or how long they might last—gaps in knowledge that may be tough to fill, now that incidence is so low. And although months of advocacy and outreach from the LGBTQ community have cut down on risky sexual activities, many cautionary trends will eventually reset to their pre-outbreak norm. “We know extensively from other sexually transmissible infections that behavior change is not usually the most sustained response,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University.
At the same time, this year’s mpox outbreaks are stranger and more unwieldy than those that came before. A ballooning body of evidence suggests that people can become infectious before they develop symptoms, contrary to prior understanding; some physicians are concerned that patients, especially those who are immunocompromised, might remain infectious after the brunt of visible illness resolves, says Philip Ponce, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the medical director of San Antonio’s Kind Clinic. (Some 40 percent of Americans who have been diagnosed with mpox are living with HIV.) Researchers still don’t have a good grip on which bodilyfluids and types of contact may be riskiest over the trajectory of a sickness. Cases are still being missed by primary-care providers who remain unfamiliar with the ins and outs of diagnosis and testing, especially in people with darker skin. And although this epidemic has, for the most part, continued to affect men who have sex with men, women and nonbinary people are getting sick as well, to an underappreciated degree.
Intel on the only mpox-fighting antiviral on the shelf, a smallpox drug called tecovirimat, also remains concerningly scant, even as experts worry that the virus could develop resistance. The treatment has been given a conditionalgreenlight for use in people who are currently, or at risk of becoming, severely sick. Anecdotally, it seems to work wonders, shaving days or weeks off the painful, debilitating course of symptoms that can send infected people into long-term isolation. But experts still lack rigorous data in humans to confirm just how well it works, Bares, who’s among the scientists involved in a nationwide study of the antiviral, told me. And although clinical trials for tecovirimat are under way, she added, in the U.S., they’re “struggling to enroll patients” now that infections have plummeted to such a sustained low. It’s a numerical problem as well as a sociocultural one. “The urgency with which people answer questions declines as case counts go down,” Varma told me.
Recent CDC reports show that a growing proportion of new infections aren’t being reported with a known sexual-contact history, stymieing efforts at contact tracing. That might in part be a product of the outbreak’s gradual migration from liberal, well-off urban centers, hit early on in the epidemic, to more communities in the South and Southwest. “In small towns, the risk of disclosure is high,” Bares told me. In seeking care or vaccination, “you’re outing yourself.” When mpox cases in Nebraska took an unexpected nosedive earlier this fall, “a colleague and I asked one another, ‘Do you think patients are afraid to come in?’” Those concerns can be especially high in certain communities of color, Ponce told me. San Antonio’s Latino population, for instance, “tends to be much more conservative; there’s much more stigma associated with one being LGBT at all, let alone being LGBT and trying to access biomedical interventions.”
Hidden infections can become fast-spreading ones. Monitoring an infectious disease is far easier when the people most at risk have insurance coverage and access to savvy clinicians, and when they are inclined to trust public-health institutions. “That’s predominantly white people,” says Ace Robinson, the CEO of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation, in Washington. Now that the mpox outbreak is moving out of that population into less privileged ones, Robinson fears “a massive undercount” of cases.
Americans who are catching the virus during the outbreak’s denouement are paying a price. The means to fight mpox are likely to dwindle, even as the virus entrenches itself in the population most in need of those tools. One concern remains the country’svaccination strategy, which underwent a mid-outbreak shift: To address limited shot supply, the FDA authorized a new dosing method with limited evidence behind it—a decision that primarily affected people near the back of the inoculation line. The method is safe but tricky to administer, and it can have tough side effects: Some of Titanji’s patients have experienced swelling near their injection site that lasted for weeks after their first dose, and now “they just don’t want to get another shot.”
The continued shift of mpox into minority populations, Robinson told me, is also further sapping public attention: “As long as this is centered in BIPOC communities, there’s going to be less of a push.” Public interest in this crisis was modest even at its highest point, says Steven Klemow, an infectious-disease physician at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and the medical director of Dallas’s Kind Clinic. Now experts are watching that cycle of neglect reinforce itself as the outbreak continues to affect and compress into marginalizedcommunities, including those that have for decades borne a disproportionate share of the burden of sexually associated infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV. “These are not the groups that necessarily get people jumping on their feet,” Titanji told me.
Some of the people most at risk are moving on as well, Robinson told me. In his community in Washington, he was disappointed to see high rates of vaccine refusal at two recent outreach events serving the region’s Black and American Indian populations. “They had no knowledge of the virus,” he told me. Titanji has seen similar trends in her community in Georgia. “There’s some sense of complacency, like, ‘It’s no longer an issue, so why do I need to get vaccinated?’” she said.
The tide seems unlikely to shift. Even tens of thousands of cases deep into the American outbreak, sexual-health clinics—which have been on the front lines of the mpox response—remain short on funds and staff. Although the influx of cases has slowed, Ponce and Klemow are still treating multiple mpox patients a week while trying to keep up the services they typically offer—at a time when STI rates are on a years-long rise. “We’re really assuming that this is going to become another sexually associated disease that is going to be a part of our wheelhouse that we’ll have to manage for the indefinite future,” Klemow told me. “We’ve had to pull resources away from our other services that we provide.” The problem could yet worsen if the national emergency declared in August is allowed to expire, which would likely curb the availability of antivirals and vaccines.
Rivers still holds out hope for eliminating mpox in the U.S. But getting from low to zero isn’t as easy as it might seem. This current stretch of decline could unspool for years, even decades, especially if the virus finds a new animal host. “We’ve seen this story play out so many times before,” Varma told me. Efforts to eliminate syphilis from the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, for instance, gained traction for a while—then petered out during what could have been their final stretch. It’s the classic boom-bust cycle to which the country is so prone: As case rates fall, so does interest in pushing them further down.
Our memories of public-health crises never seem to linger for long. At the start of this mpox outbreak, Titanji told me, there was an opportunity to shore up our systems and buffer ourselves against future epidemics, both imported and homegrown. The country squandered it and failed to send aid abroad. If another surge of mpox cases arrives, as it very likely could, she said, “we will again be going back to the drawing board.”
Chris Thomas has made democracy his life’s work. A 73-year-old attorney, Thomas spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He served under Republicans and Democrats alike, and his mandate was always the same: protect the ballot box. He trained local election workers; sought out and fixed weaknesses in the voting system; investigated errors committed while ballots were collected and tabulated; and, ultimately, ensured the accuracy of the count. Thomas was one of 10 people named to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. He earned a reputation as a nonpartisan authority on all things elections, and took pride in supervising a system that was stable and widely trusted.
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Which is why 2020 shook him so badly. Thomas had retired from the secretary of state’s office a few years earlier, confident that Michigan’s elections were in good hands. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, prompting changes to election protocols nationwide, and President Donald Trump began warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election. As Michigan rolled out new voting rules—some that had been decided prior to 2020, others that were implemented on the fly during the pandemic—rumors and misinformation spread. Wanting to help, Thomas accepted a special assignment to supervise Election Day activities in Detroit, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.
What followed was surreal—a scene that Thomas could scarcely believe was playing out in the United States. Michigan had recently expanded absentee voting, allowing any resident to vote by mail for any reason. Because Democrats are likelier than Republicans to vote absentee—and because Detroit is predominantly Democratic—Thomas and his colleagues had to process an unprecedented number of absentee ballots. Complicating matters further, Republican lawmakers in Michigan refused to let election workers start counting absentee ballots until Election Day.
The effect was predictable. Because of the backlog of absentee ballots, Trump took a big lead on Election Night. As Thomas and his team worked into the early hours, Trump’s lead shrank. By Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that Joe Biden would overtake him. “That’s when things got out of hand,” Thomas told me.
Incited by Trump’s acolytes in the state party, hundreds of Republican voters swarmed the event center in Detroit where Thomas and his workers were tabulating votes. Republicans had their allotted number of poll watchers already inside the counting room, but party officials lied to the public, saying they had been locked out. So people busted into the event center, banging on the windows, filming the election workers, demanding to be let into the counting room. Fearing for their safety—and for the integrity of the ballots—the people inside covered the windows. Thomas says the decision was necessary. But within minutes, video was circulating on social media of the windows being covered, and before long, it was airing on Fox News with commentary about a cover-up.
Trump was alleging a national plot to steal the election, and now Detroit—and Chris Thomas—were right in the middle of it.
The GOP assault on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has led to death threats against election workers and a lethal siege of the United States Capitol. But perhaps the gravest consequence is the erosion of confidence in our system. Late this summer, a Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent of both Republicans and Democrats believe that American democracy “is in danger of collapse.” They hold this view for somewhat different reasons. Republicans believe that Democrats already rigged an election against them and will do so again if given the chance; Democrats believe that Republicans, convinced that 2020 was stolen despite all evidence to the contrary, are now readying to rig future elections. It’s hard to see how this ends well. By the presidential election of 2024, a constitutional crisis might be unavoidable.
I’ve met men and women like Thomas in small towns and big counties, public servants who have devoted their career to safeguarding the infrastructure of our democracy. Over the past two years, they have been harassed, intimidated, and in many cases driven out of office, some replaced by right-wing activists who are more loyal to the Republican Party than to the rule of law. The old guard—the people who, like Thomas, committed their career to free and fair elections—are witnessing their life’s work being undone. They are watching the rise of Trump-mimicking candidates in this year’s midterm elections and wondering if anything can stop the collapse of our most essential institution. “This election,” Thomas said, “feels like a last stand.”
The irony is that America’s voting system is far more advanced and secure than it was just two decades ago.
The 2000 election was a catalyst for reform. Mass confusion surrounding the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida—butterfly ballots, punch cards, hanging chads—demonstrated that murky processes and obsolete technology could undermine public confidence in the system. Recognizing the threat, Congress passed a law to help local administrators modernize their voting machines and better train their workers and volunteers. Elections officials from around the country began collaborating on best practices. Several states introduced wholesale changes to their systems that allowed ballots to be cast more easily, tracked more accurately, and counted more efficiently.
There were hiccups, but the results were overwhelmingly positive. One study conducted by MIT and Caltech showed that the number of “lost” votes—ballots that because of some combination of clerical rejection and human error went unrecorded—had been cut in half from 2000 to 2004. Florida, once synonymous with electoral dysfunction, now has arguably the most efficient vote-reporting program in the U.S.
At the same time, the machinations that Americans observed—poll workers studying ballots through a magnifying glass, teams of party lawyers and CNN camera crews looking on—bred a public skepticism that never quite went away. In the years following Bush v. Gore, the number of cases of election litigation soared. The small chorus of congressional Democrats who objected to the certification of Bush’s 2000 victory swelled to several dozen following the president’s reelection in 2004, with 31 House Democrats (and one Democratic senator) voting to effectively disenfranchise the people of Ohio. Republicans could not return the favor in 2008—Obama’s margin of victory was too wide—so they sought to delegitimize his presidency with talk of birth certificates and mass voter fraud, introducing measures to restrict voting access despite never producing evidence that cheating was taking place at any meaningful scale.
Much of this can be attributed to what Richard Hasen, a law professor and an elections expert, has called “the loser’s effect”: Studies have shown that voters report more confidence in our elections after their party or candidate has won. But partisan outcomes are no longer the decisive factor: In October 2020—weeks before Trump lost his bid for reelection—Gallup reported that just 44 percent of Republicans trusted that votes would be cast and counted accurately, “a record low for either party.”
This isn’t entirely surprising, given Trump’s crusade to undermine our democratic institutions, which began well before he was ever elected. In 2012, he called Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney “a total sham,” adding: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” In early 2016, after losing the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, Trump called the chair of the Iowa GOP and pressured him to disavow the result; when that failed, he took to Twitter, denouncing the “fraud” in Iowa and calling for a new election to be held.
By the time November 3, 2020, arrived, Trump had already constructed his elaborate narrative of a rigged election. Republican leaders did little to keep their voters from falling for the president’s deception. In fact, most of them enabled and even participated in it. What began as a fringe movement after Bush v. Gore has spread into the GOP mainstream: Polls continue to show that more than half of all Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
They are acting on Trump’s lies, flooding into local party offices, demanding to be stationed on the front lines of the next election so they can prevent it from being stolen. They have nominated scores of candidates who deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory; seven are running to become the chief elections official in their state. Several of these Republicans—Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—are hinting at administrative actions that would reverse decades of progress in making elections more transparent and accessible, in turn leaving our system more vulnerable.
The great threat is no longer machines malfunctioning or ballots being spoiled. It is the actual theft of an election; it is the brazen abuse of power that requires not only bad actors in high places but the tacit consent of the voters who put them there.
This makes for a terrifying scenario in 2024—but first, a crucial test in 2022.
In August, when Michigan held its primary elections, all eyes were on the Republican race for governor. It had been a volatile contest; two of the perceived front-runners had been disqualified for failing to reach signature thresholds. Most of the remaining candidates were champions of Trump’s Big Lie, but none more so than Ryan Kelley, who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and was arrested this past June by the FBI on misdemeanor charges. (Kelley pleaded not guilty in July.)
When the returns came in and Kelley lost, he refused to concede. Instead, he called for a “publicly supervised hand recount to uphold election integrity.” But Kelley had a problem: He had finished in fourth place, capturing just 15 percent of the vote and losing to the Republican nominee by 25 points.
It was a similar story in another closely watched Michigan race. State Senator Lana Theis, a Republican who’d co-written a committee report debunking Trump’s voter-fraud allegations after the 2020 election, defeated a MAGA conspiracy theorist, Mike Detmer, by 15 points in their primary contest. Detmer’s response? “When we have full, independent, unfettered forensic audits of 2020 and 2022 I’ll consider the results,” he wrote on his Facebook page. This pattern has played out in races all across the country, with sore Republican losers doing their best Trump impressions, alleging fraud to explain a drubbing at the ballot box.
“This gives me real hope,” Thomas told me in early September. “Because people understand, when there’s a margin like that, you lost. And if you’re going to insist you didn’t lose, well, now people are going to be skeptical of what you’ve been telling them all along. Is the sky really falling? You can only tell a lie so many times before people stop listening to you.”
His optimism struck me as misplaced. For one thing, these were just primary elections. Tudor Dixon, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, is herself a 2020 conspiracy theorist. In fact, all three Republicans on top of the statewide ticket this fall—Dixon, as well as the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state—have claimed that Democrats stole the election. Michigan’s GOP lawmakers have not allowed changes to vote-processing laws despite the chaos of 2020. In the event of close Democratic victories in November, we can expect another “red mirage,” in which the Republican nominee jumps out to a big lead soon after the polls close, only to fall behind as the backlog of absentee ballots is counted. The conspiracy theories will practically spread themselves.
Sensing my skepticism, Thomas told me there was additional cause for hope. Two years ago, the Republican volunteers who monitored the vote-counting in Detroit on behalf of the party were completely out of their depth; most had never worked an election, and thus confused standard protocols for what they swore in affidavits were violations of the law. Following the grassroots outcry of November 2020, the Michigan GOP recruited hordes of new volunteers who have since received enhanced training. Thomas says his first encounter with this new class of Republican poll watchers came this summer, on primary day in Detroit, where he was once again tasked with overseeing the count. “It was night and day from 2020. They were respectful,” he said. “There were no issues.”
Hours after I finished speaking with Thomas, CNN published a report exposing a Zoom training seminar in which Republican leaders in Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—instructed poll watchers to ignore election rules and smuggle in pens, paper, and cellphones to document Democratic cheating. That seminar was held on August 1—the day before Michigan’s primary.
I want to believe our system of self-government is durable enough to withstand all of this; I want to believe Thomas, that everything will be all right. But as we spoke, it struck me that, despite his expertise, and despite his ringside seat to the unraveling of our democracy, Thomas is like millions of other Americans who can’t quite bring themselves to face what’s happening. Like so many of them, he clings to fleeting hints of a return to normalcy and ignores the flood of evidence suggesting it will not come. He still trusts a system that is actively being sabotaged.
Thomas has never belonged to a party. He remains proudly nonpartisan. But he acknowledges what must happen in 2022 for America to swerve off the road to national calamity. The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.
But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.
This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “Bad Losers.”
